This will be my second review (first one is only published on TrueAchievements.com and can be found here) and I apologize if I missed anything. Just felt like writing a review for this game, since I have some mixed feelings. Please note that at the time of writing, I have progressed through the first 5 missions in the single player campaign on the Expert difficulty and played the multiplayer close to 2 hours (or at least tried to play it). Spoilers will be kept to a minimum.
1. Single Player
The single player campaign kicks off with your main character, Robert Hawkins, and a group of soldiers discussing the next move of their resistance against the Nazi Reich during World War II. Off course, you will be ambushed and you will need to make your way to the resistance camp underneath the city. From this point on, you have your options on how you want to handle your missions. But is it really that easy?Short answer: no. Why? As a big stealth lover, I tried to approach this game with stealth as much as I could. But it just doesn't work. For all of you who played Sniper Elite V2 where you could sync up your shots with the sounds of a plane flying over or a thunderstorm; you will recognize the noise indicator at the right hand side of your screen. First I thought this would be awesome, but the game proved me wrong. Every time I tried syncing my shots, they spot me because of where the bullet came from which shouldn't happen. To make things worse, none of the weapons are silenced. My friend said "Do you think every foot soldier had a silencer on their weapons?" No, but in this game you are not a foot soldier. You need to infiltrate camps and sabotage Nazi equipment. Off course I will expect the stealth to work a little bit better.
I thought "Let's try running & gunning then". This does work nice, I have to be fair. There is almost no recoil on any of the weapons, which makes it fun. On the downside, taking cover is not an easy job. When going in, you might at least expect the cover system to be a little bit different but instead you need to crouch and hug the small obstacles in order not to take damage. Leaning from cover is not featured either, which makes you vulnerable for enemy bullets. Expert difficulty doesn't show you whenever you are close to dying, but you can take a fair amount of damage before you do. Enemies don't seem to take a whole clip to give them their pass to the afterlife, and it doesn't take 2 headshots to kill one either. I'd say this is realistic in some way, but you need to watch out since I had a couple of instances where they rushed to your hiding or cover spot.
The weapons are World War II and are correct in my opinion. There is no weapon too overpowered and each of them allow you to change the way you play a mission. You want to play safe and snipe them from a distance? Works for the first enemy and maybe the second but to dispose the rest you will need to wait until they are out of cover. Sometimes the enemies glitch, but it's not gamebreaking. They just stand still where they were standing which allows an easy kill. As advertised on the box itself, the game includes "Advanced Sniping Technology" which basically only includes that you can hold your breath or focus which slows down the time a bit. Nice addition, but nothing that we haven't seen before.
During your main objectives, you get several side missions which always rewards you with an achievement and/or weapons. This makes the game a bit more enjoyable and not the usual run from point A to B while blasting the enemies. I noticed that I look more at my surroundings when doing these side missions, where it's easy to kill an enemy or two by throwing a grenade underneath a car.
2. Multiplayer
This is the reason why I bought this game. I love the multiplayer in Call of Duty: World At War (if it wasn't for hackers and modders) and I thought it would be a great experience to be able to play it without having to worry about people flying over the map. I was wrong. There are no hackers so far in this game, but the multiplayer itself is poor and feels like something I need to complete as soon as possible.The hit detection feels off, there is a lot of lag and the menu makes things complicated. There are only 3 modes, and 4 different maps. Loadouts needs to be during a match, there is no map rotation and it's impossible to join a game in progress. You need to wait until a lobby consists of at least 8 people before the host can decide to start a match. If you pick Quick Match, you would at least think that you can choose your game mode and be placed in a lobby but nothing is what it seems. You need to pick your game mode and map and hope for other players to join in. This is what makes the multiplayer a poor addition in comparison from what the single player offers you.
On top of that, there is a respawn delay and a lot of lag which suggests that this game isn't run on dedicated servers. True, it's still a young game and additions might come along and the fact that this is a budget game should allow me to rethink what convinced me to get this game, but if you advertise the multiplayer as "original modes which provide interesting twists on the MP mechanics", the developers need to show me a bit more.
Something that frustrated me a lot, and felt like Medal of Honor: Airbourne is that when you reload your gun and quickly want to shoot somebody from the opposite team, your gun just doesn't respond. You can hold RT as long as you like, shooting won't happen until you release your finger from that trigger and press it down again. Nothing they can't patch, but annoying while going for the medals.
3. Visual, sound and controls
Let me start off with a big positive to this game: I love the graphics. The landscapes (in which the enemies are hardly detectable) are beautiful and destruction is shown as is should be. The fact that the single player covers more then one country is great and allows you to meet the less known regions during World War II such as Denmark, Poland and France.On the other hand, you have the sound. Sometimes the sound of shooting bullets drops, which confuses me from time to time. While being sneaky, the same tune loops and will drive you crazy. I can say with honesty that I would disable sound if I could, but it does help to locate enemies from one time to another when you hear them talking.
The controls are pretty much like any shooter, although you can carry up to 2 primary weapons and they are easily accessible by using the D-Pad while toggling left or right. To have your side arm ready, you can still press Y. Aiming and shooting is still with the triggers (LT and RT accordingly), throwing grenades is with the bumpers (RB for lethal, LB for tactical). You are able to highlight enemies with your binocular (D-Pad up) and you can get stealth kills when throwing rock (D-Pad down).
4. Achievements
This is probably what you guys have been waiting for, and I can't blame you. Let me kick off by mentioning that 10 out of 45 achievements are multiplayer related. All can be obtained in Private games except for Sir! Yes Sir! and Jackpot. This spans playing and winning each multiplayer mode, but also getting a set amount of headshots, not dying while playing FFA (thank god for Private games) and being the most valuable player 10 times in TDM (most kill, least deaths)The other 35 achievements are unlocked while playing through the single player. Some are cumulative and require you to get a number of kills with a set weapon or exploit (grenades under cars helps for the explosive ones [wink]), collecting the secrets (which carries over from one playthrough to another) and no achievement is tied to the story with the exception of the 3 difficulty related ones (from which I suspect that they stack). All achievements that are related to a single mission are missable but can be unlocked by using Mission Select from the main menu. I wouldn't say that this is a hard achievement list, but it doesn't look very easy to me either (especially the ranking and the medals in multiplayer).
5. Conclusion
The campaign is one I can recommend until the point where I am at, and is enjoyable to play even on the hardest difficulty. Stealth is something the devs could have approached better, and the multiplayer is in one word disappointing. The game looks finished but it needs some cleaning up. This is by no means a bad game, but isn't GOTY material either. Picking it up for full price might be overkill, so I would recommend waiting for a sale or permanent discount. With all these 'modern' war games out today, this game is a relieving experience and will keep the Word War II enthusiasts busy for about an hour or 10. I'd give this game a rating of 72 out of 100, which reflects to 3.5 out of 5.Thanks for reading!
- MC0REBE
