Shadowgrounds is an overhead shooter, wherein you shoot lots and lots of aliens in the face while wandering through maze-like buildings. This tried-and-true formula is foolproof as long as you can bring the goods (solid gameplay), and indeed, these kinds of games were pumped out at an incredible rate in the old days. While Shadowgrounds is a decent game, I think it suffers from a few recurring shortcomings. Shadowgrounds uses a 3D rendering engine with a viewing frustum. The camera is suspended in the air, looking almost straight down, and the player is locked to the bottom-center of the screen. In turn, the camera rotation is locked to the player's direction, so that your firearm will always be pointing straight ahead. (There's a freelook mode that behaves more like a traditional overhead shooter, but I didn't bother with it much.) This setup is more technically advanced than classic overhead 2D, but I feel it introduces problems with visibility. There are beams over most doors, arches holding together tube-like passages, stacks of crates positioned for tactical assistance, and the occasional horizontal pipe spanning the upper-section of a room. You cannot see through these things. Many doors have a blind spots directly behind them, thanks to these beams. Tall stacks of crates can partially hide monsters. And these blind spots vary depending on your position, because of perspective. Now, one *could* put a bunch of view-obstructing things into a 2D overhead shooter, but most developers *didn't*, at least to that extent. You get numerous weapons, which I think are all pretty good, but the game won't autoswitch to another weapon when your current one is out of ammo! Fumbling with the number keys or mouse wheel while getting swarmed by aliens is very frustrating, and several weapons run empty for long stretches. The pistol gets infinite ammo, so you can always fall back on it, but you have to click for every shot, against enemies that take multiple hits to die. Sometimes I switched to pistol when I ran out of ammo with some other gun, just because I knew it would work, but owmyhand. I also had issues with the shotgun sometimes not firing after a reload. By the way, you'll want to upgrade those weapons as soon as possible. These aren't just modest improvements to your arsenal: many weapons can be upgraded to deal double damage very early on. I stupidly ignored the upgrade system until the first boss kicked my ass. Shadowgrounds' enemies are pretty much excellent! They appear in large swarms, crawling out of vents and climbing up cliffs, and some of the more powerful ones force open doors during scripted sequences. Many behave differently if you cast light on them: one type of spider shies away, another lunges in anger! Some are big dumb idiots that walk directly towards you, others strafe between shots and try to keep away from you. Some can turn invisible, and can only be revealed using the light (...okay, those guys are kind of annoying.) Boss design I felt was a bit overbearing and difficult to get the hang of at first, but decent. Good stuff all around. Movement is smooth for the most part, but you can get caught on props and the corners of walls. Nothing game-breaking, but it can leave you vulnerable. Your allies block you when you're trying to backpedal from aliens (argh!). You can quickly dodge with the space bar, but not when wielding certain heavy weapons. The progression format is a sticking issue for some people. The game saves only at the beginning of missions, and you have a limited number of lives. Die, and you'll respawn at a checkpoint. After five deaths, it's back to the start of the mission. There's no quicksave, no "save & quit". I personally had trouble with one of the checkpoints, which kept placing me in a donut-shaped room filled with armored monsters I hadn't encountered before. I died and died until I realized that they were susceptible to grenades. Having said that, I never had to completely restart any mission, but I sure would have been pissed if that happened. Did I mention that the missions are fairly long? :) To sum up: 3D perspective + architecture occasionally hampers visibility, weapons are problematic, movement is a bit unreliable, enemies are great, and the save system is pretty demanding.
Chaser follows the futuristic exploits of an amnesiac toughguy on his journey to Mars, murdering (or tangentially causing the death of) nearly everyone he meets along the way. If you've watched Total Recall, you'll immediately see a lot of parallels between it and Chaser. While Chaser begins nicely, it's apparent within about three levels that the game design is very limited. The trek to Mars is extremely long and drawn-out, with some levels so dull, confusing and repetitive that I find it hard to believe they're in a commercial game. Compounding this, levels are populated with homogenous enemies that almost all behave in the same way. I wouldn't have a problem with this if the soldiers were interesting. Many just stand around, firing when you enter their line of sight. Others can approach you and do spiffy dodging maneuvers, but they seem incapable of opening doors! The fact that Chaser can't match or exceed the AI in Goldeneye 007, a console shooter from six years earlier, is simply mind-boggling. Player movement is a hassle throughout Chaser. Your jump height is lower than usual for an FPS, and the "crouch-jumping" technique is absolutely vital for climbing various props. I got stuck in the ground several times, forcing me to reload. Loose bricks and other debris on the ground act like obstacles and have to be jumped over. Swinging doors can pass through you and close. The player is especially susceptible to fall damage, made more annoying by there being no sound effect to indicate falling pain. Of course, Chaser is also full of Quake-style ladders that are difficult to engage from the top. Ugh. With the addition of enemies that pilot mechs and wield rocket launchers, the final set of levels on Mars are a real slog to get through. Quickload City, if you will. The very last portion of the game is literally an orthogonal maze with spawn triggers located in the dead-ends. I still have part of it mapped out in a notebook, taunting me from my desk. As noted by others, the ending is completely underwhelming, which just adds insult to injury. Chaser isn't the worst FPS I've played lately, but it clearly suffers from either time constraints or over-ambition, or both. If you're looking for a solid block of FPS cheese, I'd recommend Duke Nukem 3D, Blood (warning: super difficult), and Serious Sam in a heartbeat. For Mars-themed games, Red Faction is acceptable for the most part.
I really wanted to like XIII. The visuals are great and it has an awesome soundtrack, but the single player campaign is plagued by several problems. I honestly found the bot matches more fun than the single player campaign. :( My gripes are listed below: * Poor checkpoint positioning. I'm all for checkpoint systems, as long as they're implemented in a way that doesn't punish the player with tedium. In XIII, there aren't enough checkpoints to separate every "chunk" of of the level into its own thing. The result is that you often have to redo tedious stuff or re-watch unskippable cutscenes / conversations. * The save system is not typical for a PC FPS. Saving just records your progress up to the most recent checkpoint, like a 90's console game that writes to a memory card. Don't be fooled by the quicksave option: it functions exactly the same as saving from the in-game menu. Worse, there is *no* autosaving in XIII. If you quit without saving, you will lose your progress! * XIII's game design includes a heaping dose of forced stealth. Despite this, I wouldn't call it a genuine stealth game. It just happens to be an FPS with a considerable number of levels where you lose instantly if someone activates an alarm. (Me, bitter?) These sections get very aggravating due to the aforementioned checkpoint issue. * Weapon reloading and switching animations are slow, and you can't interrupt a reload to switch to another weapon. Some weapons later in the game have no hotkey assigned by default. You can't pick up bodies while wielding a two-handed weapon (and there's no in-game message message to indicate this). * While stylized visuals are the main attraction of XIII, the window dressing can sometimes impair your vision. During an intense firefight, the last thing I want occupying space on the screen is comic book frames showing off a headshot, or signaling the entry of more enemies.
Kingpin's single player campaign suffers from an inverse difficulty curve, confusing game mechanics, and enemies built like tanks that can spot you from a great distance and shoot you with pinpoint accuracy, even at the very beginning. It exhibits rookie mistakes, like requiring you to talk to NPCs multiple times before they cough up an important item. Any attempts at sophistication, like the shopping and weapons modding system, mysteriously vanish in the last third of the game. While Kingpin does give you the ability to hire thugs -- and to the game's credit, they actually kind of work okay -- you can only have two of them at a time, and they make you feel like a babysitter instead of an awesome gangster. They also have a tendency to block tight corridors. It's not surprising to find out that Kingpin was rushed to release. The original concept involved building up a gang and controlling turf. The final product is a Quake II style shooter that is marred with balance and interface issues. I will say that the setting and visuals are pretty interesting, the music's not bad, and the gibberish conversation system can be funny. But that doesn't make up for the single player campaign's shortcomings.
