24 January, 2008

Taming the Audience

I started playing Freedom Fighters, a game that consistently gets love on the PA boards, and I hate it. It's got some interesting ideas. First, you can pop in and out of sewers to move around. Second, finishing a mission puts more weapons and freedom fighters in your base. But death comes all too easy. In one mission, a kid painting graffiti tells me I started in the wrong place and need to go get some explosives. I go through the sewers and come up behind where some cops are getting shot at. I talk to the cop I'm supposed to talk to who tells me to get some explosives. I do. Then I turn to run back to the sewer and get one shotted by one of the snipers. I never saw where they were. I didn't think they could see where I was. This was the first thing that happened to me in the game. It was not a good sign.

And it became a recurring pattern very quickly. I kill a bunch of guys, then get blindsided by a sniper or guy on a 50 cal that I couldn't see. And the checkpoints in the game aren't always that close together, so I have to do way too many sections of the game over. I'll try turning the game down to easy, but so far I'm thinking I've never seen a game start out this badly that turned out to be any good.

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