So i'm moving on to the 2007 releases. I've skipped 2006's Gears Of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas - I'll play them on my new computer. So, starting at the bottom of 2007's shooters was Hour Of Victory. Installed okay, but upon loading there's no menu. Probably a good thing anyway as the game got awful reviews.

So next on my list is Infernal from Metropolis Software, a game developer i've never heard of and who was bought out by CD Projekt (The Witcher) a year later. So I guess this is their one and only title.

Now Infernal received fairly average to harsh reviews with an aggregate of 60% on GameRankings.com. However, it was actually a pretty decent game so if this is an indication of the 'worst' of 2007, with 19 other action games on my list that ranked higher, then 2007 is shaping up to the best year for PC action games ever (up until 2007 of course).

Where Infernal received flak was it's short length, repetitive gameplay and not pushing the boundaries. Honestly, those 19 shooters that ranked higher - did they all push the boundaries of gaming? I seriously doubt it. I'll quite happily take a solid, good looking game with fun gameplay that does nothing to evolve gaming. I might have played this type of game a dozen times already, but that's the kind of game I enjoy.

Infernal's level design is good, but often it just feels like you're in a huge room with a maze of small walls and walkways to navigate through. Sure it's better than the corridor-room-corridor of F.E.A.R., but there's still massive room for improvement. We do get a bit a variety in the levels; there five missions going through a monastery, refinery, steelworks, a massive ship and the mountain-based satellite centre.

Now what hides the lacking level design is the great looking engine. Everything has a glossed over feeling and the lighting in particular is very well done.

The gameplay is a little weaker and took some criticism from critics, but it was still fun all the way through. Infernal leans more towards the higher difficulty rather than being an easy game. You can tap your movement keys twice to do an invisible roll to avoid fire, and without this the game would be very difficult. It's an addition that sped up gameplay a lot and is well done.

What slows the game down to a halt is the way you have to hold Enter to strip your dead enemies of health and ammo. It takes a few seconds each time, which you need to do on probably 75% of the dead bodies in this game. It ends up being a strategy of killing everything, then slowly raping the dead bodies of health/ammo for a couple of minutes before moving to the next section. It absolutely kills the flow of action in the game.

On top of that, the game is perhaps in the 5-7 hour zone. It's NOT a long game. I won't go into the story as it's the typical cliched rubbish with a hot chick teaming up with you. Same of the one liners were good though.

Overall Infernal is a good game and certainly worth playing. It won't be the best of 2007, but certainly deserves better than a 6 out of 10. 

Decided to give it another go, this time with the "Complete" mod (graphical overhaul, bug fixes, other stuff). Looks a whole lot better than the original game, but hell if you don't have a fast machine...

Originally I wanted to play SoC, inspired by all the recent tragic events and a macabre sense of end times nostalgia, but then (as always) remembered certain 'workout' situations from the game, like the entire first level and the garbage bandits, which put me off a little. So it's the third installment now, which last time I lost interest in upon reaching the city. Probably missed the best part of it.

Anyway, bottom line, if anyone's about to replay Stalker, be sure to give the Complete mods a try. 

Oh, and I've finally played FEAR - mostly for cultural capital, not actual interest. A very boring game, no idea why I even bothered to finish it. I didn't care about the story, and the 'horror' elements were lame to say the least. Like people in this thread mentioned, the game lacks variation. The levels are very monotone in style and the enemies/encounters don't offer anying special, either.
The level design issn't all as bad as people in this thread claimed, though - but yeah, it does lack variation and unique setpieces, and indeed feels unnecessarily mazey and corridory in many places. However, I liked how most maps have a slightly nonlinear route to the goal, even though the gameplay doesn't faciliate stealh approaches or anything. On the other hand, I can see how this must have been annoying for many people as the potential for getting lost is definitely there, especially considering how samey everything looks. 

Because the lack of any risk, challenge or consequence to anything you did in the game was a pretty big blight on the original, I felt. 

I'd be surprised if they did that again. 

Where to start, I guess the obvious thing to say is that its awesome and that you should buy it ;) Also, for those wondering about performance, I could run the game on my gtx460 at the "extreme" setting and had no problems.

The single player is great fun, there are a few key differences from Crysis however, the most plainly obvious for me was that there isn't so much exploration any more. In Crysis you could explore the map in any direction but only certain areas had any actual gameplay in them. In Crysis 2 you are directed through the maps in a linear fashion but each area provides many different routes and ways to get through it.

In each area the game just lets you tackle it however you wish, and gives you a bunch of toys to play with. Cars can be kicked at things and off ledges, explosive barrels can be hurled, and just about any solid object can be moved around as you see fit. It's a playground of carnage and its fantastic :)

Guns! They all feel great to use, really meaty and the customization from the first game is still there to modify your weapons on the fly. A new feature is the ability to customize your actual nanosuit with upgrades also, such as bullet deflection, threat tracers, proximity alarms, reduced energy usage for modes and an awesome "air stomp" that will take out multiple enemies if you aim it right ;)

Story is serviceable for the most part, there are a few WTF moments but its mostly enjoyable, and its presented very very well, always from first person. There is some slight retconning from the first game but nothing major. A few characters from the first game seem to have gone missing without any explanation however :P

The one thing that is kind of a letdown however is the enemy AI, far too many times they will remain stationary and not attack, or get stuck in some sort of animation loop bugginess. It also has the ability to amaze however, some of the alien enemies will jump from floor to wall to ledge to another wall then slam you in the face and its very very impressive indeed.

I've been playing the MP also, not really enough to offer a decent opinion but I'm liking it so far, its very similar to call of duty but with added nansuit powers to mix up the gameplay a bit.

One final thing I'll add, I really love the sense of movement the new cryengine manages to convey with its motion blur. 99% of games I've seen motion blur in seem to apply it to the entire screen no matter what is moving and what isn't. In Crysis 2 motion blur is applied to objects relative to their movement speed as viewed by your player camera. The effect is fantastic and really sells the visuals.

Screenshots (Could be spoilery! You have been warned!) http://steamcommunity.com/id/darrenweekes/screenshots?tab=public&showdate=1&filter=app_99830 

One of the best-looking games as of late. The engine feels a bit like an updated version of UT3, but without the restriction to brown and blurry.

Performance is great indeed. Though unfortunately it's still pretty much unplayable for me thanks to the random system lockups. Hope there'll be an update soon that addresses this issue.

It's a bit unfortunate the game itself turned out to be this consolized, though on the other hand this was to be expected. At least it's not CoD-level. Also quite easy (even on Hard), enemies go down quickly and the assault rifles have an insane accuracy. Perhaps difficulty romps up later on. 

snooze 

It seems the lockups don't occur if I set the game to match the desktop resolution and run it in windowed mode. 

Well, it did allow me to play through the bridge and the lab rat map in one go, but then it crashed in the next map.

The graphics card is new, but there must be an incompatibility issue with some other component. Possibly the PSU - it does suffice spec-wise (780W, 4 +12V rails with 20A each), but it might be faulty still. Using it, I had the MB and my former 9600 GT die just like that. Fucking hardware geek shit.

I should probably file a support ticket with Nvidia. 

99% of games I've seen motion blur in seem to apply it to the entire screen no matter what is moving and what isn't.

I've noticed this in some of the games I am now trying (ie post 2007) and it annoys the hell out of me. What a crap feature. 

Crysis 2... only played the multiplayer so far and there were a number of things that turned me off. I don't like the intense motion blur for example. I also don't like the "consoleness" of it compared to the original Crysis.

From what I've seen, they took the same approach as in Warhead, ie simplifying and linearizing, and updated the engine (with Crytek, "updating the engine" means "dusting the competition" needless to say). I guess the singleplayer will still be good though, it's Crytek and they have a bunch of super talented people there. It would surprise me if it sucked.

I'm not finished with the original Crysis yet (meaning I very actively make stuff for it) and so I'm fine with not playing C2 right now. I'm sure Crytek's level designers can't do much wrong though and the weapons etc. were already beefy in the first game.

Sounds like Cryengine is still full of bugs though. 

there is no word from Crytek about the Sandbox editor yet, only that they want to do something like UDK.

I hope it doesn't become "pay to map". 

It doe's have quite a few bugs unfortunately at the moment, which can make it very frustrating to actually find a game!

Sometimes a lobby will fill to capacity but the match will not start, forcing everyone to find a new game server. There is quite a lot of disconnection happening (to me at least), and the server browser is a bit meh (wtf, no refresh??!).

That said, once you manage to actually find a decent server that will launch games and won't kick you, the gameplay is pretty fun. my pro tip : armour mode takes a second or so to become fully active, so if you hit the armour key *after* you start getting shot it's probably too late ;)

In fact thats probably my only gripe with the MP. Were all wearing these super nanosuits but still it only takes 2 or 3 decent hits to drop us, or 1 headshot it seems :P armour mode helps a lot but like I mentioned you basicly need to be in that mode all the time and its terrible as a reactive ability.

Gb, try playing with "r_MotionBlurShutterSpeed" console variable, might be able to tone it down a bit for mp. 

 

rock-climing game, it's like playing twister on your keyboard. I just played a couple times, haven't gotten past 4.8m:

http://www.foddy.net/GIRP.html


(from the makers of QWOP) 

The over view shot reminds of the "islands" map from Far Cry, where there were 5 or 6 small to medium sized islands on the map and each one had a small objective on it, you were spawned on a boat and basicly told "there are 5 things you need to do, go do them however you want".

Definitely my favourite FC map from the retail game. The Assault level from Crysis follows a similar formula but isn't as open.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, it looks fun from a gameplay perspective :) 

OK I've put about 8 hours in and I can say that I'm getting a feel for it.

Crysis 2 is a very pretty game. It lacks some of the pizzaz of Crysis and Crysis warhead in some areas, mainly on relief mapping on textures from what I can tell. But the finesse of the visuals is still there, in a way it is better. The animations of some of the aliens is jaw dropping, as are some of the set pieces.

The gameplay doesn't actually feel particularly like a console port at all, I found the game to run very smooth and the controls have been responsive. Unlike fallout 3 or Assasins Creed for example. The main giveaway is the lack of any quicksave that I can find. This means that the game runs on a checkpoint system. There is some degree of open-endedness apparently, usually alternative routes become apparent. The checkpoint system can be annoying, but most of the sections are quite fun to play. I went for the middle tier of difficulty.

The AI is generally OK, it could be a little harder, but some of the behavioural stuff the AI does is cool nonetheless, and the animations and the way the motion blur works together quite nicely IMO. Y one criticism is that all of the human AI seems to have the same voice, which is a bit annoying.

The score is a bit annoying aswell, but sometimes it is cool. There is a lot of big spectacular orchestral movie score music, and sometimes I think this is too much and detracts from the atmosphere of the game. You can turn it down/off though....

I found a utility which allows you to adjust all of the graphics options in a similar way to the original Crysis but the presets all look fine I guess.

I think Im gonna play again for a while now..... 

Hah, awesome, I'm a huge fan of QWOP (played it so much with collegues) this one looks great as well, reached 7m! 

i managed to get to 15 or 17 m in my last attempt... it's actually not as hard as QWOP in that regard... you can actually make discernable progress in a few tries. 

I'm wanting to reinstall Far Cry for a while now, in a way it's more entertaining than the Crysis series. More anarchistic and less americanized ("Go! Go! Go!"). 

then i hit what seemed like a dead end, and it was too late to go back down and take the other route (water was too high.) the seagull is a bastard. 

This game looks pretty funny :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TM5x72fk6o&feature=player_embedded 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mjky2QE9DA 

More gameplay :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udEAEARD-Fo&feature=player_embedded
Looks great