Advent Rising

It's a shame. It's like a dying love, advent rising has it all: wonderful, colourful artwork, a very good soundtrack. Varying. cool enemies and boss fights, except an awful giant ape. Fast, intense action with guns and mighty powers. More power than in the whole star wars universe. A good story. A few times vehicles like cars, gliders and so on to add some variety in the mission design. Unfortunately it works very faulty under Windows 10 64 bit. In sooner times I could play through using the retail version under Windows XP, which had problems, too, but not this time. I had several desktop crashes and often stuttering music and sounds. In regulary intervals the view was flipping around or to the top of the screen. In a few locations I couldn't jump straight on ledges, which was necessary to go on. After a while I found out that I have to run sidewards or backwards and then jump to proceed, which was totally nerving. Despite these technical issues I had a lot of fun, but the game ends in a boss fight with the mentioned terrible gorilla. I couldn't focus, catch and throw back stones. I tried everything: other tactics using different might powers, I searched for a cheat to skip this awful mission, I tried other keys in a fight, ... At last I gave up.

This game is a generic mix of sci fi elements from better games, especially Halo. Nothing about it is unique or inspiring, and if I were Orson Scott Card (whose books I love) I would be ashamed to have my name on it. The story is poorly told: the voice acting is off, the situations aren't believable (Ambassador goes to meet a giant new alien race and just brings along two rookies. Of course! Evil aliens want to kill all the humans on the space station? Clearly the best way is to *board* the station instead of BLOWING IT UP), the characters are wooden (my fiancée has little to say, always gets lost, and is conveniently in need of saving at all times even after beating up a marine), generic mean aliens attacking [ineptly!], and bizarre dialogue (one soldier's response to the alien invasion is "that's weird.") And many aspects are awkward, like the sub-par graphics (looks like 2002's Unreal 2 even though it was released in 2005!), and unconvincing level design (large empty expanses of terrain to drive across while you contemplate why you bought this game...). Even the collision detection is ham handed; you frequently get caught on the terrain (with hilarious consequences, like levitating down a mountainside). Gamespot was spot on in its review: "Advent Rising is a disappointing effort on all fronts, and probably isn't worth your time."

I just love how special this game was, and how epicly it begins the trilogy... but there`s no trilogy anymore, even in the plans! Oh, God, i want to see second and third parts of this franchise more than Half-life 3.

One of the better over-the-shoulder shooters, graphics stand up well even after it's time, and a good plotline and story that would have been excellent if it hadn't been planned around a sequel that was never finished. The only serious flaw in it's gameplay is that it is a console port, and like so many it doesn't handle very well without a controller.

Finally played the game I decided not to when it came out. Better than I expected. Kind of like Jedi Knight 2 just without the FMV and lightsaber. It very much like what's left after that. To play it today in 2024+, you do need to accept that its graphics aren't that great (it was not great even when it came out), and you need to accept that its fairly buggy and will crash a bunch of times. The game mechanics are not the easiest they could have been, so you have plenty of keys/buttons to use. If you use a newer controller, it must be setup from scratch with joystick disabled in the config and a binding application for binding keyboard and mouse to the controller. But, I intend to play this game through more times. Its plenty of fun.