Posted April 11, 2009
I don't know why I keep playing this game. I know that if it were a different game, I would have quit a long time ago and never looked back.
Every time I play it, there's always something wrong with the D3D renderer (the software renderer won't go past 10 FPS on my machine) that either ends up corrupting the graphics so limbs suddenly fly towards the corners of the screen or everything moves into this weird night-vision-esque mode that I never asked for, obscuring the names and the graphics of all the moving objects within the game. Maybe it's the way that the sound keeps stuttering. Other times there are just annoying battles that sometimes require you to have this one object or do this one thing in order to pass. It's one battle after another to advance a laughable plot and to reach new areas of the game. And the combat mechanics are flawed - you can throw a grenade anywhere, but you can't shoot the rifle the same way? What? The design decision of this baffles me. I know it's done in the name of strategy, but it just doesn't feel right (and then again, headshots never automatically killed a man in Fallout, for example, so hey...). And the most aggravating thing of all is when a character gets killed in battle - when that happens, it's game over, turning the strategy aspect of the game into something that you have to choreograph and reload over than just think about. No, wait, that's not the most irritating thing - it's when party members take off and leave all of a sudden with the precious items that you need, suddenly screwing you in the next battle at the end of the first part of the game.
But what I think keeps drawing me in is that even though I find the characters annoying and the way they whine about how they can't kill the monsters, I find myself rooting for them. And for a good reason, too, I think: The battles are hard and unforgiving. I always avoided fighting hand to hand and pulled out the guns at every available opportunity. Ammunition is scarce and you don't know where you're going to get more bullets. You've only got a handful of bullets and there are a lot of monsters out there - death is certain.
The voice acting is terrible, but it works - the sense of dread that is voiced by the characters whenever they're up against a 'boss' enemy or when one character falls down a pit and is forced to defend himself against two monsters at the same time resonates with the game, unifies it just a little to keep it interesting. Whether you'll find it interesting enough is a gamble, but one I don't think is worth the cost of taking.
It's still buggy, it's still aggravating, and it's still somewhat interesting, but not so much. This game has not aged well at all. Playing this is on par with watching your favorite (insert object here) when you were a kid twenty years later and saying "Hey, why is (object) not so (adjective) anymore?"
Every time I play it, there's always something wrong with the D3D renderer (the software renderer won't go past 10 FPS on my machine) that either ends up corrupting the graphics so limbs suddenly fly towards the corners of the screen or everything moves into this weird night-vision-esque mode that I never asked for, obscuring the names and the graphics of all the moving objects within the game. Maybe it's the way that the sound keeps stuttering. Other times there are just annoying battles that sometimes require you to have this one object or do this one thing in order to pass. It's one battle after another to advance a laughable plot and to reach new areas of the game. And the combat mechanics are flawed - you can throw a grenade anywhere, but you can't shoot the rifle the same way? What? The design decision of this baffles me. I know it's done in the name of strategy, but it just doesn't feel right (and then again, headshots never automatically killed a man in Fallout, for example, so hey...). And the most aggravating thing of all is when a character gets killed in battle - when that happens, it's game over, turning the strategy aspect of the game into something that you have to choreograph and reload over than just think about. No, wait, that's not the most irritating thing - it's when party members take off and leave all of a sudden with the precious items that you need, suddenly screwing you in the next battle at the end of the first part of the game.
But what I think keeps drawing me in is that even though I find the characters annoying and the way they whine about how they can't kill the monsters, I find myself rooting for them. And for a good reason, too, I think: The battles are hard and unforgiving. I always avoided fighting hand to hand and pulled out the guns at every available opportunity. Ammunition is scarce and you don't know where you're going to get more bullets. You've only got a handful of bullets and there are a lot of monsters out there - death is certain.
The voice acting is terrible, but it works - the sense of dread that is voiced by the characters whenever they're up against a 'boss' enemy or when one character falls down a pit and is forced to defend himself against two monsters at the same time resonates with the game, unifies it just a little to keep it interesting. Whether you'll find it interesting enough is a gamble, but one I don't think is worth the cost of taking.
It's still buggy, it's still aggravating, and it's still somewhat interesting, but not so much. This game has not aged well at all. Playing this is on par with watching your favorite (insert object here) when you were a kid twenty years later and saying "Hey, why is (object) not so (adjective) anymore?"