Continuing the piggy-back conga, here's yet another favourite x thread.
On the Playstation 2 was a game called Freedom Fighters. It wasn't the most original; a third person shooter set in an alternative history where the Soviets were the victors of the Second World War and completed the atom bomb first. You play as a plumber (durr) who finds himself the unwilling leader of an underground resisting a Soviet invasion of the continental United States.
Playing the game however, is pure awesome. The devs planted a lot of little hidey-holes and secondary routes. Your player character can run, jump, and climb to use cover and get the drop on your enemies in all sorts of creative ways. The levels are perfectly adapted to this run-climb-and-gun gameplay. I think this is the single-player campaign game I've played the most.
While the gunplay lacks the punch of something like GTA IV+, it's still tremendously satisfying. I love the whole scenario, the corny Russian accents, fighting in the snow with scavenged AKs, dodging Russian gunships.
There's a simple but neat and satisfying system where levels are split into areas. Each area will have objectives, and completing a goal in one area may help with another. E.g., Grab the C4 from area 1. Snipers stop your advance, so you head to area 2 to get behind them and blow up their nest. Head back to area 1 where there's a gunship landing pad. Blow up the gunship to make area 3 safer since that gunship won't cut you down in 2 seconds flat.
My favourite genre when I was younger was WWII shooters, and they've never gotten tiresome in my eyes. It's an era endlessly fascinating and I've always felt the better games were a way of connecting with a time and space I've never had the displeasure of experiencing.
Of those shooters, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 was my absolute favourite. I've gone back to replay it recently and it still hits me, the grit and brutality. It was like watching D-Day in Saving Private Ryan for the first time.
Despite the visual fidelity being nothing like modern games, or the practical effects like Private Ryan, the game has a real down-and-dirty approach. It was the first game I played with liberal, colourful language, the first game I played where I felt the human drama really tearing me up, the first game with iron-sight aiming, the first game with a sim-like approach to gunfights (Where flanking and strategy trump popping people in their helmets behind cover, like you're the world's most amazing sniper, à la late Medal of Honour games).
The game provided not only this visceral gameplay, but every level on every difficulty provided an unlockable piece of art, history, behind-the-scenes video and info, and all sorts of things. I was always impressed with the sheer detail and effort these guys put into the look and feel of the France. They traveled to many of the battlefields, modeled the buildings and locales based on personal and surveillance pictures and on inference from modern photos, they read the after-action reports (Most of the game is based on those reports and interviews, right down to the characters).
For example, here's a group of devs singing a paratrooper song. It's sung to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic, but the lyrics take a rather more personal and dark turn, so characteristic of a soldier's bloody sense of humour.
You can see in the start of the video: All the tabs are missions, each mission has 4 difficulties. There's an unlockable for every single one and that's just plain wicked.
I'll stop there so this doesn't turn into me gushing over every game I ever liked.
On the Playstation 2 was a game called Freedom Fighters. It wasn't the most original; a third person shooter set in an alternative history where the Soviets were the victors of the Second World War and completed the atom bomb first. You play as a plumber (durr) who finds himself the unwilling leader of an underground resisting a Soviet invasion of the continental United States.
Playing the game however, is pure awesome. The devs planted a lot of little hidey-holes and secondary routes. Your player character can run, jump, and climb to use cover and get the drop on your enemies in all sorts of creative ways. The levels are perfectly adapted to this run-climb-and-gun gameplay. I think this is the single-player campaign game I've played the most.
While the gunplay lacks the punch of something like GTA IV+, it's still tremendously satisfying. I love the whole scenario, the corny Russian accents, fighting in the snow with scavenged AKs, dodging Russian gunships.
There's a simple but neat and satisfying system where levels are split into areas. Each area will have objectives, and completing a goal in one area may help with another. E.g., Grab the C4 from area 1. Snipers stop your advance, so you head to area 2 to get behind them and blow up their nest. Head back to area 1 where there's a gunship landing pad. Blow up the gunship to make area 3 safer since that gunship won't cut you down in 2 seconds flat.
My favourite genre when I was younger was WWII shooters, and they've never gotten tiresome in my eyes. It's an era endlessly fascinating and I've always felt the better games were a way of connecting with a time and space I've never had the displeasure of experiencing.
Of those shooters, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 was my absolute favourite. I've gone back to replay it recently and it still hits me, the grit and brutality. It was like watching D-Day in Saving Private Ryan for the first time.
Despite the visual fidelity being nothing like modern games, or the practical effects like Private Ryan, the game has a real down-and-dirty approach. It was the first game I played with liberal, colourful language, the first game I played where I felt the human drama really tearing me up, the first game with iron-sight aiming, the first game with a sim-like approach to gunfights (Where flanking and strategy trump popping people in their helmets behind cover, like you're the world's most amazing sniper, à la late Medal of Honour games).
The game provided not only this visceral gameplay, but every level on every difficulty provided an unlockable piece of art, history, behind-the-scenes video and info, and all sorts of things. I was always impressed with the sheer detail and effort these guys put into the look and feel of the France. They traveled to many of the battlefields, modeled the buildings and locales based on personal and surveillance pictures and on inference from modern photos, they read the after-action reports (Most of the game is based on those reports and interviews, right down to the characters).
For example, here's a group of devs singing a paratrooper song. It's sung to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic, but the lyrics take a rather more personal and dark turn, so characteristic of a soldier's bloody sense of humour.
You can see in the start of the video: All the tabs are missions, each mission has 4 difficulties. There's an unlockable for every single one and that's just plain wicked.
I'll stop there so this doesn't turn into me gushing over every game I ever liked.
I still get out the PS1 and play it sometimes. As for more recent games, I can and do play Dragon Age: Inquisition all the time. It is probably my favorite game ever.
