Recent reviews by wdotica

My 3 year old daughter likes this game a lot.

For $5, this is a fun game and a good way to kill a weekend. It has a Borderlands/Fallout vibe, but unlike those games it is a shooter first and an RPG at a distant second. Most of the guns feel powerful, and there's a lot of strategy to be employed. Some guns are more useful for certain enemies than others. A lot of the enemies can soak up a lot of damage, but the smarter you fight the more effective each shot will be. Some enemies you should run up fast and shoot with a shotgun. Sometimes it's worth sniping from cover, even in a close indoor fight. Some items like the boomerangs or RC Car bombs are good in some situations and less so in others. I wouldn't say it's a thinking man's shooter, but it definitely invites more thinking than Call of Duty.

The graphics are okay. Sometimes a vista looks quite beautiful, but close-up objects have muddy low-res textures. It's a very mixed bag. The soundtrack is forgettable, but very functional. The music will essentially tell you if enemies are nearby or not.

The weakest part of this game, by far, is the story. You step out of a cryogenic freezing into a desert apocalypse with no knowledge of anything (like Fallout's Vaults). There's no real purpose or desire for your character, so basically every character puts you to work doing their violent, mercenary chores until the end of the game. Some of it makes sense (save the town from evil bandits!) and some if it doesn't.

Supposedly there's this evil dystopian government, the "Authority," that's super bad, and characters tell you that you're going to join the Resistance at some point. The only thing is, I've never seen an example of this Authority's evil. They don't even appear in person until halfway through the game. When they appear, it's because you attacked them first. And even then, clearly nobody in the towns fear them. They swear at the Authority soldiers, and the Authority soldiers don't even smack them in response. Half Life 2 did a good job of showing a citizenry that's beaten down and defeated by an oppressor. Here, the Authority inspires the same level of fear as the IRS.

The missions are fun, but there's clearly no coherent plot thread. The last mission doesn't feel like the culmination of all your work up until this point. It just feels like one more job in a series of mostly disconnected jobs. I know id Software isn't known for their plots, and that's not necessarily a problem. I love Doom and Quake and Wolfenstein and accept that they are mostly games for shooting and not learning stories. Still, I was able to understand pretty clearly that Hell Demons and Nazis and the Strogg were evil. I can't understand why the Authority is evil, except that clearly all large governments are bad, duh. I never thought I'd accuse a visual work of "telling, not showing."