Released 1.5 years after Medal Of Honor and on the same engine and almost the same settings, it's easy to draw comparisons between the two. Most players seem to prefer Call Of Duty, and I agree, but only by a small margin.

In fact, they could almost be the same epic long game, there's not much difference. The level design is good, but not particularly fantastic. The levels are fairly standard fare; either cross-country with some average looking greenery, or destroyed towns. The highlight is the final level and the level which takes place at a dam that you have to sabotage. Ultimately, the level design is an improvement over Medal of Honor, as there were no downright boring levels as MOH had.

The gameplay is all enjoyable, again the same as you would expect from this genre. High speed guns mixed with plenty of sniping means you won't get sick of the gameplay. What makes COD unique is that 90% of the game your fighting alongside computer controlled teammates. Fortunately, they're not complete morons and don't get in your way. They also don't take over the game and leave you with nothing to kill. It stills feels like your playing your own mission, but with a little help and company here and there. It was certainly a unique and satisfying feature.

The major problem with COD was it's length. I played the entire game within a day; in two sittings, and could easily have done in one sitting. This is a very short game, perhaps around seven hours. For a full game, this just doesn't cut it. I complained about MOH being so short, but this COD is much shorter. At least there is an addon pack which I'll be playing next.

So overall, Call Of Duty was a blast. Good level design, fun gameplay, not overly difficult or frustrating in any way. It's certainly the best WW2 based game thus far, despite the short length. 

Released a year after the original game, comes Grey Matter's expansion pack for the hugely popular Call Of Duty. And in most ways, it improved on what Infinity Ward did with the full game.

For a start, United Offensive, while being fairly short for even an expansion pack, was still almost as long as the full game. I estimated UO to be about 5-6 hours, with the full Call Of Duty game being 7-8. And that was my main criticism of Call Of Duty, that it being too short.

The other area Grey Matter have improved upon, despite still using the same engine and game, is level design. The levels in UO are a smidgen more impressive this time round. They feel more epic, especially examples like the lighthouse level. The only let down was the final Russian leg of UO looked exactly the same as the original game. They could easily have seamlessly integrated into part of the full game's Russian leg.

The other major difference between COD and COD:UO is the gameplay. UO features much more frantic action, with hordes of enemies running you down. Some of the battles just feel MUCH bigger. And in the process, hard as well. In some cases a little too hard. The sniper rifles with zoom features weren't used much in UO and you'll really miss them. At least in my run through I never picked them up much, if at all. Instead I stuck with the same few guns throughout the entire pack, which did get a little numbing by the end.

COD:UO is an improvement over COD. Slightly more epic levels and gameplay, a decent length when compared to the original game. But very much more of the same, just slightly better. 

Looking forward to what's next on my list for 2004 games I missed... Farcry, Medal of Honor 2, Painkiller, Chronicles of Riddick, Halflife2. Might play Riddick next I think... high expectations on this one :) 

Pick up Crysis Warhead and Dragon Age. 

far cry and riddick are great, havent played HL@ yet. Which would make us the only 2 gamers alive who havent :)

And painkiller is fun too. Dont forget to check out Dark Messiah out of the older games too. 

 

Somewhat clever platformer that requires you to re-arrange the sections of a level so that you can create a route to the goal.

http://web.student.chalmers.se/groups/idp09-7/flashgame/

I finished it, my least favorite were the samey-looking maze levels, but even then they were pretty well designed. My favorite were the more wide-open levels.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have any level numbers, so it's hard to discuss individual levels. When you get to the really hard 8-screen maze, that's the last level. 

this kind of thing could possibly be built in doom3... shit, after i beat this thing, i may give it a shot :x 

i made a map that was essentially the cube movie, with automatic script driven cube movements. i guess the only real limitation is you wouldn't get the sort of 'birds eye view' you get when you swap between slide mode and platformer mode. any puzzles done in a 3d way would have to be simpler, i'd guess, and you'd only be able to control the section you were currently in (it'd be complex to be able to control other sections with the current implementation of the guis and gui scripts)

the alternative would be to keep the automatic section movement scripts and let guis control the paths they would take (ie: you can switch the automatic movement from going left to going right instead) 

What I liked:

� The core concept makes for a good puzzle with varied scenarios.

� The musical transition between the two modes is a lovely bit of polish

What I disliked:

� The way the tiles were in bordered, rounded rectangles. Pleasant visually in itself, but the result is that the played character can't transition smoothly from tile to tile, instead there is an obvious jump from tile to tile. This seems like something that should be more important to the game than the visual choices made.

� The actual platforming is very boring, and doesn't contribute to puzzle solving at all. I spent all the time in that mode just willing the character to go faster so I could get on with the good bit.

What would I suggest adding to it:

� Some kind of additional factor to challenge the player.

A time limit in the platforming parts might make that seem more exciting, and possibly the clock could even continue running in the puzzle mode. The problem with extending time pressure to both modes is that mistakes in the puzzle mode are easier and more costly in time spent, so perhaps not.

Another factor which could make levels more difficult would be to limit the number of visits you could make to the "puzzle" mode. So in maps with many tiles, you would need to join as many as possible before returning to platforming. Might demand more forethought in the puzzle solving, but also makes it possible to get stuck, which I don't think can happen at the moment...

ps: still stuck on the last level, wrote this stuff on level 15, my opinions did not change much 

These sorts of puzzles cry out for the ability to "optimize" your solution. If the game kept track of your # of screens visited (each repeat visit counts), then you could try to find the ideal solution.

I think that this scoring system would be more beneficial to a time-based system, since the ideal time requires first finding the ideal route (from above), and then once that interesting problem is solved, all that remains is flawlessly pressing keys on the keyboard. The physics and choices when manevering in this world are not interesting enough to make optimizing your character movements sound like fun to me.

Actually, what would be really cool is seeing a faint line trace the entire route you took, so you can watch the spaghetti areas where you got lost or caught in a loop. 

to the game than just puzzle block shifting. I liked the first couple of levels because you get the whole shifting pieces around but after that, just the same old thing over and over. It feels like a good start but 30 levels without any new direction is too much.

One game mechanic I did like was you can fall through tiles, stop fall, shift blocks and carry on falling. Also the art style looked temporary to me, especially as it was not obvious which tiles linked together, should of used a pattern or symbol on the edges to show which tiles matched together. 

If I was making it, I would have made the tiles meet edge to edge, with a transparent green border between them if they match, and a solid red if they didn't (or you were at the edge of the map). It would make some of the manoeuvres around edges of tiles easier to manage at least, and as a bonus makes it explicit that the tiles match. 

Nice to see new stuff like this. 

I didn't mind that it was difficult to tell which borders matched, but i really only needed two or three levels where that was the main challenge, rather than 50% of the levels. The open levels where it was more about figuring out what jumps were possible were more my taste.

The problem, which you see especially in the 3x3 grid levels, is that sliding block puzzles are kind of tedious, and with a grid that large you do a lot of sliding (especially with trial and error.) 4x4 would have been intolerable. 

Particularly irritating in the last level where in many cases you couldn't work out by eye which blocks did connect, so you had to shuffle them all around the 3x3 square, and then if they didn't, try out another. On earlier levels, it was quite satisfying to work backwards through a chain of tiles. "The key is there, and you can only get to it from the right...that tile is the only one that connects it from the left...I need to drop down on it....so I want to move to this tile!".

But I agree that the best puzzles were the ones where you had to make big leaps of faith, switching tiles in mid jump etc. Can you do that thing like in portal where you reach terminal velocity by lining up the portals vertically - constantly falling between two tiles? Imagine if you could rotate the tiles and do portal-style flinging! 

I played through the first eight (ten? dunno...) levels and sort of enjoyed it, but it got old kind of quickly and I wasn't really having enough fun to continue. Seemed pretty easy, but granted, it was early-on.

I've been playing Protector III for the last few nights, and finally finished it last night. It's similar to many tower-defense type games, but with quite a bit more depth and continuity than some (and some of the levels are quite difficult). Very addictive!! (At least it was for me.)

http://www.kongregate.com/games/undefined/protector-iii

It *will* remember your progress, so no need to do it all in one go (assuming you were that crazy anyway--it took me quite a few hours to finish it...) 

Games are like crack.

Thanks for posting :D 

Although difficulty seems odd and inconsistent. Some of the "medium" difficulty maps took me a lot of work to figure out, and some "hard" maps I got on the first try. And I beat the final uber-map on the first try too. Go figure... 

Anyone tried Battlefield Heros yet? 

I heard they were switching payment models to really suck customers dry with those microtransactions but other than that it was fun. 

After so many positive reviews I was really looking for to Butcher Bay. Typically the big-sceen to computer-screen, film to game adaption doesn't work very well. So it's easy to assume it would have been a flop. But in fact it was a very favourably received underdog.

Nevertheless, it was with it's flaws; but perhaps my expectations were too high. Comparing the graphics to other 2004 releases like Doom 3, it wasn't quite as flash. The level design the majority of the time was good, but nothing really stood out. There were few fantastic set pieces. However, there weren't supposed to be. The game takes place entirely in a prison, mostly underground. You fight from the typical bland prison on the surface, to underground caverns, more high secure prisons, guards quarters and more. However, it is slightly disappointing that the entire game takes place in one prison. We never really get a huge variety in gaming environments. Overall, however, the design and graphics definitely live up to 2004 standards.

The gameplay was mostly good, depending on your gameplay preferences. Personally, I'm not one for the Thief style of gameplay. That is, sneaking around in shadows avoiding enemies. I'm also not one for having to complete tedious little tasks to proceed further into the game. EFBB features far too much of this. What I come for is pure action, and probably only 50% of the game features this. The tasks are boring, especially since the parts of the game that require tasks are some of the more bland looking areas.

What action we do get in EFBB, you get limited with just a few different weapons, and probably less than ten enemies to use them on, all with rather poor AI. Not a lot of variety, but it still throws up a decent challenge and fun on the most part.

The other problem wih EFBB is it's short campaign. Although I'm starting to get used to this after Call Of Duty and it's mission pack were both equally as short. Are games becoming shorter because of the extended detail gamers require in every facet of the game? I finished EFBB within one day. In three sittings to be exact, but I could have done it in one sitting.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd want another five hours trapsing around Butcher Bay anyway. It would have to at least introduce a new environment.

So overall, despite this sound like a negative review, the game actually was very good. Exceptional design and graphics, although not quite up to Doom 3, not far off it! And decent gameplay when you actually get to fight. Very much recommended. I only regret I didn't play the enhanced version released with Dark Athena.

PS. the game was a nightmare to setup and featured two game stopping crashes. It required an Open GL fix and latest EU patch, along with someone elses save games for me to continue. 

http://www.remar.se/daniel/iji.php 

Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault is up next on my list. I hope it looks better than the first Call of Duty. Screenies look better anyway.

BTW anyone played Overlord 2 yet? The graphics look so cute!!! 

I think it looked about the same, but its still fun.

I was a big fan of riddick, probably because it was different to your regular FPS at the time and parts of it just looked damn cool.