Poor voice-acting and bad delivery cripple the game's otherwise astounding sense of immersion, while the beeps and alarms that signal danger are more irksome than an alarm clock trill on a Sunday morning. Missiles fizz out from beneath your wings with an anticlimactic whoosh, enemy planes flash by in a low-res haze, while weapon effects are more often tedious than thunderous. For every new sparkle that lights up the game, there's an unsightly matt-finish eyesore that dulls it. However, these impressive new effects are sparingly employed, resulting in the visuals looking patchier than a pirate captain's convention. Lighting, shading and fogging effects have been infinitely improved, with clouds now boasting genuine depth and reflections that imbue the world with a much greater sense of realism. The crippling bug problems have been hugely reduced (though not totally eradicated), while a complete graphical overhaul has meant that Allied Force now looks more 2002 than 1998.
But then again, you might also love it for precisely these reasons. You might abhor it with every bone in your body for its clinical approach to gaming and its utter disregard for anyone without a degree in avionics and a Masters in patience and perseverance. I'll warn you now, you might despise this game. It's a simulation so utterly bent on capturing the realism of real-life, modern-day dog-fighting that it negates presentation, glitz and Hollywood cliches, preferring instead to concentrate on every switch, lever, button and protocol of flying these steel birds, right from the moment you enter your aircraft till the second you land. How do you fully review a game with an 800-page manual in two pages? You see, Allied Force - the revamped, updated and hugely improved new version of 1998's Falcon 4 - isn't so much a game as a stringent, no frills recreation of what it's actually like to fly an F-16.
0 kommentar(er)
