Shadowrun Returns and Killzone: Mercenary ... old titles, new takes As the traditional quiet of August sets in, it’s over to a selection of download-only titles to provide the fix that gamers need. Step forward Microsoft’s latest Summer of Arcade collection – led by the excellent Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons – and Harebrained Schemes’ take on Shadowrun, both proving that there’s still reason …
I have never understood the hate towards the series, I have played all 4 games, and they are fun.
I will be buying Mercenary and Shadow Fall.
They have a good back story. The so called villians (they are not villians of course*) are great. The games always look fantastic, and the multiplayers require skill. What is surprising is that the multiplayers for 2 (released 2009) and 3 (released 2011) are still very busy.
What we do find though is that CoD players usually do terribly , they cannot get used to the heaviness of the controls, that reactions are no match for experience, and that jumping up and down makes you look stupid.
KZ3 is in the top 5 best graphics on a console for this generation (TLOU or UC3 is best).
The weapons are usaully well balanced, even the LMGs can be used to good effect. And you can of course use the famous Chunky Gun.
All hail the Chunky Gun
* How can they be villians with such voices as Ray Winstone, Sean Pertwee, Malcolm McDowell, Christopher Fairbank, Richard Ridings, and of course Brian Cox.
But still lacking.... something....
SR was a nice 12 hours worth of gaming, but there is a slight tedious tide of ad nausium repetition towards the end.
If the narative wasn't as strong, and not helped along by stunning hand drawn environemnts I think I would've given up.
On a side note, the d-cell in my SNES copy of the original died years ago, so my last play through was without saves, leaving very toasty SNES waiting for after a week away with work. So the save function struck a familar chord.
"Don’t expect the variety and freedom... SR sets out with a story to tell and never really allows for significant divergence. In fact, in that way, it feels much more like a typical dungeon master-led tabletop game"
If your DM led you down a restrictive path and didn't allow you any freedom or divergence they were a poor DM. I used to run games where the players were free to explore an area in any way or order they saw fit, the events of the story would happen wherever and whenever necessary. And, they were free to find their own solutions to the problems I put in front of them. In one game that included starting a forest fire that consumed most of a continent just to kill a nest of beasties. An event which seemed humorous overkill at the time but which led to huge political repercussions in future stories.
the lack of a mid-mission save option, meaning that should you need to break off your game to, I don’t know, live your real life maybe. You’ll find yourself either having to lose your progress since the last autosave point, or else facing the prospect of leaving your game on extended pause – neither being a great option.
If a game doesn't have a mid-mission save then I simply can't invest. I don't sit down to my PC to play for a continuous few hours like I used to, at the very least it's often paused. If I can't play knowing that I can stop and leave without much loss in progress I just can't commit to playing. Especially with a roleplaying game, the last thing I want to do is keep replaying a section just because I had to stop last time
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