StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Slow-mo kill-cams have never been more worthwhile. Why didn't anyone tell me about this game? Jovial was smart enough to get it for free, I didn't get the memo so I had to drop $20 on it. NOTE: You won't find much here other reviewers didn't hit on. These are the guys who made the original AvP and Rainbow 6: Vegas game. No reviewer is holding back and it explains the lack of polish the game seems to have, while still being pretty damn good.

You're a sniper. You snipe things. If you snipe them good enough, you're given a gratuitous slow-motion shot of the bullet's path into your victim. Some of them go full-xray (though, not really: it's a cross-section). One example, first actual mission: two Germans are standing around. One is patting. I saw this in World at War. I wait for the guy to pat behind the other and take my shot. The bullet goes through the first guys heart, exits, and the deformed slug hits the second soldier in the lung. Both go down, achievement unlocked. Oh yea, projectile weapons are always more fun than hitscan.

Just the act of running (not sprinting) will empty your breath gauge (Stamina) which is used to slow time and line up shots better. This is not a run and gun game. Even on normal Ze Germans (and some Ruskies) will mow you down in a firefight. Your Thompson and silenced single-shot pistol are useful, but they are not a substitute for stealth and ambushing. Unfortunately, the AI is brain-dead and most of the challenge comes from the set spawns (previously cleared areas will become enemy stampedes once you advance far enough). Enemies will take cover in the same areas their previous comrades tried to. They huddle for salvation, by piles of their comrade bodies, and they find none. They are lethal because they are numerous. Snipers are going to be an issue on higher difficulties if only due to damage and aimbotting.

Technically, the game looks pretty good. 4K ultra everything there's nothing really beating me over the head. But looking good doesn't mean the game will run that without hard-locking a computer bad enough that Windows disables the primary monitor on reboot. I have to run at 2k.

The co-op is great: full campaign access. They've worked out some kind of system for the "Breathing" system that slows time to somehow not affect the other player (I assume it does some kind of weird sync). You basically double your firepower. Either player can mark targets. You can compete (a la World at War Competitive Co-op) via score. The kill-cams go cross player. So Jovial's shot will pause my gameplay.... and it never gets old. It just doesn't. There's other gameplay modes such as Horde style (wave after wave of their own men at you) and an asymentrical one where you have someone on overwatch while the other completes objectives).

There's nothing more satisfying than saying "oh yea, watch this" and pegging a sprinting enemy in the temple and making your partner watch the slow-mo headshot. Ah man, stupidly simple fun. This game is vastly underrated for offering a gameplay style we don't really see. And no, it isn't a discount Splinter Cell, even though there are parallel gameplay elements. But since it doesn't have "Activision" in the credits, reviews beat it up for throwing wave after wave of brain-dead enemies at you. As if rapidly tapping zoom and fire to aim-assist your way into Rambo levels of body-count is so much more satisfying in a CoD game.

Sniper Elite is a strange series. V2 was really cool, and just lacked a few necessary tweaks and improvements in certain areas.

Sniper Elite 3 makes some of those fixes, adds a lot of improvements, and has more integrated and smoother co-op. On the other hand, its DLC model is incredibly annoying, and - I don't know how they did this - somehow the sniping is less fun. The enemies are much smarter, the horde mode has less maps but is better designed and more robust, and yet somehow the sniping component gets lost. It's ostensibly about sniping, but it seems like you spend more time running around dealing with the re-positioning mechanics and trying not to get murdered, rather than actually firing your rifle. That said, it works a little better co-op, since between the two of you you have more firepower to hold off the waves of Nazis.

Then there's the Zombie spin-offs. Which are great fun, especially since I scored the 2nd episode for $3. The 3rd "master version" costs a little more even on sale, but it finally adds a horde mode which is bizarrely absent from the first two Zombie games. I only recently got it, and my friends and I are still working through the various maps (on maximum difficulty, of course). There's one that's literally just one long alley, and with only three of us our best attempt yet got to Wave 10. Compared to Sniper Elite 3, where with one buddy we beat a horde mode map to completion on our first attempt (maximum sniping difficulty but only medium enemy difficulty, but still). Zombie 3 also lacks some of SE3's features, like rifle and scope customization.

Between the DLCs and the 500 different versions of the game, it's really annoying sometimes trying to play what you want. Features, content, and gameplay are messily scattered throughout the series. If there's 3 of us looking to play, NZA3 is better for more than 2 people since SE3 doesn't support that as well, but now we're fighting zombies instead of other dudes with guns. The ballistics are subtly different with no rifle customization, but at least all the rifles are available by default. If one player drops and the two of us go back to SE3, now some of the rifles are locked behind DLC. And so on and so forth. It's a bizarre headache, and while NZA3 is a step in the right direction by unifying the NZA spin-offs in one package and adding horde mode, I really wish they'd properly package all this nonsense under one cross-compatible umbrella.

Give me a Sniper Elite base game, with modular content packages for V2, V3, NZA, and other content, please.

Yea, not a big fan of the confusing DLC model nor Sniper Elite telling me "BUY OUR NEXT GAME YOU ASSHOLE!" everytime I close it. Still, fun game. The Deadeye achievement was fun to get. I just wanted to see a guys eyeball explode.

Sniper Elite V3 is on-sale for Steam. With Season pass it's $21. Figured it's worth a shot.

Insanity Edit: It's 26 GIGS. As in GIGABYTES? WTF?

Heh. It's that time. With the artificial constraints of the PS3/Xbox360 gone, multi-dozen gig games are becoming the norm.

ARK is also 26 GB. Act of Aggression is 13. XCOM is 19. Wargame Red Dragon is 22. Rome 2 Total War is 27. Attila TW is 21. Company of Heroes 2 is 23. Payday 2 is 24. Mad Max is 33. The reigning champion of current installs on my hard drive is Shadows of Mordor at a whopping 43 gigabytes. And GTA 5 was 60-something.

Just don't shake your cane at the screen too hard when the install is 1 TB.

Man, I just bought a 500GB SSD, and swapped my 240 over to my OS. And now I get the feeling 500GBs isn't going to be enough at some point and I'll have to shift shit over to my 1TB HDD. Yea, I can always uninstall games, but it's getting ridiculous that we're shunting storage space onto the Interwebs. Developers need to learn to compress their shit. I don't care about load times because just an SSD configured with AHCI eviscerates said load times. Kids these days do not remember BF1942 and BF2 load times and how a RAID0 array for home use was actually a huge boon. Not to mention large flash storage on the PCI-E bus (either the new PCI-E cards or the onboard storage some boards like mine offer) are only going to be even faster: the ability to hold data is more important than access times.

But really, this smacks much more of an anti-piracy design choice, such as the 35 gigajoules of uncompressed music in Titanfall.

He did, however, admit that most PC gamers probably wouldn't even notice the difference. "On a higher PC it wouldn't be an issue. On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn't be an issue, it's that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn't dedicate those resources to audio."

He's so full of shit it hurts. This is about two things: fighting pirates and developers doing the same shit they did when CD-ROMs became commonplace. You went from 15 floppies that could still only hold a few dozen MBs to 650 MBs and they all just said "gotta fill that space SOMEHOW."

Whatever, clouds aren't going to yell at themselves.