Medal of Honor: Airborne is the pefect example of a game that could have been great, but was left stumbling over it's own feet in an unfinished product. I can only assume it's because Activision's Call Of Duty was jumping ahead of them in the WWII shooter market. The last MOH effort in 2004, Pacific Assault, was an average game and since then Activision released a successful Call Of Duty 2 in 2006 and was set to release Call Of Duty 3 in time for the 2007 christmas.

So EA release Airborne; their third PC game in the franchise, a game that really needed another year of development in my opinion. Only then it'd be competing against the likes of Far Cry 2, Mass Effect, Left 4 Dead 2 and another Call Of Duty title. Airborne is what happens when you make something half-assed. In my opinion EA LA shouldn't be given the MOH franchise to develop in future. Pacific Assault was a disappointment and too short. The original MOH was created by 2015 Inc, not EA. And what happened to 2015? Most went on to create a new studio named Infinity Ward, developers of the Call Of Duty franchise. That being said, EA actually started this game in 2004, giving them three years to make it. How on earth they could have spent three years creating six levels is beyond me. Perhaps they only had a single level designer and the rest were there to make coffee? Has building a single level evolved so much that it takes around 10 level designers six months to create a single level?

Enough about the politics and developmento of modern games, because I really don't know, and on to what is bad about Airborne from a gamers perspective. The most prominent problem being that the game is only about five hours long. As I said above, only six levels and while they are large, there should be twice that many for a full priced game. There are some epic moments, this is Unreal Engine 3 afterall. The final level is a great finale on a huge war tower full of AA's and the like to destroy. Walk to the partly destroyed outer-edges of the tower you can look out over a bomb-ravaged city. It's absolutely epic and probably one of the best levels of 2007 for any action game. Although the inside of the tower doesn't look all that good at all.

The other levels look almost as great too, but they are all very similar looking European towns full of debris and destruction. And none of them can catch that imposing feeling you get from the tower; of being just small dot in a huge city. Some of the levels aren't really as big as they really appear when you're parachuting down either.

Overall I'd give the design an 8/10. The job was half-done with UE3, but the levels all look good and are well constructed. 

There's no story whatsoever. All I can tell you is the players name is Travis (spelt Travers because that's cooler) and it's WWII. There are cutscenes before each mission explaining the objectives, which are both boring and skippable.

The combat also needed work. The weapons just don't feel right. You can put a few shots into an enemy and he stays there as if he wasn't even hit. Couple more and suddenly he dies. It feels as if my first few shots went right through him. Headshots are difficult to achieve because the movement is jerky and the recoil on guns just throws you upwards and it takes a second to even realise what you're aiming at. What I mean by jerky is if you've got someone down your sights, you move slightly to the left and it jumps a foot. There's not a smooth transition, so there's times where an enemy will be impossible to shoot (unless you physically move the player) because the sights jump from one side of him to the other! It feels like stop-motion animation; not good at all EA.

If I'm firing at close-range at an opponent, it shouldn't take several shots before he suddenly just drops, without any proper death animation or blood. Many times you'll shoot him again because you're not actually sure if he's dead or not.

The guns have a weak fire-rate, they sound weak, and none of them were really enjoyable to use. The shotgun is maybe the exception, but who uses a close range shotgun for long range combat?

The enemies themselves were just standard humans with different guns and average AI. Nothing new here, but even then they could be fun if the weapons had been tweaked properly.

There is one big thumbs up for Airborne that I absolutely loved - jumping from the airplane! Each level I had to demand the girlfriend to watch me jump on the big screen because it's just SO DAMN COOL! She's not interested in the slightest, but I had to show someone! It was brilliant.

However, the checkpoint system was sketchy as hell. Provided you don't die much you'll be fine (and as such I played on easy as I hate checkpoints), or if you die just after a checkpoint. In Airborne you go back to the last checkpoint of objectives, so if you've completed 5 of 10 objectives then you'll still have those completed. You return to the parachuting-in mode (which makes no sense at all from a realistic viewpoint) but you can almost land right where you died. The problem is the map gets partly re-populated and you seem to restart with the weapons you started the level with, or at least you lose all you're ammo. I didn't die enough times to figure it out, but for instance I died in the tower level and parachuted back down with many enemies re-spawned. Only this time I'm given my original two weapons back with barely any ammo in them, instead of having the machine gun I previously had with full ammo in it. Why on earth would you restart a checkpoint but lose your ammo and have the enemies respawn?! Who the hell makes these decisions at EA LA?

Oh well, this game could have been the best MOH yet. It need the checkpoint system fixed (quicksaves anyone?), the weapons properly tweaked, at least some sort of story rather than random missions, and most importantly MORE LEVELS! As it is, it feels like an expansion pack to a bigger game. It feels like a series of objective-based deathmatches with little point.

I still liked it; perhaps I've been a bit harsh on the game because of all the games in I've played from 2007 so far, this is one of the few I'd actually play a second time. It just could have been much better with a bit more work.

Rating: 7.0/10 

Finally got around to playing this badboy. Just finished the Ishimura section, so far so awesome!

I really must point out that the environments are beautiful, like the first one in the series this is sci-fi pornography at it's best. There is so much detail absolutely everywhere, I've stopped playing at times and just smiled at the screen almost in disbelief at what I was seeing. That doe's not happen often! :)

As a sequel its more refinement rather than innovation, everything just feels/looks/sounds better than before. There are no new mechanics (that I've seen just yet) but the original mechanics have been polished up and enhanced, so you now have total freedom to fly around in zero-G sections, and I've seem some gameplay involving thrusters that you can attach to things and fire off to move them around.

Curious decision to remake Isaac into a fully voiced character, I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, it doesn't get in the way at all, its just different :) I suppose it's easier to show his mental state when you can hear him getting six shades of fucked up. I think so far the other characters have been quite weak, and in general im feeling slightly more disconnected from the story than in the first game, the station commander for example, I have no idea what he wants or what his motivations are, I just know he doesn't like me very much.

I thought the intro was worse than the first game also, it didn't really set the scene too well, which is perhaps why i'm feeling disconnected. The Dead Space 1 intro was fantastic, it introduced all the crew, the Ishimura and setup the story very nicely whilst looking awesome. I can't even really remember what happened in the intro for DS2, I remember running through some corridors with a straight jacket on, not having a clue wtf was going on :)

So to round this thing off, DS2 is great and you should get it :) And if you haven't played DS1 you should get that also. 

Having not played any FPS games for a couple of years (including Quake), I have just done 15 minutes of Hard Reset. Great architecture, Blade Runner all over, yet gameplay just like Quake or Quake2: monsters, blow things up, secret areas etc, and nothing complicated (yet!). I might play some more tomorrow. 

Yeah trailer looked kinda good. I don't like the futuristic sci-fi setting much, but it looked good in Hard Reset. Funny they only announced the game a couple months before it's release I think... talk about bad marketing. 

That's a sod, 17 minutes was all there was. Will it encourage me to spend �20 on Steam...? 

Thanks for the heads up, downloading now. Wasn't super=impressed with the trailer, huge weapons and too much fancy lighting, but will be keen to give it a try. 

How many of those 17 minutes are waiting for the stupid menu system to dick around back and forth with it's "novelty wears off and boredom sets in in about 30 seconds" graphic???? 

So it's like a 2006 era Daikatana meets Blade Runner, with naff hints of Bulletstorm. Uh huh. Kinda fun tho. The city above you is rather cool. 

...and it was Syndicate as everyone thought.

At least I assume our Norwegian friend has mapped for it. 

That'll be awesome seeing what CZG can do a modern game. Can't wait for that one. 

lol as if individual efforts have any place in a production like this.

The coop will own tho... 

fucking adjustable fov in the pc version ffs! ;)

Screens look interesting, hoping you can level city blocks like in syndicate wars <3 

czg just tell the other "artists" to piss off, and that you're making the levels from start to finish. I won't have it any other way :D 

"Populous 4: The Hand" Details Leak from Swedish Gaming Magazine 

Through DART 6 bio-chip technology implanted in their head, players can slow down time and breach the digital world around them to take down their foes using a variety of upgradable hacking mechanics. Syndicate�s blend of fast-paced, futuristic, action shooter settings and story combined with innovative chip breach gameplay instantly immerses players in a unique digital world.

Unique eh. So nothing like the Veil in Wolfenstein nor the time gimmicks in Timeshift and Singularity. I bet the atmosphere and setting is worlds away from Deus Ex too. Yup screams UNIQUE out of every orifice to me.

Still it's existence as an FPS shooter seems to annoy some fanbois, so I might buy it for that alone. 

Populous becomes a first person shooter?! WTF? Why bother even wasting the Populous franchise name, just call it something different ffs. I never liked the Populous games, and if I saw the name "populous" in a video game store I'll completely overlook it thinking it's another god game. Next they'll be making a Need 4 Speed war shooter. 

Digital Extremes is well known for it's hand in the Unreal franchise, particularly the multiplayer games Unreal Tournament. By 2005 they developed their own new IP; Pariah, which was an average game at best. Warpath followed a year later and I didn't have the heart to play it since Pariah was a skippable title and Warpath was critically received as even worse.

So it's not a far stretch to assume their next IP; Dark Sector, might fail as well. It's an early-2008 game although it didn't get a PC port until 2009. Fortunately Digital Extremes have developed their own engine for Dark Sector instead of re-using the aging Unreal Engine 2.5, or at least aging in their hands.

The engine, named Evolution, does a pretty good job of making the game look appealing. My only complaint is that they went way overboard on the post-processing and visual effects. The amount of blurring on anything that isn't direcly in the centre of the screen and up close, is ridiculous. But the lighting all looks good. It looks about what you'd expect for a 2007/2008 gaming engine with all the visual effects hammed up to the max. Very, very similar looking to Infernal.

The art is also satisfying with tonnes of details on the textures throughout the game. Most of the levels look solidly good all throughout the game; there's nothing dull here. But there's also nothing awe-inspiring. The levels are all tight and claustraphoic, with a slow walking speed so you don't really notice that between each level load there's really only a few rooms sometimes. It's a corridor crawler basically, although with plenty of outdoor areas as well, they're still very linear and tight with random, unrealistic barriers used for cover everyone. There's no treking off the beaten path for exploration in Dark Sector, so expect linearity at it's hardcore.

The gameplay is where Dark Sector fails for me. Crystal Dynamics introduced a variety of unique features into the game, most notable the spinning blade you launch at enemies while holding a handgun in your left hand. So you can shoot and blade at the same time, which is great for a while. The first half of the game has you up against humans with guns; nothing different to every other shooter, but at least it's fun. Then a little past halfway they change into the infected, which are basically Doom 3 Imp's that fire yellow or blue crap at you. Two good shots from this fast projectile stuff and your dead. The health is regenerating but once the screen goes red it's several painstaking seconds before your health has returned to normal. Furthermore the infected are launched at you in spawns of 3, 4, 5 at a time and as soon as they're dead more keep spawning. As you get further into the game and different types of monsters are introduced, they have more and more health to the point where you need to hit one four or five times with the blade to kill it. Four or five times?! I might as well be using saucer than a hardcore three-edged blade!

This all wouldn't be so bad if there were quicksaves, but of course Crystal Dynamics doesn't care about PC standards, they're all about consoles, so you'll be replaying many of the checkpoints two or three times till you get through. It feels like sometimes getting through a fight is more luck than skill in Dark Sector. If you just happen to run the wrong way and there's an infected imp spoofing you, and you miss the powerhit, then you won't get away because the damn player moves too slowly.

It's a lot easier if you're able to use your guns and blade 50/50, but there's not quite enough ammo for that, so you'll spend a lot of time hiding behind cover picking things off slowly. Most of the game isn't too bad, but it's just some scenes where you have monsters spawning over and over again and it can get quite overwhelming in the later stages.

What they need to do to fix it was make the blade FAR more powerful. Sure you can do a more lethal hit if you hold the blade key down and release it at the perfect time, but it's hard to get the timing right so you'll only get the powerhit 40-50% of the time. The blade should have been an awesome weapon of destruction ripping through enemies. Along with a faster player and perhaps less reliance on the Gear Of War-ripoff cover gameplay and a faster regenerating health system, and Dark Sector would have been a much more enjoyable game. Either that or include a damn difficulty selection instead of just one difficulty.

And the boss battles were some of the worst I've ever played without any quicksaving or checkpoints during the battles - they're hardly worth wasting your time on without putting a cheat on to get through it.

Overall a good looking game, despite there not being anything too epic, but the gameplay could have been a lot more fun but just became monotonous and annoying by the last quarter of the game.

Rating: 6.0/10 

Kona becomes someone without an irony meter?! WTF? Why bother even wasting time going on SomethingAwful, just stick to a serious gaming news site ffs. 

Still it's existence as an FPS shooter seems to annoy some fanbois, so I might buy it for that alone.

You won't be so smug when Quake is remade as a third person cover based gears knock off.

Okay Fallout worked very well as an FPS, but a more strategic game with the squad elements and stuff of Syndicate? I dunno... too many games are getting sucked through either being first person or third person shooters.
I love shooters, but I don't want quite the volume of them that we now have :E 

OH haha was that a joke? I thought it might have been but it wasn't april! Didn't notice what site I was on. What a douche! lol 

With the changes made with Fallout, X-COM and Syndicate in FPS over the years, even I almost fell for it.

Not that I found Fallout 3 bad. I've enjoyed it and the game surpassed my expectations. Never played the first Fallout until the third got announced and that was an interesting experience.

XCOM just looks underwhelming. Never played the UFO Defense either until sometime before this new game's announcement. And I love the hell out of it. Very atmospheric and the turned-based strategy aspects are refreshing, including all the management and taking care of your troops while out on the field.

Syndicate? I have fond memories of Syndicate Wars on the PSX many years ago, despite being terrible at the game. But another FPS? 

Why bother even wasting time going on SomethingAwful, just stick to a serious gaming news site ffs.

Is this sarcasm?

Because, well... 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/09/16/portal-free/ 

First I'll cover John Woo, acclaimed Hong Kong action movie director who is behind Stranglehold. Now I've seen most of his top movies; Hard Boiled, The Killer, Bullet In The Head, Police Story, and his western movies Hard Target, Broken Arrow, Face/Off. I like a good action movie or a good crime/drama, but none of his movies have been very memorable for me. In fact I can barely remember a thing about Hard Boiled, and it's only been a couple years since I saw it! Stranglehold is the video game sequel to Hard Boiled. I'm not sure that it really features much of the plot, it's really just the same guy (Tequila, voiced/played by Chow Yun-Fat) in a completely different story.

The story in Stranglehold follows Tequila as he tries to get his long lost love and child back from a gang, who are using them to blackmail another gang. So Tequila sides with both gangs at some stage in order to get his family back. The story is okay - plenty of action movie cliches and rather predictable, but at least there is a story going on with cut-scenes throughout. I would have hoped the game would have featured something a little more interesting coming from John Woo; I could have thought up this plot in five minutes, but a game with a good story is rare. But the player model looks just like Chow Yun-Fat, which is great.

The gameplay in Stranglehold is straight-up action mixed with Timeshift and Max Payne. Bullet-time is important and used constantly during battle. There is a cover system, but it's not necessary, thank god, but jumping is missing. You also have special abilities which build up over time as you kill bad guys - simple health boosts, precise slow motion sniping, a fury mode where you can't be hurt and don't lose ammo and a spinning attack. They were good little features, in particular the sniping and fury were very helpful during boss fights. But I ended up using the health boost the most.

Weapons are all okay. You have only two weapon slots so I mostly stuck with the few machine guns and pistols. You do go through ammo quick and have to switch weapons often, but there are plenty around. Only the shotgun I didn't like - it was a bit useless unless at very close range. Overall the combat was fun and quite constant. Sometimes it felt a bit Painkiller-esque as you seem to enter one arena and have a set number of spawning enemies before you can continue to the next arena, but other parts of the game were more flowing so Midway didn't overdo the arena feel. Nor did they make the common mistake of endless spawns until the player moves forward - I really hate games that do that.

Stranglehold does feature a checkpoint system, so marks down for that as always. But it's not so bad here as the game won't have you dying over and over. I played on the lowest skill setting because I hate checkpoint replays, so I only died several times during the game at the most (mostly boss fights), but it wasn't stupidly easy either. There was still some challenge and strategic gameplay involved. The final level was suitably tough.

Stranglehold uses Unreal Engine 3.0, so it's no surprise that the game looks good. Unfortunately Midway really struggle with the structure of the levels from an aesthetic viewpoint, instead relying on lots of debris and detail instead of fantastic open levels. The levels are often very small and tight. When I got to the Slums level it started out with a great looking scene over a run-down city, but before I knew it the level had turned into trekking through tiny rooms, sewers and corridors. You also get to play through a museum, a penthouse building, a massive restaurant, even the Hong Kong marketplace, but while they all look really good, they're also quite small. Only the Tai O island opens up a little, filled with wooden huts and walkways through the island bays.

Strangehold may not do islands as pretty as Crysis or restaurants and casinos as impressive as Rainbow 6, but there's nothing to really complain about with the design.

The only major bug forced me to change the resolution every time I started the game or I'd just get a black screen. A minor annoyance though since I completed the game almost in a single sitting.

Usually after playing a game I know exactly what it did wrong and what to complain about. But in Stranglehold, to be honest, there's nothing really that bad here. It's just a good, action-packed game to add to the collection. Decent design, fun gameplay. Perhaps it's only big flaw is it's very short length and only seven levels.

Rating: 7.5/10