Modern Warefare 2 Multiplayer

It's time to discuss the multiplayer in MW2. I am, of course, discussing the PC version here, as I refuse to play first person shooters on a console, so take that into consideration.

Loved

• More and better. If you played the first Modern Warfare to any degree, you'll be right at home in the second. It has levels, experience, challenges, and even a lot of the same weapons. That's a good thing. The first game was a blast. In the second though, they've really ratcheted everything up a notch. There are now a LOT more weapon attachments: heartbeat sensors, holographic sights, extended magazines, full metal jacket ammunition, akimbo pistols/smgs (dual wielding) as well as just more options per gun. On top of that, they seem to have done a pretty decent job of getting rid of perks from the first game that were worthless (Eavesdrop anyone?). While not all perks in the second game are created equal (I still don't see the value in SitRep), generally speaking they all have their points. Finally, there are now a ton more death streak options (and kill streaks!) that you can even customize to your liking. It's literally like they took the first game and tried to improve upon it in every way.
  
  
• Steam/Partying. I really like Steam for grouping with my friends. It works in game, I can chat with them, and pretty much everyone uses it. Since MW2 just uses Steam for grouping, it makes life really easy. I start up a MP game, invite my friends, then select the game mode we want to play. We all end up on the same team and get to play together. While this mode does not work perfectly by any stretch of the imagination (some of us connect and others don't some times), it really is a great idea and works better than it would if we all tried to get on the same team in on a dedicated server.
  
  
• Maps. Despite what Draenoth may tell you about Wasteland or Estate, there really aren't any duds in the map rotation here. I think each of them has something to offer and they are all remarkably well balanced. It is very common in domination games to control one side of the map for the half the game and then control the other side for the second half. I do find myself wishing for more at times, but the ones that exist are actually quite good.

Hated

• No dedicated servers. This has to be said in any PC review. While the match making system works okay, it just isn't amazing by any stretch of the imagination. We've had countless times where it chooses hosts in what seems like a completely arbitrary fashion (Draenoth makes a terrible host apparently, but it seems to love him for some reason). The host migration sucks (your host quits and it has to select a new one). The lack of mode types is annoying (why can't I play Hardcore Free For All?). We can't even all play Free For All on the same server. My final complaint is that they even locked down private matches which means that we can't even play our 1v1v1 games that we used to love in the first game and still get experience. While any of you fools playing on the console are used to all of these things, they each represent a significant step backwards in the world of PC gaming.
  
  
• Only 5 characters slots. This is definitely a minor quibble, but due to the ridiculously high number of weapon/attachment/perk attachments that this game sports, only have 5 slots is completely unacceptable. It's my understanding that each level of prestige unlocks another one, but to have to spend 50-100 hours to unlock a single character slot (not to mention the other annoyances of starting over), is just unacceptable.
  

I'm not going to belabor this point too much: this game is absolutely brilliant. Despite my complaints about dedicated servers (which would make the game even better than it is), it is still just an absolute blast to play. Infinity Ward really outdid themselves here. While I couldn't recommend buying the game at full price for the single player campaign alone, I could do that for the multiplayer. There are dozens to hundreds of hours worth of play time here and they are nearly all guaranteed to be a blast.

Modern Warfare 2 Single Player Review

I've been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 pretty solidly for the last week and a half and have pretty much experienced everything the game has to offer at this point. Let me spoil the whole review for you right now: this game is good. Really good. If you played MW1 and liked it, buy this game. That's all you need to know.

As the game has 3 pretty distinct pieces (single player, special ops (co-op), and multi-player), I'll be reviewing them separately. Today: single player (expect some minor spoilers below).

Loved

• Familiar Yet Different. I was quite pleased to see some of my favorite characters return in this game: Soap, Ghost and even Price. They all have unique, interesting personalities and it was great to have them along for the ride again. MW2 definitely feels like a sequel to the first (something new for the CoD franchise), which is a good thing. I very immediately felt at home with the characters and weapons while at the same time was quite pleased with what was new.
  
  
• No Russian. I'm pretty sure everyone on the internet has commented on this controversial level by now, quite honestly I'm tired of it. This level worked for me. It made me angry. It made me hate terrorism and Mahkarov in particular. It evoked emotions and was "good" the same way Schindler's List did those things. I still don't understand quite why people are so upset about it; it's like it fully incenses some people. Here are two links to articles that I felt did a great job of expressing my point of view.
  
• http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/covah/why-no-russian-was-necessary-in-mw2-spoilers--154852.phtml
• http://www.deseretnews.com/blog/31/10007201/First-person-shooter-Video-game-blog-Over-the-line.html
  
  
• Interesting Locales. I was a little surprised by all the places I ended up in this game: an airport, an Afghan desert, some time in the frozen wilderness, Brazil, American suberbia, even The Mall/The Whitehouse. They did a great job in each of the various locations; the "set pieces" were truly great. There were few if any levels that felt like duds to me. All of them had superb art and solid level design. Kudos to Infinity Ward on that one.
  
  
• Weapons. This is probably more true about the multi-player, but the single player campaign has some new and interesting weapons. The stealthy snow levels in particular had some of my favorites: a silenced sniper rifle and a gun with a heart beat sensor on it. While lots of the guns aren't all that new, the game does a great job of giving the player a pretty wide variety of great weapons. It definitely adds to the fun of the game.
  

Hated

• What the hell is going on? When I finished the single player, I had absolutely no idea what or why various things had happened. The story is WAY too disjointed and convoluted. I literally had to go read the plot review on the Wikipedia page for the game to get an satisfactory insight into the story. I heard somebody else comment that it was like they came up with all these interesting places to have you fight in then spent the rest of their time trying to bend the story into those locations... quite honestly it felt a little true. The story was Mission Impossible ridiculous; it made no sense at all.

Other than the crazy story, there is very little to say wrong about the single player. It's fun, it's action packed, and it's solidly better than the first game. It was definitely short (<6 hours on Hardened), but if it had gone on any longer, it probably would have been too long. While I'm not sure I could recommend the $60 sticker price for the single player only, it is without a doubt a solid experience. Luckily, the single player is the weakest part of this brilliant game. Expect my other two reviews to follow soon.

Spikey's Bounce Around Review

I've been promising to start doing iPhone game reviews for a while now, and while it's possible that there is only a single person who reads my blog an iPhone, I'm still doing it.

Spikey's Bounce Around is a relatively simple little causal game made by Donut Games. Donut Games has been running a promotion offering three of the titles from their catalog for free. I've always been a sucker for a cheap/free game, so I picked up all three. While I haven't spent as much time in the other two as I have in Spikey, they all seem to be pretty decent with high production values.

The object of Spikey's Bounce Around is to shoot your little spiked ball around the stage to free butterflies. If your ball passes through a leaf/flower/stick cluster, it will disappear. If you remove all the plants from underneath one of the butterfly jars, the jar breaks and the butterfly is free. Free all the butterflies and you pass the stage. Spikey will stick to walls and other similar things but bounce off of the yellow and blue "bouncy" platforms. There are also other spikes and jarred wasps that cause you to instantly fail. Finally, you only have a finite number of times you can throw Spikey around, and in some stages, you are forced to make a single, perfect throw. There are 50 stages in all, and I can guarantee you that some of the later stages are really difficult; the difference between passing the stage and not is often the difference in a few pixels of aiming.

The controls are simple, but effective: merely tap where you want him to go. You can also hold down and adjust the directional arrow to get precisely the right shot. All shots have the same power, and the power is not enough to negate gravity entirely, so lots of shots involve lobbing Spikey just right across the screen. All in all, the mechanic works quite well and the levels are unique and varied.

Without a doubt, this is the game I have sunk the most time into on the iPhone. I've found myself sitting on the couch with the TV on trying to get a specific shot just right over and over again. Even after you beat all the stages, you can try to get the 3 star challenges on each which involve getting high scores, usually by using a fewer number of shots. I've three starred most of the stages, but am still working on the rest.

While Spikey's Bounce Around does not revolutionize anything, and the game play is not in any way deep, for a casual little iPhone game, it works AMAZINGLY well. I would easily recommend the game to anybody, especially while it's free, but I would have paid $2-$3 for it and come away happy. Pick it up; it's fun.

Borderlands Review

Draenoth graciously bought me a copy of Borderlands for my birthday (thanks man!) and we've been playing it pretty solidly since it unlocked on Steam last week on Monday. While we have yet to finish a full play through of the game, I definitely think we're close enough that I can make a final judgment call on it. In short, Borderlands is Diablo 2 if it had been a shooter with a comic book vibe. It's got shooting, crazy loot drops, and a brilliant comic book art style. There is a definitely a lot to love here.

Love

• Shooting. At its heart, Borderlands is just an open world shooter. If it failed to do that well, the whole game would fail. Luckily, it does a very admirable job of providing an entertaining shooting experience. I was a little concerned that the stats in the game would get in the way of my ability to shoot things in the head, but the only thing that stops me from doing that effectively is my own skill. Whether I'm sniping, shooting rockets, or just spraying and praying, the gun play is continuously fun and exactly what it should be.
  
• Loot. There are rocket launchers, shotguns, various forms of machine guns and pistols, and my long time favorite: sniper rifles. Each performs as you'd expect and there is actually a lot of variety even between guns of the same type. Also, you can pick up stuff that modifies your class, your grenades, and even get different shields. This game spews loot at a rate so continuous, it's absolutely crazy. Additionally, the game does a really good job at providing you both with things that are obvious upgrades as well as upgrades that are trade offs. As an example, my Hunter is currently equipped with a sniper rifle that does absolutely amazing damage (with fire!). While I would normally have only this one sniper rifle, I've found myself also carrying around a less damaging corrosive gun that has a bigger zoom. I keep finding myself switching back and forth between the two depending on the situation. While I'm used to switching between gun types (sniper rifle vs. close range guns, etc), switching between two different guns of the same type is definitely new. There's something about this game that makes nearly every loot drop exciting in a way that was never captured by Diablo or other MMOs.
• Co-op. If you know me at all, you know that I enjoy shooting it up with my friends (hmm... not sure that came out right), so the co-op mode in Borderlands is definitely a welcome setup. While the game is quite playable (and fun) single player, the game doesn't truly start shining until you get a couple of your friends in. Even with one other person, the fun value really hops up a notch, but with 2 or 3 friends, the game is a blast. If any of you all want to play with me/us, just let me know. I'm Morindil on Game Spy.
  
• Art. I'm a big fan of the art style of this game. I think the comic book/cell shaded art style is under utilized in games, so I'm glad to see a game that not only does it, but does it well. The game not only looks great, but actually runs quite well too. If they had taken a more realistic gritty approach to the art (like say Fallout 3), I think the game would lose a pretty big portion of it's appeal.

Hate

• Consolification. The PC version of Borderlands is a console port of the PS3 and 360 versions. A BAD port of them. It's missing all kinds of obvious features: in game microphone controls, anti-aliasing, a proper FOV, text fields that the mouse wheel can scroll, mouse friendly tools for inventory management and item comparisons, and so on. I quite honestly haven't seen a game that was such an obvious and sloppy console port since Deus Ex: Invisible War. With some proper PC fixes, they could REALLY turn the game into something amazing.
• Co-op setup. I am absolutely flabbergasted that a game that marketed itself so heavily as a co-op shooter could fail at co-op so epically. First off, the game uses Game Spy for match making, which in and of itself is sort of a joke. Furthermore, you need to forward half a dozen ports just to allow people to connect to you. I REALLY wish people would realize that the average PC gamer doesn't know how (or want to!) forward ports to setup a match. There are so many games that seem to manage this kind of thing fine (see Left 4 Dead), that when one doesn't, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Draenoth and I spent almost 2 hours the first night just trying to connect to each other and find ourselves praying to the connectivity gods every night hoping that it'll work. (For the record, we've had the best success when we both go into single player games and I invite him into mine).
  
• Skill Trees. This is probably my most minor gripe, but I found the skill trees to just not be all that interesting in general. Most skills just increase damage or clipsize or reduce a cool down of some kind. While it is possible to make some reasonably diverse characters, most characters of the same class really come out to be mostly the same. It's possible I'm missing something here (perhaps the diversity comes in late, late game), but so far, I've been unimpressed.

Despite the sloppy/lazy console port involved here, Borderlands is a great game. It's not perfect, it's not flawless, but it is a hell of a lot of fun. I fully plan to play at least my Hunter main to level cap (takes 2+ play throughs) and possibly others. It definitely scratches an RPG/FPS itch I didn't even know I had. I often find it hard to recommend games at full price, but if you drop $50/$60 on this game, I promise that you won't be disappointed.

Aion Initial Impressions

I must admit that playing large quantities of MMOs has really messed up my regular blog writing. I start playing one, then play it for 2-3 weeks during which I seldom have anything more interesting to write than "we killed 10 turtles, then gathered 8 shells, then..." Furthermore, the "end" is usually so far off that I feel ridiculous trying to write anything resembling a review. So, 3 weeks into Aion, I'm going to drop down some of my initial impressions as that's about the only thing that feels "right."

How would I describe Aion? It is definitely a game that seems to borrow a little bit from lots of various MMOs. Its general feel has a lot of WoW in it, the grindy nature of combat and crafting reminds me of FFXI, the PvP is reminiscent of Dark Ag of Camelot (or so I'm told), and the whole wings/ability to fly seems most like Champions Online (probably only because I had a winged flier there). As seems to be the case with most MMOs that come out these days, it does a pretty good handful of things right and some things wrong. I'm going to analyze various things one at a time:

Combat. I really have no complaints with the combat. It's very WoW-like with the addition of some skill chains and the addition of movement based bonuses/penalties, e.g. if you move forward while swinging you gain offense and lose defense, if you move backwards the reverse is true. The game has a very standard array of taunts for the tank, heals for the healer, and damage dealing moves for everyone else. In general I would say that combat is more interesting that most other MMOs I've played, but that's probably like saying that Return of the Jedi was more interesting than Empire Strikes back. It's still basically the same despite the differences.

Crafting. Crafting is a place where I think they got it half right and half wrong. The part I really like is that you generally level your crafting skill exclusively from doing work orders. You pickup a work order, buy whatever mats you may need from the nearby vendor and start crafting. Doing a work order requires creating a certain number of items (6 in the lower tiers) and usually grants you a single skill up point (a 1 to 450 scale) and a random item (more mats, designs, etc). The advantage of this model is that people are not creating armor/swords/necklaces to level up and thus completely devaluing the market for said items. Furthermore, those items are not worthless and easy to make (pointing finger squarely at WoW). That means that the items you craft are not only semi-decent (you'd actually use them), but there is actually a market for making and selling them. For that to happen with the lowest tier of items is quite remarkable in my opinion. The problem with this model is that doing work orders is spectacularly boring. You can only get a single work order at a time, which means you need to: get your work order, buy mats for 10ish work orders (this saves time), move 5 feet to the crafting table, craft your six items (while waiting/doing something else), move the 5 feet back to the work order NPC, turn the quest in, get another quest, and then repeat your crafting/turn in motions 9 more times. Once you do this (assuming you actually got your 10 points from the 10 work orders), you get the next tier of work order and start over. Even doing 10 work orders feels really boring. I kept feeling like I should have been able to just pay for my mats and have it give me the points automatically. You would literally spend dozens of hours doing nothing but what I just said to raise a crafting skill to max.

Quests. The quests are very much like the combat here. It's okay, but nothing really sticks out. At any time, you have a set of "Campaign" quests to do and regular side quests. The campaign quests generally have more steps required, or even a group, but the item and XP rewards are often phenomenal. While there are some small cut scenes that take place in the campaign quests, the majority of the quests are presented in the time honored MMO fashion of dense blocks of rather pointless text. I actually made a sporting effort to read a lot of the quest dialog, but there just really wasn't much point. I could see someone really getting into the lore here, but there really isn't enough here to get me overly excited.

Grinding. Aion is a grindy MMO. That's pretty much all there is to it. The XP and item rewards from grinding are nearly always better than doing quests. In fact, some of the quests are even grindy, like the group quest we did where each person had to collect 50 "Krall Marks." (Luckily, each mob dropped one for each of us, so we only had to kill 50 mobs, rather than 300). While that may very well be a deal breaker for some (go play Champions Online; that game has NO grinding), I actually think it's part of the game's charm. Of course, in all fairness, I spent around 5 hours hunting a rare mob that dropped a shield I really wanted (I got it!). I personally don't think it's a very big deal, but may be to other people.

PvP. PvP in Aion doesn't really start until level 25. After 3 weeks of not very heavy play, I'm barely level 20. I've heard that the PvP reminds people of DAoC, and supposedly it's quite decent, but I can't speak to it at this time.

Wings. If I had a disappointment in Aion, it's the wings. First off, you don't even get them until level 10. That wouldn't really be a problem, however, if they were more interesting. You can only fly in a very small number of areas. In the level 10-20 zone that I've mostly been in, there are only two relatively small flying areas that surround quest hubs/cities. The game gives some sort of random excuse for why you can't fly everywhere, but it felt pretty flimsy to me. The border between the flight and the non-flight areas is often just this invisible wall in which the game informs you that you can't fly there. When you are outside of a fly area, you can still pull your wings and glide downhill/across flat areas, but it's really not much of a mechanic. I could probably overlook these problems, if flight time was infinite, however, it is not. At level 10, you get 1 minute of flight time that takes 2 minutes to recharge. At higher levels (30, 40, 50) you get new wings with longer flight times (I think up to 2 minutes) while the 2 minute recharge remains. There are also items/potions/food that increase your flight time, but nothing very significant. I generally found flight to be little more than a gimmick or something that I had to sit around waiting for so I could gather more Aether (a resource that you gather out of the air). In all fairness, flight apparently plays a lot bigger role in the Abyss (level 25+), where there are even rings in the sky that increase your flight time, but as a whole, I am very unimpressed with flight.

I'm not quite sure how I would sum up my overall feelings. So far, I'm liking it well enough. Draenoth expressed his concerns (and he'll probably quit over them), mostly the fact that the story/lore is not at all interesting. I'd really like to get another ten levels or so in at least and see some of the instances/abyss content... just to give it a fair shake. Aion is definitely not a game for everyone, and certainly not a game for the average WoW player, but I think there are plenty of people out there who will really find something to enjoy.

Champions Online Review

Draenoth and I officially played Champions for the last time last week. We logged out having just completed the last level 29 mission we could find; we were only 3 bars into level 28. Not anxious too do any +2 missions (with no hope of ever catching up again), we decided to log out for the last time. My final review follows below, please see my initial impressions too, as not much changed since then.

Loved

• Powers. Generally speaking, nearly all the power sets had something going for them. There were relatively few really bad powers (although definitely some where better than others). Additionally, the ability that the game gives you to choose powers from any power set really adds to the diversity of your characters. I had a lot of fun trying to figure out how different powers would go together thematically and even changed the core concept of my main character twice.
• Missions. While there certainly aren't enough of them (see below), the ones there are are actually pretty decent. While the majority of them are definitely standard MMO fare (kill x, collect x, take this to him, etc), they are decently varied and provide a pretty good amount of entertainment. Also, the drop quests are generally smart enough to give the drop to all party members. The only glaring oversight is when you need to pick up an item off the ground... this had us running around finding twice as many as we EACH had to collect the items.
• Solo Friendly. You can do pretty much everything in this game by yourself. While there are a few quests in the game that recommend groups, most of them become very solo-able after you pass the recommended level by 2 or 3. The game really does allow you to roll just about any character and run out and be a hero all on your own.
  

Hated

• Content. I have definitely touched on this before, but it bears reiteration here, this game does not have any where even close to enough content in it. Period. When you do EVERY mission in the entire game and you still don't have have enough content to stay the appropriate level as your missions, there is definitely a problem. That doesn't even bring up the fact that the game offers zero re-playability in its current form. If I could say one thing to the devs of the game it would be: ADD MORE CONTENT! Perhaps they'll get there in another year or two.
  
• Zones. For the first 30 levels of the game (and there are only 40 total), you spend ALL of your time in only 3 different zones. You travel between these zones multiple times and visit multiple areas, but it doesn't change the fact that by the time I was in the late 20's, I was desperately bored with the frozen landscape of Canada and the barren wasteland of the Desert. City of Heroes definitely did this better, as even though you were in Paragon City the entire time, each of the various zones of the city had a unique feel. I honestly don't know what they were thinking in having such few zones... it felt like they merely did it to meet a deadline.
• Respecs. I brought this up in my initial impressions post as the reason I would probably quit the game. While it was definitely atrocious in its original incarnation, they did make it better over time. As of this writing, you can respec all the way to your first power and you can even afford to do more than 2 of them at a time. Regardless, it is still a pretty dismal system and serves to curtail one of the best features of the game: the customization of your characters. It is far too easy to mess up a character in Champions and not realize it until many levels later. Since you need to undo all choices to get back to the one mistake, it essentially becomes impossible to undo a single bad choice you made early on. All they need to do is provide a way to undo single purchases and I think most of the respec complaints would go away real fast.
• Public Quests. I think the idea of public quests is a great one. Lots of people team up to do something epic. However, the implementation in Champions definitely left something to be desired. The rewards (both in items and experience) just weren't significant enough to warrant doing them... really at all. There was one we tried to do where a cosmic boss shows up at the end. There ended up being about 6 of us fighting him (only because we were yelling across the zone for help) and we ended up killing him only by employing "zerg" tactics (dying then running back to the fight). At the end, I received a single healing patch (like a health pot) as my "contribution" was the least, since I didn't actually damage the boss at all (I was healing). Even the person who does the most damage merely receives a dime a dozen item upgrade which is quickly sold. If they would make these quests rewarding enough that people were actually excited about doing them, then they'd definitely have something amazing on their hands.
• Too Solo Friendly. Perhaps this changes in the very last levels of the game, but there is essentially no reason to ever group up. Other than the few group quests (which are TRIVIAL even with just 2 people), there just isn't any reason to be in a group at all. In fact, it was often detrimental to our questing to be grouped when we each had to pick up 6 of something off the ground. Furthermore, the group mechanics don't feel very fleshed out to me. As a healer, I spent most of my time in a Sentinel role which sped up my energy recovery at a cost of damage output. This allowed me to heal ridiculous amounts. However, Draenoth took a crippling health hit when he switched into a dps role or a crippling dps hit when he switched to a tanking role. Also, I pretty much just pulled aggro ALL THE TIME as a healer, even though my highest stat was Presence, which is supposed to lower your threat generation. We never did any full group stuff (as there was NO reason to up the point we were), but I've read that threat generation and full group mechanics in general just don't work very well even later on.
  

While I definitely had a lot of hates in this game, it is still a fun game. My main concern can be wrapped up in a single phrase: "This game is not done yet." While you can probably say that about most MMOs, it definitely holds true here. Perhaps in another year of tweaks and content patches, there will be a complete game here, and even one that provides an actual reason to keep playing, but that game does not exist in its current form. At best, the game has 1-2 months of play time on nothing more than 1-2 different characters. It was definitely an enjoyable month, and if that is all you want out of it, you honestly can't go wrong, but if you want a "real" MMO that you'll be playing for months to come, this game is definitely not it.

Escape from Butcher Bay Review

Last night, I finished my play through of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. All in all, it wasn't a bad game at all.

Loved

• Price. It was $5 and included not only Escape from Butcher Bay, but also Dark Athena. That is an absolutely steal no matter how you look at it.
• Side Quests. While the game was more or less strictly linear, there were at least two times in the game when a section of the prison was fully open to me. I could chat with various inmates/guards, take quests, and do other similar things. It definitely added something to the game that I'm not sure would have been there otherwise. Unfortunately, the majority of these side quests were largely forgettable or uninteresting with poor rewards. The fact that they existed at all though, definitely added something to the game.
• Setting. The gritty, futuristic setting was done very well. It's also a setting that doesn't make it into games quite as often as I would like.
• Vehicles. For two different sections of the game, you have the ability to pilot vehicles that are essentially mechs (think Mechwarrior or the awesome suit Wikus puts on in District 9). Both have unlimited ammo and unlimited ass kicking abilities. These sections of the game were definitely a blast, although in general they were quite easy.
• Riddick. Riddick was voiced by Vin Diesel (as he was portrayed in the movies) and in fact looked just like him. In short, Riddick is a card carrying badass. As one dimensional the character is, I definitely enjoyed his attitude and mannierism, so much in fact, that playing this game actually gave me a desire to watch the movie(s) upon which it was based.
  

Hated

• Cyclical Story. I'm going to drop two Butcher Bay spoilers on you right here: first, you eventually escape from Butcher Bay. Second, it takes multiple tries. Without spoiling too much, the game consists of you trying to escape, getting caught at the last minute, trying to escape from a more secure area, getting caught at the last minute, trying to escape from a more secure area, getting caught at the last minute, then trying to escape from a most secure area and actually escaping. When I got caught that last time I was actually yelling at the computer, "BUT I WAS ON THE SHIP!" It was annoying the way the story flowed and it was easily my least favorite part of the game.
• Inconsistent Difficulty. When melee fighting with another melee character, the combat is so easy it fails to be challenging at all. When fighting melee with a range character (something that happens ALL THE TIME, due to the fact you keep getting recaptured and losing your weapons), the combat is almost impossibly hard. The enemies have immaculate aim and even the most basic assault rifle wielding trooper can mow you down in no time. While this mechanic is almost certainly in place to force you to use stealth (something you HAVE to do on occasion), in some places you are given no choice. Two instances in particular come to mind:
• At one point in the game, I found myself with a single path that led me straight through a riot guard (small mech) with nothing more than a club and a tranq gun. I eventually just ran like hell past him while tranq-ing his two solider friends. I lost most of my energy in the process, but was alive on the other side.
  
• Another time, late in the game, I was without any weapon whatsoever and forced to get past a gun toting solider at the end of a hall way. After 2 or 3 attempts of trying to run him down while he reloaded, I exploited some sort of weird path finding bug and managed to get him to run down the hall towards me and perform a quick kill.
  

Escape from Butcher Bay is definitely not a perfect game, but it is without a doubt a very solid shooter experience. I could easily recommend it to anybody, and even at it's current $20 price tag, it would be well worth the cost.