I wanted to buy it a while ago and it had vanished.

Yes, it is on Steam. But I'm poor so will continue playing RMQ instead. 

isn't there a 'medium' ending for when you only kill some of them? 

any tips against the Big Daddies? 

nitin: Armor-piercing bullets or grenades. Electro plasmid helps too.

necros: Yes, but it's basically the Bad ending with a slightly different text. 

Call of Duty 2 is, at the time of it's release in October 2003, the best war shooter to date. It's not quite the best shooter of 2005. Quake 4 is my pick with F.E.A.R. slightly ahead as well. But being third best of the year in a shooter sub-genre dominated by bland level design and repetitive gameplay, is a good accomplishment.

Call Of Duty 2 proves that the realistic level design required for war shooters doesn't have to be ugly and uninspiring. It's miles ahead of 2005's other contenders including Vietcong 2 and Brothers In Arms. While the original Call Of Duty was okay in the design department, particularly for 2003, it wasn't amazing. Call Of Duty 2 doesn't look amazing either, but it's the consitency that counts. There's variety in design from Moscow and Stalingrad, Egypt, Libya, Germany and even the expected Omaha beach raid. The highlight for me was running up a giant French hill with mortars and machine gunners mowing you down from above.

So overall, the design and levels were consistently sprawled with debris, destroyed houses; everything to make them look like they've been part of a war. And importantly, there's plenty of vertical movement instead of huge flat levels.

Having said that the design looked good throughout, it was the gameplay that is COD3's main feature. You can only carry two weapons at a time, although once you have an automatic that's all you need. There's no healthbar and in fact no health pickups at all. Instead, at least in medium difficulty, it takes around 4-5 shots to kill you. If you get shot once or twice, you can duck down and your health will regenerate in a few seconds. It ends up being a great way to manage health as you'll still die plenty but also have many close calls where your on the verge of death but manage to somehow find cover and survive. Unfortunately the game uses checkpoints instead of quicksave, but there's several per level, all at good saving points.

Enemies are all the same, just with different weapons. However machine gunners, tanks and other vehicles help to break up the action. You also have plenty of objectives per level, from clearing out buildings, disabling tanks, destroying obects. The game is only several hours long but never gets dull. The action is constantly full-on and intense. 

Played on medium difficulty, Steam says I beat it in 6 hours, so the campaign is retardedly short. I guess I would boil it down to :

Think Wolfenstein with more linear, traditional levels, trying to emulate Half-Life somewhat but fails ultimately. Story is nonsensical really (but what time travel paradox story isn't?) The powers you get are binary and boring. The weapons are kind of dull feeling, but the Grenade Launcher weapon has a cool alternate mode, it launches a controllable grenade that you can roll around at will like you're controlling a balled up Samus. The Seeker is okay, very gimmicky but fun for a bit.

Monster design is generally very good, they look fuckin rad, but the combat is just boring. There was one monster they used (by my count) a total of twice, which is a shame, it was one of the best looking monsters in the game. Seriously, try to find some art of this game, Raven's art team rocks.

Level design was detailed, but very corridory and ultimately stale. Apparently Russians SUCK at building dependable stair cases because EVERY FUCKING STAIR CASE IS BROKEN in this game. I don't know how many times they use the 'oh no stair case to lower area is broken, I guess you're trapped once you walk off the edge' trick in the game.

Soooo ummmmm I would say it's similar to Fear 2 - stale design, pretty graphics. Highly polished but unoriginal. 6 hour campaign with many flaws in game design, but plays very well in those few areas where the game just 'clicks.' I would avoid it unless you can get it for $10-$20 or so? Otherwise there are better games out there. 

First 2/3rds were pretty good, felt like the old 1998 game, with updated graphics, but still not really up to 2006 standards. Level design was a bit bland. It felt more like a really good Halflife mod.

Unfortunately the last 3rd was utter shit. Level design turned to custard and the gameplay was pretty much impossible without reloading 10 times for every second enemy (the ones with chainguns). The enemies are far more powerful than you are, and have instant hit. I had to god mode it, and even then the ammo was spread thin.


Apparently some patch fixes the difficulty a little, not that I could find a downloadable version - it's only available through steam.

It would have been nice if there were a full Sin 2 instead of these episodes. Sure it'd be a financial flop and the reviewers would rubbish it for being too old skool, but I like old skool. But I think the guys are Ritual themselves may have been too old skool to do a successful game. Hence why they never did another sin episode and they all moved on to other companies. 

Anyone get it yet? I have to wait for paypal. :( 

those god damn chaingunners. it was mostly those guys alone that brought the game down for me. still, i would have bought for additional episodes. it was still fun, despite the difficulty problems. 

vids of it look terrible, in terms of level design. 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/42910

This is brilliant =) Real shame there is no multiplayer in the demo! You basicly have a "recipe book" of spell effects that you can choose up to 5 of at any time to create a spell to use. Shield & Earth makes a row of mountains in front of you, but if you use Shield + Earth + Fire you get Volcanoes! There must be thousands of different combinations you can do, I keep finding new ones all the time =)

Give it a shot, its only 260mb! 

that magic system sounds very cool. i'd love to see it more often. iirc, arx fatalis had a system like this. it was even more involved because you had to 'draw' the spell out on the screen to cast it. 

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.

Tried to get a emulator for it but none work apparently because of the various insanity interface tricks - deleting saved game, flies crawling on screen etc.

Good Lovecraft styled RPG with a lot of different content and rock paper scissors style. 

A while ago, stopped about 30 minutes -60 minutes in. I should pick that up again, but I'm afraid after 3 years I won't remember what's going on. 

Apparently Russians SUCK at building dependable stair cases because EVERY FUCKING STAIR CASE IS BROKEN in this game.

Hahaha, awesome.

Thanks for the review, I was interested in this game. Was. I can live with corridor shooters being corridor-y, but they have to be good at what they do (ie killing monsters). 

I posted in general abuse the other day about my new tf2 server*. It now has sourcemod running on it, so you can vote for maps and whatnot. It's set up for 8v8 atm, i still have to see how the server it's running on handles the load.

*the ip is 208.111.39.111. 

I'd be up for some #tf TF2, server added to favorites. 

Alright, we'll have to figure out when a good time.to play is.


On another note, I bought monday night combat, garry's mod, greed corp, and dead space yesterday. 

Oi, let's have some quality duels again. 

We have a tf2 server up. C'mon #tf TF2!


But if we don't have enough people I'll QuakeLIVE with you. 

I'll be available on tuesdays at 21:00 EST for tf2. Other days there's no gaurantee I'll be able to play. If i'm on and anyone wants to play, just invite me and head over to where ever you are.

playing right now, btw. 

pretty good game but the strong thematic concept actually made it a bit repetitive in terms of both gameplay and visuals after a while.

Was wishing for cooler set piece designs and different enemies after about 2/3 of the way through. 

Only just realized how many improperly aligned textures the maps have, floor trims in particular. Yeah, it sounds aspie, but still pretty lame how they don't even care for keeping a constant level of visual quality which wouldn't have been hard to maintain. The former custom maps are affected in particular. Sure, blah, gameplay++...
Also, they ported many arenas from ra3map1 - except for the best one of the map. I never understood why that whole map was so popular after all. Probably because most players were too lazy or dumb (no, "pro") to switch. Some of the later maps were much better. 

So what's the 'best' doom src port? I've seen some with silly things like md2/3 support, but are there any that stay 'true' to doom? Sorry if I'm being too vague. 

prboom/glboom are very faithful.

If you want a crosshair, mouselook, auto-run etc, use zdoom or gzdoom.

jdoom can be stripped of all that model/texture junk but it can't run larger maps from stuff like Speed of Doom or Plutonia 2.

I use zdoom myself, and prboom for viewing demos :)