Well you can't say Cauldron
HQ wasn't given a chance. They sprung up with
the excellent sci-fi shooter Chaser in 2003,
thereby getting the chance to create the third
Soldier of Fortune and a series of games for
The History Channel. I skipped the first two
History Channel games simply because they were
obscure enough that I didn't know the existed.
Their SOF: Payback was rubbish. Cauldron then
released Secret Service in 2008 (reviewed
here), another existing I.P. which was also
rubbish. And now with the third History Channel
game, they've fumbled again. Proving once again
that they're a very average game developer.
Seriously, someone from Cauldron
should play Crysis and they may realise just
how poor Secret Missions really is. It's almost
a chore to play through it, because it's certainly
not fun. And the linearity is laughable. Even
the original Medal of Honor and Call of Duty
from 2002/2003 weren't this linear. We're now
living in an age where if you want to create
an outdoor game, you can't have the player travel
along narrow paths winding through thick bush
where just two metres off the path you hit an
invisible brush and flat wall of shrubery. It's
simply poor game design. I don't even mind linearity
- Legendary and Turning Point had it this bad
and I didn't complain, but they were based in
confined urban environments, not supposedly
sprawling outdoor fields.
The art and graphics don't
look too bad in Secret Missions. I can live
with it, in fact at times it looks quite quaint
and cute. Not really up to 2008 standards, but
not far off. The levels remind me of Brothers
in Arms: Hell's Highway, only without the modern
Unreal 3.0 engine with all it's fancy effects,
and nowhere near the size of the levels in that
game.
I don't really understand why
Secret Missions is always so bright and colourful.
If you're making a game based on something that
happened over 100 years ago, with all the GUI's,
videos and imagery looking old fashioned, why
not give the game that old fashioned look as
well? Such as a desaturated, almost sepia style.
It would surely give that feeling of 'old' a
lot better.
Right so on to the god awful
gameplay of Secret Missions. The combat consists
of both sides ducking up and down from cover,
very similar to Brothers In Arms, shooting one
enemy at a time. The aim is awful. You have
to be close to hit them and they take 2-3 shots
to die. Sometimes enemies sit behind cover for
quite a while, so you've just got to sit there
with your scope aimed above the cover waiting
for them to pop up. Once they're cleared (or
as you're clearing them) another identical looking
enemy will spawn and move to the exact same
position. Sometimes you can just keep your mouse
pointer in the same place and wait for the clone
to appear.
Then you get the sniper mission
where you sit through a mindless reloading animation
after EVERY SINGLE BULLET fired. I've never
experienced something so retarded in a game.
I don't care that it's realistic - it's just
not fun. Then there's the canon level where
you can't even tell where you're aiming because
the goddamn canon is in the way. There's no
scope so it's trial and error until you've got
the distance right with buildings you can barely
see so you don't even know what to shoot out
within the tight time limit.
As for this being part of a
History Channel learning experience - I didn't
really learn a damn thing. There's no story.
It's more of a game demonstrating the different
tactics during the civil war, rather than real
life locations and scenarios. Things like the
gatling gun mission, the sniper mission, the
canon mission, the train mission. All of which
last less than ten minutes, meaning the game
is only 2-3 hours long at best.
It's quite a difference going
from the huge open-'universe' and gameplay possibilities
of The Precursors to this game... a small, linear,
extremely basic shooter. I just hope it wasn't
at a full game price. Even City Interactive's
crappy Russian shooters of 2008 were more fun
than Secret Missions. I'm pretty sure this will
be 2008's worst first person shooter.
