A Matter of Protection

Rasping her tongue against the bow string, to slightly whet the nocking point, Fayde's keen eye could sense approaching humans. The air shimmered liked a still rock pool that had just been defiled by rampant pond skaters. Human odour also betrayed their stealthy tricks and tactics. She could visualise the airplay of their bulky forms writhing back and forth, attempting to remain in the shadows. Before her next thought, an arrow whipped from the arched weapon, almost singing as it clipped the shimmer just above his elbow. This winged ruffian dropped his crude dagger to the floor in surprise, and as the pain registered on his face, realised his stealth play was over.

Scooping his iron blade from the floor with his other hand, he made a charge at Fayde. No time for another arrow. Fayde whipped her bow updwards and slapped the horned tip against the brigands face, it carved a small trough across his already maddened features. She slammed her elbow into the bridge of his nose, sounding a satisfying 'crack', upon which she performed a tumble into the corner of the room and leaped from a crouching position up onto a high stack of crates. In desperation the brigand threw his dagger at her, it lodged moments away from her in the wooden wall behind her. A quick lick of the hair string, and she nocked another arrow. Stumbling forward spraying the floor with facial blood, the hairy rogue managed to claw at her feet before she loosed the feathered stake. He yanked both of her feet suddenly and she fell backwards, hitting her head against the wall and dropping her bow to her side. She kicked one foot free, and tried to pry him off her. But with every movement she made in this prone position, brought him closer to her as he climbed her body like a lizard on an ivy encrusted tree. Fayde struggled for her Rapier, but it was splayed out to the side, and she had most of her weight on the scabbard. His hands curled around her neck as his heavy blood saturated body entombed her arms in a heavyweight hold. Gasping for air, as his grip tightened, she spat in his broken face. A last act of defiance. Before the encroaching darkness took her away to peaceful eternal sleep.

He smiled visciously, his teeth jagged with half broken crowns. Blood endlessly gurgling from his mouth and his fat purple nostrils. He was almost laughing at her demise. As his head came cleanly off. A shining gauntlet grasped the twitching neck stump and yanked the decapitated carcass off her. A rather regal gentleman stood before her clad in the most noble suits of armour she had ever seen. "Caldovan, at your service my lady". He winked. And smiled. And turned to swing his sword and cull another of these rogues in the process of silently creeping up on him.

Fayde grabbed at her bow to steady herself. She used it as a crutch to heave her gasping body back up onto the crate. A burst of flame spouted from the left, she only just caught it in her peripheral vision. She crouched instinctively to avoid being singed. "Saphina, at your service sister". A small halfling sorceress grinned at her momentarily, before focussing on controlling more flames exuding from her slight but nimble fingers. Fayde felt she was amongst friends, ones who could protect her, so she smiled inwardly, and licked her bow string before letting loose a hail of arrows.

Dungeons & Dragons Online BETA

http://www.ddo-europe.com

As a quick sound bite, I can sum up DDO in one sentance. "Neverwinter Nights with better graphics".

Each quest is a crafted storied instance, with varying lengths (short, medium and long) and difficulties (normal, hard and elite). Nothing in the game allows "free form" hunting, theres no experience gained from killing more or less monsters. Finishing the quest is where you reap your rewards. The emphasis is heavily placed onto the goal and sub-goals of the current dungeon, rather than falling back on the xp grind of slaying endless spawns. Even in the dungeon instance, the quantity of kills is irrelevant to your rewards. Loot is rarely dropped from kills made in the dungeon, the little that is dropped is usually a collectable 'turn in' item, that equates to very little worth really. The majority of your questing loot will be gained from treasure chests, usually found after a quest goal has been acheived, or rewarded to you by the quest giver.

Real time combat interaction (your positioning affects the damage done). The combat relies on you to keep the monster in front of you, for attacks to be successful. Shifting position during combat can modify the chance of you being hit. Turn your back on an enemy and you'll no doubt suffer a critical hit. You can force a direct swing of your weapon by right clicking the mouse, or you can initiate auto-attack and swing automatically. Positioning still plays a part even with auto-attack toggled on. You can also react to the monsters attacks and try to block, using the shift key. Combat can become quite an intense session of keyplay, and to truly do it justice requires your attention and concentration. I enjoy the dynamic it adds to the gameplay, it makes it more real to me, more important to control my avatar as an efficient combatant. Encircling an opponent, to swipe at their side or back becomes a viable tactic, as does trading blows with blocks and counterattacks. It takes some getting used to, especially in third person. But I think it does give a more organic, less predictive flavour to the combat and its outcome.

To complete a quest, quite a bit of thought and planning is often required. There are stages where you just can't throw everything in and to hell with it. You often find yourself having to conserve Health and Mana because once you're in the dungeon, you have limited resources available to you in terms of Healing abilities and Mana regeneration. All casters have a finite amount of mana when they enter, and the only place you can regenerate that mana is at a resting shrine. Even then its a one shot deal. Once you've used it, no more. Your only other option is to stock up on health and mana potions. However, these items are incredibly expensive and are difficult to find a vendor with them available. Perhaps you'll buy one or two and use them in extreme emergencies. Since all casters have to prepare their spells before entering the dungeon, spell selection and spell/feat conservation (eg. level 1 clerics can only Turn Undead 5 times before they need to rest to regenerate) are also issues that need to be decided on.

Overall, the party requires a lot of co-operation to get through the quest. Since the players are quite interdependant on each other, you have to 'care' more about the other players. If the party splits and charges off in different directions theres sure to be a death or two. Since your reward (xp and loot) are dependant on completing the quest and its sub-quests. If you have a death, the party has to take the responsibility to get all their players back into the dungeon so they can continue, and so that the downed player gets his reward. This opens up a method by which gung-ho players can leave their comrades in the lurch, if they're about to complete the quest, and you have two or three other people dead and waiting to get back in for the completion update to their quests. By and large, I have been fortunate enough to have been in groups where everyone looked after everyone else. If a death occurs, we would try to heal/repair them back to life, if not, you'd try and carry their soulstone to the last resurrection shrine, and if not, they'd recall to a tavern and everyone would wait for them to run it back. If you die and recall and then re-enter the active quest dungeon, the overall XP you will get is dimished by a percentage.

The game does seem to promote the need for a slow and methodical way to exploring and questing in the dungeon. Take your time, conserve your skills, use the right person for the job, look after each other, and get the job done. I like this. As I said above, it reminds me very much of my time playing on a Neverwinter Nights Persistant World Server. The 3rd edition D&D ruleset sits perfectly with my idea of how dungeon exploring should go. The more I play this game, the more I seem to fall in love with it.

My greatest concern for the game is whether it will have enough storied quest content to justify the subscription fee? Guild Wars already provides similar storied instance questing (plus a very complete team PvP experience, PvE "free form" hunting with a rudimentary crafting mechanism) for only the box fee - no subscriptions. Repeating the quested content for diminishing returns on XP rewarded will only push the progressing characters forward into the new content, will there be enough of it? They haven't released information on subscription fees, or how that would relate to content provision. I hope they strike a balance that makes it affordable enough for people who like adventuring in the D&D ruleset online, and also provide enough regular new quested content.

RF Online

http://www.codemasters.com/rfonline


First thoughts, "Ah, just a prettier version of Lineage II then". I rolled a Cora "elf" ranger and shot a few arrows at some cute dinosaurs. Didn't inspire me at all. Graphics were really nice, detailed models, very sharp impressive landmarks, environment and terrain a bit bland. Since you are forced to be one of the three races and you can't mix and match them on the same account (for PvP purposes, like DAoC), I trashed the elf and rolled an Accretia "robot" ranger instead. Time to get some guns out.

The Accretian starting zone is very much more impressive, a large nexus that is not a million miles away from having been styled by the people who did the interiors for Phantasy Star Online. Only better. The Accretian robot style is very much japanese killing machine, think 'cool as fook'. The character models are very well done, so much effort going into the detail on them. However, they are all very similar, apart from a few slight modifications to the starting armour, every Accretian looks like every other Accretian out there. So you're more of a soldier pawn in a massive android army, than a deadly unique armour plated assassin.', 'Out you go from the nexus, the Accretian HQ, with your standard issue training gun and a couple of clips of ammo. Your first quest is to kill some cute dinosaurs (that could have starred in several episodes of Barney) with the laughably named the 'Flem' and in addition to frazzle some flying baubel guns known as the 'Wing'. The control mechanism is typically awkward. Holding down the Left mouse button, runs/walks you forward. The Right Mouse button and mouse movement turns you left and right. Forget using WSAD here, but fortunately you can couple directional movement with the cursor keys and rotational movement with the mouse. The interface is minimal and basic, like most other Korean MMO's. You have skills associated with your chosen profession, they seem to be set in stone, and have experience bars by the side of them. So you can choose which skills out of your skill set you want to use and level up. I dragged the fast shot ranged skill onto the quick bar, along with the aiming boost skill. You can start combat by double clicking on the target, or by selecting the target with a left click and then performing a skill on it. You can toggle auto combat on and off.

The whole zone seemed well paced out, by level 2 you'll be in amongst lots of similarly levelled monsters. The dense groups of monsters were easy to find, and the respawn rate was astonishingly fast. Good thing too, since most areas had many many people equally searching for the same things to kill. Monsters dropped weapons, armour, and hunting loot (for crafting with). Loot seemed to drop generously. Your experience seemed to raise with each shot, rather than with each kill. Every successful hit would yield some experience, both in your overall xp gain, and in your skillset (both active skills, such as the fast shot special and passive skills such as defense etc). There was a fair bit of diversity in the monsters you encountered. The quests seemed to be given to you at key times in your development, such as after you've levelled. You didn't visit a quest giver, once the quest was over, you'd be contacted and rewarded, and then given the next quest. The next quest usually being, kill 20 of th next set of monsters you're likely to stumbled upon.

You run around a fair bit, and this is controlled by your stamina bar. You toggle between the very slow walk, or the slowish run. Running uses more stamina, and subsequently you can't run for really long periods of time, unless you have stamina potions. However, most of my gameplay seemed to consist of a run, then plenty of battle, then a run to the next pocket of quest monsters, more battling. So I never really saw the stamina pool affect my play. The only time it became apparent, was when I died a long way away from the nexus and had to leg it back to the area I was in, that long a run, sapped my stamina about three quarters of the way there, so I had to pop a stamina potion to continue running.

In order to use your skills (specials) you need Force power, each special having a force cost, so you had to use them sparingly. Each fight would only allow approximately one or two specials at these low levels. The force pool grows when you level, and so you can then start to fit more specials in. Or there are force potions. Healing out of combat is slow, unless you sit down, which makes you vulnerable to attack. Health potions seemed to be essential if you wanted to keep up a constant rate of combat and not spend lots of downtime sat down regenerating. Healing potions could be used whenever you want, they didn't seem to have any associated cool down period, so when I had the money, I stacked up 99 heal potions and could more or less ensure my saftey, even when fighting quite tough mobs, as long as I could chug potions and the amount healed was bigger than the damage taken I would be ok.

I found as a gun toting ranger, my damage ability was impaired quite a bit, so I also dabbled in swords, axes etc, and started to make much faster progress. So I used my melee abilities quite heavily to finish quests and level up swiftly, and only when I started to find better guns, could I return to levelling my ranged skills. Even though I was a ranger, it seemed as if I could chose to live the life of a melee warrior almost. Dual wielding some rather nice looking swords, I was one cool robot assassin at one point. The specials have enough 'cool value' to make you want to do them again and again. Enchanced effects and really cool acrobatics were the order of the day. All japanese kill style.

There were some high level (named 'Ace') monsters kicking around even in the newbie yard, and you had to be careful not to draw their aggro. They would sometimes notice you attacking a newbie dino, and join in, pursuing you quite a way. This pursuit also meant it was easy enough for someone to train the nasty onto you. The chat channels were thick with people shouting about kill stealing. That went on all night. The game doesn't protect you from Kill stealing whatsoever. In fact with the servers and kill areas chock full of players, you had to ensure you'd do enough damage on a monster as you grabbed its attention, or someone would swoop in and hit it hard and then the kill credit would go to them. As I levelled towards 12, there was an area that was so full of players you'd end up getting one in five of the kills you'd started. That was a bit ridiculous. But I put it down to the gamut of beta players levelling at approximately the same pace as me, and hitting a monster bottleneck.

Parts of the game I didn't manage to sample where the ore collecting, and the PvP. Some determined players already had reached the level limit of 30, and had amassed a PvP force at the appropriate PvP area, and any new players who stumbled out there were being executed by them. Many heated comments about joining the wrong side etc were littered throughout the chat channels. As well as mention of the fact that sometimes PvP come down to who had more health potions. Which didn't sound encouraging.

Weapons and armour seemed to be graded according to level, with certain levels opening up new types of armour and weapons. Such as level 15 being the gateway to the launcher style guns, big heavy duty grenade and rocket launchers which seemed very popular with the robotic rangers. Some armour was tailored with certain skills in mind, such as the Accretia "launcher" armour, which had stats to boost your launcher skill. You also had yellow special weapons with boosted stats (known as the 'intense' weapons), or even purple weapons that were rare and more powerful. A bug existed with the purple ranged weapons at the time (where the stats didn't kick in, or something like that), so the general vibe was go intense weapons if you are a ranger for now.

The musical accompaniment to the whole process was rather splendid, from the wistful login page to the battle chants and emotive racial scores. In fact I liked the music so much, the mp3 score is sitting on a memstick awaiting my attention.

All in all, it was straightforward and stylish. Limited interface and very simplified quest mechanics. Cannot comment on how the PvP will pan out, but the PvE game seems only geared to making a level 30 PvP player out of you. very little in the way of story. However, since I started it at about 8pm, and didn't surface until I had a level 12 Accretian Ranger at 2am, I was embroiled in the experience, and the combat remained satisfyingly exciting.

Cosmic Encounter

Here I am, still ill as a dog, with some viral throat/ear/chest infection, can't sleep, gargling with my own juices, and I stumble upon a rather fetching web based board game conversion called Cosmic Encounters.

COSMIC ENCOUNTER ONLINE


It's all about battling against and with 3 other aliens, to land a colony on their homeworlds. You send ships out to the encounter, and then you recruit allies, and then you throw encounter pods into the battle to boost the attack points, or negotiate booty from the encounter. It's all rather bewildering at first, and I'd recommend going through the quite well put together tutorials, before venturing into a real game. I stumbled into a game as a Guest and watched the fireworks and my mind explode. It is quite simple, but it has certain subtleties that are not obvious. The obvious subtlety is that the alien race you are randomly assigned (one of six in the free or guest game), each having a specific special power that usually defines their mode of play. Like each ship actually having the power of 4 ships for the offensive alien race. Or one where the oppositions encounter pod value is revealed to them before they select theirs, or, one where losing a battle can be turned on its head as a win. I've found, with the limited number of games I've played that even though theres a lot of rallying together with the aliens, this isn't a game of loyalty, its more a game of selective diplomacy. You win the game if you gain 4 new colonies on other worlds. If you kick an alien off three of his home worlds he loses his special ability. And there are artifact pods, that have special functions that can be played at crucial times to negate powers, release ships trapped in warp and to destroy opponents ships etc. All in all, the more you play it, the more woven the secret to winning seems to become.

As a free account, you only have a limited number of aliens available to you. If you're willing to cough up some money then you open up even more game specials and styles. It seems a perfectly interesting game with just the basic six though, at the moment. There didn't seem to be a lot of players online, around 20 when I logged on, but most of them were friendly and you can join a game with bots if you just want to test out your game without the competition of real people. It's a visual stylised feast of a game, works in Flash. Might be worth a look see for those slow lunchtime sessions, because the average game seemed to last about 20 minutes.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

What I am about to write, will most certainly be biased heavily towards the positive. I like Ghost in the Shell. I like the Anime, the Manga, the concept, the stories, the whole shooting match. So the chance to play a game based around the anime is quite a dream for me. This isn't a novelty though, because I've played the PS1's Ghost in the Shell game too. And I liked that too. Anyway, with that out of the way, GiTS:SAC is quite a competent 3rd person action platformer. Most of the usual 3rd person action dynamics are there, the jumping, crouching, clinging, side-shuffling, shooting, melee combat are all in place. It could almost be described as Tomb Raider-esque, with bigger guns. What makes GiTS:SAC stand out for me, is that all this 'expected' action takes place inside an episode of GiTS:SAC. If you stripped away the narrative, and the nuggets of information thrown at you, or the lovely rendered cut scenes, then you'll have a bog standard 3rd person action platformer. The fact that it is gelled together in a typical GiTS story line, and you get to play either Major Motoko Kusanagi, or her trusty beefcake sidekick Batou is icing on the cake, which will probably do it for fans of the series, and make no difference whatsoever to the ambivalent gamer.', 'The control mechanism for the game is quite odd to begin with, there are a lot of basic moves, such as shoot that are assigned to the L1 shoulder button, whilst melee was L2 and jump was R2 and grab was R1. Essentially you could perform all the main assault or platform moves from the shoulder buttons leaving your thumbs permanently attached to the two analogue sticks, for constant position and aiming control. Once you get used to it, its quite a nice setup, but it does have that learning curve when you feel like you're fumbling around and whacking shoulder buttons without reason. There is an unfortunate double click on the jump button that basically does a spectacular 360 flip through the air, looks brilliant, but is annoying if you're trying to grasp that ledge and have mistakenly double tapped the jump, when you meant to single tap the grasp.

The Major is wonderfully rendered and she has the more supple and lithe moves of the two. Her wall jumping and mid-air acrobatics form the main core of all the games platformer sequences. Many of the levels take place on high complex structures that plunge you to a scary death, if your gymnastics stray. This can be a little frustrating, the same way the insta-death moments in some of the Tomb Raider series got on your wick. But, most of the danger can be avoided by performing the correct aerial tricks. Most of the platformer areas have a logical route through them, and with a bit of exploration and rooting around you can usually find the expected path. Whether you can perform the moves is a question of knowledge and dexterity mixed with a small amount of luck (sometimes). The Major excels at melee combat, so much so, that you enter a cool Matrix like Bullet Time as you land the killing blows. Melee however, doesn't use the complex button skills that the platform game requires, essentially you mash the L2 shoulder button as much as you can when you are in close proximity of the enemy. The kicks and punches fly according to quite spectacular animation of the Major and then you get to the coup de grace. It's pleasant action, that is great to watch, but slightly mundane to execute. I found with the Major, if you could position a jump properly to land in melee range, that knocking out all sorts of enemies with all sorts of kung fu moves was easier than having the troublesome bother of aiming you current weapon sight and letting rip with sub machine guns or assault rifles. The gun kill was often longer to achieve and much more unreliable, playing as the Major.

Batou is a big hulking character with a penchant for big guns and lots of them. You can forget the acrobatics, you can forget melee combat, get the guns out and start spraying. He's also quite a dab hand with the sniper rifle. Gun play in the game is surprisingly satisfying. You only have 2 gun slots though, so you have to pick and choose as you navigate an area. The shotgun is a nice one-shot put down, but it has limited ammo, and difficult to re-load without finding other enemies wielding the same gun. So you generally end up with a bog standard SMG (which can be restocked with ammo from most kills) and a specialist weapon of choice for that level, such as a large rocket or grenade launcher or sniper rifle.

The puzzle elements to the game come in the form of obtaining permission codes from specific enemy, where you hack their corpses and gain the appropriate data, you can then open a give door, or turn on a specific mechanism to progress through the level. There are instances where you "ghost hack" an enemy soldier, or robot, and you can control them for a limited time period. However in order to gain access to the ghost, you have to match locking spinning discs, in a kind of timing puzzle. It begins out fairly easy, but as you progress through the game, this ghost hacking becomes very challenging indeed. The discs spin quite fast and your brain has to match a circular pattern of peaks with a large circular pattern of troughs. Since they're both spinning fast in different directions it starts to get a little spooky and difficult. If you can pull it off, then you can gain extra recon info using robots or there was one level where you could ghost hack a sniper in a tower, then proceed to snipe all the other snipers in their other towers. Specifically focussing on that sniper level, you were in a dockyard with a bunch of sniper towers overlooking the area. As you enter and move around, you notice between cover that a laser sight beam focuses on your head, you have to be nimble and quick to move out of the way, because if not, you get the slow-mo headshot animation and the Major is no more. You had to cleverly use cover, and duck and weave tactics to get through that level. Really enjoyed the sense of impending doom as soon as the laser sight scoped in on you.

Overall, GiTS:SAC doesn't do anything astoundingly new, but what it does do, is give you almost an episode of GiTS:SAC that you can participate in. The original voice actors of the TV series do all the voices in the game, that adds to the authenticity of the game, that takes the action game above its acceptable level of gameplay, and into the realms of being involved with your favourite anime. Of course if you aren't a fan then I think your experience of the game will be only satisfactory.

Untold Legends

I finally got my copy of Untold Legends, and it is good. You'll enjoy it if you like Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance, or Champions of Norrath, or Dungeon Heroes style action RPG. It's an action button masher make no mistake. From my brief play, it seems to give you a lot of cool equipment up front, like weapons with specials and trinkets to enhance your armour, way before it feels like you should be earning those sort of things as loot. I mean I've got some modifier runes installed on the rough patchwork stuff I was given when I started the adventure at level 1! From the few bosses I have encountered it still seems like the game can present a challenge. But it just feels a little wrong to have a level 2 alchemist wander about with a glowing and shimmering double headed axe.

The classes seem a bit odd, Knight, Beserker, Druid and Alchemist. They all rely on melee a lot, even the Alchemist, with casting really only providing support damage to the melee. I guess in the single player game, then you're going to have to melee more often than not, simply because you have no-one to stand at the front and take the damage, whilst you waggle your fingers. Tried a Druid too, although again at these levels I'm guessing melee figures big in the only way to progress.

The graphics are excellent, and you can zoom close in for some hot boss action, or pull out to watch the horde fall. The play areas seem a little too small, but dungeons tend to consist of lots of these small rooms interconnected, with a boss at the end. Some story, enough to get you to the next quest boss.

The action is non stop, frenzied fun though. This is the definitive action RPG game your'e going to get on a handheld for a while, nearest thing you'll get to it though, is the Lord of the Rings diablo-fest on the GBA. And if you're comparing the two, theres no comparison.

If only my fat hands wouldn't ache so much using that bleeding analogue PSP thumbtack. Why they situated it at the bottom of the console, so that youre like pinching the handheld and twiddling your thumb in small circles is beyond me. I'd have much preferred it if they'd have swapped the d-pad with the thumbtack, since most of the games I have use the tack.

Alien Shooter

Fook me this is the biz, the bees nollocks! Imagine unimaginable amounts of alien horde swarming towards you in narrow science lab hallways, breaking out of walls and generally coming to dismember you. Then imagine having a leather clad honey (or leather clad butch) depending on your persuasion, with twin desert eagles blazing away, with shells falling all around, and pulsing techno beats rattling your brain. Then imagine, if you will, picking up a shotgun and emptying that into the green menace, out comes your minigun and you chain spray them all over the walls, they still keep coming, so you flip out the grenade launcher and thin them out a touch, to nail them hard with your plasma gun, instantly turning them into mulched goo! Nightvision equipped its time to crawl through another dark infested lab.

http://www.sigma-team.net/alienshooter/index.htm

Time limited demo available for download. I just bought the full version for £12 (inc VAT). It's isometric top down view (ala Diablo etc), it uses the WASD or cursor keys for movement (or right clicking the mouse) and it uses the left click of the mouse to empty your chambers. So the firing and the movement are separate mechanisms (ala Zax the Alien Hunter). My favourite. Gives you plenty of options to backtrack and lay suppressing fire, or circle strafe round a leggy horde to drop a grenade in the middle. The environments are nicely constructed with blowable walls, and doors that need power to open them, and walls that burst holding fecking millions of the things. The nasties are suitably menacing in very large numbers, bigger bipedal aliens and spitting crawlers etc are all there.

Blowing shit up hasn't been this good for a long time, and the action is relentless. You collect money and ammo on the way, health here and there. You use the money to buy equipment before the next mission. The bint decked out in full red armour (90% damage absorbtion) carrying a minigun is pretty impressive. The music is nice, although I haven't heard many different tracks, it goes plinky plonky for a while, until the horde start emerging then it picks up with the pounding techno, "kill em all". Theres one slight niggle, in that if you use the mouse totally to move and shoot, the pathing AI of your character to the next click point, is virtually non-existent. She'll bang into the wall in a straight line more or less and won't move unless you click somewhere else. This isn't a problem at all if you prefer the more responsive keyboard movement control mechanism. I wouldn't advise using the mouse for both movement and shooting, it slows the action down because you're having to worry about getting to where you want to be, whereas with WSAD I'm already there, and I'm already circling the perimeter of a seething mass of nasties. Gun sounds are great. Empty shells make a clink as they hit the ground! I try to keep the minigun stocked with ammo at all times, but for clearing the wooden boxes that sometimes carry equipment, the two pistols are sufficient. They have infinite ammo. Be careful not to clip a oxygen tank strewn across the floor or kaboom baby, say goodbye to that red armour. You can use the liberally sprinkled oil cans and gas tanks in the environment to organise ambushes that will take only a single bullet to initiate.

Top bloody stuff, this. If you like masacre of aliens on a grand scale its worth a butchers.