Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear

Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear is a on rails shooter set in the modern era. It is a slightly worse looking and running version of it’s older brother Heavy Fire: Afghanistan. It is weirdly quiet and more difficult but really isn’t worth looking at if even if you are interested in this genre of game

A decent on the rails shooter that will reward you with good achievements. Play through veteran mode and unlock the best ones. I had fun playing this game but nothing to take too serious. I got a solid 5 or 6 hours of blasting sand people.

First off, I'll recomment this one simply because of the diversity of weapons and when on sale. Except this, that game is a worst version of the other one "Heavy Fire Afghanistan". It's glitchy, the sound, voices and feel are worst, the mission are shorter and it's much less well designed. Keep in mind that this is a pure arcade rail shooter, just like the ones you play on an actual arcade machine. It's really not for the FPS people. In more details: The main voice over sounds very amateurish. The level intros are read almost like a machine and the in-game voice (of your character) sounds like a teen recorded the lines with his parents in the next room. The sound is very clear but also filled with quiet shouting and tame. The story is overall what it needs to be but the writing is very sub-par compared to the other game. Or any, really. It looks like that same teen has written a military fantasy homework the night before it's due for his litterature class. Maybe the game is a teen effort and I'm too harsh but this is also an evaluation in the frame of the previous game that's better and from the same company. The music is so generic, it's unpleasant. The other game has a much better rock music that fits the action pretty well. The weapons sound a bit soft in both games and this time there is recoil but it's more of a hindrance as it's not calibrated for this kind of arcade style. There's also a lot of red-ish/warm colors in game and the weapon cursor is red to it's not the best choice and can't be customized. As for the gameplay, it's rather cumbersome and there are still QTE but you might die if you fail. I really despise these but they didn't go overboard so it's overall fair to add some spice. Which the game needs. The only somewhat difficulty comes from a few sequences where enemies swarm from everywhere and it's kinda hard to shoot between the weird recoil and hard to see cursor. The shotgun which is unlocked with mission points kinda solves this. No recoil and a wide area of effect makes it easy, a bit too much. Another gameplay choice that's rather unpleasant is the overbearing lock of the weapon. There are plenty of times where the game locks it and you could maybe do a trick shot or get a bonus but it's deactivated. The levels are urban, underground and a bit of village, except for the special big gun levels so it's nothing fancy but fine. However it's less well put together than in the previous game. This time around, they don't allow friendly fire so be careful if you're a twitch shooter. I actually enjoy this over killing your allies and only getting negative points. This should be a toggle in the setting. Now the good part is the variety of weapons. There are RPG, assault rifles and a handgun if you're out of ammo, which doesn't happen unlike in the previous game. There are also fun sequences with a minigun on a chopper, a very fun C130 gunner sequence and a 3 mounted heavy gun ones. These are fun but also easy and being very short means it's very repetitive to replay, sadly. Replaying the game isn't fun this time around. As for the previous one, the normal (aka veteran) mode is more enjoyable than the mandatory easy one. However, it's really short. The easy campaign lasts 80min with listening to the intro and doing it twice (easy + normal) takes a bit over 2.5h as the normal mode is actually easier and since you know the map layout there's mostly no challenge. It's not enough time to get the cards drop... On a more technical side, the game has issues with...keyboard and mouse and it's laggy for many people. Unplayable laggy. Maybe it's a bad console port. The issue is - mostly - fixed if you go into the windows device manager, then locate the "human interface device" tree and expand it. There, you should deactivate each item until you find the one that causes lags during the game. Also, the controls can't be modified so you should set your keyboard in qwerty mode if it's not your default layout, which seems to be an issue for light guns as well but I havent tried. Maybe some day, it's the actual reason I got these games. Overall if you need to buy one of these games, then buy the previous "afghanistan" one and maybe the "reload" game. That one is a play with friends type of game with clunky controls but actually fun if you like arcade shooting simulators. If you get the pack on deep sale, then it's worth it becaue it's so cheap why not. Too bad they didn't expand this as they got the basics. It's the execution that's hesitant and short.