Oh my God it’s that time of the… Whatever, it’s time to make a kick-ass review about a kick-ass game pack with a shit load of games including three new games that pwn so hard, you won’t be able to remove yourself from your PC for days on end. Yes I said “pwn” and I intend to use a lot more gamertalk in the following game reviews to come! And that’s a lot of ‘em. Game Cam v2 is out in a few days, so maybe I can finally record games on Vista? Guess we’ll have to find out, and if so… My God I’m going to rip out my heart, pinch it, and put it back into my chest just to be sure it’s not a dream.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two
It’s here! The second installment of the HL2 episodes with one more to go at a currently unknown date. Ep2 (Episode Two) continues where Ep1 ended. The Citadel just blew up and all hell broke lose. The Combine are trying to open up some sort of super portal that would make the Seven Hour War happen all over again, only it won’t last seven hours this time. Of course there’s no real rush since this is a linear scripted FPS and so you really have all the time in the world! But as always, the scripted events always immerse the player right into the game and before you know it you’re running your ass off trying to save the Earth. What else? Remember that data that Alyx stole from the Citadel in Ep1? Well the Combine isn’t too happy about that since it contains data that is kinda confidential and for Combine eye’s only. So you’re racing against time and you’re trying to fend off the Combine who are desperately trying to get that data from Alyx’s cold dead body. You start out with no weapons at all ‘cept the gravity gun. I guess that’s because the HL2 episodes are stand-alone games and thus Valve can’t be more than 99,99% sure that the players of Ep2 have already played HL2 and/or HL2: Ep1. What sucks is how they teach you how actually play an FPS all over again. Oh really? I have to jump over that obstacle? You don’t say… Luckily nothing in Gordon Freeman’s (the main character that you play) life is ever boring or peaceful and quickly the game throws a large number of Ant Lions and zombies in your face before you even have a decent gun. Which is cool because it adds to the tension and the intensity of the initial fights.

You start the game inside of the train you used to escape City 17 in Ep1. You’re quickly taught how to play the game and from there you see how the Citadel starts to create this super portal that is comperable to the portal to hell from Doom 3, only this will be way worse. So you and Alyx advance slowly but surely while fighting zombies and other weak opponents. Once you get to a certain place Alyx is critically injured by a Hunter, a new enemy that will make your (half-)life hell later on in the game. AVortigaun comes to the rescue and what follows is a classic Half-Life moment. The Vortigaun tells you you and him have to get from one place to the other, simple right? All you have to do is walk a few hundred meters and you’re there. Piece of cake! NOT! Because the game inevitably traps you and then you’re screwed and you have to take a small and very dangerous detour. Classic. I won’t spoil anything beyond this point but what follows is an awesome “king of the hill” part where you, two turrets, a few mines and two NPC’s have to fight off waves of Ant Lions. You’ll also get to face a special Ant Guard that you’re not allowed to kill, so instead of using one of the many guns you have already aquired you’ll have to just sprint your ass off dodging the Ant Guard while hiding in small tunnels and stuff like that. Very intense stuff, no kidding.

What’s good about this game? Well, the Half-Life story is continued of course. New enemies, a cool new Strider Mine which is loads of fun to use, a few VERY interesting plot twists and revelations and more. What’s not so good about this game? The usual entrapments that lead to longer roads to get from one point to another, Hunters are a pain in the ass when they come in packs of three and there’s really no way you can play this game the first run without dying because of them, it’s an episode but it’s still too short despite the fact that it took me 1,7 hours longer to complete than Episode One. Conclusion? Get this game, don’t ask questions just get it and play it.

The Orange Box
With HL2: Ep2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 (as well as the original HL2 and HL2: Ep1) this game box is the best value for your money ever! Do not wait another second and just rush to your local game store and get the Orange Box NOW!

Initially I didn’t want to even try out the demo, but since it was already installed on my PC anyway I thought “Why not?” so I tried it out. So I started this motherfucker up and was like “This’d better be an improvement over Pacific Assault or I’m going to do something crazy.” and fortunately it was! But it didn’t stop there, it was actually loads better than any other MoH prior to this one, and not because of the new “Drop your ass anywhere you want even though there’s only 2 real choices to choose from” feature either! Yes that is right, that whole feature is a crock of shit but we’ll get into that later on.

Breaking the habit
Unlike all the previous MoH games, the developers didn’t promise us the dawn of a new age in gaming and then having none of the features they promised in-game. Like in Pacific Assault, they promised us all sorts of amazing stuff like destructible environments and super intelligent squad AI but only gave us a few towers that we could blow up and a squad AI that made me want to kill myself. Your squad is the most intelligent one featured in any game, you say? More like all they do is hide behind objects when the enemy is firing at them from the direction they are NOT hiding from. That’s just fucking genius.

No, this time they said land anywhere and start your mission from there! But in reality you can choose to land on one of the safe spots that are marked by green smoke, OR you can choose to land on top of a random building and be surrounded by hundreds of enemies with no support from your squad that basically just lands ANYWHERE… Where there is green smoke. Yes that’s right! All those parachute misdrops? Not in Airborne! No, everyone can basically land their WWII parachute anywhere they want! How? Well since this is physically impossible I’d have to say either BioShock plasmids, or… Ancestral ghosts. Duh…

What else sucks total monkey dick about this game? Your squad is not all that smart. Yes, now they hide behind an object that can actually shield them from the enemy rain of bullets, but then that’s all they ever really do. They just hide and shoot from their cover. Only once all the enemies are dead, or there is nothing to take cover behind, will they get their asses up and advance towards the next objective. I know this isn’t Brothers in Arms, but can’t they at least TRY to flank the enemy and vice versa? No, just dig in and shoot away all your ammo and see if there’s anyone left on the other side. Great.

Graphics
The graphics are pretty nextgen, so that’s a good thing. There’s even a nice motion blur post-processing effect that, unlike Rainbow Six: Vegas‘ motion blur, does not cause hitches in the FPS despite of the fact that you’ve got a rig that could run the game twice. Overall the FPS was actually very steady and I was actually surprised when it would hitch every 2 hours or so. There’s a lot of well-placed HDR. No Lost Coast HDR with the entire world seeming to blind you wherever you look. As I’ve said countless times, put motion blur and HDR in a game and you’ve already got a pretty damn good looking game regardless of the poly count on the 3D objects in the game or the resolution of the textures. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things in this game! The game is obviously running on the Unreal Engine 3 which allows for some pretty amazing graphics. Fire looks AMAZING in this game and so does smoke, though it’s not as good as Call of Duty 2’s smoke. The 3D skybox is also very good looking with all kinds of things going on all around you, it would almost make you forget that each map is incredibly small and there are actual invisible walls! INVISIBLE WALLS!!! EA takes us back a decade by placing invisible walls around the map, oh how nostalgic.

Sound
The good ol’ Medal of Honor soundtrack is back with some changes that still give the game it’s own unique feel. There’s not a whole lot to say about the music since pretty much everyone knows what I’m talking about. The sound effects are amazing. There, that’s one thing this game excels in. Some sound effects are just so realistic you’d almost think you’re actually in the game hearing all of those sounds. I never knew SFX were that important! All the weapons sound right, though they could have used a bit more punch to ‘em and the voice acting is good but nothing special.

Gameplay
What’s there to say? You land, you regroup with your squad and you start to complete your objectives one at a time. The order in which you complete them is up to the player to decide, but usually it’s just smarter to do ‘em all in one particular order since it’s the only smart thing to do. Of course you could fuck with the game and see if you can complete the objectives in a different order, but there’s usually a shitload of enemies waiting to stop you from doing so and even if you manage to do everything backward and still live to make it to the next map, it’s going to be even more impossible to do so there since the enemies keep getting tougher and tougher, not because that’s what happened in real life but because this is a game that was designed by people who think “traditional gameplay” equals “Fuck smart AI, just make the enemies stronger and faster and better at aiming but give them different colors so every level is harder for the player to complete!”. If you’re the genius behind this decision then I have one thing to say: FUCK YOU. This could have been a great game if the difficulty of the levels wasn’t raised by the good ol’ “same enemies, just a lot harder to kill” principle. Now the game is just mediocre and enjoyable, but not amazing and memorable.

Conclusion
Despite all of my criticism, this is the best MoH ever. Which is pretty sad when you think about it, but it’s still an enjoyable game that’ll keep you playing for a few hours. I didn’t count but I believe I read somewhere there were 6 maps? I thought it was just 1 map with different art assets here and there. Every time you’ll complete all of the objectives, and you’ll be ordered to go to some other place where you’ll be introduced to the new enemy units you’ll be facing from now on. It’s like a freaking 1980’s game! But regardless, it’s good fun so I’ll give it a 7/10 for enjoyable gameplay and good graphics combined with surprisingly good sound! What had the potential to be an amazing WWII shooter was simply killed by certain game elements that were copied from some old SNES game. I hope you’re proud of yourself EA. But fuck it, I’m still waiting for Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway to show me what a real WWII shooter is capable of.

EDIT:  Fucking typos and grammar errors everywhere! It’s too damn late to be typing this type of shit anyway… I think I fixed most of ‘em if not all.