The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

When I last talked about GRAW, I was a little pissed, as you can tell. The game still is a pretty glitchy, horrible mess. On a lot of missions, Brer and I will get into a co-op game, and then fall through the world geometry and have to restart half the time. It has crashed many times. It’s just pretty badly put together. I keep being told that GRAW 2 is better in every way, but dammit, it’s still $20, and I had GRAW. So that’s what we’re playing.

There are plenty of problems outside of the glitchy-ness, too. There is a really small selection of weapons. There’s only like 6, and several of those are extremely situational. There’s no respawning, so when you die, you’re dead. This actually makes two players the optimal number, I think, because if there are AI partners and you die, you take over for an AI. So playing 2 player basically makes you have two extra lives for your team. Still, it’s not really optimal, especially since when you’re playing co-op games, there are no mid-mission checkpoints. So unlike playing them in single player, you can’t save in the middle. You have to complete the entire mission in one perfect run. This means you never complete missions unless you’re some sort of god or something. I mean, we’re playing on easy, and we only got close to beating our first mission the other day, and we still didn’t pull it off.

Still, I can’t deny I’m having a good time with it. I wasn’t sure I would. Brer is a very controlling perfectionist, and past games that are his games that we’ve tried to play co-op, I kind of hated because he was basically treating me like a little smarter AI partner, you know? We work alright in Left 4 Dead and Killing Floor, because they’re very arcade-y in a way. You have to use strategy, but you’re mostly running and gunning, and everyone is yelling out strategies and having to change them on the fly. I mean, I enjoy my games a bit more on the arcade-y side in general, where people go down with only a few shots, like in GRAW, but where you can take many, many more, which GRAW is not like. You can easily get ambushed and die before you even see there’s someone there. That’s the kind of gameplay Brer likes. I thought that, because this was his game, it would probably end up with him working in that controlling, no fun for me way.

But I think Brer either decided he wasn’t going to do that so I would enjoy myself, or the way I play made him change his gameplan, but he just decided to play extremely aggressively instead of slow and steady, and we clicked very well. His aggressive is my normal pace in such games. So as we started pushing forward, we really started clicking together as a two-person team. We’d call out enemy locations. We’d split up the jobs, with me doing most of the sniping work and Brer handling figuring out where to maneuver and ordering the AI around and whatnot. Even though we haven’t beat a mission, I still keep finding accomplishment in those moments when we are working in perfect harmony. It’s pretty damn awesome when it happens, and the more we play, the more it happens. It’s fun.

There is also one thing that GRAW did so well that, when I realized it, it blew my fucking mind, and that is the aiming. If you hold down the “look through scope/iron sights/aim” button, then when you release it, you go out of aim. If you tap it, then it toggles you in and out of it. I personally hate toggle aiming, having been trained the other way through so many console games, but I know Brer hates the “hold down” aiming. There are times when both are useful, but normally you have to chose. The method in GRAW is so fucking seamless that I was toggling sometimes and holding others, and it took me many, many sessions to realize what it was doing, and only because I had recently had conversations about having to set that up in Killing Floor. Bravo to GRIN for that bit of control decision. Every shooter with that kind of aim button should work like that.

Still, I don’t know how much I can recommend the game outside of a neat control thing and that I was having fun with it. Co-op can make anything significantly more fun, and I don’t think the game would be very much fun, at least to me, without it. I mean, I don’t have any interest at all in the game’s “die constantly, memorize enemy locations and move super-slow” gameplay outside of co-op, and the co-op really doesn’t work that well. You’d probably be better off getting GRAW2 for co-op, or anything, really, if it’s as fixed as I’ve been told. Still, it’s got me interested enough to wish for Steam to discount GRAW 2 and Rainbow Six: Vegas and Vegas 2 down to $10 so we can try those co-op as well. Hell, if Steam wanted to have some sort of GRAW 2, Vegas 2, HAWX discount bundle, that would make Brer’s co-op day for me to pick up, and I’d love to.

TL;DR: Co-op is Fun.