an extremely fast paced third person shooter that looks great and plays smooth

User Rating: 7 | El Matador PC
This game is hard as hell to get through without using cheats. The game is pretty much unbeatable the first time you play it and soon becomes frustrating constantly reloading the last saved game. While I don't mind using cheats to have some fun in many games that I've already played with no cheats, this is the first time ever that I can't make much progress without at least the "health" cheat being enabled. I'm not sure why the developer made the "easy" setting so insanely difficult -- I'd suspect that the game was too short and to artificially prolong the play time the difficulty was bumped up to the level of unplayability. Obviously, the second big weakness of this game is that it is really short.

On the positive side, this is an extremely fast paced third person shooter that looks great and plays smooth. There is really no time to follow the story since you are busy trying to stay alive and shooting bad guys popping out of every corner. Although this is a third person shooter, surprisingly it does play like like an FPS and many FPS fans won't have much trouble playing this.

Also, on the positive side, weapons are pleasure to fire (especially shotguns) and they do a rather graphic damage to the enemy. Sound is pretty good all over the place, from ambient to shots. The proprietary Typhoon2 engine performs really great and considering that this is a year old game the graphics look amazingly good. The AI and physics are also very good, and your own movement is very neat -- I especially enjoyed the effect of moving sideways while crouched and aiming. Neat stuff.

In conclusion, I think this developer was running out of time and money and published a very good but also very short game. Instead of adding to the game content and making it longer, the developer unfortunately decided to make the gameplay insanely difficult even on its easiest difficulty level. Yep, a huge mistake. Too bad, because the developer, Plastic Reality Technologies, was very promising especially looking at the performance of their Typhoon2 engine ... so naturally I was looking forward to their next project. However, it seems they shut down the company and we could only hope to see some of their work and talents in productions of other game development studios. The game itself is otherwise very much fun to play once you know the maps and know what to expect around the corner.

Score: 7.3