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Forum - View topicPR: Operation Darkness Demo Now Available on Xbox Live® Marketplace
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Unholy_Nny
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YES!
Wait, my 360 is a broken POS because Microsoft can't make any decent hardware... Nvm. *wants to play it really bad* |
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Monsieur Pink
Posts: 141 |
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I hope that Operation Darkness will be better than Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, the last fictionalized World War II game, it certainly looks promising, but so did TP: FoL and it turned out to be a pretty mediocre game at best.
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Taiyz
 Posts: 202 Location: Canada |
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However, when your game summary involves nazi vampires, you've obviously got a different beast of a game. It's not really a realistic outlook on WWII or an alternate retelling like Turning Point; it's the same sort of amalgamation that has made Smash Bros. so popular. Can you seriously say that you wouldn't think twice about adding vampires, werewolves, dragons and cyborgs to World War 2? Going with the analogy, there should be very few people who could pass up a chance to have Mario beat up Sonic or vise versa. It's just trying to be "different" I suppose. It succeeds in that, though. All that said, I've tried the demo and am impressed with several things, and severely disappointed by others. First-off, Atlus' first foray into next gen. It's pretty sweet; they did an amazing job with localization; even getting a demo onto the service is a feat, really (I'm not sure we can expect the same from Aksys Games and Guilty Gear 2.) Text is snappy and well-written and explains everything clearly, and the spoken dialogue is great (it seems they even got foreign talent, as there are various European accents such as Scottish, Irish, British and German) although some American talent has remained with a faux accent that works quite well (Yuri Lowenthal and Liam O'Brien do a great job.) Naturally, the storyline is rather average since there isn't much to work with based around WWII, but the cultural information and history details that are left in are impressively detailed and develop a great setting. Conversations between the the primary antagonists are rich with technical stuff. Again, the main draw is the concept, not the storyline; the dialog sure doesn't get boring, though, which is a feat within itself. Finally, everything is voice-acted, which is great, apart from the terrible, always-repeated lines whenever a character attacks. "You can't hide from me!" BANG "You can't hide from me!" BANG...etc. I'd also like to note that either Japan's getting witty, or Atlus has added another one of their signature touches to the game. O'Brien's character is named Herbert East; I'm not sure about his profession or anything, since most characters work the same apart from their magic/special attacks ("MS Attacks," simply special skills that use MS points, which replace MP) but his MS Attack in the demo is a revitalization technique (there's no direct healing apart from items, but he's the only one who can revive other party members.) Basically, he's just one big ol' parody of Herbert West: Reanimator, crafted by H.P. Lovecraft. Onto presentation. It's all sort-of uneven. The character art is great and well-detailed, and the character designs are utterly amazing in some cases (dear god, the Irish sniper woman; I'll definitely be looking out for her actress as well) but is sorely misused as plain old art+text in-dialog cutscenes. Some animation would go a long way. The actual 3D graphics of the games are pretty weak, with lots of dull colours and a very small amount of detail in individual character models (there's practically none in enemies, and many of your personal units are identical apart from their heads.) Proper 3D cutscenes with characters moving around are pretty few and far between, which is an utter disappointment. The environments are huge, so you'll most likely waste 10 minutes in each stage just running over to your enemies (I'm serious; you have to move...11? 13? I forget, of your own units, and then there are the 20+ enemies that each move separately. The time for each turn really adds up...) They're also almost totally non-interactive. When tanks appear, they can blow up a building without reason...And it does nothing! There are towers that you can blow up at some points to cause them to topple onto enemy units, but targeting big units with your big guns is somewhat of a chore. Sometimes it thinks you're not actually aiming at something that can be targeted. The frame-rate is also consistently chugging and moves noticeably slower or faster based on where you are on the map and what the camera is showing; it's somewhat inexcusable, really...The camera itself is hard to move; the sensitivity is too extreme, so sometimes you'll just tap the right stick and you'll suddenly swivel around your entire character then get a nice close-up of the side of a building or be underground or something. It doesn't handle well in closed spaces especially. Now for the good parts of the gameplay. Being a strategy RPG based around war, you know 90% of the game's contents already. You'll manage your skills and characters or buy new weapons on the world map, and guns and grenades and so-on are limited in ammunition and you've got your standard array of special attacks, items and more. The thing that makes the game unique, is the way you interact with the enemies, item management and the cover system. Guns have various ways of firing, and typically when you aim at an enemy, there will be a lot of splash damage, so a lot of the gameplay is about optimizing the amount of enemies that will be hit in one attack, since bullets are limited. Grenades as well are unique in that they can be thrown over trees and such, where-as typical guns will be interrupted by terrain. Naturally you can also just shoot at the ground and let splash damage do all the damage. Item-wise, you can walk up to any enemy corpse and loot it for various kinds of weapons you can't get from the stores (since the nazis all have stuff of German make) and a great deal of tools are actually set to automatically be used based on certain conditions. There's a skill that forces you to heal when you get below 20% of your health (it also seems to prevent you from dying...A tank shot one character point blank and he went flying across the map and crashed into a wall, only to pick himself up and heal himself >_> I think he was damaged for 4x his actual total health...) You also use special reload items automatically to refill bullet capacities when you run out, otherwise you'll be scavenging a lot (given the number of enemies in a single stage, scavenging actually makes for a unique strategy element and is often required.) The cover system again makes use of automation. You can use 3 types of Cover: Move, Attack and Ambush. Essentially, the cover system lets you specify a situation for a unit to react to. With cover move, you select either an ally or a spot of ground; if the ally moves, or if an enemy wanders into that spot, your character will then move. This way you can move multiple units at once, or have your character run behind a tree when an enemy turns the corner so they can't attack you in the same turn that they got around the corner. Attack allows you to synchronize ally attacks, and form a sort of combo. You select a weapon, and the weapon will have a specific radius that it covers. Any ally that attacks an enemy within that radius will cause your covering unit to attack the same enemy (unless the unit runs out of ammunition.) Ambush employs a similar strategy; any enemy that moves or attacks within range will be met by that unit's fire. All of these conditions last until the character is shot, or if their turn pops up again and you choose to cancel the condition. Now for counterpoints. Again, there's too many enemies and the maps are too large. I think it's basically an hour or more per level. You spend so much time crossing the area, then you take out one unit, then reinforcements arrive in some arbitrary location and you have to slog back all the way to get rid of them. It seems that there's no quick way to end a stage apart from keeping specific characters alive and killing every other enemy, so stuff is drawn out for a long time and they end abruptly. Enemy positioning has very little to do with strategy...Most of the time you can basically just throw your units in front of the enemy and start shooting, so the cover system is sorely wasted. If they had uniquely set up a specific array of units in a static position instead of having people arrive half-way through the stage, it would work much better. Another complaint is aiming in general. There seems to be a random chance of your character tripping and shooting into the forest completely opposite the enemy you targeted. It just doesn't make any sense at all. There's also no way to physically attack people unless you have a bayonet or if you run out of every weapon (then you can punch,) so even if you're right beside an enemy, you're gonna have to shoot them with a bazooka and suffer the consequences. I could go on...Basically, it's another case of poor execution. It's not bad in that it's easily on par with many strategy games we've seen before, but unless you find the plot really compelling it's going to be a chore. |
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