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» Pros

Well my impressions are it was fun, the graphics were good, but not amazing considering other stuff that has come out. The physics were likewise good, but not excellent. They were more realistic than Dues ex where you could make a bridge of boxes, but still had some weirdness and despite what was said things act way to light.

I really liked the vehicle stages even though they were entirely linear, this is one of the things I wished they had in doom3, you could have raced to another outpost across the surface of mars it would have been fun.

It effectively made you care about the characters alyx, and so forth

» Cons

It was completely linear those who complained about D3 well this was everybit as bad. One example was a glitch that caused a door to not be openable made me stack a huge pile of urinals, radiators, barrels, doors, and so forth up to get out of the roof, but alas there was an invisible wall... It really isn\'t as hard as people think if I were designing it I would have made a roof to the building with a large drop on the sides. Ta da! the player is contained still but not by a stupid invisible wall. Quake 2 offered more in the way of allowing the player to follow multiple paths, and if you don\'t believe it look at quake2 done quick.

Whether it is monster closets or people magically spawning I see little difference on the annoyance level. However for me that level is relatively low, the mad hatters in that tunnel got annoying though.

The game was easy, but the makers made a very poor design decision to limit the amount of ammo available and carriable for the crossbow, magnum, and rockets. As a player I would lke to be able to at least stockpile the ammo for a bit of fun. This was the most annoying part it meant that you had to use the shotgun, assualt rifles, and regular pistol along with gravity gun the whole game basically with small things where you had a supply of rockets or somethig for a specific task.

» Review

On the striders level the squad didn't really help at all. I like to keep my squad alive just because I do, and I had a squad of four rocket launchers through that tunnel, I sent them early to the end so they would survive and then went myself. Their rockets did not damage the strider b/c the developers assumed they would all die in the tunnel, that was crap. For a game that wasn't suposed to rely on scripting well it did.

Overall it was a good game. It was certainly not groundbreaking. As with most games it lacks subtlety in trying to get some plot points across to the player. The game had high points but for me those were the begining orwellian city, the buggy run and after that it went downhill.