Yes they are, and on PC they are more like Ghost Recon 1, no run and gun COD stuff but all about pin and flank, slow and steady wins the game. You can watch videos on Youtube to see if it is your cup of tea. I have it on disk somewhere but a) I don’t think it will run on Win10 and b) probably fugly to my modern eyes.
I have it on Steam, runs perfectly on Win10, but like many games of that era, it is SO BROWN.
It must be some regional lock issue, because I can’t find them in the steam store.
I can’t either. It must’ve been available at one time but no longer.
As I said, the GRAW games on PC aren’t available anywhere (and haven’t been for several years now). Apparently, it’s due to an engine licensing issue, since the games were made by Grin and used a different engine than then the console versions.
I have to say, this game in general is both muddled and rather entertaining. It’s muddled because, well, it’s caught somewhere between several different types of games, and the systems it tries to combine end up being more like a jumble of stuff than an integrated whole. It’s entertaining though because the moment to moment stuff is pretty darn good. The gunplay is satisfying, the tools you have to work with are interesting, and if you approach it with the right frame of mind, the set-piece battles like taking on a facility or firebase can be fun.
That’s a problem, though, because if you don’t approach fights with the right frame of mind, you will instantly notice the things other folks have pointed out. If you approach bad guys from certain directions or in certain ways, like climbing up a ladder to their sniper perch or falling down a hillside, rolling up to their watch station, they often won’t notice you. They have horrible radio discipline and always jabber on, even if there’s only one of them left. The Wolves are tougher, and marginally smarter, maybe, but overall the bad guys are like bad guys in all the Ubi open-world games. Me, i adjust, and view the set-piece fights like little puzzles or enjoyable fidget spinners. That keeps me from thinking too much about the idiots I’m slaughtering.
Welcome to Ubisoft.
Well, yeah. I love Ubisoft open-world games, despite all of their weirdnesses. They all share a few of these things in common, for sure.
Does it have equivalents for the Wildlands mission types - defend the radio dish, breach the comm centre, kidnap the leader etc?
There are side missions, that I have not explored yet, where the descriptions include stuff like stealing a truck or freeing a prisoner, etc. Don’t know how varied they are or how the compare to Wildlands’ missions, but they seem on the surface to be at least roughly similar.
Couple of hours in, having a good time. My fear of limited landscapes seem unfounded… but that UI :/
What parts of the UI are bugging you? It’s a bit clunky, for sure, making it harder to shift loadouts and consumables and stuff than it should be, and actually tracking quests is an exercise in, I dunno, something annoying. Those are my main issues.
Sliding down the hills is annoying as hell.
A thousand times this. Add to that the porn-movie grunting and moaning the civilians engage in every time you’re near by (no holster weapon command as in Willdlands, not that I’ve found at least), the inane barks I’ve noted before (“You’re in my personal space!” “Whoa, slow your roll there!”), and on a more mechanical note, the sheer awkwardness of CQB when you are up against cover and have to turn around rapidly to shoot someone. The game does not handle that third-person close in view very well, and there’s a nasty delay in getting hipfire shots on target sometimes, if you’re in the process of turning near obstacles.
But, I do like playing this stupid thing. Even if every weapon upgrade is…well, hard to tell if it’s an upgrade.
Right, the quest UI. Some way in I’m still not sure I know how it works… when do I have to ‘Resolve’ stuff again? Maybe it’s brilliant and I lack the eyes to see, Van Gogh style.
I like the sliding down hills, and all the related animations about interacting with the landscape. Go slow or go around :)
It’s not the animations, it’s the sounds, which are, to me, kind of bizarre, like Nomad isn’t actually a SpecOps bad ass but, I dunno, some guy working at the 7-11 making Slurpees who happened to get lost on an exotic island filled with guns.
The quest UI is Byzantine, and I have yet to figure it out. Nor have I figured out why, every time I log in, the game tells me I’ve finished some tutorial quests, but it’s the same ones each time. They seem to give me experience each time, so I guess it’s ok, but it’s odd.
Also, money seems to be not an issue, though I have no idea what to use money for. Nothing seems useful.
@Jason_McMaster should come in here sometime and sing the game’s praises like he did on the latest Qt3 Games Podcast.
My Nomad is a woman, and presumably sounds different :) I did notice the civilians and the lack of holstering though. But I think we’d both agree these are things around the edge of the main gameplay, which is a lot of fun :)
Yeah, I still really like playing the game, as goofy as it is sometimes.
I’m loving the way camp smoke is visible across long distances, so you can see some off in the distance and set off on a real expedition to get over there. It makes the terrain meaningful. Rage actually did the same with its ‘Arks’. There was a vision mode that showed beams of light shining up into the sky from them which you could see from miles away. It made you engage with the landscape rather than the map. The Arks were where you found your sci-fi ability upgrades too, so it would have been a meaningful system but I think you could find them in less cool ways too.