Red Faction: Guerrilla <\/a> last year, so who knows. Still, the game is completely worth your time, even if you aren’t the sort who likes RPGs, because it’s gotten away from that significantly. It’s not a competent third person shooter that has choices you make which matter. Also, you get to have sex with people. But I’m so glad Gamefly randomly sent me the game on launch day so I could play it.<\/p>\nBasically, as I said, it’s just a third person shooter. They’ve tightened the cover stuff from the first game, added ammo, and given classes who don’t have a special weapon a submachine gun to help them out, as well as the concept of the “heavy weapon,” which are things like rocket launchers. In the first game, I mostly rushed out of cover to get my AI partners to get out in front of me, firing like crazy, then went and hit before I did another rush. It felt kind of stupid: I was playing Infiltrator, which was supposed to be a sniper, but I couldn’t snipe because my squadmates couldn’t be told to get out there so I could hold back. The AI is much, much, much better in this game. I had the option to order everyone around, but I rarely did it, because they did useful things without me trying to micromanage them. Occasionally I would tell a character to switch to a Sniper Rifle or something, but otherwise I left them alone, and they were a huge help.
\nThe combat was also very different because I changed class. I loved Infiltrator because I had more armor than an Engineer in the first game, but had access to all the tech spells, which I very much enjoyed. I spent most of the game casting Overload and Overheat. In this game, they actually made Infiltrator a class which could infiltrate, giving them a cloak and such. This didn’t seem like the sort of character I wanted to play, so I went ahead and switched to full Engineer. I feel like it was the right choice: due to it being more shooter-y, I didn’t feel gimped at all by my smaller selection of weapons, and my spells were so useful, I’d often go through combats without firing a shot. I’d send out AI Drones and just maneuver to cast Incinerate over and over, and since my squadmates were smart now, they’d finish off everyone I weakened. It really made me feel like I was commanding the battlefield like I wanted to.<\/p>\n
People are saying the scanning\/mining minigame is the worst part of the game, and it probably is. But it’s not that big of a deal. I’ll take it over driving around aimlessly on the Mako any day. You can mostly refill your various resources with just a few minutes of flying around and mining, and you’re often rewarded for doing so with side missions. If you’re not obsessive about always having those resource meters full, it won’t take all that long to get the resources you need for an upgrade you want. I just put on a podcast during those parts and had no problem. Just do buy the scanning speed upgrade for your ship. It makes it so much less tedious.<\/p>\n
Bioware really did it. They kept everything that makes their RPGs so much fun to play, and refined the gameplay of the first game into an actually fun shooter. It’s excellent, and I’m right on board with the third game. Hopefully since they finished this gameplay overhaul, it won’t take them as long to get the story stuff on board for the third game. I can cross my fingers anyway.<\/p>\n
Now come back tomorrow for spoilarz and such, hm? I’ve got to talk about characters and plot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes it’s so hard to come up with good title jokes. But no, seriously, Mass Effect 2: Amazing, amazing game. Possibly game of the year. I can’t think of anything else that’s likely going to knock it off. Then again, I didn’t expect Red Faction: Guerrilla last year, so who knows. Still, the game is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1034,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033\/revisions\/1034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}