Done and done.
Decent mechanics. At least after the patch, I think it was different in the demo (deadzones lol). Weapons feel good. Detaching/reattaching/swapping out VS weapons is kinda cool. Especially in missions where you realize that is key to winning (or at least not dying). Using the VS weapons on foot does feel clunky (no movement while firing, terrible reload times), but I guess it's for balancing. The mechs are fun. Bonus points for making turrets are regular game mechanic you can use or leave, and not a forced "change of pace"-style thing. Underwater and zero-g areas with weird jumping mechanics were fun to do.
Sub-par campaign. Almost a comedy. They have the land carrier from Haze. Okay, it's definitely not a comedy. But keep thinking that if it helps.
Laughable AIs all around. Soldiers just standing in one spot, firing, but not moving, soliciting punishment. And they are glitched too. I had enemy soldiers standing only a few feet behind my back, gun pointed towards me, and nothing happend. I just didn't trigger their routine somehow.
I fought several (optional?) major enemies alone because my entire AI squad had already charged forward to the end of the level. Speaking of which, they aren't really good for much, are they? They do hold their own in the first few levels against Akrid, but something about soldier-type enemies just makes them stop working.
This obsession to resemble a western online game as much as possible makes the game more stupid than it has to be. Why do I have to confirm twice and wait 5 seconds before my "offline session" starts? Why does the post-mission briefing have a coutdown? All I'm doing is playing a campaign level in good ole solitude. Main menu should just have "Single player"=>("Resume","New game","Load game") and all the coop stuff tucked away under "Play online".
The game feels like a gauntlet of user made UT'99 assault mode missions. Some are good fun. Others are just busywork. Some maps are just a corridor. Some are five-level 3D labyrinths, too complex for their own good.
There are literal capture-and-hold missions with enemy spawn points in plain sight. They just materialize there, in that opening in the wall.
Many of the maps are easy to break with grapple traversal. You can skip around places the AI (both frienly and enemy) can't seem to deal with properly, either getting stuck or going passive.
Boss fights are kind of bullshit. You can take off limbs, but they grow back before you can exploit your deed and circle around to the maw or whatever. It's regular old bullet sponge design mostly.
Seems to be mostly about luck whether you can avoid a hit or not with some of them. Luck of the draw when it comes to which attacks the boss performs. Luck of not being inside the super-mega area-of-effect attack in other cases (hello, final boss, who is lethal with a single hit).
The trophies are messed up in ways that other developers couldn't even imagine. I finished the game on normal and have 17% trophy completion, all bronze. And to even get there I had to go back into a campaing mission, find a sort of secret level, and finish that too. You don't even get the "beat the game" trophy without doing that, and you get nothing else out of the final mission either.
The amount of shit you'd have to grind out to plat this is amazing. PS3Trophies.org estimates 1200 hours of your life.
Difficulty trophies do not even stack. Meaning if you finish the game plus secret level on hard, you do not get the completion trophies for easy and normal. You only get the bronze trophy for completing hard difficulty.
Bottom line: thanks for the laughs. I will never touch this game again.
