NEED FOR SPEED WORLD
NFSW is an online street-racer in the same vein of other games in the Need for Speed series. When it's not about racing, it's about avoiding the long, wheeled arm of the law. The game purports to be massively multiplayer and open world, and in some sense it is both of those. The world is indeed open, and as you drive through it you'll see a great many players, but that is where the ties to the MMO genre seem to end. The ability for you, the player, to interact with other players in this open world is minimal. You can talk to them, compare your stats, invite them to a match or a group, and that's about it. That would probably be enough under most circumstances, but NFSW is a racing game, and as such has no real cooperative mode, so grouping up becomes pretty much useless.
Upgrades and new cars are few and far between. As it stands, the max level is 50, and there are very large gaps between levels when you unlock a new car or a new upgrade. The grinds in between those feel too long, as you still only have the same handful of tracks to race on. By level 14, it was taking me about twenty victories in completely packed races to level up. With a limited number of available races, a small gain in rep for each victory, and very little incentive to level up until you get a new car or upgrade, running the same laps over and over begins to get very tedious.
Participating in races and evading the cops also rewards players with a random powerup. This was a particularly missed opportunity, as currently the game has no player-driven economy. Players earn money that can only be spent in the game's store – no trades between players can be made. This feels like something that could have been very easily fixed by simply having things like car modifications as rare-drops from the end-of-race rewards, and allowing players to trade them. Instead, they're simply bought and used and there isn't enough player interaction.
BATTLEFIELD 3
When it comes to virtual battlefields, nobody does it quite like the Battlefield series. It has a long history of creating sprawling conflict zones where players have an exhilarating range of ways to make powerful contributions to the war effort. The competitive multiplayer mode in Battlefield 3 stays true to tradition, delivering an online combat experience that is amazingly addictive, immersive, and exciting, with refinements and new elements that make the familiar action feel fresh. Unfortunately, the stale single-player campaign fails to capitalize on the strengths of the series and feels like an off-brand imitation. The six cooperative missions fare better and offer a tougher challenge, but only the competitive multiplayer provides a compelling reason to buy Battlefield 3. With online battles this excellent, though, that reason is all you need.
There are many factors that combine to make these battlefields as good as they are, most of which will be familiar to series veterans. Nine great maps set the stage for up to 64 players to fight it out in a variety of urban, industrial, and military locations. These places all look beautiful, though the grassy hills and blue skies of the Caspian Border are naturally more appealing than the drab urban corridors of the Grand Bazaar. The maps vary widely in size and offer diverse environmental elements, including claustrophobic tunnels, coastal roads, desert plains, and a variety of multistory buildings. Many man-made structures can be damaged or destroyed by the explosive tools at your disposal, creating new infiltration routes or removing cover positions. The maps are designed to create opportunities for combat at all ranges, and the element of destruction lets you manipulate the environment to create even more.
Combat is not just about where you are, but also about how you get there, and the variety of vehicles is one of the things that makes Battlefield so uniquely engaging. Small maps might only have a Humvee or a light armored vehicle, while larger ones boast buggies, tanks, amphibious transports, helicopters, and jets. There are a few variations within each class of vehicle that make them better suited for troop transport, anti-infantry, antiair, or anti-vehicle combat, and learning how to get the most out of each one is a blast, even if you're sometimes the one getting blown up. Whether you're piloting, gunning, or just going along for the ride, vehicles offer a key tactical element that can change the tide of battle when used by a savvy squad. Using a vehicle well can earn you powerful upgrades and bonus weapons, but it can be tough to get the hang of the flight mechanics for helicopters and jets. It's a shame there's no way to practice flying them outside of active multiplayer matches (with one exception), though you can take comfort in knowing that you are at least entertaining your fellow players when your jet nose-dives into a mountain.
The maps and vehicles allow for a great degree of strategic freedom, but choosing your class and loadout is the first and most important decision you make before spawning into combat. Abilities and weapons have shuffled around a bit since Battlefield: Bad Company 2, so now the assault class slings health packs and totes defibrillators, while the support class carries light machine guns and ammunition boxes. Engineers still thrive on vehicle support/destruction, and recon delivers long-range death. New gadgets like robots that can arm charges (engineer) and mark targets (recon) give players more to look out for on the battlefield, and claymores and mortars (support) ensure that the engineer class isn't the only one packing an explosive punch. Unlockables include class-specific weapons and gadgets, gun-specific sights and attachments, and specializations that can make you tougher and deadlier. Focusing on one class to unlock higher level gear has its advantages, but so does spreading around your progress in an effort to be more adaptable to the ebb and flow of combat.
SNIPER GHOST WARRIOR 2
If sniping in real life – outside of the whole morality issue – was as easy as it is in Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, then a few soldiers probably could save the world. Unless you’re playing on the hardest mode, bullet-drop indicators and omniscient AI teammates make sure you know exactly who to shoot and when, taking almost all the tension out of pulling the trigger. Ghost Warrior 2 ultimately does exactly what I feared the most when I started: it takes one of the highest forms of shooting skill and makes it repetitive and uninteresting.
Almost every level in Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2’s brief four-or-so-hour campaign boils down to the same thing. You arrive on one of these pretty, CryEngine 3-rendered jungle scenes either alone or with a partner, and then move from position to position, killing everyone as quietly as possible. If you screw up, enemies will rush you with reckless abandon and you’ll probably die, so if you’re playing on Easy or Normal, you’d best kill people in the explicit order you’re told to. Not that that’s particularly difficult, since you seem to always know exactly where enemies are at all times.
Ghost Warrior 2’s multiplayer doesn’t exactly add a lot of diversity to the experience, either. True, lying completely still watching the area in front of you for movement or the glare off another sniper’s scope, or waiting for the sound of a rifle, does create a few moments of high tension. More often, though, it means I'm sitting around for minutes at a time, never seeing anyone or anything, except maybe one of the flickering shadows or other annoying minor glitches that cropped up as I played (on two different PCs). Whole rounds often pass where I’ve fired maybe two shots, and I died many times without ever having a chance to retaliate. The campers among you may find it entertaining, but outside of the very rare intense sniper battle, it quickly became tiresome – especially considering there are only two maps at the time of this review.
COUNTER STRIKE GLOBAL OFFENSIVES
Death is a great teacher. Failure in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is, as it always has been for this series, the greatest way to learn where you should have gone, what you shouldn't have done, and how you could have done better. Counter-Strike players spend a lot of time learning -- consequently, they are always getting better.
Growth is an important factor in Global Offensive, especially if you're coming into Counter-Strike fresh or after a sabbatical. This is an extremely hardcore, skill-based first-person shooter, and it forces you to think differently than other modern shooters. If you’re a Call of Duty player, you’re going to need to change your play style to succeed here. Counter-Strike also tries developing into something new here as well, despite doing little to push itself beyond what it’s always done best. Global Offensive modifies old maps to keep veterans on their toes, and introduces official new modes that encourage different play styles for the first time in almost 15 years.
Pieces of the Counter-Strike formula are dated at this point, but the superb heart and soul of Global Offensive is timeless. Teams are small, guns are lethal, and rounds are short. There's an addictive just-one-more-round quality to it, because there's a constant desire to do better than last time, to earn a satisfying kill, or to win in a new way. Call of Duty and Battlefield vets will wonder why they can't sprint to escape enemy fire or look down the iron sights to improve aim; Counter-Strike players will feel like they walked into their redecorated home. Certain map redesigns will catch hardcore fans off guard, but the changes are for the best -- the underpass choke point in de_dust, for instance, has a new escape route.
Even in the face of genre evolution, Global Offensive doesn’t care to adapt. CSGO is so dedicated to Counter-Strike's aging ideals despite market and trend changes that it brute-forces its way to success. Part of what makes it such an engaging competitive game is that killing in Global Offensive requires a wholly different skill set than other shooters. Everyone is limited to what they have and can see, with little room for character modification or on-the-fly advantages. Running and gunning is a useless play style, even if you've bought a helmet and kevlar that round, to the point that someone standing still is more likely to score the kill. Walking, crouching, or standing are your best bets to reduce the inaccurate spray of machine-gun fire.
Unlike other game types, Arms Race allows for respawns. It's the most chaotic and care-free mode in Global Offensive, with players throwing caution to the wind for the sake of climbing the kill ladder as quickly as possible. It's a shame there are only two maps in Arms Race -- a problem that will more likely persist on consoles than PC.
APB RELOADED
With open world city-games like Grand Theft Auto, I inevitably find myself becoming bored of the storyline missions – and missions in general – and the prospect of driving through narrow alleys, jumping off ramps and generally causing mayhem becomes the focus of my efforts. The exploration is its own reward, and narrowly weaving between traffic or causing an enormous pileup its own challenge.
APB, developed by Realtime Worlds (Crackdown) is an open world urban MMO, where each of the two action areas are isolated segments of a city, and each is capable of housing up to 80 players at any one time. It's a third person shooter based on the age-old game of cops and robbers, where you're either a reckless criminal or an enforcer trying to put a stop to them. It's one of the few MMOs released that is almost entirely player-versus-player centric, in that it relies on players on both sides of the law to be active for any real conflict to ever occur.
APB has many strong points. The customization options available to players are some of the most flexible we've ever encountered – from facial structure to age, makeup, weight, height, muscularity, freckles, wrinkles, and even tattoos (which, with some very careful shaping, you can create from scratch), the character customization suite alone is extremely impressive. Then there's a car customization suite with almost as many options, including the style and tone of paint, decals and car attachments. Then you can create your own little tune that will play for any opponent you kill, design your own logo, and even your own clothing. Each individual customization suite is complex and can be difficult to use, but in a talented hand can produce some stunning results. In a less talented hand, it can produce a backwards person in pink underwear. All that flexibility is totally cosmetic, though. A tall, muscular character will move at the same pace as a short chubby one.
The first time you create a character, you will be asked if you want to go through the tutorial. The tutorial consists of a video that quickly summarizes what you'll be doing and totally skips past rather important gameplay aspects like equipping upgrades, and only briefly mentions that you have to equip new weapons to use them, but never really tells you how. Then it puts you into a tutorial map, which is the same as a normal map, but won't force you into PvP for the first few missions. This too skips a lot, and only teaches you the absolute basics of movement on foot and in a car. Grenades are mentioned in neither tutorial, but end up being an integral part of combat. APB would certainly benefit from a more structured, linear and in-depth tutorial than the one currently built into the game.
Matchmaking works like this: every time you complete a mission, the game looks at how effective you were during it – how many people you killed, how many times you were killed, how many objectives you completed etc… and will try to figure out how much of a threat you are compared to other players. It'll assign a threat level to you that serves to figure out who to match against you. In a mission where it's you and one other player, and you're both very high threat, the game may assign three or four players to fight against you. Likewise, if you're both very low threat, it may only assign one medium-threat (or higher) player against you. Otherwise, it'll do its absolute best to match you threat-for-threat. If it's still not an even match, the lacking team can call for backup, which sends a message to all eligible idle players in the area with an option to join the fray. The end result is ideally a contest between equals, where it's a challenge for both sides, and no one feels like a sore loser by the end. To Realtime World's credit, it often works out that way.