5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Good game, but disappointment compared to the 1st
Date of Review: Nov 8, 2003
The Bottom Line: Disappointment compared to the original pack.
This is my 3rd day of playing this expansion pack, and I must say it's a disappointment. I haven't yet tried the multiplayer, so what I'll say is about the single-player mode.
Every step leaves the impression of being cheap. It's easy to see how carefully the 1st pack was created, and how this expansion pack was rushed to the market a.s.a.p. In the first episode, they even forgot to remove (so it seems) developers notes on the screen, like there are still 4 barn_investigators .
The path is very straightforward, and I would say, one-dimensional. While in the original pack (I'll call it MOHAA) we often saw several possible ways to go, here there's only one. The overall space of the game is noticeably much smaller - there's this path to go, several buildings around, and that's it. Just one detail: almost all doors are locked, except usually the only one to go through - in MOHAA there were much more rooms and environment to explore, one of the features that made it so great.
Enemies are significantly more dumb, and even at the hard level, killing them is so easy that it's boring. I also have an impression that game creators deliberately made the game easier, so the enemies are firing much less precisely, and even when they hit, their bullets make much less damage than in MOHAA, and certainly, in real life. It's not unusual to get under machine gunner's fire for 2 seconds and lose only 20% of life.
On the top of that, there are bugs. For instance, several times I ran into a room with an enemy; the enemy is standing with his gun drown, very concentrated, pointing at the wall (not even at the window!), completely ignoring my coming. Bum.
Like in MOHAA, enemies appear from nowhere however, here it s even more noticeable. For instance, you go towards the bridge, the bridge is quite visible, and there s noone on it. One more step, and suddenly there are already 10 soldiers out of the thin air. In MOHAA, they at least used to come from around the corner, or from inside the buildings here, the developers didn t care for such nuances.
Because of these features, the game advances very quickly and easily - as I said, at the "hard" level. So easily that it s boring. In MOHAA, there were many situations where some experimenting was required (not to speak of things like secret scenario Bazooka Med , an Easter egg in fact); some situations that were really hard and required real involvement. This pack is quite straightforward shooter. You go, enemies are jumping at you, you kill them.
So far I encountered 2 non-standard weapons situations: FLAK against Tiger tank, and anti-aircraft gun. However, the adventure in both cases lasted for about 10 seconds: I killed as many as one Tiger with Flak, and as many as one truck with the gun. What a waste.
The graphics resemble MOHAA, but somewhat different, somewhat more cartoonish. Same with interiors.
The sound is actually the same.
The overall impression is that releasing this expansion pack was mainly making a quick buck for the producers, on the wave of success of the original version.
