/stops banging head on desk

I can't believe this is a game. I played the first one briefly, and it seemed pretty cool, but it was borrowed and I had to get it back, so I didnt get a chance to play it much. I got CD2 from Gamefly a few days ago, and was hoping it'd be awesome.

So far, I see there's maybe a paragraph of story. And what's there makes no sense. Cell is a terrorist group that wants to bring down the Agency/local government. So apparently they helped release a mutant virus which is killing everything... so the government will be brought down? They have the support of locals, who they're killing by turning into monsters K.

The game nonstop bitches about killing Agency cops or civilians, yet they run in front of you, and seem to actively try to piss you off every single second. I had a cop run in front of my car, and it counted against me when I ran him over, okay sucked, but I could understand that. When the cops are in a car and they run me over, and their car explodes, how the hell should that count against me? And it's not consistent either, with this one car that throws other cars over it's roof at high speeds, I was blowing stuff up nonstop, and no kills counted against me.

The game revolves around activating the solar collectors, which funnel their solar energy to a beacon, which are 200 feet +/- underground, which is then detonated only after you stand there forever and defend the thing. Each beacon has 3+ solar collector stations you much recover, and I think there's around 20 beacons. Every single one has the exact same mechanic around it. Not even different scenery, the exact same thing.

There's strongholds of Cell, the terrorists. Each one has 2 or 3 little parking lots/areas you have to kill the bad guys in to get awarded as clear. There's like 25 of them, see above, exact same thing.

There's breaches, where the mutants are crawling up from the caverns. Instead of nuking them with beacons, or... nukes... or dunno, you have to stand there and fight off wave after wave after wave after... you get the idea. And then they just shoot some normal missiles out of a helicopter to close the thing anyway. There's multiple breaches. All the exact same.

There's literally nothing else to do in this game for single player. You can join other folks' game and do the exact same thing in theirs, but other then that, unless you want to pay for the DLC that lets you fight waves and waves of monsters with up to 4 friends, that's it.

Jumping. The game centers around the idea that you're an evolving clone. As you collect 500 agility orbs.. or 100 of the Xbox orbs, or a few hundred of the hidden orbs, no I'm not exaggerating, you evolve slightly, and can jump farther, shoot slightly better, or lift heavier things up. Jumping itself is pure broke. You sometimes can't hold onto a ledge you obviously should be able to, sometimes you suddenly can't jump as far as normal, etc. Considering most of the action takes place on the rooftops, with no street level access to them, you jump nonstop, and the mechanic blows.

Edit: I forgot to mention how everything that's on the roof, seems to only have one, maybe two ways up. Considering how everything's mashed together and looks identical in most areas, you're going to spend a good bit of time trying to figure out how to get where you want to do, and then falling and dieing when you realize that ledge you need to grab to pull yourself up, for some reason isn't grabbable. SPLAT. Try again.

Camera/controls. Absurd. I die more often from the camera moving on me then anyway. I'm writing this raging atm, because the camera clipped itself inside a building and I can't see to move. No idea when the last time it saved was.

Aiming. This game's aim system is pure.t.bullshit. It favors cars, any cars, over anything else. You hold LT to aim, no zoom, fuck zoom, who needs zoom, you've got auto aim! It might lock on those 20 Cell guys. Or it might lock on the exploding barrel 100 feet behind them. Or it might lock on the civilian car going by at 60mph, but you don't notice, so you hit LT, and then RT to fire, and you're getting yelled at for killing a civvie. I've yet to once get this aiming system to work correctly, and killing anything without a retarded amount of bullets just doesn't work unless you've got a sniper rifle. Which is so overpowered it's broken. LT-RT dead. Only they don't give you shit for ammo, so you can't use it much.

Map. A useless piece of shit hud map, no waypoints, and an even worse usless pos map in the menu.

I'm sure there's more that'll come to me, but these are my impressions 4 hours in

 

Okay...

So stop playing it. Save yourself the rage?

I assure you there are a multitude of other games out there, even freeware, that will amuse you more if you're worried about spending money on it and not getting its worth.

 

Thank you for this amazing nugget of advice. Without it I may of been lost in the streets of Pacific City for days. I'm very glad our board policy of "if you don't have anything to add, don't add" is firmly in place, and we have members who follow that standard to the utmost degree.

~
A review is a review, and I try to play my games to finish, keyword is try, I doubt I'll dick around in this one much more. Saving others from fail, and laughing at the reviewer's rage is what the review's about, and running commentary is a part of it.

 

Yeah, I know, sorry.

I'd actually just seen this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egxjuLkhXUw&feature=related - recently, after having loved the original. I personally was considering picking up CD 2, but that was enough to change my mind.

I'd just beat a particularly hard Super Meat Boy level that took me a little less than an hour of dying over and over again to get through, right before coming into this thread. So, in my point of view, there's good frustration and bad frustration. I sometimes need a kick to get me out of playing bad games, so thought the advice, though obvious, might be appreciated.

 

Yeah, I tried this game on a friends console for about an hour before ragequitting because I kept missing ledges.

Fix'd.

 

Yeah, there's a fine line between frustrated, as in "DAMNIT I got to get that" and "DAMNIT WTF" The whole sometimes you can grab on a ledge that's clearly 5 feet out of your hand's grasp, and the other times you can't grab on stuff that your arms are so far past your chin is on the ledge is crazy. It's damning entirely considering that most of the time the guys are on top[of buildings that are almost impossible to get to.

Another thing is the way you jump. You launch up into the air with superhuman almost speed, but you some times float down maybe 1/3 as fast as you should, and then other times you just plummet. Worse because the camera spazzes out and doesnt follow you right, so you can't save yourself usually by trying to steer towards something. Later on once you've collected a bergillion orbs you get the ability to have jet thrusters in your feet, which fixes a ton of the problems, and homing missiles and grenades that do enough splash damage to make killing massive amounts of Cell easier. As long as there's no innocents around.

I think I forgot to mention this about the aiming system, the terrorists usually carry garbage spray and pray guns. Only in their hands, they're machine gunning you from 5 stories up with sniper like accuracy. In order to hit them back, you have to find them, assuming they're not shooting through walls, you get the system to lock on somehow, hit up on the stick, and wait for a few seconds until the reticule shrinks to a dot, and then shoot, and 1 bullet will find it's way there, even if your gun normally sprays huge bursts. If your gun has high enough damage, that head shot will kill them, if not, do it again, or get a sniper rifle.