It's fun to try out decade-old games I remember having a tainted view on by critics poo-pooing them back in the day as generic & subpar, only to find out once the dust settles that they're actually kind of cool games.
This isn't a masterpiece don't get me wrong, I'm relatively sure it probably went through devh*ll as I saw that some of the more ambitious ideas started to crack towards the end, and some aspects showed sings of being a bit unfinished even - Could be a bug, but I'm almost convinced some sound effects, ambiance, isn't just broken, but perhaps wasn't fully realized? It only started to become noticeable towards some of the final missions & some side-missions. And a few other details show signs of being rushed, cool ideas with the base you return to, where weirdly towards the end on base visits 3-> you notice cracks more, NPCs standing around not doing anything, clones clipping through each other, was hilarious I'll admit.
Still, I appreciated this, as a sort of Mass Effect-lite "clone" in some minor ways, Third-person cover shooter with a pause where you issue orders to squad mates & have a bunch of cool abilities, & then some minor inklings in the storytelling & there's even a few different endings you can get in this.
On PC, on Steam, I can't really point to a ton of Mass Effect clones or other quality third person cover shooters, maybe console players got bored with all of those back in 2013, but I never on PC suffered through that oversaturation, so this one was again a pretty fun one to experience inbetween my many FPS games.
The setting was one selling point for me, over the course of the campaign in both main & side missions you go through various 1960's styled locations across the US, with classic diners, small towns, from redwood to pinewood forests & also many alien locations that look very striking in scale next to the small human settlements.
The combat has the core basics of cover shooting as seen in Gears of War, not as punchy as GoW though, but then again you aren't playing as a meatblock inside a Space Marine power armor who can slide & thud into cover like the very act of taking cover is a punch to the environment.
But still, lacking that, it has decent weapons that pack a punch, from 1960's pistol, shotgun, M14 rifle, sniper, to a lot of alien energy weaponry that you slowly get over the course of the campaign.
And then there are the powers, abilities, for you & your squad, composing of Recon/sniper, Engineer, Commando/soldier & Support classes with their own specializations, from turrets & mines, to taunting or shielding, weakening or buffing, to sniping, cloaking or bombarding & a lot more, & then you can also play around with powers [spoiler]having harassing blobs to send out, support drones to deploy, mind-controlling enemies[/spoiler], and it kept it engaging up to the end of the game, the progression of getting new powers & weapons felt pretty well paced for the length.
Story ended up being surprisingly decent, I wasn't expecting much, but it threw some neat twists into it. You do see some cracks again, some RPG-ish choices aren't properly handled in the game code, they wanted to do more clearly with the storytelling.
Slightly stilted voice acting & writing, but I found it honestly kind of endearing? It reminds me of old media, like Star Trek, everyone is trying to act professionally & not constantly quip or mug at the camera, they're officers trying to do their jobs, and into it are relatively seamlessly interwoven all sorts of subjects where it only feels natural for the time period & subject matters.
Technically there are some flaws. It's Unreal Engine 3, it used PhysX, you should turn PhysX particles OFF. Even if you fix it with a better DLL as is suggested on PCGamingWiki, it's still horribly unoptimized. Many combat arenas can be fine with PhysX & maybe it enhances some of that, but many specific alien shield like effects have way too many unoptimized swirly particles that will tank your performance. PhysX cloth is fine though to have ON if you can.
This is a charming looking UE3 game though, bless its heart, it's trying to have fancy real-time dynamic shadow maps which UE3 has never been good at (I blame Tim Sweeney who didn't listen to his engineers who momentarily convinced him to put in dynamic shadows after forcing him to see Doom 3, but then he ripped all that out because consoles couldn't handle it & his single-minded drive for more polygons won over, as is seen in GoW, a good case study for his philosophy for the tech that ruined the engine, BTW UE2-2.5 had wonderful dynamic shadows, see Splinter Cell1-3 or Deus Ex 2 or Thief 3)
Still, here they tried & they tastefully placed in many places striking lights at angles to cast neat shadows, coupled with decent SSR, SSAO, some nice water ripple physics, & then overall the time period art style has made this visually age relatively well, despite UE3 jank, occasional glitchy shadows, ugly Depth of Field you can't really turn off as it's metastasized like cancer into a lot of other post processing pipelines (but you can tweak engine ini for some other stuff though to improve stability, visuals). Performance should be fine on most PCs newer than a decade, I played with a laptop, i5-11400H 3050RTX 16GBRAM Win11, max settings minus Motion blur, AA, lens flares, and it was locked at a decent 60fps 1080p. Don't think I had any crashes?
To me, biggest issues were just where I could see that there was potential & clearly something cool planned but they either ran out of time/money or it swapped hands a few too many times or something, and then a bit of technical wrestling at the beginning, and maybe a difficulty spike a few times because I played like a dummy and it's maybe not the game's fault, it does give you 4 difficulty options so you make your own bed I suppose (it has perma death for squad members on higher difficulties)
I'm glad that this exists alongside the turn-based tactics games, it's a cool companion piece, not everything has to be in the same genre, it sort of makes sense to have a third person cover shooter off-shoot with the turn based tactics, I mean someone at Microsoft clearly copied the homework when they figured they'd do the reverse and make a fitting turn based game for Gears, and it worked, there's enough similarity in the structure and it's fun to play them in reverse at times.
Get it on sale though, and if 2K ever retroactively patch in yet again one of their horrible launchers I'll delete this kind review or turn it negative if I'm feeling spiteful.
