Very disappointed in WFC so far
Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2011 1:09 pm
A long, long time ago, first-person shooters and their third-person bastard children were actually good. Does anyone remember Duke Nukem 3D? Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force? MoHAA? American McGee's Alice? Great games, all. However, they didn't tend to port well to consoles, the reason being that consoles suck ass. Initially, console-makers decided to get around this problem by making keyboards, mice, and - god forbid - even hard drives for their machines! Then Halo came along and proved that first-person shooters for consoles could work if you crippled the game design in such a way as to work very well with the limitations of consoles.
Of course, this proved to be a bit of a problem when trying to make a game that both PC gamers and console gamers might want to play. Thus, between the 2004-2005 season of games (Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, etc.) and the 2007-2008 season (Bioshock, Crysis, UT3), game designers - who apparently are all Marxists hell-bent on the equal sharing of misery - decided that the solution to the conundrum was not to make consoles as awesome as PCs, but rather, to make PC shooters as crappy as console shooters. A few games, like Unreal Tournament III, managed to mostly escape this curse. Most didn't. Transformers: War for Cybertron is one of the latter. It has all of the hallmarks of playing a console shooter on the PC, including, but not limited to:
- The two-gun limit
- "Halo healing"
- Checkpoints as a crappy substitute for an actual save/load system
- Zero interactivity with the environment whatsoever beyond what is required in order to win
- The expand-o-matic reticle, offering neither the precision of a real targeting reticle nor the luxury of auto-aim.
I can't say that the ultra-linear level design helps matters much, either. So why is this game so popular? Has everyone just forgotten what good shooters are like? Has everyone forgotten the joys of walking up to a toilet, pressing a key, and hearing Duke say "Ah, much better"?
Meh. I'm gonna go finish chapter III, then drink myself into a stupor.
Of course, this proved to be a bit of a problem when trying to make a game that both PC gamers and console gamers might want to play. Thus, between the 2004-2005 season of games (Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, etc.) and the 2007-2008 season (Bioshock, Crysis, UT3), game designers - who apparently are all Marxists hell-bent on the equal sharing of misery - decided that the solution to the conundrum was not to make consoles as awesome as PCs, but rather, to make PC shooters as crappy as console shooters. A few games, like Unreal Tournament III, managed to mostly escape this curse. Most didn't. Transformers: War for Cybertron is one of the latter. It has all of the hallmarks of playing a console shooter on the PC, including, but not limited to:
- The two-gun limit
- "Halo healing"
- Checkpoints as a crappy substitute for an actual save/load system
- Zero interactivity with the environment whatsoever beyond what is required in order to win
- The expand-o-matic reticle, offering neither the precision of a real targeting reticle nor the luxury of auto-aim.
I can't say that the ultra-linear level design helps matters much, either. So why is this game so popular? Has everyone just forgotten what good shooters are like? Has everyone forgotten the joys of walking up to a toilet, pressing a key, and hearing Duke say "Ah, much better"?
Meh. I'm gonna go finish chapter III, then drink myself into a stupor.