Helo said:
Ok, Ive been playing it about a day and....this....is seriously lacking. I have a couple major beefs.
Gameplay- The training does NOT at all relate to the gameplay itself. For instance, to be a medic you have to sit through lectures and take tests. While the lectures are informative and interesting, they give you NO advantage on the field where you heal someone just by pressing and holding enter.
The training is only to give the player a sense of what training is like in the US army. It is not meant to improve your play all that much - practice is the only thing that does that.
The aiming system is clumsy with no real way to tell who your shooting at. Especially when theres not much light and everyboddy runs off in thier own direction its incredibly easy for someone to pop out of a corner, you hose them down only to discover it was your beloved team-mate. To make matters worse, from a few yards away, your team members and the enemy can look identical except for a few tiny little details that you dont have the time to take note of. If your wrong, your dead.
It takes time to get the hang of recognizing the enemy. In the real world, the enemy does not always look completely different from your friends or civilians. Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy. I rarely kill my teamates(except for accidental rpg...)
The sights are virtually useless, by the time you can draw bead on someone they've already killed you.
Actually, using the sights is much better than not. Your accuracy improves greatly. Once again, it only takes practice.
The control scheme is confusing and while it can be changed, its hard to get away from the overall setup. The logical sequence that most FPS games follow as far as control schemes go isnt followed and its confusing at time and bordering on carpel-tunnel syndrome inducing at others.
I find the controls quite similar to other FPS such as doom3. What buttons do you have trouble with? I personally didn't like the leaning buttons where they were.
The missions are not that innovative, you basically just kill eachother untill one team is gone.
You can kill eachother or you can complete all the objectives. It is the same for any FPS.
The visible distance in the game itself is not that great unless your on one of the few maps that isnt fogged in or dark which makes long-range fighting near impossible. You do get night-vision goggles, but they dramatically limit your field of vision and still dont make it any easier to discriminate between friend and foe, it just makes EVERYBODDY easier to see.
The weather effects and night/day only give the game more variety. If you don't like fog, or you don't like darkness, you don't have to play on maps with fog/darkness. I see it as greater difficulty = more fun.
Your able to throw smoke grenades to mask your movements, but all too often one or two smoke grenades blankets an area turning the game into an excersize in "spray-n-pray".
I haven't really seen this happen, except on Bridge, but that would be supressive fire, a tactic often used by the US army.
There are also a couple of glitches in the game that make for very agrivating game-play. Crouching or huddling behind objects and walls, sometimes bullets will pass through the object that your hiding behind. Normally said objects would STOP the bullets, hence why your usually hiding behind the object in the first place.
I haven't had any problems with this, but I guess no game is glitch free. Do you mean that you could be behind a wall and still get hit by someone on the other side? Or are you getting hit hiding in a tent or behind a bush?
Grenades also bounce in strange ways sometimes and those strange ways is back at you. Ive seen a grenade thrown at a solid wall go flying off to the left
You have to remember that grenades are not perfectly round objects, and walls are not always perfectly flat. I like the variation, and once you get the feel for throwing grenades, it's quite easy to get them to go where you want.
The honor system is confusing and not very well explained nor is how your able to gain new weapons.
You get honor points for killing opfor, completing objectives, and winning. You lose honor points when you die or when you kill your teammates. Once you reach level 15, you are eligable for Special Forces. In order to use a sniper rifle, you have to pass sharpshooting training. In order you use the M4, you have to pass Special Forces training. Other than that, all the weapons should be available.
When you die, you go into Spectator mode untill the round is finished. So if you die in the first 10 seconds, you could spend a long time just sitting there waiting for two players to complete a game of hide and seek.
Point is, don't die right away! If you do, watch the others to find out what you're doing wrong.
The honor system is everything in AA and even accidentally wounding annother player takes away honor. If your honor drops too low, you are automatically banned from all servers and have to start all over again. You get SERIOUSLY dinged in honor (-500) for getting kicked from a server, which can happen if the PunkBuster program detects an abnormality in a file that you didnt put there.
So the general confusion of battle can lead to you getting kicked out of games and even off the game entirely.
Just like in the military, if you aren't careful with who you're shooting at, you will be punished for it. The point is to teach you to identify your taget before you start shooting at it.
