After that first mission to rescue the old guy at the farm, the game opens up completely and leaves the player to fend for himself. “Take down El Sueno by any means necessary!” Bowman growls. Then the game basically tells you to go wherever you want and hit the cartel’s bases in whatever order you’d like.
If you go into the game map, you can hit a button to bring up a relationship chart of the Santa Blanca cartel. The lieutenants portraits have another hidden button to bring up little intro briefings for each of them. I have no idea if these movies pop up later in the campaign as part of the story, but you can watch them all right there at the beginning of the game if you dig into that screen.
This is sort of how the whole game works. Stuff is there. It’s just buried or hidden in favor of presenting an unrestricted open world to the player. For some people, that’s going to be great. They want game stories to get out of the way of their emergent playtime. For others, this makes the game world seem aimless and grindy.
What I did is to hit “Matchmake in coop” as soon the game loaded. Because I have no idea or concept of playing this type of game alone.
How the difficulty works? If I set difficulty to arcade, do bullets do less damage to me in coop than somebody with a extreme dificulty setting? I was playing in arcade, and other guy in extreme. Dunno how that works.
Also, there are too many awesome games :D I could be playing horizon instead of tryiing to make sense of this one.
I’m not clear on that either. As far as I can tell in SP testing, bullets are just as deadly in Arcade as Extreme to the player, it’s just that enemies are a lot more accurate and aggressive in Extreme. Expect the bad guys to plink you with headshots in Extreme.
In co-op though, I have no idea. I couldn’t really tell because the bit I played with another person, we were running around like idiot Rambos, so I wasn’t really keeping track of what the enemy was doing.
What’s weird is that in SP you get three AI buddies. In co-op, you only get as many human buddies as you join. That means that if you co-op with one friend, that’s it. Your squad will only have two people. You and your buddy. Are the encounters actually balanced for just two people?
Early on, (at least as far as I’ve gotten) it’s cake to just solo your way through everything. You can literally command the AI buddies to stay put while you buzzsaw through a dozen guys. Later though, when more heavily armored foes fill huge bases, are those areas going to work with your brain-dead AI? Or just one other co-op player? I’m interested in finding out.
Yes, sort of. I’m not ready to say how I feel about GRW just yet, but this is no Crackdown.
Crackdown had treasure hunt challenges built in to the game with the orb collecting. GRW doesn’t have anything like that. You can collect info documents and little doodads, but it’s just typical Ubistuff icon hunting. You walk over to the thing and get it. The core gameplay mechanic of walking around and shooting bad guys is always the same whether it’s base infiltration, rescuing someone, or getting in somewhere to gather bits. There’s no platforming or traversal gameplay. It’s all scoot and shoot.
So far, that shooting is pretty good. At least, I like it more than The Division’s bullet-sponginess. Here, a headshot is a headshot, which is the way I like it.
Never approach a mission gun-ho. Always scan for enemies first.
Anyone in the coop team can suggest a new mission.
Our infantry rebels can be useful sometimes, like the “distract” skills can be usefull for the radio missions where you have to defend a radio for waves.
Some of the convoys are actually destroy the convoy!, way easier since mines are a cheap unlockable.
I figure out why the flying model is so weird: is activelly tryiing to be easy to use, the chopper try to continue with the original speed no matter what the actual ship do, so is kind of weird and disconnected, is all about to build momentum in the direction you want and then let it go there. I can work with this. The plane is somewhat like that, but more natural, I think I can land the plane in a dolar coin.
You can quicktravel to any teammate (thats gets you nearby him, not in his vehicle or next to him) thats really usefull if the team spreads too much.
Things I don’t understand: how to properly repeat missions already completed, they sometimes don’t want to start (?).
I kind of like the chaos and the diferent map styles. Like … today I visited a swamp and a salt lake, cool stuff.
This is how they compensate for the AI squadmates not always picking the best routes through a base when you’re sneaking around. They just fudge it and make the enemies completely not see your buddies until open combat. It’s a necessary trick because the only other option would be for your buddies to stumble around and constantly blow your stealth approach, which would be frustrating to say the least.
But it’s so damn clumsy. It completely draws me out of the game every time I see it happen. I’ve literally watched an enemy saunter right past one of my guys standing out in the open. He practically said, “Excuse me!” as my goofball soldier stood on the sidewalk.
Far from the first game to go this route. Remember plenty of times seeing an infected totally ignore Ellie in Last of Us instead of trying to chomp down on her as we sneaked around.
Sure, but there’s nothing else here. GRW has a barebones story, no setpieces, no puzzles, and no character interaction. It’s just a vehicle for co-op shooting. Other games hide this stuff with other activities or giving the player some story meat to justify the AI flaws. Here, it’s just dumb-as-rocks AI not interacting with each other.
The AI is pretty dumb for sure. If I get a good covered vantage around a corner, they’ll just keep walking in single file for me to get headshot after headshot. Playing at the normal difficulty level.
What I’ll give this game, is that Bolivia looks gorgeous when you have all the bells and whistles turned on. Some of the set pieces (IE first boss fight) while not smartly scripted, are suitably discomforting. A torture Lodge. Urg. I also appreciated that at least the initial Cartel boss targets go down like normal humans. They’re not super tough video game enemies.
It’s a game that encourages you to be stealthy and tactical. You are far better served hiding around the perimeter making good use of your drone to mark targets and picking them off methodically instead of running in guns blazing. At least with my shooter skills!
