Forums → Games → Raze 2 Review
| 36 | 15120 |
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
If you're going to review something, pick a number... Dammit.
No.
Pretty generic "review stuff" indeed. I'll get to your incessant acronym-ing later.
I'll get to your complaint later.
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?
I'll use acronyms whenever I want to. If people don't know what an acronym means, Google is a highlight and two clicks away. I apologize for not catering to braindead people. BTW you spelled "iece" wrong. Don't be lazy, use a spellchecker.
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.
Already commented on acronyms. Granted on the credit part.
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.
I didn't take 5 points off due to the story. I took 4 points off a 9/10 because of all the stuff that went wrong in the alien campaign combined.
What in the hell is artificial difficulty.
It's when a game is hard either for arbitrary, unnecessary reasons or because of a cop-out on the developers' parts. Example: Advance Wars 1's Advance Campaign. Anyone who's played that game for a decent amount of time can tell you that the AI in it is abysmal; it constantly makes subpar decisions in regards to unit management and even forgets to use its units entirely on occasion. However, the Advance Campaign is still one of the biggest pains in the *** you'll find in a GBA game. Why? Not because the AI is any good (it clearly isn't), but because the developers gave it a huge pile of tanks while the player gets little to nothing to fight it with. This is an example of artificial difficulty because instead of working on the AI and making it not suck, the developers took the easy way out and gave it the aforementioned huge pile of tanks.
There you go. A reason to tack off a point.
Point accepted.
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.
Except Mission 14 was a good example in its entirety. The whole "shooting at the ceiling" thing probably happened earlier as well and I just didn't notice it because I wasn't looking for examples of how terrible the alien campaign was at the time.
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
I never wanted it to think like a human. I just want its skill level to parallel mine. An easy way to program it would be to tell it to check the player's kill/death ratio (I could've used an acronym there just to irk you but KDR is actually semi-niche) every time it dies and change the teammate's setting accordingly. Something like a [select_case] with results [if player_kdr<0.5 set teammate difficulty to very_easy][if 0.5<layer_kdr<0.8 set teammate difficulty to easy][if 0.8<layer_kdr<1.2 set teammate difficulty to normal]. I haven't ever programmed in Flash but I've used Game Maker and a bit of Visual Basic before so I don't think it'd be THAT difficult to figure out.
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!
Already commented on the artificial difficulty. As far as challenge goes, it's a pretty stupid challenge. I honestly wouldn't have a problem with it if Razey didn't flat-out disappear once his cronies are all gone. I spent a minute and a half once trying to find him after I offed the humans. With about 10 seconds left I used a jump pad in the corner and got a rocket to the face right before I picked up the shield... Rage moment, indeed.
God forbid a flash based shooter have a "dumb" story.
Maybe I'm spoiled from playing too much Phoenix Wright recently, but I expect more from game stories than what this one offered.
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.
Dumb teammates is a wrong reason. Gimping your weapon loadout is a wrong reason. Jacking up an enemy's health is not a wrong reason. Having said uber enemy avoid you entirely for most of the game IS a wrong reason.
Thank you for reading my review of your review. I hoped you learned something.
Thanks for reading my review of your review of my review. This is now officially Reviewception. Have a nice day.
Raze 2 is very fun, but it isn't a long term game
Yeah, it gets pretty repetitive after beating every thing, unlocking the achievements, and unlocking all the weapons/equipments/abilities. That is one of the reasons that everybody had a demand for multiplayer. But it's time to wait for Raze 3 (hopefully they're making it), they should make Raze 3 and I'm very positive that they'll make it. Raze is a really great game and multiplayer will be the best addition to the game.
The AI are pretty hard if you put them on hard or insane in quick matches i find it a challenge going up a 3 other teams that are hard! it just makes things more fun! i dont mind the credits thing its a good idea so you dont start out like a "god" in the beginning because you got all the good weapons, abilities and equipment. As far with graphics and gameplay it is very excellent and i really enjoyed it i mean compared to unreal flash and raze 2 i say raze will bring it out of business. but for the maps i didnt like to much yes there is alot to choose from but most are the same but the only difference is that they are either day or night...he could have put more effort and made bonus maps that can only be played in quick match but i guess he didnt think of this. now as for the weapons they are great yes some come do KO in an instant but that depends on the enemy you are battling like i noticed that some enemies have this special equipment where a fatal hit will only bring their health down 1 thus not killing them and giving them the advantage to kill you but i simply pull out my ripper and end their life but some of the weapons are really creative and alot of enemies or allies use different ones or the same ones as you but with lots of different weapons being fired it really makes the map go into a total war zone! The abilities are top notch i like most of them especially the grenade one where you can take their sheild down or their health down by a notch and take them right there by any weak weaponry you have. I really liked the cloaked ability its really useful when retreating a battle and your about to die but mainly i use it for going behind enemies and killing them with my shot gun and say "SURPRISE!!!!" Above all that i really liked the game and i dont think ill get bored of it for awhile but i will be using it for quick matches heck i havent even beaten the human campain and already i won 18 quick matches. but anyways this game is great and i hope there will be multiplayer soon so here is my rating 9.6.
Shade
I'm still stuck on the second to last alien mission. I agree, the AI could be much better and add a lot to gameplay like assigning each AI a behavior type rather than weapons to make their behavior, but it doesn't. Instead, it has crazy accurate aiming I've been 1HKO while i was flying across the ice map from an ion cannon from the bottom of the screen. If we could actually command our teammates (follow, attack, fall back) things would be less frustrating. I think the alien campaign has you play as a commander *shrug* it would make more sense. 8/10
he alien campaign totally REEKS of artificial difficulty.
when you click campaign right below alien it says somthing whats that little word oh yeah HARD. Every game needs a challenge or else it gets done fast and its gets boring quick....
i dont know how many MILLIONS of times i had the flag only to have johny rockit spawn on me with is katana
[i]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.
[quote][/b]of course the raze's life is high because he is mutating into a zombie and guns have a hard time killing zombies
I was also frustrated by how bad my teammates were doing in some missions (especially 14, and the capture the flag one). However, it encourages the "if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself" thinking. It didn't feel artificial at all, I just felt that more was depending on me personally. It really builds character, and in the end, I'd still give the game 10/10.
I disagree, that ramping up Razey's health is artificial. It really puts tactical thought into the game, promotes clever usage of terrain, weapons and game mechanics. I had a lot of fun trying to complete level 15, even though running out of time with Raze having 1 life made me wince a lot.
After I finished level 15 for the first time, I could finish it in 80% times I tried it again. It really builds skill, so I guess that the difficulty curve was done pretty much right.
Oh, and the commanders didn't do half bad on level 15, too. Razey ruined their scores, but that's natural. They were okay.
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.
I clearly understand that you hated the alien campaign because of its difficulty, but because of that you're giving Raze 2 a maximum rating of 6/10? That was supposed to be the campaign about the aliens that kept failing at the humans campaign. Of course it's going to be hard. The producers wanted you to fail, even if you win. But I guess they could have made the alien campaign a little bit easier.
I'm giving it a 9/10 because of its story, weapons, and the music. But it's 1 point short because of its abysmal way of getting credits to unlock stuff. They could have made it easier for players to make credits fast without paying. Other than that, it is a fantastic game and it will be hit for the next 5 years or so.
'Nuff said.
[quote]But it's 1 point short because of its abysmal way of getting credits to unlock stuff. They could have made it easier for players to make credits fast without paying.
Yes, I have also been cranked up by this. That said, I watched a YouTube video that shows you how to farm credits. Once you know how, it really isn't that hard.
i give it a 10/10 i just beat lvl 10 of human OMG im gonna kill myself
Every time I play the game It doesn't work. This started happening when I got an account. I think my account has a bug. Other this game is one of my favorite games ever 10/10
Thread is locked!