Operation Failpoint (a rant about how Codemasters bent us over and screwed us all)
51 days 7 hours ago
| by:
matchgrade
It's been a little less than two weeks, and I'm already ready to say goodbye to this game. Getting the $20 at gamestop out of the $60 I paid for it might actually be better than having it sit in my home. Here's why.
I'm not a CoD fanboy either. Military sim and tactical shooting are totally my cup of tea. I've been waiting a long time for the "ultimate" milsim that this promised to be. But this game turned out to be so horribly last-gen that I don't know how I didn't realize it before I bought it.
I'm not going to rant about the AI, glitches, or other technical problems with the game, because no game is perfect. I'm just going to talk about the choices that Codemasters made to build a truly half-assed gaming experience and sucker people into buying it.
First off, the open world is a lie. Yes, there are 220km's of land for you to explore. But is there any point for you to explore them? Nope. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING on the island for you to do besides the main missons. You can't run off and fight skirmishes with random enemies in a bigger war around you, because there is no war going on around you. On a given level, the island is devoid of all life outside your direct mission area. It's as if the US and China agreed never to deploy more than 40 troops in the theatre at any given time.
Level design also fails. The game is over in 11 short but time-consuming missions. Your engagements with the enemy are very small, and you never feel like you're making any kind of difference in the war. I guess this helps with the feeling of being a small part of a big war, but it makes for a boring and unsatisfying game, and by the end you feel like nothing really happened.However, there is NO excuse for the emptiness of the last level, when your commanders repeatedly tell you that the PLA is making their last stand, and to expect heavy fighting, but instead you find nothing but occasional enemy watchposts (with 2 guards each) and a naval base garrisoned by like 3 troops. Definition of anticlimactic.
Also, the game is a pitifully limited experience. There's lots of variety in weapon types and vehicles, but you don't get access to most of them. If you stick to your mission and don't friendly-fire your teammates to loot their weapons, the only guns you'll ever get are your standard assault rifles (which all handle the same, so don't expect variety there) and a couple of sniper rifles (again, they feel identical). Want the M249 SAW that's a staple of modern FPS? You have to kill your buddy and steal it from him, thus screwing yourself. Vehicles are the same. Lots of tanks, APCs, and helo's, but you never get to use em (at least, not in a context that benefits you). Again, you have to steal em from your allies to get em, which takes away from the feeling of being a real soldier and not a war criminal. It's as if Codemasters is taunting you by showing you all the cool stuff they could've given you but never do. Oh, and that cool little offroad buggy that you saw in the screenshots? It doesn't even show up in the game. Codemasters should be indicted for the amount of false advertising they did to dress this game up and sell it.
Seriously, this game feels like a mod of Ghost Recon ONE. Sure, it's open world, but it might as well not be, given how little there is to actually do. The only thing remotely next-gen about this game is the draw distance (not like there's anything to see). To be fair, the graphics are better than last-gen, but are crap compared to every other shooter this generation.
I thought this game was going to be phenomenal. And when I realized it wasn't, I tried really hard to like it anyway. But I can't help but feel cheated by the amount of unfulfilled promises that Codemasters made but didn't follow up on, and all the flashy stuff shown in the previews that aren't actually in the game. Mostly I'm pissed off at myself for paying $60 for it instead of waiting for Demon's Souls to restock.
I'm thinking hard about whether to trade it in and get what little money I can for it, or wait to see if the patches and DLC actually do anything, but Codemasters would have a lot of catching up to do to fix this fundamentally-flawed game.
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