Forums → Games → Raze 2 Review
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First off, I do not hate the game. I rated it 10/10 after playing for about half an hour, but in all honesty, I should've played it more before rating, since now I'd probably give it a 5 or 6 out of 10.
Let's get some generic review stuff out of the way first: Graphics and sound are exactly what I expected. No qualms there. Let's skip right to the gameplay, which is what makes and breaks this game IMO.
First thing you'll notice: Out of all the default weapons only three are pick-up-and-own weapons (shotgun, minigun ,and rocket launcher) and the rocket launcher is the only one of them that can consistently OHKO. Contrast this with POS games like Combat Hero Adventures, which from my experience only had like 2 weapons that DIDN'T OHKO. This basically means there's much less cheap **** flying around than there would be otherwise. That's GOOD.
The credit thing is very reminiscent of CoD Points, which is not surprising seeing as how Raze has always come across to me as a fusion of CoD and Halo leaning towards CoD (Contrast Armor Mayhem, which is the same thing only leaning towards Halo). The credit packs were a good idea; people who want everything unlocked from the start can pay IRL money for it, and people who like unlocking things themselves can save a couple bucks. I don't have any issues with the price of any abilities or anything; playing deathmatches to 100 kills is quite fun because, simply put, playing Raze 2 is quite fun.
So why a 5/10? All I have to say is that the alien campaign totally killed it for me. I first noticed the pattern where every alien mission was basically the corresponding human mission from the aliens' perspective. This works well in theory, but suddenly stops making sense when you barely squeak by with a victory only to have the story say "oops we failed." That's exactly where the execution falls flat.
Second, the alien campaign totally REEKS of artificial difficulty. There are a bunch of ways I see to fix the problem, but first, I'm going to elaborate. More obvious are the AI and their perfect reflexes and uncanny ability to show up at the powerup RIGHT when it spawns. Slightly less obvious is the part where YOUR TEAMMATES ARE BRAINDEAD. Case in point is mission 14, where your teammates serve as cannon fodder while you're stuck trying to cover for their constant dying and even BETRAYING you. All I have to say here is that this mission was terribly designed from the start. 3v2 in a mode where the smaller team has the advantage. You can't use rocket launchers because you're stuck with this ice turd gun while the AI get to spawn with free rocket launchers. Your teammates both go 1 and 15 every game. I caught one of them shooting their starter pistol at the ceiling for crying out loud... you might say "Oh but it's hard so it's a good mission," but I say "Cheap difficulty doesn't make things fun." Granted, in a game where quick reflexes are everything, it's hard to make a difficult-to-beat AI without having it rely on AI superpower reflexes. I'm OK with that part. I'm also OK with the 3v2 and the part where you get a gimpy rocket launcher. Even giving the humans free rocket launchers wouldn't be that bad if they didn't spawn on top of me 5 or 6 times a game. The part I'm NOT OK with is where my teammates help the humans more than me. At the very least, their ability should be tied to mine, meaning if I'm going 20 and 3, they should be too, and if I'm going 3 and 20, they should be too.
Let's contrast all that to mission 15, where you get 4 minutes to finish a 25-life elimination match. On the surface it seems fairly straightforward for a final mission, until you get to the part where Razey has his superpower health from human mission 15... That's another case of artificial difficulty: jacking the enemy's health up to an absurd level. That's also BAD, especially considering how he's got lackeys running around with powerups and rocket launchers coming out the wazoo, and as soon as you get rid of them he flat-out disappears until the time runs out. Get rid of Razey, and the mission becomes kind of lame, but keep him and the mission reeks of the same artificial difficulty the rest of the campaign reeked of. My suggestion is to add a pointer to elimination mode only that shows up if someone hasn't died for over, say, 30 seconds that points their enemies to their location until they do die. This both makes it easier to hunt down Razey when he's playing wild goose chase with you and it makes it harder to survive long because after 30 seconds the AI will be allowed to actually use that thing where they always know where you're at anyways against you.
Long story short, Raze 2 is a good game, but as long as the alien campaign's story is dumb and it stays difficult for all the WRONG reasons, it's not going to score much better than a 5 from me. Thanks for reading.
- 36 Replies
You only say you should of rated 5/10 because you didn't like the alien campaign but you did like everything else?
I agree with the al's.... they are seriously stupid. Can't they be just average! Like in mission 14 they always get around 1 kill - 14 deaths. They should do 6 kills 10 deaths. And I really hate in mission 15 where you spend a minute trying to find raze, then when you find him, he shoots you... One thing I will like to be added in Raze is a mini map.
I agree that the alien campaign is insanely hard because of the dumb AI's, but that's what also makes it fun!
oh well for you. this game is too fun with me even if im stuck on the same level in the alien campain
I really don't see the appeal. The game is too frantic to have any kind of skill element besides dumb luck and repetitive clicking, the 'story' is hilarious and the weapons can be divided into 3 categories; useless, automatic, rocket launcher.
FPS does not work in flash format.
The thing is, the game is good, but it's not 10/10 good even though I thought it was after the first half hour. Take the alien campaign out and I'd probably give it an 8.8 or 8.9 rounded up to 9. The alien campaign in general just left this nasty taste in my mouth even though the rest of the game was solid.
I'm about to review your review, break it down piece by piece, and tell you what went wrong. Pay close attention, you may learn something:
First off, I do not hate the game. I rated it 10/10 after playing for about half an hour, but in all honesty, I should've played it more before rating, since now I'd probably give it a 5 or 6 out of 10.
If you're going to review something, pick a number... Dammit.
Let's get some generic review stuff out of the way first: Graphics and sound are exactly what I expected. No qualms there. Let's skip right to the gameplay, which is what makes and breaks this game IMO.
Pretty generic "review stuff" indeed. I'll get to your incessant acronym-ing later.
First thing you'll notice: Out of all the default weapons only three are pick-up-and-own weapons (shotgun, minigun ,and rocket launcher) and the rocket launcher is the only one of them that can consistently OHKO. Contrast this with POS games like Combat Hero Adventures, which from my experience only had like 2 weapons that DIDN'T OHKO. This basically means there's much less cheap **** flying around than there would be otherwise. That's GOOD.
Don't use acronyms in reviews or literacy if you want it to look good. When you use an acronym some people may not know what your saying. I'm going to have to assume (which is not good, don't make me assume things) OHKO means one hit knock out or one hit kill and assume POS means peice of ****. Don't be lazy, spell it out. Also, if you respond to this, enlighten me, what does IMO mean?
The credit thing is very reminiscent of CoD Points, which is not surprising seeing as how Raze has always come across to me as a fusion of CoD and Halo leaning towards CoD (Contrast Armor Mayhem, which is the same thing only leaning towards Halo). The credit packs were a good idea; people who want everything unlocked from the start can pay IRL money for it, and people who like unlocking things themselves can save a couple bucks. I don't have any issues with the price of any abilities or anything; playing deathmatches to 100 kills is quite fun because, simply put, playing Raze 2 is quite fun.
Do not use acronyms... Dammit. By the way, credits are more reminiscent of Halo because of how they are awarded. They lean toward Call of Duty how they are spent.
So why a 5/10? All I have to say is that the alien campaign totally killed it for me. I first noticed the pattern where every alien mission was basically the corresponding human mission from the aliens' perspective. This works well in theory, but suddenly stops making sense when you barely squeak by with a victory only to have the story say "oops we failed." That's exactly where the execution falls flat.
Oh goody you have an opinion. The media is so opinionated isn't it? That's why you can't tack off a whole five points out of ten (also don't use numerical characters in reviews or literacy) because you didn't like the story. Yes, the Alien campaign may not have been thought through entirely but that's two points off at max. Games are all about game play and whether they're pretty or not, but mostly game play. You can't base the whole game off of half of the story, and that's not even half the game, its like a fourth.
Second, the alien campaign totally REEKS of artificial difficulty. There are a bunch of ways I see to fix the problem, but first, I'm going to elaborate.
What in the hell is artificial difficulty.
More obvious are the AI and their perfect reflexes and uncanny ability to show up at the powerup RIGHT when it spawns. Slightly less obvious is the part where YOUR TEAMMATES ARE BRAINDEAD.
There you go. A reason to tack off a point.
Case in point is mission 14, where your teammates serve as cannon fodder while you're stuck trying to cover for their constant dying and even BETRAYING you. All I have to say here is that this mission was terribly designed from the start. 3v2 in a mode where the smaller team has the advantage. You can't use rocket launchers because you're stuck with this ice turd gun while the AI get to spawn with free rocket launchers. Your teammates both go 1 and 15 every game. I caught one of them shooting their starter pistol at the ceiling for crying out loud... you might say "Oh but it's hard so it's a good mission," but I say "Cheap difficulty doesn't make things fun."
Whoa Nellie! No Reviewception, reviews within reviews. Simply give a short example like "E.G. In Mission 14 of the Alien campaign I caught one of my teammates shooting at the ceiling." Don't go into great detail.
Granted, in a game where quick reflexes are everything, it's hard to make a difficult-to-beat AI without having it rely on AI superpower reflexes. I'm OK with that part. I'm also OK with the 3v2 and the part where you get a gimpy rocket launcher. Even giving the humans free rocket launchers wouldn't be that bad if they didn't spawn on top of me 5 or 6 times a game. The part I'm NOT OK with is where my teammates help the humans more than me. At the very least, their ability should be tied to mine, meaning if I'm going 20 and 3, they should be too, and if I'm going 3 and 20, they should be too.
Look at both sides of this. You want AI that follows how well you're doing, while on JuiceTin's (the developer) side that's is an incredulously hard thing to program. Its not like programming an artificial to follow you physically, but to program it to think like a human. Call of Duty 4's friendly AI was so retarded I wanted to punch Infinity Ward. Resident Evil 4's AI for Ashley made me want to cry, and its the best reviewed game
of all time.
Let's contrast all that to mission 15, where you get 4 minutes to finish a 25-life elimination match. On the surface it seems fairly straightforward for a final mission, until you get to the part where Razey has his superpower health from human mission 15... That's another case of artificial difficulty: jacking the enemy's health up to an absurd level.
That's not "artificial difficulty" (whatever the **** that is) that's called a final boss battle. Its a challenge. It was designed to test the skills you developed throughout the entire game!
Long story short, Raze 2 is a good game, but as long as the alien campaign's story is dumb
God forbid a flash based shooter have a "dumb" story.
and [Raze 2] stays difficult for all the WRONG reasons, it's not going to score much better than a 5 from me.
What exactly is a wrong reason? Maybe the Artificials are purposely dumb as hell to test your skills as a player, like the final boss fight against Razey.
Thanks for reading.
Thank you for reading my review of your review. I hoped you learned something.
of all time
That was supposed to be italicized like so "Resident Evil 4's AI for Ashley made me want to cry, and its the best reviewed game of all time.
Also, if you respond to this, enlighten me, what does IMO mean?
I was reading what you posted until I saw this. IMO stands for 'In My Opinion'.
You can't rate a game 5-6/10 just because you can't beat the alien campaign. Yeah it's insanely hard. But you have to build a good strategy, choose good weapons, etc. I'm struggling with the alien campaign too. And I'm sure that every last battle of a game is hard (unless you put it on the lowest difficulty but in this case you can't adjust the mode in the campaign). Still, it takes patience and you'll beat eventually.
Sorry for the Double but I just read this (don't judge anybody, I'm a slow reader):
What in the hell is artificial difficulty
I'm too sure what it means exactly, but just take that out of context. I'm beyond positive that any AG user that posts in the forums can use context clues to figure out the meaning of words.
Edit:
"I'm not too sure"
No I can apologize for the double post.
Sorry for the Double but I just read this (don't judge anybody, I'm a slow reader):
I don't judge.
I was reading what you posted until I saw this. IMO stands for 'In My Opinion'.
Thanks for the clarification. That's why your supposed to clarify in writing. For *******es like me who don't know simple acronyms.
I'm [not] too sure what it means exactly, but just take that out of context. I'm beyond positive that any AG user that posts in the forums can use context clues to figure out the meaning of words.
"Artificial difficulty" isn't a thing. Either difficulty is intentional or due to a fault (unintentional). Saying difficulty is artificial is saying its fake, and difficulty isn't fake, Its real. Dear God, its real.
Saying difficulty is artificial is saying its fake, and difficulty isn't fake
'Artificial' means man-made. AI stands for 'Artificial Intelligence'. Because it's man-made doesn't make it fake. The computer you're using to post on AG is artificial, doesn't mean it's fake. you can reach your hand out and touch the screen you're using to read this post, as well as the computer that's giving the monitor the image.
That's why your supposed to clarify in writing. For *******es like me who don't know simple acronyms
I didn't catch on to the meaning until about a week or so after setting up my AG account.
I have a mini review for Raze 2, ahem.... Raze 2 is fun and all, difficulty is very challenging, especially in alien campaign (Dam mission 15), but once you finish the campaign, there really isn't much to do. Just unlock all the stuff and achievements, then what? Just keep doing quick match? Raze 2 is very fun, but it isn't a long term game, also very addicting. I would rate it 8/10 then what I did before I finished the game, 10/10.
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