I started playing this last Friday, then stopped over the weekend to do the AV grind in World of Warcraft. I couldn't take any more of that yesterday afternoon so started playing Jericho again, finishing it around 3am.
This very well could be my favorite single-player FPS to date.
It's amusing to read reviews of this game. Hexus' review in particular made me almost laugh out loud. Their complaints?
Controls aren't complex enough and ammo is too plentiful.
Wait, what? Are they honestly suggesting that they'd rather have clumsy controls and play the oh-noes-I'm-out-of-ammo-again game?
Look, I'll say this once, and only once: Making a game wherein the player never has enough ammo does not make it more "difficult"--it makes it more "frustrating". Fuck, what is this--1999?
Seriously, even if it does have some console artifacts (yes, it is a port) this is one of the funnest games I've ever played.
There's so many great things about its gameplay that break the trend of standard FPS games.
1) You get all your weapons at the beginning. Yay! OK, I understand the reasons for the traditional "Oh hai! Since you're here why don't you use this New Uber Shotgun instead! It's sitting under the stairs over there" meme. I never liked it, but I understood it. It's refreshing here to get all your weapons up-front. And you still have a sense in progression since you gain access to the various powers over time.
2) There's no health kits and ammo boxes laying around. Because we all enjoy hunting for ammo in secret areas, right? Because being forced to ration your ammo is fun, right? And it's not like you have infinite ammo. It's that it's restored to you (slowly) over time once you get the ability and (quickly) at each checkpoint.
3) Speaking of which, the checkpoints are event-based, not location-based. Which is really quite nice. Man I hated screwing up a checkpoint by going somewhere I shouldn't.
4) Not only are there no health kits, there's no health! If you take too much damage too quickly you die. If not, you live. That's great for people like me who would re-load just because they ended a battle with 90% health instead of 100%. It's a much better design than the standard hitpoint system.
5) The fact that your team fights with you is great. You can revive dead party members, so some fights can become purely support oriented, as you race around reviving fallen comrades rather than actually fighting. When you're separated from your team (or at least most of them) you tend to feel very vulnerable.
Of course there are some bad things about the game, mostly involving the fact that it's a console port. The limited graphics render range, for example, or the fact that the game makes heavy use of invisible walls to prevent you from walking off cliffs or going where you're not supposed to.
Really, the main disappointment for this game is that it wasn't long enough to support its vast depth. The gameplay could have gone so much deeper if only there were more content. Hopefully there will be an expansion or two which builds on the system already built.
Again, I can't speak highly enough of this game. It's definitely worth playing.
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The fallout series of TBS/RPG was pretty strict on ammo sometimes, and that made the game really fun for me. Often times you would have a very few rounds for your rifle, or some special pistol, so you were often using a smaller weapon, or often times 4-5 different weapons at a time since you had fairly limited ammo with each. But there was always the chance of finding something new or helpful in an encounter too.
I like that sort of micro-management however, feel that it adds slightly more depth to a game sometimes. Granted not all games need that, and if all of them had it im sure id grow to hate it, but stuff like Doom2 on nightmare setting makes sense to me (and also kills the hell out of me.) Dont kill what you dont need to if you dont have the resources to spare. I enjoy making those sorts of decisions. Waste the ammo and go for the health, or bypass the encounter entirely and not risk losing either.
If a game dosnt give me the sense that if im not careful i could run out of <insert supply here> and or does not offer some sort of challenge in that respect, often times i lose interest very quickly. The point of a game is to have fun, and obviously its not going to be fun if you are constantly saving and reloading. But why have ammo at all if everything you kill is going to drop 5 times as many rounds as it takes to kill it.
Its often hard to find a good balance. Most games (for me) dont offer that sort of encounter. In FPS in particular, instead of limiting ammo slightly in game, often times they make the enemies twice as hard to kill, which disrupts the 'original' gameplay feeling, and makes your weapons feel ineffective, instead of making you plan more, or not take certain chances like you'd do if you had less (more expensive?) ammo.
Sorry, I just think games can be challenging without being frustrating.
Chess? Go? Challenging.
52-card-pickup? Frustrating.
I remember it being sorta neat though, cause you get like 50 bucks by walking back to the hospital and selling it. Dont recall if that was a lot, or whether it was just 'neat' in how they tied it into the game, and it being different with you not forced to pay to get cured like all other games.
I find little things like that annoying at times, but also fun and funny too, if not just plain neat. It can get to be too much sometimes, but considering how shallow most games are, (today) i think a lot of those types of small things add up to give games some nice character.
I, for one, am glad (most) games have evolved beyond cheap tricks like that.