So I caved in and bought it. I've read the reviews and parlayed the criticism and jumped in. I didn't take this jump lightly as I'm pretty stingy with money and $50 is a lot to drop for a game that lasts roughly 5-7 hours. But I am a huge fan of Hard Boiled and recently bought the special edition DVD so I figured why not?
STORY:
So our invincible cop Tequila is set loose upon Hong Kong's seedy underworld as a cop is taken hostage by a new young upstart gang. Along the way he gets caught up in a kidnapping plot that involves his ex-girlie and his illegitmate daughter. Naturally, when someone kidnaps your kid and ex, the only thing you can do is grab your duelies and dodge bullets like they were rain drops. What was a little un-Woo like was the twists in the story. Usually, in Woo action movies, you see the deceptions and betrayals as they occur. In this game its, a subtle hint of a guy sneering or such and then guns start blazing. The plot is a little hard to follow, but most of the roadblocks come from Chow Yun Fat's broken English, which I wont bombast but its kinda hard to listen, especially when everyone else in the game speaks perfect English, I mean all the Chinese cops and gangsters all speak English like no ones business.
PRODUCTION:
The Unreal 3.0 engine is pretty bad ass in this environment. Theres some kinda proprietary device they call Massive D to describe the huge amount of damage that can be done to the environment. All the settings are very well designed and laid out. Everything looks damn pretty. Everything blows up damn nice. Its a blast to destroy whole casinos or museums. Its just fun.
Theres actually a neat tool in effect that randomizes the bad guys faces and clothes so that every time you play and every guy you face is always gonna be slightly different. Which is actually pretty neat. As every kill you see close up just seems a little different. This adds to the immersion and should be implemented in other games.
GAMEPLAY:
This is what you do in the game: aim and dont stop firing. To many people, the fact that all you do is just shoot an ungodly amount of bullets at hundreds (and i do mean hundreds) of bad guys seems contrived and gets old quickly. Sorry to say I didn't feel the same way. It is damn fun shooting everything and everyone. Im not sure how the console players are doing it but the mouse/keyboard was perfect. Reminded me very much of Max Payne controls. Aiming was clean and concise and movements were responsive. And plus, on Hard Boiled mode, Im not sure if the console players have as many baddies but if I didnt have my mouse/keyboard combo, Id prolly die more than I already did.
There was 1 extra gameplay mode where you grab a chaingun on a helicopter similar to Matrix:Path of Neo that was totally un-necessary but I guess they wanted to give a small amount of variety.
There is also the standoffs where you have to kill a group of the bad guys surrounding you. That actually got old quickly.
You get a couple of special moves as you do more damage and get Style points for killing people. From health to invincibilty, they become essential in the later levels.
CONS:
There are definately a few problems with the PC version of this game... though since I dont own any of the next gen consoles, save Wii, I can't totally compare them but I'm pretty sure I can point out the issues considering.
Lets do a list shall we?
- 15 gigs of HDD space... really?
- on my quad core with 2 gigs of ram, my CPU utlization was at nearly 40-60% the whole game. Thats pretty insane considering games like Bioshock and TF2 were only running around 20-30%. I even topped 70% a few times. Is there really THAT much going on?
- the menu interface is hands down, awful. It looks like they made this for a console first and had no intention of tweaking the menus for PC users. Shame on you Midway. You couldn't just make an easier interface for the mouse users out there. There were many times you are asked Yes/No question in the menu where you need to click a small arrow to change them. But as soon as you click it, the game assumes you accepted the default answer. Weak.
- multiplayer blows. the fact that nobody has a game going except for that guy in wherever who has everyone connected pinging at 250+ is weak. it would have been cool to get something more out of it but i couldnt. and once again the menus here were TERRIBLE
- standoffs with the mouse are angering. every time you get in a standoff, you have no idea where the mouse reticle will appear, while not a problem in general, these standoffs are time based and it totally throws you off everytime you get into one. the worst is on the last level where you have to kill like 20 bad guys in a row. def not thought out for the PC version
- short. yea i beat it in around 7 hours. yea it was kinda short.
- jumping. apparently Tequila can't jump like normal people. he can only dodge bullets. This was kinda annoying in a few areas where you wanted to get by and any normal person could just jump over said obstacle... but not Inspector Tequila... he had to dive in dramatic fashion.
- bugs. I definately had a few times early on that I had BSOD crashes from the game where I had to reboot the whole damn computer. Not exactly happy about that. Would have been nice to see a patch or notice of a patch from Midway but their support forums are about as useful as 2kGames'. But nvidia's new drivers seemed to have fixed something as after installing them, I had 0 issues with the game
THE DEAL:
Yea it has flaws. As you can see from above it has a few of them. But still, I had a blast playing the game and will have a couple more run throughs. Theres just something fun about running through and destroying everything you see around you with little remorse for those bad guys. Im hoping since this is an Unreal 3.0 game that maybe a mod community could come out of this... but the way the game seems set up doesnt allow for easy map making. But we can only hope. For those Hard Boiled fans out there, you should give it a try. If not now, definately later when the price comes down. It is still pure fun to play... at least when its not crashing.
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