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.