UNCHARTED 2 MULTIPLAYER NOTES

I've been a huge fan of Uncharted 2 multiplayer ever since playing the beta, and after actively playing the multiplayer ever since the game's release a little over a year ago, I'm ready to give some of my thoughts.

Essentially a 3rd-person cover shooter, Uncharted 2 offers more freedom to players than similar games like Gears of War. Instead of just going from cover to cover, the characters can jump and climb around the map, adding an aspect of verticality to a traditional cover shooter.

The competitive modes feel balanced fairly well, with no weapon combination overpowering others - each weapon is good for a certain situation. Each player can have 2 boosters on their character, Uncharted's version of perks from Call of Duty. Below are some observations I've made regarding weapons and boosters:

WEAPONS AND TOOLS

GAU-19: A very loud chaingun, players know where you are immediately the minute you start firing one because

a) the sound can be heard pretty much anywhere on the map and
b) it's always in the same set location on the map, meaning that as soon as players on the enemy team hear you firing one of these, they're going to instantly know where you are

The GAU is only useful in situations where enemies are grouped up near the gun, which doesn't happen often. Even if you have direct line of sight to an opponent across the map, he'll either roll out of the way or kill you.

Riot Shield: Protects you from bullet fire from the front, but seriously slows down your movement speed. I find the shield useless because a grenade toss can easily eliminate a person with a shield, and the grenade doesn't even have to land behind the shield. The enemy can also easily run around you and kill you from behind before you can turn around quick enough. Because of the nature of the game, mobility in Uncharted 2 is always more important than protection.

BOOSTERS

Competitive multiplayer also offers boosters, which are perks that players can use to help them have a certain edge (like in Call of Duty). Things like starting off with an extra grenade or having more pistol accuracy. You buy all these with the money that you earn from matches. Top players can choose to purchase Badges of Honor, which act like negative boosters, providing a disadvantage. In return, every 5 kills they get will net them a nice XP bonus, creating a risk/reward structure. These range from having half health to a carrying half a loaded clip to the worst one that lets enemy players see your name through walls, acting as quite an ego boost.

Below are my thoughts regarding some specific boosters:

Break Up: Lets players destroy destructible objects faster. Useless because the only destructible objects that act as cover are a few wooden boxes (which aren't good cover anyways) that are found in a few maps. Propane tanks and generators can be destroyed easily without this perk with a few extra bullets, which is not a problem if you have an automatic weapon, and everybody starts off with an AK - an automatic weapon. If the maps were designed to offer more destructible cover, I could see this booster being useful, but as of right now, it's just a waste of a slot.

Hell Blazer: Move faster with the GAU-19. Still not fast enough to be of any use. Plus, a player has to get to the GAU first.

Turtle: Move faster with the Riot Shield. Moving faster isn't really a big boost if players using shields die from grenades most of the time. If this booster allowed the riot shield to withstand a grenade blast up close, I could see it being useful for players that like the shield. Also, it has the same issue of the player getting the riot shield first to be useful.

Once again, a big negative of the above 2 boosters is that they're too specific and not worth the booster slot when there's better ones available that always offer a passive bonus.

There are other specific boosters like Rocket Man and Launch Man which increase the ammo of the game's most powerful weapons - The Hammer and the RPG, but those are worth it because both weapons are the most powerful in the game, netting easy kills.

Situational Awareness: The player can stop and with the press of a button, see close-by enemy player names through walls. This booster breaks elimination games, where the goal is to eliminate the opposing 5 player team, offering no respawns when players get killed.

The thrill of elimination games comes from a cat and mouse hunt metagame. If there's 1 or 2 enemy players left, you can just find them using this booster instead of carefully trying to spot them, all while worrying about your safety, offering no thrill or challenge. I've had situations where me and another player on the opposite team were the last ones left and we both had Situational Awareness. Afraid to attack each other, because we both knew where we were, the match usually resulted in a tie.

Evasion: Immunity to Situational Awareness. I think having a booster that nullifies another one is a poor design decision, as each one of them should offer something positive without having to worry about what perks other player are using. Modern Warfare 2 did this even more, and I didn't like it either. It ended up being a stacking game to see who's perk can negate what. Perks and booster should be used to enhance your play, no matter what other players are using.


POST-LAUNCH SUPPORT

Naughty Dog has been providing excellent multiplayer support, releasing DLC packs with new co-op modes, multiplayer maps, and skins. An interesting thing that they've starting doing is a gameplay mode that changes every weekend called The Lab, which acts similar to Left 4 Dead 2's mutation modes - offering a special randomized gameplay type. Modes like Pistols and Grenades only, RPG's only, or team 3 vs 3, instead of 5 vs 5 keep the multiplayer competitive scene fresh with new and interesting options. Variation never hurts.

During many holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, Naughty Dog has also been doubling the amount of XP players can earn, enticing players to play more during these weekends. One weekend even had 5x XP! After that, everyone that I played online with seemed high level.

Occasionally, you can also spot a Naughty Dog employee in a game with a red paw next to their name. It's always cool to see developers playing together with their players, supporting the lifecycle of the game.

MAXING OUT

The max level cap in multiplayer is really high and while it's a nice goal, average players will never even come close, as it takes way too much XP to level up starting around level 45. I think doing something similar to prestiges in Call of Duty would have been a better option. On top of that, Naughty Dog raised the max level cap twice - to lvl. 70 and then 80, making reaching the end even more insurmountable.

BALANCE CHANGES

Even though I enjoyed the multiplayer of Uncharted 2 through all the patches, Naughty Dog has been changing multiplayer balance a lot since game launch. At the start, players had more health. Then a patch made everyone weaker so people weren't so bullet-spongy anymore. However, players complained that everyone was too weak and eventually, player health was raised a bit, although never as high as before.

Same goes for grenade damage and radius - it was adjusted multiple times. At launch, grenades were too powerful and they were patched to be weaker. However, they became too weak, and thanks to complaints, their explosive radius was extended.

I understand that a game is always evolving, and it's good to listen to your community and let them playtest the game, but when you have to make such drastic changes multiple times, it becomes dangerous and you risk alienating some of your user base.

QUIT PENALTIES

Another thing that was added post launch were penalties for match quitters. Quitting a game in-progress drastically affects your team since there are only 5 players on a team. To combat quitters, a solution was put in place where the 1st quit would give the player a timeout penalty of 30 secs. During this, you can't do anything but sit and watch the countdown clock tick down. This is a bad decision. There's nothing worse for players than to have their valuable time taken away, even if it is just a measly 30 secs.

The 2nd time you quit, you forfeit some XP, which I have no problem with. In my opinion, players should forfeit their XP just for quitting the 1st time, not their time. The 2nd time quitters should be demoted a level.

If you can't play a 15 minute match, then don't - simple as that. Wasting XP is totally fine, just don't waste my precious time!

ELIMINATION MODE

In Elimination, my favorite multiplayer mode, players don't respawn after they go down. Whichever team eliminates all the opposing players scores a point. First to 3 points wins. This is similar to Counterstrike matches and the Search and Destroy mode in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

What really breaks the Elimination games (besides the Situational Awareness booster) are the power weapons like the Hammer and the RPG.

Having these weapons be there during Elimination games is both a pro and a con. On one hand, you have guaranteed chokepoints - spots that players will meet at, resulting in conflict - something that designers strive to make happen in a multiplayer game.

On the other hand, whoever grabs the weapon first has a good chance of winning because the RPG and the Hammer are very easy to get kills with.

If you decide to not go for the power weapons and play the game your way, you're already at losing odds, because whoever gets the power weapon has a huge advantage on their side. This makes it so that you pretty much must go towards the power weapons and pick it up out of fear that the other side will do it.

It would have been cool to see a vote on whether to have power weapons in elimination games, much like a map vote before the game starts.

Overall though, playing Uncharted 2 online has been an absolute blast and I would say that it's my favorite online game on the PS3. Since launch, players have seemed to get better and better, upping up the competition, especially if people are playing together in parties. With around 35k players playing worldwide every night, it's a healthy community of players that I am happy to contribute to.

DESIGN REVIEW: Fallout 3 - Operation Anchorage

Operation Anchorage added what every expansion pack should - new missions, characters and items. However, on top of that it changed previously established core mechanics: player healing and obtaining ammunition.. Having the expansion pack take place in a simulation has its pros and cons, but for the most part, it provided a good change of pace.

LIKED:
- Old Mechanics Born Anew. The majority of Operation Anchorage takes place in a simulation, much like one mission in Fallout 3. Because of this, Bethesda was free to implement a new health and ammunition recovery system. Unlike in Fallout 3, the player can't hoard stim packs and ammunition - instead, health and ammo is replenished by stationary canisters scattered throughout the game world.

Because of this, every enemy encounter is much more serious. You can't simply pull up your pip-boy and heal yourself in the middle of a gunfight - you must survive the encounter and get to a health station to recover health. This is a nice way of balancing things out for a high-level player - all the player's items are stripped upon simulation entry and he has to get used to core game mechanics, now unfamiliar to him. It's almost like playing the game for the very first time again.

Searching is also non-existant - players can't search anything in the simulation, save for certain items that flash red. Dead bodies evaporate, giving you no time to ransack your defeated enemies for ammo and other goodies. This isn't necessary a bad thing, just another change to the main gameplay. Whereas in Fallout 3, I would search every nook and cranny of a room, here I just ran through, fighting enemies and never looking back. It provided a breath of fresh air for highly methodical players like me.


- New Environment. Having Operation Anchorage take place in a blue, snowy, and mountainous Alaska is a stark contrast to Fallout 3's post apocalyptic green-tinted wasteland. It provided a nice breath of fresh air for someone like me who has played the game for a long time.


DISLIKED:
- Disjointed and Unconnected. Because Operation Anchorage is a simulation, it's even more separated than other missions in the game. Once complete, the player is unable to revisit the simulation and replay it. All the characters that the player met in the simulation are gone, and while the game does reward you with some items that you used in the simulation upon completion, it doesn't give you all of them. Once the player loses or breaks these items, there's no way to get more.

Having taken place many years ago before the Fallout 3 game timeline, the player is unable to meet the characters in the simulation once he gets out, and is generally unaffected by the events of the entire expansion pack once he completes it. This lessens the effectiveness of Operation Anchorage as a whole, acting as a quick and temporary thrill, never to be relived or remembered again.

DESIGN REVIEW: Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 struck me as a very ambitious open world FPS game experiment. There's tons of small features and details in this game that elevate it above other games in its genre, but there are also surprisingly simple, yet vital details that the designers didn't quite implement correctly. If time was spent on those details, I strongly feel that FC2 could have easily stood with the best games of the year and acknowledged by the public for its interesting features instead of publicly being considered just 'good'. All the details complement each other and contribute to what I feel the theme of the game is - improvisation.

LIKED:
- Map Navigation. The map screen in FC2 is simple to use and navigate. Instead of pausing your entire game while you look at the map, the protagonist simply pulls out a map in real time and looks at it. Just this little piece of detail brings you closer to the main character and makes you believe you are him (you can select out of 7 male characters which has no real gameplay impact, and I remember reading they had to cut the women as playable characters!). As you're looking at the map, you are staring through the protagonist's eyes, which is really cool for such a small detail. This features adds to the general theme of the game - improvisation. If you're driving a jeep and being chased by a bunch of bad guys at the same time, you better know how to drive and read a map at the same time! With a few button presses, you can easily toggle the zoom level of the map, which translates to the protagonist pulling out another map out for you using beautiful animation. The maps contain everything that you need and expect like mission objectives, enemy outposts, and even collectibles that you have found.



- Weapon Jamming. On one side, it's cool to see weapons slowly degrade with actual cosmetic changes that you can observe like rust and dirt. This mechanic makes you pick up weapons on the fly, once again contributing to the overall theme of improvisation - many times while you're engaged in fierce combat. One the flip side, every weapon that you pick up from the bad guys is in pretty terrible shape, meaning that it will be useless very soon, in some cases before you can even get done with the current firefight, causing you to scramble for yet another weapon. It's not so much fun wildly running around to find a usable gun - any gun while getting shot at from all directions (thanks to the hawk-eyed AI). All is not bad however, as there are weapons that you find in crates which start in perfect condition and deteriorate from there. I may be on the fence regarding this feature, but this mechanic works excellent in the grand scheme of things of improvisation.



- Fire Spread. The fire propagation in FC2 is the best out of any video games I've seen. Many weapons, some obvious like flamethrowers and Molotov cocktails, others less so (certain explosions) start a fire in the savanna grass which grows for a certain amount of time and area. The direction is uncontrollable by the player, adding an interesting random element, but goes with the wind, making it very realistic. Many times, the fire turns back on you, forcing you to quickly think on your feet. Once again, the random an uncontrollable fire propagation in FC2 welcomes... you guessed it improvisation with open arms. This is a very interesting Gamasutra interview with the programmer responsible for the fire implementation.



- Amazing Atmosphere. Seeing the sun go down in FC2 is a really beautiful moment. The shadows jump around the jungle realistically, and the world slowly turns dark. But it's not just the graphics that make the atmosphere good, it's all the little details - game map, individual vehicle dashboards, and architecture all help make up the atmosphere.

- Something New. Emphasizing actual (or similar to real) conflicts that are happening in Africa - the chaotic nature of civil wars, FC2 is the only game that does it, and for that, I applaud the developers for trying something new and the publisher for green-lighting it.

- Map Editor. Simply throwings objects onto the terrain which you can manipulate with a variety of brushes makes a very functional map editor. The cool thing is that you can enter the map instantly and play around sandbox style in your own creation. The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions also shipped with the editor, which is unheard of in the FPS console market.



DISLIKED:
- Enemy AI. The AI in FC2 is good, a little too ridiculously good. So good in fact, that it hurts player choice, which is very odd, considering that's what the game is about. Taking a sneak approach always ends up with you quietly taking out 2 enemies, followed by the entire base converging on you... during nighttime. During the day? Enemies can see you ahead, no matter what kind of trees or shrubbery is blocking their field of vision. Like hawks with terminator-like vision, enemy soldiers will spot you from a mile away and open fire. Because of this, all missions pretty much boil down to you walking into an enemy compound with guns blazing and methodically cleaning camp.

This bring me to another negative issue that me and a lot of other players had - death by jeeps! Enemy soldiers can 1 hit kill you with their vehicles, which might be realistic, but not so fun. It's cool the first few times it happens, but you never feel safe ever again (once again, improvisation). There's an audible VROOOOM! sound cue when a vehicle is about to run you over, but it all it does is make the player sprint in a random direction and pray that the vehicle misses you. A lot of times, the AI decides to run you over while you're engaged in a heavy and very loud firefight, giving the player absolutely no time to judge where the vehicle is coming from. I would have liked to see some kind of an equipment piece that the player can buy that pings your map when an enemy vehicle is nearby.

I would have relaxed the AI, making it less accurate (not a 'lower the difficulty issue') because after playing many open world games, I found that having easier AI makes the game more enjoyable for the player. The skill of the AI is always offset by the quantity of enemies.

- Infinitely Respawning Military Checkpoints. Imagine this scenario - you're driving happily across the African jungle on your way to a mission when you come across an enemy checkpoint. No big deal - you kill all the bad dudes and clear the checkpoint, and then drive on through to complete your mission. However on your way back, you have to drive through the same checkpoint, and all the enemies are completely respawned! No matter how many times you clear out a checkpoint, the next time you pass it, all the enemies will be back, ready to gun you down! The fastest way to travel through the game world is by roads which are infested with these enemy checkpoints. If you don't travel by road, it will take you a very long time to reach your destination, making it never worth it. Coupled with the fact that the enemy AI is too good in this game, fighting the same enemies in the same spot becomes a hassle.

I understand why the designers chose to implement continuous enemy respawns at the checkpoints. It's a double edged sword - if there were no respawning enemies, once the player cleared out a checkpoint once, those parts of the game world would get very uneventful and even boring, making the player feel unthreatened and less time in the action. So they chose to respawn the enemies to keep the player on their toes at all times, which adds to the central theme of improvisation.

To fix this problem, I would add an icon for each checkpoint on the player's map that would start a timer as soon as it was destroyed by the player. When the timer expired, the checkpoint would be rebuilt and repopulated by enemy AI. Different checkpoints could have different timers, maybe even all of them being a random value from 10 - 30 minutes. The beauty of this fix is that players could strategically plan which roads to take depending on how much time is left on certain checkpoints.

- Buddies. Buddies are supposed to be a huge attraction of the game, but all they're good for is reviving you on the field of battle after you die. It's nice and gives you a 2nd chance, especially if you're run over by an enemy vehicle, but other than that, all the buddies are EXACTLY the same. There's nothing different about them, save for the model and voice actor - you don't get any unique weapons or equipment for having a specific buddy, no boosts, nothing. They all give you calls after you accept a mission, and advise you to do a mission their way, which is ALWAYS the better (i.e. easier) way to do a mission.

They do however add to the overall atmosphere of the game and the nature of the player meeting new people in an unknown land of Africa, I just wish they had more gameplay value.



- Voicework. I've never been to Africa, but according to this game, everybody there talks REALLY, REALLY fast. Playing the game with subtitles is a must, as you'll constantly miss what your contacts are saying to you. I don't know if Ubisoft was trying to make the game more authentic, with everybody talking so fast, but a lot of characters were lost in the crowd, and proved to be really unmemorable, thanks to them all talking like they're in some kind of a speech race. Interestingly, the characters talked normally in the trailers for the game, making me believe that the new, fast voice work was a last minute change.

DESIGN REVIEW: Wet

Borrowing heavily from grindhouse films and Quentin Tarantino, Wet can't be played like other 3rd person shooters. The correct way to play the game is to jump or slide on the ground as soon as you see some bad guys, which automatically triggers bullet time, giving you easy kills. While a solid experience, this sole mechanic which the entire game is based on overstays its welcome just a bit, making the normal sections of the game tedious at the end. What I really loved were the balls to the wall on the rails sequences like being in a Matrix-like car chase and falling out of an airplane.

LIKED:
- Style. Wet borrows heavily from the grindhouse era of American films. Inevitably, that also means emulating Quentin Tarantino. The dialog is cheesy - just bad enough to be good, the game by default has a film grain filter to it (which you can thankfully turn off), and the characters are all crazy. The most bizarre however, are the classic advertisements you get to view before the start of each chapter, which look to be lifted straight from the movie theaters... 50 years ago. Rubi, the game's protagonist also has the most bad-ass way to climb down ladders I've ever seen in a video game.


- On the Rails Sections. These are the parts where I had the most fun in the game. Exciting and crazy, it really is something to fall 20,000 ft in the air, dodge airplane debris and shoot bad guys. I really wished there were more of these in the game, as they help break up the monotonous nature of the game fairly well.



- Rubi Vision. The world transforms into red, white and black colors and Rubi gets even more badass. Serves for some entertaining enemy deaths as they evaporate into thin air. Also a pace breaker... even though it still closely follows the main game mechanic of using bullet time to kill dudes.


DISLIKED:
- Overused Main Game Mechanic. There's a reason that bullet time should be a commodity, and not be allowed to be triggered freely, anywhere and anytime the player feels like it - if you do it all the time, it loses its special meaning and becomes monotonous. This is a very negative issue for Wet, especially since the entire game revolves around this sole mechanic!

DESIGN REVIEW: Call of Duty: World at War

Fun, but has the "been there, done that" feeling. While it didn't really bring anything new to the table, it was an enjoyable FPS experience. Oddly, the Russian campaign felt more fun, even though it's been done in previous CoD games multiple times. The American campaign in the Pacific was alright and had some small new mechanics like enemy infantry popping out of the ground to surprise you, but my main problem was that all the missions blended in with each other, and only a few were memorable.

LIKED:
- Nazi Zombies Mode. Although not considered part of the main game, Nazi Zombies is the most fun I've had with the game. This awesome game mode locks you in a house and tasks you with defending yourself from increasingly difficult waves of zombies who are also Nazis - evil incarnated! While pretty fun by yourself, this mode becomes an absolute blast in co-op (up to 4 players). The zombies try to get into the house through windows, which you can board up as many times as you wish for free. You obtain points by killing zombies, and boarding up windows. These points can then be spent on things like specific weapons or mystery weapons, where you get a random weapon, but this is the only way of getting the most powerful weapons. So pretty much if you want to get far, you're going to have to gamble! Or you can also open up new areas in the house to run around in, increasing your odds of survival, but also increasing the windows you must defend. There's also temporary bonuses that you can pick up like 1 hit kills or more points per kill. It's a hectic and fun enjoyable experience!


- Mission Briefings. Each mission briefing is done in a very appealing style - combining CG with real life footage, and a voice over. Design-wise these flashy and stylish intros serve as a nice way for people who don't really care about history to pay attention to it.


- Mission Samples. Here are 2 missions which I thought were really cool. The first, Vendetta is the start of the Russian campaign and has a really nice dynamic to it, combining sneaking, sniping (drawing inspiration from Enemy at the Gates), and straight up combat, with a little storyline plot of trying to assassinate a German general.

Black Cats is an on the rails shooting mission where you're tasked with fending off Japanese zeroes and patrol boats with multiple gun turrets on the plane, while saving a couple people when you land in the ocean. Call of Duty: United Offensive had a similar mission, but this one was more interesting due to your plane starting in the air, and then landing in the water, all while you're firing away.


DISLIKED:
- Lack of Creativity. I've played as the bold, Russian sniper hero already in previous Call of Duty games, Enemy at the Gates style. And yet, that's exactly how the Russian campaign starts. On the rails shooting mission? Did that in Call of Duty: United Offensive. Driving a tank? The first Call of Duty had that. The parts are still fun, but something new would have been welcome.

DESIGN DIARY: Difficulty Levels

When you hit start in most modern games, you get a prompt asking you what difficulty you would like to play the game on. Ideally, normal is the default difficulty option - not too easy and not too hard. So you complete this awesome game on normal, and then decide to try it on hard for the extra challenge. This is where things start to fall apart.

I strongly disagree with how most games have been implementing easy and hard difficulty levels.

It doesn't matter what game, genre or platform - all have been guilty of this. It's understandable for old school 16 and 32-bit games where memory was low and changing the color pallet was a good solution to make "new" content. In that situation, you could easily adjust some enemy stats to make the gamer easier or harder for the player. However, in today's day and age, it seems almost criminal that we're still doing it. Hard mode in games like Modern Warfare, Halo, Uncharted, Warcraft III, and God of War means the same thing it did 20 years ago - toggling some numbers for attributes like player/enemy HP, and player/enemy damage output.

Having hard and easy modes be the same game as normal with simple number adjustments is an incorrect way of thinking and handling this issue. The most common way of adjusting the game to hard mode is raising enemy and lowering player HP. Because it's so easy to implement, it doesn't cost developers any extra time or effort, and I understand where they're coming from. However, they're missing the point.

By spending some extra time and making easy and hard modes of the game different enough, you can add some pretty great replay value, potentially interesting players to try more than one mode, therefore spending more time with your game.

If hard is supposed to be hard, why not make the player work harder and press more buttons? Maybe to reload correctly, two button presses are required with timing involved. For example, imagine that an FPS game on hard would differ from normal in the following ways:

- Reloading your ammo clip in a gun before it's empty takes longer, and would eat up all your bullets for that particular clip. Bullets also wouldn't magically transfer to your other clips as they always do.

- No HUD. Much like Modern Warfare's "hardcore" multiplayer game mode, there would be no indicators present for your ammo, health, and mission objectives.

- Running makes more sound than walking, and walking makes more sound than crouching, allowing enemies to spot you easier.

- Weapons have more recoil and react more realistically and less arcadey.

- The amount of guns you can carry at a time depends on the difficulty level. For example, easy = 5 guns, normal = 3 guns, hard = 1 gun.

Adding random factors can also make the game feel more challenging.

- Random gun jamming after lots of use. Far Cry 2 does this. In a normal game, it's annoying, but for those looking for a challenge, it's a good way to mix things up and have the player constantly think on their feet.

Setting a time limit on the player in certain situations also works well. Modern Warfare 2 puts a timer in certain instances on hard, where there isn't one on normal or easy.

These are just some of the suggestions for FPS games, but similar changes like these can also be used for games in other genres.

RTS games:

- A unit on the player's faction randomly rebels against you, and attacks your other units/structures if you haven't used him in some time.

- Weather would temporarily interfere with unit electronics and radar causing them to either shut offline or go haywire for short periods of time (tanks start moving in different directions, fracturing your formations). Units who are weaker, but don't have any electronic equipment are unaffected, making them more valuable, even though they're weaker.

- Map scenery could randomly affect the game like trees toppling over and crushing units underneath.

My point is that game designers have to give a second thought to difficulty levels. Upping or lowering some stats feels rushed and inconsiderate to all gamers - both hardcore and those looking for an easier interactive experience. By adding more interesting tweaks like I listed above, they would also get their audience interested in the game more, adding replay value - something every single game needs and always strives for.

DESIGN REVIEW: Dead Space

Definitely creepy and enjoyable space horror survival game on a spaceship that brought new ideas to the table, while using very solid mechanics that other games like Resident Evil have proven to be successful.

LIKED:
- Holographic HUD. The Heads-Up Display is a holographic projection that appears in front of you, without pausing the game. You can turn the camera, and the HUD will turn with it - very futuristic and fits in well with the atmosphere and the general gestalt of the game. One button press brings it up, and it's very simple to navigate - even when you're getting chased by monsters. From this menu, you can manage everything from inventory to objectives, to the map. On a related note, Dead Space also has this innovative objective marker - with a button press, a holographic line appears on the floor, pointing in the correct direction and through which door you must go to progress. It solves the annoying problem when you encounter 2 doors, and you want to go through the optional one to pick up all the items, but you don't know which one is the optional one without going through one of the doors and possibly backtracking half the time.

- Zero Gravity. When you enter a zero-g area, you can propel yourself in a straight like off a wall to another wall. The concepts of up and down get turned um... upside down and can be pleasurably disorienting at times. Monsters do the same thing, essentially making you approach combat in a different way while in zero-g compared to normal areas of the game. Sometimes the player is out in space, with no oxygen, pressured to move ahead and make it to a door before oxygen tanks run out (refillable via items or environment).


- Tentacle Grab. Three or four times over the course of the game, you're suddenly grabbed by a giant tentacle and must struggle to shoot it in its weak spot while your aim is affected. Good pace breaker and an intense moment.

DESIGN REVIEW: F.E.A.R. 2 - Project Origin

Overall, it was a solid shooter. The slow-mo parts were fun as always, the Mech riding was well done and the Alma parts were very well designed like in the first game. F.E.A.R. 2 also takes the cake as having one of the more wilder game endings that hasn't been done before.

LIKED:
- Mech sequences. Particularly the snippets where you get in and out of the Mech - I think Monolith nailed it. It's so realistic, I can believe such a machine actually exists. Everything goes well together from the character animation getting in, to the sound of the mech being activated, to the panels lighting up from inward to outward. The HUD is also spiffy looking - I like how when you zoom in, the reticle translates. Makes me wish for Shogo 2.

- Tram sequence. A nice change of gameplay that feels particularly epic.

- Scares in the school level. There's this one section where the light keeps alternating between on/off and it creates a very eerie and disorienting feeling. Love it! Reminds me of the time when I was a little kid and went into this Halloween haunted house - they had the same effect of a light being turned on/off within a small interval. It made me feel like I was in slow motion or on something.

- Colonel Vanek QTE. A fun little addition that varies the pace.


DISLIKED:
- Melee combat removal. The removal of the melee actions that you could do in the first F.E.A.R. Maybe Monolith thought it was unnecessary? Kicking dudes across rails was always so much fun.
- Level drag. Some of the earlier levels where you play in the destroyed city feel a little dragged out and the color palette looks too dull. Thankfully, it picks up in both areas as you progress through the game.