There are loads of weapons kicking about too, and there are enough in the menus to buy too, which means you can always upgrade or buy new weapons, tweaking each weapon to your heart's desire. And while we're on the subject of weapons, they do all feel different, fire differently and respond differently. It's a great achievement and something which EA Montreal have nailed.

I'm also glad to report that you can pick up both ammo and weapons from downed enemies, a complete oversight in the first game. But here it's all fair game, and you'll also come across money. It's as simple as running over the items to collect them.

Gathering these items and downing enemies isn't as hard as I thought it would be though. Not only is the AI pretty stupid, but the enemy classes do disappoint too. There are four types of soldier: the soldier - light or no armour and lowest rank, the officer - a commanding officer and has some armour; soldiers will drop their guns if taken hostage, the elite - the best of the soldiers and armoured up. Capturing an elite officer will guarantee the surrendering of lower ranked soldiers. The final class is the heavy soldier, and they come in four shapes and sizes: the shotgunner - heavy armoured shotgunner, the gatling - basically a meat grinder, the grenadier - a massive grenade launching, masked bandit. Finally there's the flamethrower - a fire-breathing maniac. Well, he doesn't actually fire breath, but he can burn you pretty quickly. The heavy soldiers are armoured to the teeth, and depending on which one you're fighting, each has their weak spot for you to exploit. Do so, and you'll get a chunk of cash as well as having the option to pick up their special weapon in addition to yours.

Despite this the game becomes a grind, and that's primarily down to the lack of variety in enemies. I mean, really. Recycling enemies is a dirty trick, and increasing the amount of recycled enemies is even more dirty than recycling enemies in the first place. This, as far as I'm concerned, is cheating it's a real shame because there is scope in the game (due to the noticeable lack of story) to go a little crazy with characters. I mean the whole thing is about blowing up Shanghai to smithereens, and a few more enemies or better bosses would have been greatly appreciated.

Although the AI isn't the most interesting or intelligent enemy, the cover system is brilliant. It's fluid and intuitive and one of the strongest points of the game. And although I hated the camera to start with, you become more accustomed to it. My biggest issue with the camera was flicking the camera viewpoints from left to right (click down on the right stick) giving you better field of vision, vitally important later on in the game.

I want to come back to the morality very quickly too. Obviously there are civilians to save, and even tying up enemy soldiers increases your morality, but there are certain points in the game which require you to make a decision. Each decision has a consequence, and once one of you has made the decision, you make the decision for both of you, therefore sharing the consequence. The consequence is nothing of real importance though, it's just a beautifully constructed comic strip of what-happens-next. They add a human interest side to the game, but has no bearing at all to the actual outcome of the game itself.  This morality tree, however, does give you a reason to play through the game again, and because the game is very good co-operatively, you don't mind going through the grind again.

Like most third person shooters, the button mapping does take a little time to get used to, and you'll find that you're pressing all the wrong buttons for crouching and sprinting. Everything else is pretty much the same, with grenades on the right bumper, right trigger for shooting, left trigger for precision shooting, the d-pad for commands in the single player and communication in multiplayer, Y for weapon cycling, X for reloading, B for melee combat and A for dash and cover. Pretty much the same as Gears of War.

Of course no game is complete without the mention of multiplayer modes. Unfortunately, at the time of review, there was no one on the servers playing multiplayer, so instead I've just outlined what it is you can expect from the multiplayer game modes. Partner Deathmatch - with up to six teams of two fighting it out, Warzone - Two teams of six have to complete missions ranging from planting bombs to killing VIPs, Control - capture and hold the point on the map, and finally Extraction - a bonus mode for up to four players fighting wave upon wave of increasingly difficult AI.

There's a lot to get through, and with old tricks like back-to-back fighting and rock, paper, scissors, this game is a huge leap forward to its predecessor, but does it compare to the other games out there? I think it does, but it still needs to make some major changes for it to be a huge hit.  Co-op play can't keep crashing, when it's supposed to be a co-op game, healing your partner needs to be sorted out and checkpoints need to be addressed.  It's no fun having to watch cut scenes all over again and fighting a horde just to get back to the boss you were at.

We're sure the dev team know all of this, and now it's up to you guys to make your decision.  We've made ours.

Comment

Add a comment using your Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google or OpenID accounts.
blog comments powered by Disqus