Project: Snowblind was originally
supposed to be the third Deus Ex game. However
since Deus Ex 2 didn't do well enough commercially,
Project: Snowblind became it's own universe.
You play the role of a soldier
who, after being injured in war, is surgically
enhanced with a number of pointless powers.
One of the biggest problems
with this game, that I found, is that I struggled
to get my head around all the powers, weapons,
alternate fires and general rubbish used to
improve your assault. Give me a shotgun and
machine gun and i'll be happy. And that's basically
how I played the game, switching to the plasma
gun and lightning gun (don't know what the actual
names were but they're very similar to Quake
3) later in the game. It boggles the mind how
a console gamer could come to grips with all
the shortcuts for this game when I strugged
to remember everything on the keyboard.
You also have a railgun and
rocket launcher, both of which I chose to save
for boss battles. In the end, there was only
one boss battle a few levels from the finish.
The actual final two levels were difficult overall
for the only reason that you have such limited
ammo (and I never realised the vehicles have
insanely destructive guns). In fact throughout
the entire game ammo is very tight, probably
because I was sticking too much to the same
weapons.
Project: Snowblind has no difficulty
settings, a fairly big flaw and from what I
recall the first action shooter I've played
without them. Nevertheless, the game was fairly
good at getting the difficulty just right. It's
hard at times, but often it's because you don't
have ammo for the right weapon. I probably died
several times during the game, half of which
I was able to resurrect myself using an item
acquired for this purpose (there's plenty littered
around).
The other major flaw in the
game is no quicksaving. Instead in most levels
you get 1-2 checkpoints; which are basically
rooms with a computer where you can save progress.
It wasn't until the last 1/3 of the game that
I realised you could return to the checkpoint
and resave again. It's a silly and pointless
idea, they should have either done quicksaving
or automatic (magic) checkpoints.
The enemies are all fairly
similar, just carrying different weapons or
shielding. There are some robots which take
a bit of firepower and dish out a lot of damage,
but they're slow and can easily be bought down
by keeping cover.
The design of the game is fairly
average for a 2005 release, although it was
only February 2005 that it went gold. It was
also intended for Xbox and PS2, so this may
explain some of the average looks. But i'd expect
better. None of the levels are fairly big, there
are very few set pieces and instead of lot of
corridor-room-corridor designs. Doom3's corridors
look a lot better than Project: Snowblind's
corridors.
The game was criticised for
being too short, but coming off a 6-8 hour walk
in Vietcong 2, Project: Snowblind isn't too
bad. Perhaps just under the 10 hours.
Crystal Dynamics aren't known
for their first person shooter PC action games,
so it's a good start. Pity they've done nothing
since except overflow the market with Lara Croft
games.
