I went to GameStop yesterday hoping to find a used copy of Operation Flash Point Red River. Reviews online show that the 4-player co-op campaign is top on the market right now and in the FPS genre. The downfall is that with less than 4 players in your party, you MUST play with computer AI, which is beyond awful, and can easily ruin gaming sessions. I was ready to take that hit, knowing that if less than 4 of us were logged in, we could always lean on Zombies if needed. As it turns out, the two guys working the store were pretty good with the genre/game type I was looking for.
Their suggestions started with Dead Island, which does offer a multiplayer online co-op campaign mode, but similar to GTA (Grand Theft Auto), where you roam an open world doing side missions. The game style I am looking for would have levels and/or missions that direct the flow of enemies and/or mobs, until a goal is met, at which point the level and/or mission would end. Then you start it again, or try another map, sort of like what zombies offers. Dead Island was close, but not close enough.
The next suggestion was Far Cry 3. Yes, that game is probably sick. In fact, it might have a great multiplayer option as well. The problem is that the game is rather new, which means rather expensive. Having our BOZL team (6 members total) each buy copies would be an expensive venture. If the game fell short, or didn't beat the Zombie experience, the investment would turn out to be a bad one. What else do you guys have?
A few title discussions later, I picked up a box of Resistance 2. A few minutes later, I bought 6 copies, each was only 6$. Last night I played from 7pm - 12:30am. Here are my thoughts from the first gaming session:
Gameplay (10/10)
You can customize the button layout to match Black Ops. The only crappy thing is that the sprint button is also the crouch button. You will learn to deal with it quick, mine is currently set to L2, instead of pressing down the left analog, which would be how you sprint in Black Ops. R2 is alternate fire, which is better described as your "special". This option changes as you change your weapon from primary to secondary.
The graphics are not bad at all. Very comparable to Halo. Not as good as Black Ops, but again, extremely playable.
Mission content is spot on, from the map size to the enemie count and difficulty. I played the Chicago map (which is the first co-op level) 11 times in a row, and each time was better than the last. Mission objectives and enemy hordes change each run. There are 3 different boss sets. This is beyond what I could have thought the game would offer.
Community / Server Connection (8/10)
Creating a Clan was super easy. (BKC) Krom was born 1/1/2013. Kahseim and Sterling are already in. When you guys load up the game and are ready to get started, I will walk you through it and send you an invite. Once in the clan, we can party together and have Bluetooth ability while surfing the menus. Spot on here again.
Creating a game looks impossible. I got errors every time, no matter what map I tried. Google shows this has been a problem since 2008, when the game was released. Looks like a patch might have fixed it, not sure if those auto-update or not. Either way, I found this on one forum, and will try it out next time I go to make a game:
"I found a way around the errors...do Create Game and it'll say "Error Creating Game"...just keep pressing X & O and eventually you'll create a game and get people to join"
The good thing is that creating a game is not a big deal, because I easily found multiple games to join. Not once, in all 13 missions that I played last night, was I waiting. Not once did I get kicked out of the server. Bluetooth sounded good, and others were using them as well. The other awesome thing is that since this game is so old, the ONLY players still running are good and/or above average. You will not have to worry about teammates that suck and/or leave. Looks like mostly pros on this server/game, and that was only from the first map. Chances are as we progress the players will only get better.
Character Options / Builds / Weapons Loadouts (6/10)
I like the creativity this game has. That said, there is clearly too much character type difference, and not enough weapon choices. I will explain both below.
There are only 3 playable character classes (Soldier, Special Ops, and Medic). Each is VERY different. My advice is to figure out which playing style you enjoy better, and stick to it. Each co-op mission depends on having a balance of the classes, sort of, but not as much as it looks. This game plays like Halo, where if your team starts dying, you can simply back up your position and wait for them to respawn. For this reason, a Medic is not NEEDED, but good to have, because they heal allies.
Medic: Healer. Primary Weapon is a laser beam, with unlimited ammo. When this beam is on an ally, it heals him. When it is on an enemy, it drains power, while replenishing the ammo for the Medic's special. The special looks like a rocket launcher type shot, but doesn't do much damage. I only played him once, so even this explanation might not be accurate. It was boring, to be honest, and I would not see any of us doing it, even the most support minded player. As I said above, he isn't really even needed, but nice to have.
Community / Server Connection (8/10)
Creating a Clan was super easy. (BKC) Krom was born 1/1/2013. Kahseim and Sterling are already in. When you guys load up the game and are ready to get started, I will walk you through it and send you an invite. Once in the clan, we can party together and have Bluetooth ability while surfing the menus. Spot on here again.
Creating a game looks impossible. I got errors every time, no matter what map I tried. Google shows this has been a problem since 2008, when the game was released. Looks like a patch might have fixed it, not sure if those auto-update or not. Either way, I found this on one forum, and will try it out next time I go to make a game:
"I found a way around the errors...do Create Game and it'll say "Error Creating Game"...just keep pressing X & O and eventually you'll create a game and get people to join"
The good thing is that creating a game is not a big deal, because I easily found multiple games to join. Not once, in all 13 missions that I played last night, was I waiting. Not once did I get kicked out of the server. Bluetooth sounded good, and others were using them as well. The other awesome thing is that since this game is so old, the ONLY players still running are good and/or above average. You will not have to worry about teammates that suck and/or leave. Looks like mostly pros on this server/game, and that was only from the first map. Chances are as we progress the players will only get better.
Character Options / Builds / Weapons Loadouts (6/10)
I like the creativity this game has. That said, there is clearly too much character type difference, and not enough weapon choices. I will explain both below.
There are only 3 playable character classes (Soldier, Special Ops, and Medic). Each is VERY different. My advice is to figure out which playing style you enjoy better, and stick to it. Each co-op mission depends on having a balance of the classes, sort of, but not as much as it looks. This game plays like Halo, where if your team starts dying, you can simply back up your position and wait for them to respawn. For this reason, a Medic is not NEEDED, but good to have, because they heal allies.
Medic: Healer. Primary Weapon is a laser beam, with unlimited ammo. When this beam is on an ally, it heals him. When it is on an enemy, it drains power, while replenishing the ammo for the Medic's special. The special looks like a rocket launcher type shot, but doesn't do much damage. I only played him once, so even this explanation might not be accurate. It was boring, to be honest, and I would not see any of us doing it, even the most support minded player. As I said above, he isn't really even needed, but nice to have.
Special Ops: Sniper. Primary Weapon is a burst fire rifle, with sniper scope. This character can also throw out ammo boxes for others to grab, which is VERY important, for a reason I will explain later. He is also a support player, like the medic, and will not be in the heat of battle many times at all. He will snipe from far away, and provide ammo to allies. If you can play that role, than this is the character for you. I can't. I tried it for 3 missions. Not enough action for me, but again, this class is needed, so someone has to do it.
Soldier: Tank AND DPS. Primary Weapon is a two handed barrel gun, very similar to the HK for reload time and rate of fire. You special is a shield that covers only your front side, but allies right behind you are shielded as well. This runs on a 35 second timer, and drops per second while activated. When it is off, it does NOT regenerate time, so when it hits 0, it turns off. When this shield is down, you will die, and fast. Ammo packs (from the Special Ops, see above) DO replenish your shield time, which is why they are needed. The strategy is simple, Soldier puts up the shield and starts killing everything. Special Ops feeds him ammo packs so that his shield stays up. Easy to understand, works well, but NOT easy to perform, and your sides and back are exposed during, which means if you are flanked, you die.
To me, the character types are WAY too different. The Medic and Special Ops classes have far less effective weapons, and no shield. The Soldier is the only one that can truly survive an intense battle/enemy push. And to me, the Soldier is the only class that is comparable to Black Ops gameplay, the others are new. Hopefully two or three of us will try Special Ops or Medic and actually like it, which will make our team runs a bit better. If not, and we all end up Soldiers, we should still be fine, just have to play smart, and be mindful of re-spawn times. You can revive as well, which is better than letting the player re-spawn, but only for one reason, which I will explain below.
The Builds are lackluster to be nice. This aspect of Resistance 2 reminds of the entire Black Ops 2 Zombie mode/maps/structure/etc. Extreme and embarrassing lack of content, attention, detail, thoughtfulness, etc. You get the idea. Sucks, because if this was better, the game would be top of the market right now. The actual "perks" that you purchase with Grey Techs (which are this games form of points), are basic ideas, faster reload, more bullet capacity, etc. but they are very similar, and in some cases exactly the same, for each class. There will be some variance in our end game charaters, even if we are the same class, but not much. Not enough, or even close to enough.
Each class will have very similar weapon/beserk layouts, because those are exremely limited as well. I have yet to unlock much of anyhing, so maybe I will be surprised. For now, I will say this is the downfall of the game, where downfall actually means what keeps it from being perfect.
The Beserk loadouts are another character based special that can be activated when you gain enough whatever it is called (comparable to Mana, or Energy). This would be like in Street Fighter 4 when you are waiting for your Ultra to activate. As you kill guys, yor bar goes up, and when it is full, you can activate this special move. The tank one I have been using is take less damage from enemies. The healer has an aura that increases ally health regen. I have no idea what the Special Ops does. This bar resets if you die out, but does NOT reset is you are revived, which is the advantage to reviving your allies opposed to letting them respawn. These specials are huge, especially in boss fights.
Missions / Maps (8/10)
Awesome. Each run was more fun than the last. Looks like there are maybe 8-10 co-op maps, each with probably 3-4 different objectives/bosses, so the math comes out to about 40 different runs, and then you can toggle difficulty on each. I played Chicago 11 times, on normal, and although the map itself was the same, each run felt a little different. The enemy difficulty seemed to increase as my character progressed, which is nice. No run was super easy. I think the game somehow gauges the team's experience and matches the enemy difficulty off that. Well done.
Maps are pretty small, but still bigger than any Black Ops Zombie map. Enemies are everywhere. They hunt you down, which is cool, instead of staying grouped up in mobs. There are some spots in Chicago that are tough to navigate, but overall, not too bad. You just have to follow the guys that know what they are doing. There are also stars on the map that show you where you need to go, it is just hard to know what level, upstairs/downstairs.
End bosses are pretty cool, but extremely easy. This was just the first map, so maybe it gets more involved down the road.
Overall Grade: 8/10
This game dropped in 2008, and the server is still VERY active with pro players, not noobs. Any of us should be able to log in solo, just as easy of all of us could log in together, and find a game. Hopefully the trick for creating games works, then we can easily get all 6 of us in a party and start an online co-op mission together, even having the ability to max the player count at 6 and make the match private, so it is only us, which would be ideal.
The gameplay is very comparable to Zombies. In fact, this looks very much like a good mix of Zombies/Halo, but staying more human than alien. The first few runs might be shaky, as they were for Kahseim and I, but trust me, once you start leveling your guy, it gets better, and fast. Where I am now, my last 4 or 5 runs were epic. Each was intense, and super fun.
The XP system is pretty cool as well, and does NOT award kills above team play, which is just ironic. The support players (Special Ops and Medic) get points for healing/ammo drops. The end scorboard is rarely based strictly on kills. XP points however, like points in Zombies, does increase with every successful shot on an enemy. Overall, the XP and Grey Tech (used to buy stuff) systems are very well done. I am impressed, and that doesn't happen often.
I bought 6 copies of this game, so I personally am invested. You may not like it better than Zombies, in fact, there is a slim chance you will, but give this game a chance. If you guys get a character, of any class, to level 10, and don't want to play any more, I will take that as a good effort. Anything less would be quitting. My Character is about to be Level 6, and that is after about a 5 hour session.
Boat Hard....
There aren't many out, but chances are they will start dropping heavy. Knowing the early versions of the genre would be cool. Games I would have to include, to this point, would be:
COD Black Ops (Nazi Zombies Mode)
BlizzKid Rating: 10/10 (solid)
COD Black Ops II (Nazi Zombies Mode)
BlizzKid Rating: 4/10 (current, can change pending updates and/or new content releases)
Resistance II (Cooperative Mode)
BlizzKid Rating: 8/10 (current, can change as I progress through the game)
I know Juni mentioned that Resident Evil may be a game to look at as well. Everyone should be on the lookout for games that INCULDE ALL of the following details:
1. Online Co-Op Campaign Mode (needs to be AT LEAST 4 players at once)
2. FSP (First Person Shooter) Genre (can not be 3rd person, over the shoulder is not the same)
3. Customizable button layout, or something close to the Black Ops layout (all you have to do is open the book for the game and check out the controller section)
Soldier: Tank AND DPS. Primary Weapon is a two handed barrel gun, very similar to the HK for reload time and rate of fire. You special is a shield that covers only your front side, but allies right behind you are shielded as well. This runs on a 35 second timer, and drops per second while activated. When it is off, it does NOT regenerate time, so when it hits 0, it turns off. When this shield is down, you will die, and fast. Ammo packs (from the Special Ops, see above) DO replenish your shield time, which is why they are needed. The strategy is simple, Soldier puts up the shield and starts killing everything. Special Ops feeds him ammo packs so that his shield stays up. Easy to understand, works well, but NOT easy to perform, and your sides and back are exposed during, which means if you are flanked, you die.
To me, the character types are WAY too different. The Medic and Special Ops classes have far less effective weapons, and no shield. The Soldier is the only one that can truly survive an intense battle/enemy push. And to me, the Soldier is the only class that is comparable to Black Ops gameplay, the others are new. Hopefully two or three of us will try Special Ops or Medic and actually like it, which will make our team runs a bit better. If not, and we all end up Soldiers, we should still be fine, just have to play smart, and be mindful of re-spawn times. You can revive as well, which is better than letting the player re-spawn, but only for one reason, which I will explain below.
The Builds are lackluster to be nice. This aspect of Resistance 2 reminds of the entire Black Ops 2 Zombie mode/maps/structure/etc. Extreme and embarrassing lack of content, attention, detail, thoughtfulness, etc. You get the idea. Sucks, because if this was better, the game would be top of the market right now. The actual "perks" that you purchase with Grey Techs (which are this games form of points), are basic ideas, faster reload, more bullet capacity, etc. but they are very similar, and in some cases exactly the same, for each class. There will be some variance in our end game charaters, even if we are the same class, but not much. Not enough, or even close to enough.
Each class will have very similar weapon/beserk layouts, because those are exremely limited as well. I have yet to unlock much of anyhing, so maybe I will be surprised. For now, I will say this is the downfall of the game, where downfall actually means what keeps it from being perfect.
The Beserk loadouts are another character based special that can be activated when you gain enough whatever it is called (comparable to Mana, or Energy). This would be like in Street Fighter 4 when you are waiting for your Ultra to activate. As you kill guys, yor bar goes up, and when it is full, you can activate this special move. The tank one I have been using is take less damage from enemies. The healer has an aura that increases ally health regen. I have no idea what the Special Ops does. This bar resets if you die out, but does NOT reset is you are revived, which is the advantage to reviving your allies opposed to letting them respawn. These specials are huge, especially in boss fights.
Missions / Maps (8/10)
Awesome. Each run was more fun than the last. Looks like there are maybe 8-10 co-op maps, each with probably 3-4 different objectives/bosses, so the math comes out to about 40 different runs, and then you can toggle difficulty on each. I played Chicago 11 times, on normal, and although the map itself was the same, each run felt a little different. The enemy difficulty seemed to increase as my character progressed, which is nice. No run was super easy. I think the game somehow gauges the team's experience and matches the enemy difficulty off that. Well done.
Maps are pretty small, but still bigger than any Black Ops Zombie map. Enemies are everywhere. They hunt you down, which is cool, instead of staying grouped up in mobs. There are some spots in Chicago that are tough to navigate, but overall, not too bad. You just have to follow the guys that know what they are doing. There are also stars on the map that show you where you need to go, it is just hard to know what level, upstairs/downstairs.
End bosses are pretty cool, but extremely easy. This was just the first map, so maybe it gets more involved down the road.
Overall Grade: 8/10
This game dropped in 2008, and the server is still VERY active with pro players, not noobs. Any of us should be able to log in solo, just as easy of all of us could log in together, and find a game. Hopefully the trick for creating games works, then we can easily get all 6 of us in a party and start an online co-op mission together, even having the ability to max the player count at 6 and make the match private, so it is only us, which would be ideal.
The gameplay is very comparable to Zombies. In fact, this looks very much like a good mix of Zombies/Halo, but staying more human than alien. The first few runs might be shaky, as they were for Kahseim and I, but trust me, once you start leveling your guy, it gets better, and fast. Where I am now, my last 4 or 5 runs were epic. Each was intense, and super fun.
The XP system is pretty cool as well, and does NOT award kills above team play, which is just ironic. The support players (Special Ops and Medic) get points for healing/ammo drops. The end scorboard is rarely based strictly on kills. XP points however, like points in Zombies, does increase with every successful shot on an enemy. Overall, the XP and Grey Tech (used to buy stuff) systems are very well done. I am impressed, and that doesn't happen often.
I bought 6 copies of this game, so I personally am invested. You may not like it better than Zombies, in fact, there is a slim chance you will, but give this game a chance. If you guys get a character, of any class, to level 10, and don't want to play any more, I will take that as a good effort. Anything less would be quitting. My Character is about to be Level 6, and that is after about a 5 hour session.
Boat Hard....
There aren't many out, but chances are they will start dropping heavy. Knowing the early versions of the genre would be cool. Games I would have to include, to this point, would be:
COD Black Ops (Nazi Zombies Mode)
BlizzKid Rating: 10/10 (solid)
COD Black Ops II (Nazi Zombies Mode)
BlizzKid Rating: 4/10 (current, can change pending updates and/or new content releases)
Resistance II (Cooperative Mode)
BlizzKid Rating: 8/10 (current, can change as I progress through the game)
I know Juni mentioned that Resident Evil may be a game to look at as well. Everyone should be on the lookout for games that INCULDE ALL of the following details:
1. Online Co-Op Campaign Mode (needs to be AT LEAST 4 players at once)
2. FSP (First Person Shooter) Genre (can not be 3rd person, over the shoulder is not the same)
3. Customizable button layout, or something close to the Black Ops layout (all you have to do is open the book for the game and check out the controller section)
4. Character progression and/or character building (minimal or extreme).
5. Difficulty settings (should be able to toggle normal/hard modes, because the difficulty of the game is very important)
5. Difficulty settings (should be able to toggle normal/hard modes, because the difficulty of the game is very important)
