I played around with a few more of the demo's that I downloaded the other night... Shadowrun, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, & Operation Darkness.

Shadowrun leaves me with mixed emotions. I'm an old-school geek and I still meet with a group of friends every Saturday night to throw dice around the table. In fact, we are playing Shadowrun right now (which reminds me... I need to tomorrow night's 'run ready for them). This multiplayer-only offering carrying the Shadowrun name can be compared as doing little else and is only loosely based off of the RPG. Which is sad, because it shouldn't have been THAT hard as so much of the work would already have been done just by picking up the license. The entire game seems like the designers just flipped through a book and then took general concepts in a direction that they liked rather than trying to follow the source material. The races are lacklustre, poorly implemented, and they left one out for no discernable reason. The weapons bear little to no similarity to favorites from the RPG and are just the basic FPS fair of pistol, submachinegun, assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle, & minigun... many just as poorly implemented as the races. The different tech gadgets and magic effects at your disposal are kind of neat, offering some interesting twists, but are once again only scratching the surface of what the RPG supplied. Furthermore, a major aspect of the RPG was that tech and magic can work side-by-side but do not mesh very well.

Ignoring the baggage I bring from knowing the source material, the game is basically entertaining with both a look and sound that are enjoyable as well as gameplay that isn't upsetting. Being multiplayer only disappoints me, but at least I can technically play alone with a bunch of bots if I don't want to listen to random strangers crowing because they wtfpwned me. The bots actually talk to you, too, calling out the presence of enemies or other combat updates that can actually be handy, though they seem to be a little on the stupid side. I will probably still add it to my Gamefly list to see the full game... but I doubt it will stay long.

All together, given the source material, I could have designed a MUCH better game with my eyes closed and certainly wouldn't have wasted the awesome potential of a single-player/co-op storyline.

Next was Turning Point, whose storyline I just wanted a peek at. Now, I am granting that I just played a portion of the game's first level, and while I see some of the complaints posed by the Gamespot review... it wasn't THAT bad. I definately would call it as a good FPS game, because it was severely lacking in that regard but the flaws weren't frustrating or game-breaking. I have less to say here as there is both a lack of baggage to compare and comment on as well as just not as much to talk about. This is another game that I would like to try out in full sometime just to get a better opinion of.

The jewel of my evening was Operation Darkness. It's a turn-based, squad shooter. It immediately reminded me of the Front Mission games. The demo starts you off on Mission 6, so I'm not sure of the story or what the build-up is like to that point, but you get a half dozen or so characters with an assortment of WWII era weaponry that you can customize via skills and equipment who you deploy on a rather large grid map with a particular objective in mind. The game looked pretty good but the camera control was rather terrible and left a LOT to be desired. Gameplay-wise, you move your people around the map and try to line-up attacks with your various weapons against your enemies while trying not to let them do the same to you in the process. It is basically like chess but with submachineguns, rifles, grenades, bazookas, the occasional tank, and werewolves... oh... yeah, apparently the story of Operation Darkness includes werewolves and vampires and nazi zombies... or something. This one is definately high on my, let's play the whole game to see just what the frack is going on.

And I just got the little chime from my inbox that told me Gamefly has sent me Bullet Witch to play with. Yeah, I know... people have said horrible things about it, but something about it begged me to form my own opinion.

Now, about that 'run...

Edit: Wow. You can't use the word c l a s s anywhere in blog entries without causing an error in the scripting? What the hell kind of worthless programmers do they have working here anyway? Sheesh.