Gameplay (cont.)

The island’s 220 km2 of terrain is ambitious, but largely unremarkable. There’s not much point in the freedom of such an environment if all it means is you have to run a kilometer between objectives. I swear, at the end of one mission, I was running for almost 10 minutes trying to egress to the extraction point. Of course, vehicles are sometimes provided to cover lots of ground quickly, but the physics are pretty awful. I found this surprising, considering Codemasters’ other major franchises are racing games that I really enjoy. You can’t even use the mouse to look around while you’re driving!

Destructible environments came as a pleasant surprise. Sure, it’s not anything to look at – literally, bits and pieces just disappear – but when you shoot a fuel tank outside a house and it explodes, taking off a huge chunk of the building, it’s pretty sweet. The first time it happened to me, I was up in an airfield control tower. An enemy tank came by, and BOOM, I fell from the 3rd floor down to the 2nd. Soon it was little more than four half-walls and part of a roof that I was hiding inside.

Controls

First of all, you cannot lean in this so-called tactical shooter. The only reason for this has to be consolitis. I don’t understand how they can add weapon hotkeys but not the ability to lean around corners to avoid being shot, though. It’s inexcusable. You also cannot jump, which isn’t as big of a deal and isn’t unusual for this type of game anyway. You can vault over fences or sandbags, but for smaller, more uneven things like rocks or foot-tall ledges, you can get stuck and have to go around.

Native support for the Xbox 360 controller is good (not that I tried beyond turning it on and seeing the menus change) but from what I’ve read, support for other peripherals like driving wheels and flight sticks is lacking. Add this to the aforementioned absence of free-look, and it seems vehicle combat never stood much of a chance.

The quick command radial (comm-rose) is very awkward, using WASD to navigate and execute orders. This means you have to completely stop moving, which discourages its use. On top of that, it has to be manually closed after issuing a command, and toggling your selection of AI teammates with number keys is also a pain.

I immediately noticed that mouse look is a bit sluggish. Turned off V-Sync because it is usually the culprit, but that made no difference. I eventually got used to it, though. It might help some to fiddle with combinations of mouse DPI settings and in-game look sensitivity.

Common actions sometimes border on unresponsive, apparently due to your character being really stupid and only able to do one thing at a time. So, you have to stand still in order to switch weapons. When switching to the barrel-mounted grenade launcher, I kept reloading it for some reason, and you can’t interrupt that process. Even after it’s completed, there’s an inexplicable delay of about a second, during which you cannot aim or fire.

Multiplayer

The usual deathmatch and assault modes are playable with up to 32 people. The maps are limited to 4 square kilometers in size, however. At least it’s an improvement on the console multiplayer experience that claims to be 16 vs. 16, but is really 4 vs. 4 with 3 bots per person.

The most promising mode of online play seems to be 4-player co-op, as it allows you to play the story missions with a more reliable squad. However, you must stay within 275 meters of your squad leader, or else be insta-killed. This severely limits your strategic options, and is obviously a compromise between the much more open campaign area and the smaller maps used in the other MP modes. By limiting the range between players, there is less area that needs to be synchronized between players.

All of this may be a moot point, though, as right now there is no dedicated server support, anti-cheat measures, or CD-key authorization, for that matter. Perhaps even worse, you can’t join a game that is already in progress, which would make organizing a full house virtually impossible. Everyone is praying these things are fixed in a patch, but it’s quite outrageous for these issues to be present at all.