The years haven’t treated this FPS particularly well. The graphics are still passable, although the animations for the human characters is quite hilarious, reminded me of Woody in Toy Story to be honest. The controls are pretty simple, not too dissimilar to today’s shooters so can’t complain on that front.

Where it did get frustrating was the number of times you would insta-die, especially once the Railgun became a weapon prevalent amongst the NPCs. You basically have to Quicksave your way every couple minutes just so you don’t lose too much progress when an unseen enemy Rails you through a wall. The guns are fun, I did end up using most of them at one point or another, although the ability to use certain weapons to blast your way through walls seemed more gimmick than anything. There didn’t seem to be alot of point to it unless you had to blast a hole somewhere in order to progress.

Finally the story was pretty bland, the ending in particular seemed very ho hum (I won’t spoil it). And the randomness of the final activity was extremely frustrating. There are several more Red Faction games, my experience with this one hasn’t totally put me off yet, although I believe some of the later ones leave a lot to be desired.

 

The Witcher is a very nice story-driven RPG. It is fairly on-rails as far as progression goes, there are side quests you can take but you are quite restricted in how you progress the story. Actions you take do have an affect on subsequent chapters in the game however which is a very nice touch. There could have been some more variety in the human models, there was alot of re-use for different (often quite important) characters. The voice over work was good, Geralt in particular was very good.

The combat is not very tactical, it essentially boils down to clicking the mouse at the appropriate time to get combo’s, however there is some need to pay attention to which of your weapons you are using (steel or silver) and the style (fast, strong, group). Certain enemies require different combinations in order to efficiently kill them. In addition you have the potion making subsystem which is used to assist with combat primarily. I found that I probably only used half to two-thirds of the potion recipes that I acquired however.

The ending was a little bit anti-climactic to be honest, however it won’t stop me playing The Witcher 2, although I believe that is more of a separate adventure rather than having much in the way of continuity from this game.

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