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The game throws a great variety of baddies at you, starting you out with soldiers, guards, and guys in HAZMAT suits, and as you progress you are fighting off hoards of zombies, and monsters that shoot dozens of shard-projectiles at you. When you begin fighting the zombies, which are very reminiscent to the bad guys in Resident Evil 4 you have to fight off hordes of them, with dozens coming at you at once, and a lot of times they will get in your face. This prompts you to do a quick button press to smack them off, or dodge out of the way. This comes in handy, especially since you are fighting in pitch dark half the time anyways. With as crisp and detailed most of the visuals are, with the two archenemies throughout the campaign being particularly detailed, you would think they would want to show the visuals off more. I understand the need to have better detailed visuals, and use moody camera tricks, but it becomes a nuisance more than submerging you when even the light you have from your glaive isn’t enough to navigate. Similarly though, if you get an enemy down and they glow red, this opens up the opportunity to allow you to finish them off in an incredibly gruesome way. The game definitely does bring the gruesome as well, tying the likes of Condemned 2 and Gears of War for the nastiest game out there. Somebody might as well be spilling buckets of “Hawaiian Punch” and strawberry syrup all over the place, and that isn’t overstating the gore one bit.
The guy on the right was rejected as a Geico mascot and takes it out on you.
The game has a bit of a boring pattern throughout the first half of the story: fight a bunch of soldiers, see something crazy happen, fight a bunch of zombies, see something crazy happen, so on and so forth, until you start finding yourself in more frequently in boss fights. The boss battles are actually very enjoyable for the most part, having you go against helicopters, mechs, giant gorilla monsters, a blade wielding monster ninja, and more. There is a lot more variety in the second half of the game as well, which is actually a pleasant surprise, however some of it is badly executed, stopping the flow of the core gameplay at times, but it typically isn’t long enough to hurt it to bad. The controls are very similar to Gears of War, so if you are a fan of that game, then you will feel right at home with this. There are a few strange parts with the controls, such as you need to push B to do certain actions, and it feels like they did this to make sure you don’t mistakenly jump over cover in the heat of battle, but it just adds too much at times. The camera, movement, and the way you aim, while pretty accurate can feel kind of flaky at times.
The multiplayer portion of the game is surprisingly bare for a developer that made its name creating multiplayer titles, allowing you to play on Xbox Live and System Link with up to ten people per game in one of two modes in either a ranked or player match.
“Epidemic” is essentially a team-deathmatch with up to five on each team, with one person on each team having all the abilities of Hayden in the main game. The other people on the team wield a shotgun or machine gun along with grenades and proximity mines. Whoever kills the Hayden player on the opposing team ends the round and becomes the Hayden character for the team next match. In “Infected” one person is the Hayden character, while the rest of the people are soldiers working as a team to kill him. Whoever kills him becomes “Infected” the next round. When you are the Hayden character on either, there is a moment where you are down ala “Gears of War style” and as long as no one finishes you off you can get back to your feet. The Hayden character uses the shadows and all the powers from the campaign to the best of their ability, and with some practice and skill, use your abilities to best the entire opposing team fairly easily. The maps are all mostly uninspired, and geometric, with some reminiscent of Gears of War and one map in particular, while based around a level in the campaign, very similar to the tanker map on Call of Duty 4. The multiplayer is a bit shallow, but overall it is a pretty enjoyable experience, if not just a temporary distraction.
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It definitely will hold people over until Gears of War 2, it is by far the best looking game out on 360 this year, and while the variety they try at the end half of the game is hit and miss, the story is garbage, and it isn’t quite as polished as it could be, the elements that they don’t borrow from other games are great, and the multiplayer experience isn’t all that bad either.
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