Tagged: fps
Remember September '44
Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway was released on the 26th of September 2008 a week after the anniversary of Operation Market Garden – the largest airborne operation of all time that ultimately ended in failure – this was also the storyline of the game as you again played as Matt Baker of the 101st Airborne Division.
BiA: HH was a solid tactical FPS that I thoroughly enjoyed, the cover system was well thought out, being able to direct fire of bazooka and machine gun teams helped your strategy and the action camera made for some intensely exciting and gory moments during a fire fight. Looking back I’d probably give this game a rating of 3.5 out of 5. It wasn’t perfect, the multiplayer was a serious let down unfortunately.
Today is the 17th of September 2009, the anniversary of Operation Market Garden and one of the achievements from Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway was to play the game today for a cool and rather easy 50G. While I appreciate that a lot, it has to be said the massive losses in this operation to the British 1st Airborne Division is something I couldn’t overlook, some 8,000 men died here alone.
I truly do love a good FPS, and am a big fan of the WW2 genre of FPS as it’s a part of history I am genuinely interested in, but the people who lost their lives shouldn’t be forgotten.
Wolfenstein
I was massively excited when I heard that a Wolfenstein game was being made for the Xbox 360 – I absolutely loved Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory the free PC multiplayer game, as well as being a fan of the original Return to Castle Wolfenstein and of course, Wolf 3D!
The single-player campaign in Wolfenstein is a familiar one yet I found it massively enjoyable. You play as B.J. Blazkowicz fighting off not only the feared German SS but a vast array of supernatural villains that at times will have you backing up in fear. Upgradeable weaponry through collectable gold allows you to modify your standard WW2 weapons such as the MP40, Kar 98k, MP43, Panzer and Flame-thrower to be more accurate, more powerful and ultimately more deadly. The addition of some supernatural weapons is a nice touch, electrifying and vaporising the Wehrmacht has never been so satisfying.
Isenstadt the fictional town the game is based in has a semi-open world environment, you can walk the streets, find side-quests and collectibles through-out but it is by no means a true open-world game. The missions are however very good and played out in some brilliant scenarios, I played through the SP campaign on Hard but never at any point found it particularly difficult. Sound effects, environmental features and not to mention the Veil and it’s four powers you posses makes for a truly enjoyable single player game that’ll keep you entertained for around about 10 hours.
The multiplayer portion of Wolfentsein was not created by Raven Software but by Endrant Studios and you can tell, it’s of inferior quality, rather limiting, laggy and has some poignant bugs that don’t save your stats after each game, making for a frustrating and short lived MP experience.
That said, the story mode isn’t without its major issues either. I was near 80% completed and decided that before I headed off to defeat the final boss I would make my way back around Isenstadt and the various missions where I hadn’t collected everything necessary… only to find out their is a serious freeze bug that now stops me from loading the finale just because I replayed some past missions. Fucking ridiculous, Raven need to get their finger out and patch that before Wolfenstein joins an ever expanding collection of games on my dusty shelf.
Sadly because of this and the poor multiplayer Wolfenstein only gets 3 stars out of 5 from me, it pains me to write that as I love this franchise, and was thoroughly enjoying the single player campaign until I and many others stumbled across these annoying bugs. I hope in the future that Raven Software realise the public are not their beta testers!
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
The idea of a Western themed first-person shooter really got my attention when I first heard about Bound in Blood, a prequel to the original Call of Juarez, and I’ll be honest, it surprised me on many levels.
The wild-west environment of Bound in Blood is absolutely stunning, what impressed me most was the seemingly never ending horizon, I’m not clued up on how the Chrome Engine works exactly but there appeared to be no skybox in sight. Lush forests and baron wilderness make this an enjoyable foray away from modern or WWII based environments.
While short the story of the McCall brothers and their adventures across North America set in the Cival War period was worth the ride. The two free-world chapters were rather limited with both only having 3 real missions and some collectibles to find, however I found the intense shootouts, duels and stagecoach chases in the varying other chapters certainly made up for that.
The weaponry I found well balanced for the period, depending on your chosen character for the mission you either find yourself with a trusty lasso or some rather powerful dynamite, combined with a vast array of pistols, shotguns and rifles you never find yourself short of ammo or firepower. Duel-wielded quickshooters really do give you that authentic feel of western style combat while throwing knives and bow & arrows keep the rather lacklustre enemy AI in check.
My brief stint of multiplayer action didn’t disappoint, there are various game-types many of which felt refreshing: Manhunt sees you gain a bounty on your head based on the amount of kills you rack up making you the enemies prime target and the objective based Wild West Legends mode harbours even more team-based combat.
The achievements from Bound in Blood are easily attainable if you fancy pumping many an hour into the multiplayer, most are story based and several will have you grinding your teeth trying to complete. All in all I thoroughly enjoyed Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, it proved to be an exciting shooter that was helped along by a good story, stunning graphics and gruelling 1v1 showdowns.