Continuing on with CoD4, I finished Act 2 today, and it did feel quite a bit shorter than the first one. If this trend keeps up, Act 3 should only take a couple hours…

The highlight of this act was one chapter that was essentially a stealth mission, where you and your commander have to infiltrate the area around Chernobyl while disguised in ghillie suits. At one point you’re right out in an open field and have to keep low while enemy tanks and soldiers walk right past you, and you still have to carefully make sure that they don’t run or walk right over you.

The other high point of the act is one where you’re sent on an assassination of sorts, and after completing the hit you have to scramble to escape a rather large number of enemy soldiers, holding out until the chopper arrives to pick you up. It’s supposed to be one of the hardest parts in the game, and I did have to restart a handful of times, but it didn’t seem quite that bad in the end.

I finally got back to more CoD4 today and completed the first act (which actually puts me halfway through already, going by mission number counts alone). The high point of this one was definitely a part where you take the role of an AC-130 camera operator, calling down weapons fire onto the ground below as you watch on an infrared camera as the squad you’re protecting moves forward. It plays out a lot like this real video of an AC-130 attack, and creates an odd feeling of detachment from the actual combat.

The end of the act is another unexpected atmospheric bit that sets a mood really well, but I’d better not spoil it…

After finishing GoW, next up is…another shooter, Call of Duty 4. WWII is kind of cliche as a setting now, so fortunately they’ve set this one in the modern era instead, based around a nuclear crisis involving the Middle East and Russia.

The most obvious difference that you notice right away is that everything is a lot more tightly scripted, and instead of being able to relax and take it at your own pace you often find yourself being swept up and forced to press onward. At the beginning, it often feels like you’re just tagging along with your teammates and don’t really get to do much on your own, but before long your teammates start depending more and more on following your lead and waiting until you act a specific way. It sometimes feels a bit stifling, like you’re being forced to play in a very narrow way, but it also gives the game a more cinematic quality. You often play out things that would have been relegated to a cutscene instead in something like GoW, like the escape from the sinking vessel near the start.

Cover is important, since you’ll get cut down quickly out in the open, but it’s just a plain old move-yourself-behind-something system, not the explicit cover-activation system of GoW, so I kind of have to unlearn how that worked. I’m already dying plenty of times even on the normal difficulty level, mostly due to my cover not being as safe as I thought it was, or grenades that I failed to notice and throw back in time, but checkpoint saves are also plentiful here.

It looks like the single-player campaign will be fairly short, as I’m already halfway through the first act and there’s only three of them, but it’s a pretty well-done story so far at least, with uncomfortable this-could-happen undertones.

The multiplayer is supposed to be excellent from what I’ve heard on various forums, with an RPG-ish experience and upgrade system keeping you interested in playing on and reaching for that next rank or unlock, kind of like the Battlefield series. Normally I don’t bother checking the multiplayer too closely since I’m always anxious to get on to the next game, but I might have to try this one for a little while at least. After the main campaign…

I finally finished off Gears of War today, though I hadn’t really intended to. I got up to the end of the new PC content, figured I might call it a day there, thought maybe I’d just see a bit more, and before I knew it I was looking at the credits.

The PC-specific content was mostly just more straightforward firefights, but at the end there was a new ‘boss’ battle involving a monster seen but not directly fought in the 360 version. It must have taken a good ten tries though, since although there are plenty of spots around to hide in, it’s tall enough that sometimes it can hit you even when you’re hiding behind a pipe, leading to a lot of unexpected deaths.

After getting back to the regular campaign, it was mostly occupied by a slog from one end of a moving train to the other, with a lot of firefights in a narrow space. At one point a berserker attacked, and I thought I botched the expected way to kill it (it’s immune to regular weapons), but it turned out there was another way too. And towards the end there was a section with my old friends, the Lambent Wretches… Fortunately they weren’t too bad here compared to Act 3, and I could run past a bunch of them at the end.

And finally, there was the fight against General RAAM. It was looking pretty rough at first, since you have to make sure you remain in a lit area so the Kryll don’t kill you, which is tough when some of the lights move. I wound up defeating him on around my fifth attempt, though it was a close one, as I was out of torque bow bolts, down to my last grenade, and the sniper rifle wasn’t having much effect on getting the Kryll away from him. I wonder if it was glitched though, as I wound up not having to move from the initial spot as RAAM didn’t come close enough to force me to run. Eh, I’ll take it anyway…

Overall it wasn’t quite as mind-blowing as the hype might have led me to believe, but it was still pretty fun. There were various spots that were frustrating, but that was at least partly self-inflicted by going for the Hardcore difficulty right off the bat.

I finished off Act 4 of Gears of War tonight, and the rest of it wasn’t quite as hard as the start. Again, nothing all that unusual or different though, just straight up firefights both outside and inside, with more Theron Guards and Boomers around to make things tougher. The final bit was timed, but all I had to do was make it to a certain spot, and near the end I just ran for it and made it.

I think this would normally put me really close to the end of the game, since Act 5 looks fairly short on the 360 version, but this is where all of the new PC content is supposed to be, so I’m not sure how long it’ll be. In any case, the final boss fight is supposedly fairly tough, though I at least have some forewarning.

And as if I didn’t have enough shooters already (Call of Duty 4 is still waiting), I just had to go and pick up Crysis on the way home…

I only made it about halfway through Act 4 in Gears of War tonight because the difficulty level is really starting to annoy me. It took me numerous deaths and a lot of time just to make it through the first handful of fights of the act, thanks to cheap instant deaths from snipers and torque bows from out of nowhere, and sparser checkpoints that made me redo multiple fights in a row just to get back to the spot where I kept dying.

There isn’t really anything interesting or different so far this act, it’s just a lot harder.

Of course, I did choose the Hardcore level, but the description at the difficulty selection screen made it sound more like it was a ‘medium’ level.

I hope there aren’t any more lambent wretches in the remainder of Gears of War, because after finishing Act 3, I’m going to scream if I ever see another one. I managed to get past that first fight I was having trouble with yesterday after a few more tries, but it turned out to be only the first of various encounters with them. They’re small, quick, hard to see, and often appear in large enough numbers to swarm you quickly, and finally beating them felt more like a matter of luck.

At one point I had to cross some floorboards, many of which would break and drop you down into a pit full of lambent wretches below. Fortunately I’d already heard about this part ahead of time and took it carefully enough that I didn’t fall in. After that was another well-worn cliche, riding in mining carts while under attack by, of course, lambent wretches, though it wasn’t that difficult. And near the end there was a battle with a large ‘corpser’ enemy, though the corpser itself was the easy part and I mostly kept dying to the mid-fight waves of…lambent wretches.

Other things of note: although you can be commanding a group of up to three other soldiers, quite often the game finds some excuse you split you up into two separate groups that can’t help each other out. Even if you’re only separated by the flimsiest of doors or windows.

And although there are plenty of checkpoints, some of them could be better placed. If you fail the final big battle at the end of the act, you have to waste time redoing one part where all you do is run around a bit, pick up a weapon, and have some NPC chatter. If I hear “Lookit all that juice!” one more time…

Tonight was Act 2 of Gears of War, and fortunately there were a few surprises to it rather than endless leaps from cover to cover.

At one point I had to continually turn a crank in order to cross a canal, while taking fire from groups of nearby enemies. I used up nearly all my ammo in that crossing, praying that there’d be a resupply on the other side. There was, but there were also hordes of bat-like creatures that instantly killed me a few times before I figured out the trick to it (they don’t attack as long as you’re in light)

I was wondering if there was going to be any vehicles, and I finally found the first one in this act, though it wasn’t a very long or difficult part. Hopefully there will be more later on.

And now I’m stuck at one part near the start of Act 3, when you encounter lambent wretches for the first time. The problem is that you can’t let them get near you, since they explode when they die and kill you if you’re too close, but there’s a lot of them and they run right up to you and I just can’t kill them all fast enough. I guess I’ll just have to keep reloading and retrying until I get lucky…

I finally started playing the PC version of Gears of War in earnest tonight, having only done the tutorial before. It took a bit of getting used to the third-person view and how the screen rocks around a bit when you’re walking and running, but it’s not too bad.

They seem to have overdone it a bit on the grim-n-gritty, macho, manly-men atmosphere, but I can still appreciate it on the campiness level. It at least takes itself more seriously than Hellgate: London, which had a similar post-apocalyptic humanity-fights-back setting, but had NPCs that seemed to be trying out for Monty Python auditions…

The highly-touted cover system works fairly well, except for a couple minor problems. The first is that it seems to be slow to take cover again, which can cause problems when doing things like rescuing teammates. Numerous times I was right next to a downed teammate, behind cover, but actually rescuing him required me to pop out of cover, trigger him, and then get back under cover again, and I’d sometimes die just from being out of cover too long doing that.

The other problem is that since there’s really only one ‘action’ button, it doesn’t alway interpret what you meant to do properly. I died a few times at one spot because I held down Space to run across an open area, except that at one point it suddenly decided that my holding Space meant ‘take cover here’ instead. Except that the cover at that point was on the wrong side, leaving me open to the turret rapidly firing at me.

And oh have I died a ton… I’m playing it on the “hardcore” difficulty, since “casual” would probably be too easy (the text describes it as being for people who only occasionally play shooters), and some achievements are only given out if you’re in hardcore or higher. Fortunately, there are plenty of checkpoints, so I’ve always been able to slowly progress with enough persistence, even if I had to die a lot.

I made it to the end of Act 1 tonight, and with only five acts, it shouldn’t take too long to finish off the single-player game. I doubt I’ll do much multiplayer though, especially since the PC version can’t play together with the 360 version anyway. Which probably also means no co-op, alas.