This weekend, I managed to beat two games. As per the standard operating procedure, I'll provide my thoughts on each.

The first game that I beat was Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II. It is a real-time strategy game that is not particularly like any other RTS games that I've played before. The game completely lacks the idea of base building, instead you control a small number (4-6) of hero-type squads which advance from mission to mission. This means that the game focuses distinctly on tactics and equipment to the exclusion of higher level abstractions. Suprisingly, this makes the game more exciting. Since you begin every mission at your peak of strength, you dive right into attacking objectives and assaulting enemies rather than waiting to build up an unstoppable force. This also leads to each level taking less time. Generally speaking, even a hard level can be cleared in under 30 minutes and most can be done in under 15 once you become proficient. The game also presents a relatively non-linear world in which to fight. You are given a set of possible missions, some required, many optional, and allowed to pursue them as you see fit. This, however, is my main complaint about the game.

The game measures your ability to do missions in terms of "deployments". By default, you get one deployment per day. By doing well in a mission (killing lots of enemies, completing it quickly, not having your squads fall over), you can earn additional deployments per day. Why would you need more than one per day? The answer, of course, is because some missions have a time limit. Also, the game penalizes you quite heavily by letting a mission expire, thus you spend a great deal of time just trying to complete all of the time limited missions before they expire. This is especially troubling in the end game. At that point, missions are continually randomly generated, all with time limits at a rate faster than it would be possible to deal with them without getting at least two deployments per day. Once I realized this, I just did the last mission.

The second game that I beat this weekend was F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. It was similar to the previous F.E.A.R. game and its expansions. Overall, the game played well and was as atmospheric as ever, but being the fourth F.E.A.R. game that I've played at this point, I've become somewhat resilient to its form of "scariness". Also, since the game doesn't actually follow/respect the two expansions to the first game, we're left with a completely new group whose purpose is never really clear. Also, near the end of the game, they do what seems like it might be meant as a suprising reveal, but the reveal is just the same reveal as the previous game has (Alma's history) which seems silly given that I've played that game, dammit. Regardless, the gameplay was pretty solid, though enemies can take too many shotgun blasts to the face (more than 1). It was also relatively short. I started playing it this afternoon around 2 or 3 and had beaten it before 10:30 while also doing 6 loads of laundry, making cookies, doing the dishes, and cooking dinner.


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