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Nov 28, 2010 - 09:15 PM |
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Worst Game Of The Year: Like Blood From A Kidney Stone |
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Let it be said that one of my favorite games for the 360 is Quantum Of Solace. I'm not sure why it got all the bad reviews it did since its worst offense is that it simply does a lot of stuff more popular games did in the exact same way. So I suppose if you want to damn it for something, damn it for not being at all ambitious. Theres also no cutscenes between levels for some reason, so if you haven't seen the movies the story ain't going to be there for you.
Its your basic first person shooter with the quicktime events and takedowns. Two-thirds of it takes place over the movie Quantum Of Solace and another third takes you through parts of Casino Royale. The best thing about it is that you feel like Daniel Craig's Bond. You sneak around with your gun, beat the shit out of some people and blow up a bunch of stuff. The first player is a good time and the 007 difficulty is enough to give you pause without being mindlessly frustrating. The multiplayer is surprisingly solid as well, with several different types of gameplay like Golden Gun (one shot kills) and Bond Evasion (One player as Bond must sneak past all other players and make it to the goal or kill all the other players).
Its also one of the very few games I liked enough to get 1000/1000 on. I really, really like the game. The music is badass Bond music too.
That said, I was really looking foward to Blood Stone. It looked more or less exactly like QoS except in the third-person. I had thought they were using the same engine but I guess not. Anyway, when I saw the original trailer for the game I was fucking stoked to waste more time on another 007 adventure.
And this one was going to be written by the guy who wrote Goldeneye! That means it would have to be awesome right? And they even got Joss Stone to do a number for the opening titles. Its not spectacular but its pretty good for a video game.
Needless to say, this was a blind buy on the day it came out. And its not like I could've "waited around" to see the reviews since QoS originall got crappy, middling reviews as well. So I got it and suffered through the rest of my shitty day at work to go home, take in dinner and sit down to crack open this sucker.
Three days and two sitdowns later, I was done with it on its second highest difficulty (007 Difficulty is unlocked when you beat it). I was fucking flabbergasted at how fucking *awful* it was.
First off, the story amounts to nothing. As someone who reads a lot and likes to wax his bishop to intelligent reasoning as much as forgiving weaker points in franchises I love, the end of this game is paramount - the single weakest ending to a game I've ever seen.
The gameplay its self is barely there. Its split between driving levels which are really awful - surprising since this is the group that gave us racing games like Blur and the PGR series - and on foot levels which are simply okay but only because you're thankful you're not driving anywhere at that point in time.
On foot you can pick up a number of different guns and pistols as well as do context take downs which I wish were cool. Unfortunately the game is buggy when it comes to takedowns and you have to be in X distance and in Y position to do either a takedown or a stealth takedown. Its tricky but rarely a point unless you're trying to achievement grind.
The guns are nothing special though the sniper rifle is incredibly hard to use, more so than most console FPS games. Theres also no grenades or weapons of that type which is amazingly bizzare in this day and age. There is that "mark and execute" feature carried over from ... what is it, Splinter Cell? Its done the same way - one melee kill gets you one chance to do an autoheadshot with a pistol and you can accumulate up to three. Its pretty pointless except in situations where you're taking out snipers.
That said the single player is immensely disappointing. A story that meaders like a Battlestar Galactica season and then fails entirely like Lost. No interesting gameplay, no mines or grenades or much of anything aside from some neat "hide behind a corner" takedown animations.
Now... the multiplayer.
The MP is the worst I've ever played. I'm going back to the days where Duke Nukem 3D wouldn't always direct connect to my friend across town and the out of synch error made it into a whacky funhouse of weird clipping and bot errors.
However, this side of the game is fucking insane with glitches and bullshit. Instead of explaining them in full, heres a pointed listed straight down as they occur to me...
* You can get killed in cover - if you're at the corner and not peaking around, you can die from what I'm assuming is the "flack" from the bullets going into the wall you're hugging? However, this also goes for things like crates, boxes and steel girders.
* Achievements - one of Quantum Of Solace's best points was the fun achievements. Most of them were in context to the story mode and named after 007 movies (A View To A Kill - Open The Cellar Door With One Shot ((In other words, shoot the guy on the balcony in the head and let his body break the door open))) and this game *kind of follows that* since a couple of the achievements are fun too. But theres others that are fucking insane and seemingly impossible. Theres one called Speed Run - "Finish the Istanbul driving chase in under 2 mins 59.4 secs". What the fuck? 59.4 seconds? Why? I should also mention that the level is a fucking beast since you're driving a fucking brick the whole time.
One of the achievements - and this is my favorite by far - is called "Blood Stone Elite" and for 30 points you have to "Obtain the '00 Agent Mission' medal in online ranked multiplayer"
How do you do that? The requirements for this achievement are made up of ten parts:
Earn 15 Standing Fire medals: Shoot 15 people while in cover or standing using the following weapons:
- Assault
- Sniper
- Shotgun
- Pistol
- SMG
Earn the medal/award for staying alive for seven rounds during a Last Man Standing match.
Earn five Defender awards in Objective Mode
1 Assault Specialist Award: Have the most Standing Fire medals at the end of the match
1 Assault Efficiency medal: Have the most assault rifle kills at the end of the match.
Are you fucking kidding me?
* You can take a ton of hits, escape around a corner and bullets will follow you - I kid you not. Its like you're fighting Wesley in Wanted. You'll escape a firefight and a full two seconds after leaving, you're still taking hits. At first I thought it was latency or server problems but apparently its actually the game its self.
* Melee - the melee option in this is horrible. I've witnessed and been a part of two people running at each other, meleeing each other in the face and nothing happens. Or meleeing each other three or four times, wildly swinging. Sometimes one person goes down, often both people go down. Thats right, you both die from a punch to the head at the same time. DKO = WTF.
* Maps and Modes - Theres three game modes (Team Deathmatch, Objective and something like Evasion - a huge step down from QoS which had five gameplay types of which three were regularly populated) but theres no one on anything but Deathmatch. And theres only five maps. Two of them are pretty good but none of them are particular great.
Much like Team Fortress 2, you spawn at the same camp every time so you often find that if the other team is aggressive, you're going to get spawncamped. I hate to say its *really* easy to do this on one level; in fact, I got one of the harder MP achievements (Nobody Does It Better - Survive One MP game without dying) by staying near their camp, moving around in cover and taking everyone out as they went to move toward the center of the map. And I hate to say that this is pretty goddamned typical of most games. On the other hand, I've also had to be "that guy" when being forced to play on a team with 12 year olds (in other words, they don't know what they're doing and I clean the fuck up. Twice I've won matches almost by myself because of this.)
* Random notes: You can't kick or vote to kick players. Theres no way to check latency. Theres no grenades or mines in the MP. Sniper shots to the chest don't always hit and when they do aren't always one-shot kills. You can do "mark and execute" kills in MP which seems amazingly cheap; thanks to this, I once ran into a crowd of enemies and systematically took out five people by meleeing one of them, taking the next guy out with the "M&E" and then just repeating that and roomclearing by myself. Thats just wrong no matter how you cut it.
If you want to see these complaints in action or just scrolled to the botom of this entry, this guy on YouTube made a fantastic review video. The problems with the game and how he points them out is pretty funny.
But this game is dreadful. I'm really fucking pissed I got this game and I'd turn it in if I wasn't determined to grab a couple more achievements first. But its one of the worst games I've played and yet it got better reviews than Quantum Of Solace which was a pretty fucking fantastic game. Worse still, since Bizzare Creations is being shut down this game is never going to get patched.
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