Recenzii recente de DiggerDog

Recommended for co-op PvE play, particularly with the "no combat vehicles" option active. Having your tiny squad as a part of a 32 member team fighting against another 32 member team has a different feel than any of the many small-squad-against-the-whole-evil-world games that I've played. I like it. ...and it's brighter than most of the squad-fighting-evil games that I've played.

Note that although no bot/AI takes over your character if you need a break for 5 minutes (Left 4 Dead continues to stand alone in this regard), with 32 player teams, your friends won't suffer that much while playing without you for a short break.

The bugs are fixed. Development has stopped, after 7 "seasons" so you won't have to learn any new rules to continue playing next season.

There are two official game modes that support co-op no vehicles: Breakthrough and Conquest. 3 maps on the first, and 2 maps echoed on the second. There is also an easy to use "Portal" feature on EA's site, in which you can specify rules for a server that lets you host games on any of the game's 20 maps (including 4 maps set before 2042) with no combat vehicles. The server specification site is AMAZING (see the co-op no-combat-vehicles guide link at end of review.)

On the Portal web-site, there must be over 250 settings available, but you only have to change the defaults on about 5 settings to set up a PvE co-op server without combat vehicles. The choices available are wide. For example, if you don't like the rail gun? No problem; you can ban the rail-gun in the server specifications. (You can also change damage, so headshots hurt more, or wounds don't self-heal when you hide for 15 seconds, or you can multiply damage so everyone gets incapacitated with a single hit...but I bet most people find that's less fun.) If you're winning too easily, even on advanced, you can unbalance the number of AI players on each team (they're AI players now, no longer simple bots). Note however, that to upgrade your guns (to get more attachments (scopes, magazines, etc.) you need to get experience in official game modes.

The mechanics of the game just WORK. At least in solo or co-op. Sometimes it takes a bit of figuring to do anything the first time, but once learned, it's easy enough to remember. For example to change your default gun, or modify its attachments, strangely there is no tab for weapons on the game's home screen, but click the CLASS tab, and picking or modifying your weapons is included in a fairly straightforward manner (maybe weapons were originally assigned to particular classes? (Assault, Engineer, Support/Medic, Recon). Or when re-spawning, just before you deploy, you can change your gun in game by picking one out by clicking on your gun's picture and choosing a different gun. You can change your class before re-spawning too.

The marketing of the game is awful. I bought the "Elite" edition, and I still don't know what I extras I got, and which extras I would have quickly earned during regular game play. Even with the Elite edition, you still must level up your guns. 360 kills in co-op maxes out any gun's usefulness by making (almost) all of its attachments (scopes, magazines, etc.) available (there are some attachments on a few weapons that ask for odd-ball unlock-tasks like: perform 100 hip-fire kills). (Incidentally, there are fancy skins for guns that are awarded after 1200 kills with a weapon, but the game stops counting co-op kills after 360.) Marketing. When unloading a map, you click on the bottom right to skip one screen, then bottom left to skip the seasonal, paid subscription rewards, then get a meaningless confirmation question in the center of the screen asking you if you're SURE you don't want to stare at the seasonal rewards (enhanced by paying) for 30 more seconds? EA Marketing.

The story in the game is awful. And you have to listen to the idiotic three sentence back-story for every map EVERY TIME you play that map. They've even got one desert map that somebody decided to set in Panama, because...well, weather catastrophe's are BOUND to turn Panama into a flat-terrain desert in another 20 years. Argh.

The in-game explanations are often awful. For example, telling me that to unlock the so-and-so gun, I need to get 10 kills with the XYZ. Is the XYZ a regular gun? There are about 45. Is it a specialist's weapon or piece of equipment? Good luck finding the XYZ without external help. But happily, the game is old and you can look up the XYZ on the net, and also find out how to use the specialist's airburst gun, or the other specialist's grappling hook gun.

Loading the game is very slow. Loading and unloading each map is slow.

But for me, the gameplay makes the irritations worthwhile. I like the chaos of 64 player maps. In Sniper Elite's survival mode, I like playing against waves of angry Germans too, but in BF2042, the controls, the smoothness of the animations, the sound environment, and the significant differences in gameplay when using different guns or different operatives (specialists) are a welcome upgrade (In particular, I sometimes get very tired of the controls in Sniper Elite.)

I've set up a Steam beginner's guide to starting co-op, no combat vehicles games.
https://sp.zhabite.com/id/diggerdogg/myworkshopfiles/?section=guides&appid=1517290

So...yeah...recommended if you want to play a fast-paced shooter amongst a swarm of bots fighting you and each other, alone or with your friends. If you know of any similar shooter games, please let me know.

Sniper Elite Resistance Review

I'm going to refer to Sniper Elite Resistance as SE6, and its two predecessors as SE4 and SE5.

If you tried SE4 or SE5 and really enjoyed either game, consider getting SE6. Or wait for the sale. If you have NOT yet tried SE4 or SE5, DEFINITELY wait for a sale and get one of the older games first. Rebellion brand games, old or new, are expensive, but regularly go on deep sales. Don't bother with SE1, SE2, or SE3.

SE5 and SE6 are almost exactly the same. There are a few tiny differences, for example in SE5 you can select your drop key (drop from a ladder or ledge) while in SE6 the drop key is hard-copied from whatever you set for crouch. The custom difficulty section has 30 settings, and is EXACTLY the same in both games.

The bigger differences are in the feel of the maps. SE5's maps were inspired by real landscapes and real buildings. Only one map in SE5 has incredible vistas for sniping: the beautiful island castle map (inspired by Mont-Saint-Michel). Every single SE6 map is artificial and has some great sniping vistas. Which is better? I like both, but really wish the designers had gone back to more challenging sniping rules of SE4 for all the many, many locations that allow long distance shooting in SE6. Long distance sniping simply isn't as important in SE5; most shooting takes place at less than 150m.

(The sniping in SE4: the wind guage at the top of the scope shows windspeed in SE4. In SE5 and SE6, even on "Authentic" difficulty, the wind gauge at the top of the scope shows the wind's actual bullet deflection, perfectly adjusted for your gun and ammo type.)

SE5 and SE6 have nicer graphics than SE4. But SE4's graphics are still pretty. I'm not sure if the graphics improved between SE5 and SE6. I think maybe yes? The rooms and colours seem better in SE6. There are more different paintings (but the record players still haven't licenced any authentic period music). The artists seem to have been much less rushed.


https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3418622303

https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3418622274

More mechanics:

In all Sniper Elite games, bullets always fly true. If you aim right, you can always count on a headshot with a low velocity bullet from 300 or 600 yards. That's dumb. But it's still fun. When you turn off the aim assist (recommended as soon as you are comfortable with the game), then it's pretty satisfying to guess the proper deflection of a bullet, based on distance and wind. Your scope is zeroed for some pre-set distances, like 50m, 100m, 200m, etc. But bad guys aren't often at exact distances, and also, you might not want to take the extra seconds to select the closest preset zeroing. As mentioned above, sniping is best implemented in SE4.

Two warnings:

1. In SE5 and SE6 campaign, by default, "Invasion" mode is ON. Turn it OFF, or you probably will get a random, often highly-skilled player, dropping into your solo or co-op campaign, acting as an extra special bad guy: a human-controlled enemy sniper, among all the other enemies you have to kill. If you want PvP, it's great. But most new players don't and this setting should NOT be set to default ON.

2. The inventory system/item selection system is extremely awkward for a PC game.

Edit: and then I wrote so much about the game mechanics that I decided to write a beginner's Sniper Elite game mechanics guide. Check it out if you've never played before.

https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3420004401

...

A couple of new mechanics in SE6. High-explosive rifle ammo. It's great fun in survival mode, but I never use it in campaign, where stealth is always important. HE ammo alerts enemies from greater distances.

The other new thing is the stealth and sniping challenges. You unlock the challenges by finding particular pro-France "propaganda" posters in the campaign maps. (In general, I HATE the treasure-hunting unlocking system of SE5 & SE6...but you can consult the net for exact locations easily, and the posters make a flapping sound.) The sniping propaganda challenges are flat out fun. There ought to be 50 of them included; that would be a fun game in itself. There are only 3. The 3 time-limited stealth challenges are not so fun for me, and are the reason I won't be getting all the "achievements" in this game. The single combat challenge is also fun.

After you've played the campaign a few times, you'll probably either gravitate to the PvP or the Survival maps.

The survival maps are good, but there are only TWO maps, one daylight, one night (with 4 possible command post lists for each) and the Germans seem to always arrive from the same direction for each command post. In SE4 and SE5, the direction of approach was much more random. So...survival wasn't given enough effort, so far, in SE6?

The most disappointing about SE6? There's are a LOT of obvious choices that the game designers don't bother to fix or explain for new folk, or turn off by default, when you can turn those mechanics off at all. For decades, RPG games have had keys to select which items to pick up. In SE6, you still have to micro-adjust your facing to select between two or three close objects. Why? Because on consoles, there are a limited number of buttons available and extra programming for PC costs money. In SE4, there were different buttons to search bodies, pickup weapons, and defuse mines. All one button now. Sigh.

As far as I can tell, most of the people who don't like the game but have played it already, are complaining because they don't think they got their money's worth. Well...your opinion holds true for you, but I think bottled water and football tickets are overpriced, and my opinion hasn't brought the price down those prices yet. I don't regret buying the game.

Helldivers 2

Recommended, but with strong reservations.

The game can be a lot of fun, and with 9 levels of difficulty, after you've got used to the weapons and the enemies as they function under the latest patch, you can probably find a sweet spot where you will be challenged but still win most of your games.

I also really enjoy the huge maps, and the way higher difficulties are made by increasing the number and kind of enemies you encounter, rather than giving the enemies more hitpoints and giving higher level players guns that vastly overpower the guns available to starting players.

However, I'm going to concentrate on the what's missing or poor about the game, since there are so many, many places you can find that paint Helldivers as a nearly perfect game. It's not. Maybe it will be in six months. But it's not right now.

As an example of over-the-top praise, I've even heard many reviewers say the landscapes are beautiful. They are not. At best, the landscapes look other-worldly (which is high praise.) Generally, landscapes look somewhat like barren landscapes on Earth, in particular, rocky highlands shrouded in a thin dirty mist. They're good. They're often very big. But never beautiful. And so, so often, the air is filled with dust or spores or firestorms or blizzards.

So, my complaints. The game is unfriendly to casual players.

First, if you get a phone call, you gotta just abandon your mission and "Return to ship alone." Fifteen years ago, Left 4 Dead showed the way for co-op games, enabling players to take a break while a bot filled in for them in a multiplayer game, or simply to pause the game in a single-player game. Nobody significant has bothered to include that rather obvious feature since L4D2.

In most games, re-spawns are handled individually. In Helldivers, a group shares a maximum number of respawns (equal to five times the number of players). If the rest of the team needs to respawn a member, they must first respawn you, and if you are still on the telephone, you've just wasted another respawn for the team. Better leave instead.

Second, the game is changing all the time. Weapons that were effective last week won't work very well this week. The enemies' stats change too. The game is NOT listed as early access. It ought to be.

Besides the basic way the any weapon functions, there are about 10 basic stats that would be helpful to know for the weapon. Abord ship, only five of the basic stats are supplied. Only by trying a weapon out planetside (or consulting a wiki which must be edited with each patch), will a player learn something as basic as the maximum ammo that can be carried for that weapon (and that changes from patch to patch.)

Third, the friends system is not integrated with Steam friends very well. Perhaps this will improve, now that universal PSN membership is never going to happen. I read that Helldivers can now see friends lists, even if they are not public. Perhaps these friends can now be invited to a game too?

Fourth, the private/friends-only/public settings for your games are glitchy, and suddenly finding yourself in a public game is common (although it is easy for hosts to kick unwanted pub joiners, kicking unrecognised folks is never fun).

Finally, the attitude of the developers leaves much to be desired. Forcing players to experiment to find out what works after each patch is easiest for them. One old Steam friend with over 120 hours in game simply quit playing in disgust. It also is very helpful to YouTube influencers and reviewers who get to constantly re-report what to expect following the new patch.

And the developers ARE trying to make more money from every player. "Live Service" games like Diablo IV do seek to profit off rich players by offering $10 and $20 skins. And they introduce a new "Season" three-four times per year, which cost a player $10 and rely on FOMO (fear of missing out) to encourage players to take part. Helldivers brings out a new "Warbond" every month, costing $10, which can be earned by playing a lot in game, but casuals will probably have to pay about $5 per month if they want access to all the latest weapons. And they will have to play a lot too, because money is just used to unlock the Warbonds - medals earned by playing unlock the individual items. Personally, I've played a lot and still have not unlocked the final gun of the final page of the first warbond. And there is FOMO in Helldivers. A race to unlock any particularly good weapon, and have fun with it, before the developers nerf the weapon in the next patch. Twice, I've finally unlocked a weapon that got nerfed within 2 days.

When launched, Helldivers had one shotgun that was far superior to all the other options available. Players could take that shotgun and concentrate on which heavy weapon they wanted to play with. People enjoyed the game. The devs nerfed that shotgun.

Recently, added patrols have made the game more difficult for teams smaller than the maximum of four people. The devs didn't like that too many people played solo or in pairs.

When selecting an operation, it's very, very easy to select a public game that is a tiny distance away from the mission you actually wanted to select. Boom. You've now dragged your whole squad into a pub game, hosted by someone nobody knows; there's no confirmation dialogue. That's because the devs want to encourage people to play in 4 person groups.

All these changes, and yet for some guns, each time you pick up a gun, the game cannot remember if you prefer single-shot or burst, and on no gun that I've tried, can the game remember whether you prefer third-person or first-person ADS. Significant errors, considering the game has been out for three months. And of course, when aiming down the sight in first-person, several guns don't quite target where they say they are targeting.

Perhaps the developers are getting a little concerned that they've alienated too many players. Personal orders, granting 15 medals if completed, routinely require such things as killing 100 enemies with the flamethrower - forcing players to use a weapon they enjoy less and might otherwise avoid. Today's Personal Order merely asks players to kill 35 warriors, a common and fairly weak type of bug. In other words, today, they're just encouraging people to play, instead of playing THEIR way.

Several days after the Sony PSN mandatory sign-up fiasco, the reviews for the game have still not rebounded all the way. There are good reasons for this.

Like almost any co-op game, if you get four friendly people with mics playing together, you'll probably have a lot of fun. Like most modern games though, the vast majority of random people you encounter do not use their microphones. I don't think I've found a single person who was not a friend, or a friend of a friend who used their mic. That's not a fault of Helldivers, (and maybe I need to look for groups on the Helldivers discord server) but I really wish there were a way to join games where everyone had recently verified that they had voice comm.

Try SE4 or SE5 instead. Their controls are not that great, but they are much better than SE3's controls. I was unable to make small adjustments in my position easily. Getting on ladders was awkward. I was regularly walking off ledges within arm's reach of a ladder. Getting in the right place to search a dead body was awkward. Adjusting my sight-lines through some lattice or small view ports was awkward.

What finally killed the game for me though, was an autosave that left me unable to complete the mission without restarting it completely. That is just too much irritation on top of the rest. Basically, I threw a grenade, killing a guy I wasn't supposed to kill...yet. This was near the end of an hour-long mission and the game always reloaded just prior to that guy's death - they've fixed this problem by SE5, and I don't recall any limitations on the saves in SE4.

Also, I guess I don't like the silenced pistols, which are much more inaccurate than in SE4 and SE5 and can't seem to hurt an enemy significantly, unless they hit the face or back of the neck. And of course, they need to be more carefully aimed than a sniper rifle from 100m. Because? Because the developers wanted players to only use sound-masking and kills from as far away as possible.

Other stuff too. You can't shift the map when you view it. You can't mark a way-point on the map.

It's just a very unsatisfying game after you've played SE4 or SE5.

It's terrible, when compared to Sniper Elite 4, so don't bother.

SE2 is OK, but why play a game that is only OK?

First of all, I don't particularly like the seek-cover-to-heal mechanic common in close combat games, since CoD2-2005. In long range sniper games, it's almost always possible to duck back behind cover, so the hide & heal mechanic feels like cheating. Worse, it feels like necessary cheating. It's the best way to spot the enemy - advance a bit, get shot, duck back into cover, heal, then kill the now revealed enemy. Why not scout the area ahead first? Works in SE4 and SE5. But in SE2, the next wave of enemies often won't materialise until one advances past the next trigger point.

Then there is checkpoint saving only. I don't care much for that either. Why not let me decide how often I want to replay a certain difficult scene?

And there's the controls. There's no last weapon used button. Frisking dead bodies (looting corpses) regularly results in you doing something unintended that uses the same key: you drop your weapon and pick up the nearly empty enemy weapon on the ground. And why are enemy weapons almost always near empty? Why does nobody have an extra mag of ammo? Why does my SMG always start with only 2 mags? If I'm still in Berlin, why do I always switch back to the Thompson SMG, even if I re-equipped with a Russian or German SMG (and painfully filled it with little dribbles of ammunition) in the last mission? (Because I was always low on SMG ammo, I stalked in close quarters with my rifle in hand, and needed to learn to use the shoulder-aim button.) Eventually, I simply stopped trying to pick up anything off the ground. (The few mines I got weren't needed.) I wish the option to loot had been left out of the game; the occasional ammo boxes were sufficient.

I also had trouble checking what was in my inventory and accessing it. When I set Trip-mine to #4, it never worked, but worked fine when I reset it to #2. I've never seen that error before in a game.

I re-played the Kill Hitler DLC mission again on the highest difficulty. My rifle always had to be told to zoom in to max on EVERY shot. Holding breath not only steadied my gun, but also granted a further, temporary zoom, which lessened again as my heart rate increased, before going wobbly finally. The varying zooms were irritating: on breath hold, just steady my gun, please.

The maps for navigation are adequate if you play a mission in one session, but if you save and come back the next day, it can be difficult to figure out where to go next when navigating a multi-story building.

I wish the HUD stayed on all the time.

And of course, there's a pronounced arbitrary feeling where entry is prohibited. It can be hard to tell from any distance if an area is meant to be passable or not.

The prone/crouching/standing mechanics are poor. I'm not really sure I've played any game that allowed prone but for example, would back a player up six inches when he wanted to go prone, but was a bit too far forward. In SE2, if you already are prone and go forward, you will suddenly find yourself crouched instead. Why is there no warning that I can't stay prone if I advance? Why can't I look at the ground and know whether I can go prone or not?

And as bad as anything else: everything looks ugly, repetitive, and lacking detail. For example, there are only about 3 blurry, ugly paintings that are repeated on about 75 walls Karl passes by. Maybe everything in Berlin in April 1945 was ugly, but this is a game, not a documentary.

For the good, well, there IS a lot I like.

No leveling up! of me, or my equipment.

Same old bullet drop and wind mechanics from SE4 & SE5. Maybe in 2012, this alone would have made me love the game, if I hadn't already played with the same mechanics in the newer and better games.

Enemy snipers don't always project a blinding spotlight flare from their scope's lens when they see you.

Enemies often do the smart thing, ducking back behind cover, and not always (well, usually, but not always) popping back out to exactly the same spot.

Variable difficulty settings are supported, allowing the user to select what to make more difficult or easier.

Short, to the point story, told by Karl reading aloud a paragraph or three of text.

Easy installation. No crashes.

But all in all, only touch this game if you're interested to see where SE4 and SE5 got started. I was glad to be finished with this game.

Played once. Then killed Hitler. Then almost killed Hitler on highest difficulty. Then uninstalled.

I like it, despite its many, many flaws.

Sure, the whole game ought to be a better game than it is. But the essence: unhurried sneaking around and head-shotting a finite number of bad guys from a safe distance is something I really enjoy. And it's fun too, when you miss too often and are forced to fight.

The two co-op modes are campaign and survival. I’ve played a lot of survival with my brother, and with only 2 players on 4-player maps, it’s challenging enough to be fun – we get wiped out often enough :-) There are five survival maps to choose from. Each asks the players to repel (usually) 3 waves of Germans at a series of 4 command/ammo-resupply posts. Each map has a choice of 3-5 operations, that put the command posts in different places, so the survival games can feel quite different even on the same maps. Sadly, in SE5, no maps allow a long-ranged sniping game.

(And FYI, the steadiest way to join a friend's co-op game is for him to set up a lobby (For example: Play, Survival, Host) then for him to click on his own name in the top right to reveal an invite code. You click on your own name, see a form where you can type in his invite code, and you can now join your friend, even in a private game, even if you suffer a disconnect later...so long as you still have the code written down.)

The graphics are improved from SE4. Lots of green. Better faces. The settings are much more beautiful than say, L4D2 or Killing Zone, or most maps of World War Z. The voice-acting is good. The story, well...Sniper Elite stories are terrible :-)

And the user interface is still crap. It is adapted from a console layout. One example: stand/crouch/prone is controlled by one key instead of three. A second example: you select an item with one key, on a radial menu, then apply/use/deploy the item with a different shared key. Why a different key? Worse, the game won't let you select an empty item slot, and if you run out of an item, it auto-switches you to another item you still have in stock. So, many times I've selected a bandage, not realised I had no bandage, or had just run out of bandages, and instead of healing myself, I lobbed the explosive which had popped into my never-allowed-to-be-empty hand. Another example, but this is avoidable: the default hold breath key is the space bar. (Try assigning Breath-hold to shift.) With default settings, you often press space when NOT yet in scope, and when not in scope, space means hop over the cover in front of you...so you jump over a railing or wall in front of you and hang from it in full view of the enemy. Shared function keys.

(Just played some SE4. The F key isn’t so over-used. There are different keys for searching a corspe, using equipment, defusing a mine, or picking up a discarded weapon. Ammo is automatically picked up.)

Oh! I forgot. When your chosen cover is a bit too tall, you can observe over it, look downrange through your gun's scope, but cannot shoot. I simply had to stand before shooting, but there was NO indication of why I could not shoot. Similarly, my brother ran out of special ammo once and thought his main rifle was glitched - he had plenty of regular ammo but the game would not let him fire that weapon again until he switched ammo-type manually.

YouTube reviews are ambivalent about the new maps. They are more closely based on real environments than SE4, so there aren't as many long sniping opportunities. The new maps do feel more real. And that's nice. But the SE5 maps also feel more cramped. At distances under 100 meters, wind and bullet drop are somewhat insignificant, so the biggest skill in SE4, aiming your rifle over 100m, taking bullet drop and wind into your estimate, rarely becomes necessary.

In SE5, the combat distances are so short that aim-assist is turned on by default, except at the hardest difficulty, since aim-assist doesn't make much difference most of the time. Happily, one can customise the difficulties fairly finely, and turn off the aim-assist if one prefers to play that way. I think it's MUCH better. (With no aim assist, it feels GREAT when you get a head-shot over a 150m in a strong cross wind.) Unhappily, the fine difficulty management is really uneven. For example, in SE5 you can tune the mine defusal distance to about either 5, 6, or 7 feet. But you the HUD can only be adjusted by turning it off completely, or keeping it completely on, including its sixth-sense warning that the enemy is looking at you, and from which direction.

Yes, I finished on authentic difficulty, but no, I won't play authentic again. I like either lots of ammo, or the ability to conserve unused parts of my magazine when I reload. In authentic, I particularly don't like checking my health by trying to apply bandages (at full health, you get a message that you can't bandage yourself anymore.)

Gun modifications are a big, big thing in SE5. There are very detailed stats for each gun that you can examine while setting up your loadout. Vertical, horizontal recoil. Shot grouping. Damage. Audible range. Audible range is what I look at most. It can vary from about 4m to over 160m. Even with a quiet gun, eventually, the enemy will spot you, if you keep shooting. But a very quiet gun lets you shoot much more often without moving between shots.

Most of the mods and many of the guns only unlock after discovering particular workbenches, located in enemy territory on the campaign maps. (You do NOT have to return to the same workbenches to re-apply the mods after they are unlocked.) Some of the mods unlock after certain feats, like total headshots with the weapon, or kills within or beyond a certain distance.

In my second playthrough of the campaign, I used the D.L. (De Lisle) Carbine, a highly suppressed rifle - only easily audible within 17m. It's a DLC gun. Well...the game is old now, so if you want to play, wait for a deep sale and get the DLC too - how else will you get a chance to kill Hitler in a dozen different ways?

In my first playthrough of SE5, I was pleased that tanks were realistically hard to kill. In SE4, it was always presumed that tank drivers and gunners had had their vision blocks damaged, and hence had removed them, and hence could be sniped through their small vision ports. Not in SE5. I used panzerfausts and TNT and teller mines to disable tank tracks and had to leave the tanks damaged but dangerous behind me; sometimes they'd burn out over the next 10 minutes or so. Unhappily, I later learned that SE5 simply has different weak points than SE4. Armoured cars have engine port covers that can be destroyed with bullets, after which the armored car can be blown up by shooting a couple of bullets into the engine. Tanks? Yeah, tanks too. With bullets, one can (not simply pierce a hole through, but instead) blow a big chunk of armor off the back of a King Tiger, between its exhaust ports, then blow up the tank completely by shooting its exposed engine. Bullets. A full-health King Tiger. Sigh.

It can also feel a bit disappointing that even on the highest difficulty level, the enemy often stands still and peers about after a near miss, or when an explosive goes off nearby. The highest difficulty should feature bad guys that keep their heads down, or move a few feet behind cover before exposing themselves again. (Checked: SE4 enemies don't keep their heads nearly as still as enemies in SE5.)

And of course, even on authentic difficulty, there were plenty of magic healing kits to restore you to 100% health, and enemy snipers continued to reveal their position with lens flare on their scope that shows up like a search light.

Did I mention that when you crouch and concentrate ("focus"), you can see through walls out to a distance of about 50 feet? But you can turn that off in the the fine difficulty settings if you want.

And yet, I enjoyed the game. I really did. And I'm going to try SE4 again too, now that I've forgotten most of its maps.

Update: January 2025

Still a NOT recommended game, but...

I found out the solution with CoD:WWII's quick time events. Set frame rate to 60fps, and you get the amount of time intended for quicktime. Set it to 30fps, and quicktime events are easy. I was playing at 120fps so I only got half the time intended to respond. Perhaps I only finished the QTE's during lucky framerate stutters?

That problem should have been spotted and easily fixed by the publisher. It was not.

Additionally, I've tried to get the multiplayer to work several times, hoping to check out the zombies. Nothing worked on multiplayer.

Be nice if the program gave ANY error message. It does not.

The original CoD was one of my favourite games. CoD:UO was OK too, and again, CoD 4 was great. But the owners of the franchise simply don't give a damn about PC anymore.

March: 2024
Seems to work exactly as the developers intended and I don't like it.

All the worst things from past CoD games, and some brand new awful game mechanics too!

I *think* there are 11 missions. I've done six and will probably never do any more. I was only interested in trying the campaign.

There are mad dashes into enemy fire. There seem to be infinite enemies at some points that replace the guys you've killed much too quickly. This necessitates hurried assaults into enemy fire. There are times when you jump into vehicles and drive with WSAD instead of WS & mouse (why was mouse-steering, good enough for CoD:UO (the 1st CoD expansion) yet is never supported anymore?) There's an AA gun that you jump onto and shoot down over a dozen Stuka planes in about 45 seconds. There are chances to be a hero by pulling or carrying wounded men out of the line of fire - or to feel badly that you were already hurt and didn't have enough health packs to do that. There's tracking the ammo-dispensing guy on your team, because you never have quite enough ammo. And you've gotta track the medic too, to pick up more health packs. And sometimes, you have to track the special equipment guy. There's nothing on your HUD to tell you whether you're standing or crouched or prone. But the part that I hate the worst is the quick time events. MASH F suddenly comes up. After the first time I set up a mouse button to repeatedly hit F for me, because I hate mashing buttons. So that's doable. Pressing F very quickly saves you somehow. Next you drag your mouse towards the center of a circle, which may be drifting around, and when you hit the circle's center, press the suddenly indicated key. The key changes on each attempt. C, now G, now E, now whatever. It generally took me 8-12 attempts. It doesn't seem to give you extra time if you lower the difficulty. I'd get through quick time events about 80%+ of the time in Tomb Raider. Not here. Perhaps the drag the mouse to the center of the circle part always conflicted in me with the read the proper key and press it part of my brain. I hated it. And it's almost always near the end of a mission. One time, I stormed a house, cleared it out, got in a jeep, drove like a maniac for about a half mile, jumped on the jeep's 50 cal while my squad-mate drove, killed most of the Germans firing from about a dozen sequential train cars, ran into the end of mission quick time event, failed it, and had to repeat the entire mission. Because CoD doesn't support manual saves in most games. So I repeat the entire mission twice, then the game decides OK, you're terrible, so now you only have to repeat the last 10 seconds of the mission. But we still won't give you a tenth of a second more to hit the right key. About ten repeats later, I'm finally done with that mission. Whoopee.

Fantastic graphics! Especially between missions. The faces are incredibly good compared to the faces in, for example Sniper Elite 5. But the game almost exclusively shows you ugly things. Seen the film 1917? Remember the ugly parts and the green parts. Nope, nothing happy to save or to savour in the world of CoD:WW2.

And the story? Woh. Lots of emphasis on telling a serious, dramatic story. Not quite deep enough to hook me, and make me stay to find out who survived. But easily deep enough to feel shocked whenever I went from semi-serious story of guys recovering from wounds, etc., to silly, overly-rushed assaults, where my squad-mates constantly get shot, but shake it off, protected by their plot armor, while I get killed, fairly frequently, read a pithy quote, and try my next rushed assault a little differently.

The first time I bought this game, it wouldn't run. I tried a lot to get it running. I returned the game. I read about a new thing that would make the game run for sure. I bought the game again. Same deal. New computer. It worked! Beautiful, beautiful graphics, even if they were depicting ugly, depressing sights. Something came up. I set the game aside for a year or two. Shouldn'a done that. This is NOT a game for me.

1st Edit: First hour in game seems OK. But I LOATHED getting this game going. If I play the campaign through twice, I will recommend the game TBD.

Original: Nice production values. No quick-time events. The missions are a little short. But for a six hour campaign, I'm still PO'd about spending 2 hours of active trial and error trying to get things running. See below.

Maybe six hours after starting my install, I am finally a minute into the game and it's working. Still returnable, because Steam says I've played only 34 minutes. Maybe the game is good enough. Maybe I'll keep it. But it took me an outrageous amount of time to get the thing running.

When I booted the game, after the initial splash screens, I saw a big START screen. It said, in big plain letters on the left half of the screen: CALL OF DUTY and Play Now! The right side of the screen, where we naturally don't look first, in faded letters, you see Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. 0 Friends. It's a GD trap to get players to install a bunch of extra stuff, that I suspect nobody needs. I clicked Play Now, and the game asked where to install it...even though I thought the game was already installed. I didn't specify a destination (because it was already installed, wasn't it?) and the game crashed, and it didn't help that when I asked Steam to verify my installed game, it said I had 912 corrupted files, which I dutifully re-downloaded. I immediately checked to see if the re-downloaded files were better. They weren't. It wanted to re-download 912 of the same files immediately after downloading them. So Verify doesn't work for CoD:MW.

I also spent some time getting a new Activision account, and a new Call of Duty account and linking them with my Blizzard and Steam accounts. I also found a suggestion that CoD would crash if you had over 250 friends. Great. So I made sure I wasn't signed into Steam Friends. (Later...they must have fixed this issue.)

Anyway, I ended up re-installing CoD from scratch, then installing the new CoD background program, which includes launchers for CoD:MWII(2022), CoD:MWIII(2023) and CoD:WarZone, all of which have a rating below 33% on Steam. I'm honestly now sure if all that was required, or if I could have skipped it by clicking on the faded RIGHT side of the CoD:MW launch screen. A few restarts of the game were needed after that, to get the anti-cheat system going, and I was bewildered by the CoD background program for a while. Finally I rebooted one more time, noticed the faded writing on the right side of the screen and hovered there and Bingo! it was obvious how to proceed. The game started. It's going to have to seem quite promising to keep me from returning it.

CoD:MW seems OK. I'm going to try it for an hour now.

First draft: March 16, 2024

Won't boot. This is a common problem. I got my 19 minutes playing time by leaving the "Do you want to run in safe mode?" question on screen for several minutes.

Previously, I spent about 30 minutes searching for and trying solutions, like compatibility for Windows 8, or a few launch options, including -fullscreen. I also tried administrator mode.

Waste of my time. Waste of many folk's time. Steam ought to have a category of reviews from people who could not get their game to run properly. I would really like to see a stat for games: percentage of people who asked for refund.

A pity. The original game was great.

Changed my mind FOUR times about this game. Sigh.

So the big waves of zombies that attack you are neat. To get a taste of that, buy the game, and play New York, Map 3: Hell and High Water, on any difficulty. The map is very straight-forward. The hordes are so much more impressive than Left 4 Dead 2. (Even more impressive, are the hordes on Marseille, Map 2: Missile Command, that takes place in cheery bright daylight, but requires the Aftermath upgrade.)

If you love that, you might decide to keep the game past Steam's 2-hour return limit...although, I think your life would be better if you return the game. It's better than slowly becoming disillusioned.

Or instead, you might get disgusted by New York, Map 4: Dead in the Water, whose finale is difficult to figure out on your first try (Protect the civilians? The game doesn't let you know the civilians are being attacked from TWO widely separated sides. This game does NOT coddle the customer.)

Because...the publishers can't seem to decide if buyers are customers or just rubes and marks.

There's so much they could do better.

Right from first boot: 45 seconds to get ANY indication that the game is running. A minute 15 before you get to the first menu, even skipping everything skippable.

Today, Sabre updated everyone's saved games, stripping away the selections for perks on all weapons. There are thirty weapons, with 3 perks each. They knew this was going to happen, they mention it in the patch notes, but they went with the update anyway. So, because you have no idea which weapons you may pick up over the course of any map...10,000-20,000? customers must spend 10-15 minutes re-selecting 3 perks for all 30 weapons. They couldn't pay a programmer to better convert everyone's save-game database?

This is the only game I've played where the WASD movement routinely - at least a few times in each map - glitches and loses track of whether a key is pressed down: I must release the stuck WASD key and re-press it. (Not my keyboards, or even the brand...tested.)

This game is adversely affected by things happening on the desktop. A message from Norton would crash the game. I finally uninstalled a desktop organisation program, Fences 3, and my game crashes dropped by about 95%...but yeah, the game still crashes, and in the weirdest way: I can still see the zombies, teammates can still kill 'em, but until I get back to the lobby, I have no mouse or keyboard control AND I've got a popup saying please, please, pretty please explain everything you were doing before the crash so we can fix the game. Hint: they only act like your feedback is important to them.

On the game forums, they've hired someone to pretend to care about people's complaints, but my experience is that their helpful, personalised advice is a simply pasted advice, supplied without actually reading your post...maybe better to not pretend to read the post?

These are the folks that currently run Sabre Interactive
Matthew Karch (CEO)
Andrey Iones (COO)
Tim Willits (CCO)
Anton Krupkin (CTO)
Todd Hollenshead (Head of Publishing)

I don't plan to buy anything else from this gang.