@NoWhereM: Well that's interesting. So am I to assume that all the traingles I saw in SoC were due to my card overheating? That's not good. Hope it didn't damage anything, but nothing's happened since, so whatever. I've been lucky enough to not have this issue in Clear Sky, which points to craptastic coding and optimization by the developers. Moving on...
Finito. Just finished it. Total playtime is about 30 hours including reloads and screw ups. Performance wasn't too bad. In major fights at night with multiple factions, it got a bit slow.
Massive Spoilers Below:
Ok, let's start with the bad. The absolute worst addition they made to this prequel is the ability for enemies to use grenades. I posted earlier about this, and at that time, I was ambivalent. Now, I'm pissed. What the fu*k. Somehow, they always manage to drop in your lap even if you are behind an 8 foot wall. If you're lucky enough that they missed and fell on the otherside of your cover, well see ya; it'll kill you through it anyways. Well over 50% of my deaths and reloads are due to frags. There is nothing worse than attacking a group of 8 bandits and getting 5 drags land in your lap within 10 seconds of your first shot.
Sticking with frags. What the fu*k again. Now frags are useless for you. Much of the time, it takes 2 or 3 to kill a bandit, and that's if they don't miraculously run away. Other times, a dead on hit (thrown and launched) does nothing as a result of some perverted divine intervention. And a final note on grenades, the sound sucks and the high-pitched whine should be changed to a mute/muffle.
On to another topic: faction wars. So much potential destroyed by poor implementation and bugs. Before I joined Duty, I was with the Stalkers and thanks to a bug, clearing out the Bandit base only completed the main faction quest... until 5 Bandit squads respawned within 5 minutes of me leaving the base. In Cordon, Stalkers could never hold on to anything cause mutants would respawn endlessly and Stalkers couldn't kill anything. They have to nerf respawns and make factions wars actually 'winable' to some degree. I won't even go into the bandit respawns at the rear entrance of the Agroprom Research Center. Simple solution is to nerf respawns.
Now for the ok/good. The story wasn't bad. Final cutscene could have been better. Gunplay was excellent. Loved the new implementation of anomalies and artifacts. Upgradable items were awesome and very welcome. Ammo types appeared much more unique. They could have made armor more unique though. Once you bought the SEV suit early on and upgraded it, there was no point to anything else. Didn't see any exoskeletons for use either. I was hoping to score one earlier this time. The best part had to be the urban settings.
Overall, this was pretty good. If there weren't so many bugs and they didn't screw up the new additions (i.e. frags and faction wars), it would be gold. I'll replay it once they put out a new patch.
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