Phml
Forum Staple
Posts: 2035
Registered: 06-09 |
I've bought the first one after hearing about it for months, expecting to play it for 2-3 hours doing stuff singleplayer and leave it forever ; but then friends joined me and in the end I've sunk hundreds of hours into the two games.
It had all the basics for an enjoyable shooter experience to me: movement-based gameplay (projectiles and melee rather than hitscan), good use of 3D space, powerful feeling weapons, responsive controls. What sold it to me was partly the atmosphere, it's all "show, not tell" and lets you make up the best story with your own imagination, and partly the co-op mechanics, so intuitive and commented through the characters speaking up you don't even need to use voice chat at all (which ties into immersion ; for me, nothing shatters atmosphere as much as someone starting to talk about yesterday's football game, or playing drill sergeant like this is a chore to get done).
With friends, it's just so easy to get into it, and few moments have felt as visceral as hearing the tank tune starting to play when we were in a bad spot, or racing to the rescue vehicle right as we were being overwhelmed, getting separated, losing one man, going back for him, getting him back or having another going down, or even having one of us bastards hop up in the chopper and leave everyone else behind, throwing a molotov cocktail on the path...
There's a fair amount of custom maps available, most of them admittedly poor but sticking to the higher rated ones generally offers a decent experience.
The versus mode is quite fun, as long as you ignore the good fourth or third of the community that can't hack it in more competitive games and choose to try to play pro in a casual game. Getting, with teamwork, that perfect ambush on the survivors is, again, one of these moments I've found fairly unique. Playing the tank is also a blast. That said, I haven't really played the game for a good year or so and I wouldn't know what goes on now. A good survivor team was pretty much indestructible, as they can all play as solo players whereas infected have to work as a team to get anything done ; if the overall skill level has increased since 2010, it might make things fairly boring without friends.
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01-24-12 04:21 
