| May. 19th, 2006 @ 09:51 pm SIN Episodes: Emergence |
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Current Mood:  content
I preordered Emmergence over Steam on a whim, a way to get a Source engine fix before HL2 Episode One comes out at teh end of the month. It is very much an old-school shooter. It is pretty short, and there are only four weapons, including an incendiary grenade, but it is also only $20. One cool feature is that difilculty is chosen on a fairly broad sliding scale, after which the challenge system adjust the dificulty to match your preference and play. Four days after release, Ritual managed to put out a patch that fixed not only a bug in the challenge system, which made the dificulty near impossible for people who played a certain way, but also fix all the known porblems that were making the game crash for many people, including myself. Sadly, also for people like myself, with graphics cards like the Radeon 9000, who can't run using DirectX 9, there remains a problem that a certain bullet-time like effect in the game turns the screen dark green, so you can't see anything. This can be worked around by using a command line option to run in DirectX 7, but then the game doesn't look nearly as pretty.
Other than that, many are bothered by the end of the game, where you have to fight through wave after wave of chaingunners, who can do alot of damage, and take a lot of fire to kill. Fighting 20 of them in one game might be fun, 100 is not. Still, most of the game is exciting, and it takes nice advantage of Steams capabilities. medical stations use canisters of blue gas. You can put a canister into an empty station, eject one from the station, or break a loose canister to release the gas if their isn't a station around. The grenades light the area on fire, and i love burning things.
With the major bugs fixed, $20 seems good for this game. If Ritual gets a bit more creative with level design for the next episode, I may end up sticking with them for all eight planned episodes. On the other hand, if it's all just fighting, fighting, fighting, with interesting bits like the brief car scene few and far between, maybe i won't.
Oh yeah, and the menu music is really good. Unfortunately, it's DRMed because they are trying to get people to actually buy the soundtrack. I guess they think they are Bungie or something. |
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