Elite Force 2 Demo Impressions

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Alright, here is my best impression of the Elite Force 2 demo. *Ahem*

"Look at me, I'm Elite Force 2! If you jammed any more over-used game devices into me I'd kill your desire to ever play games again!"

Let's see here, the opening of the first mission has you starting in a room full of crates as small insect-like aliens attack you. When you kill them, they explode (hold on to your hats!) in a spray of green goo. Once you kill the initial rush of critters you have to jump over some gaps that (oh man, I'm gonna nut!) have fire shooting across them every five seconds. So you have to jump across the gaps in those brief moments when there isn't any fire shooting out. Man, it's innovation city around here!

Ok, sarcasm off now. The Elite Force 2 demo is fast paced, good looking, clean running (Quake III engine), tight controlling and somewhat fun even though it contains no originality what-so-ever. It's worth a download and a quick play though to see for yourself but those of you on dial-ups may want to wait for it to hit a magazine cover CD. I don't think I'll be buying the full game unless the multiplayer has something a bit more original than the singleplayer demo.

Comments

These might as well have been my impressions.  I'd have added something about terrible dialogue, a contrived plot, and the imbedded excuse that the aliens attack mindlessly and seem unaware of their surroundings as a clever excuse for crappy AI, but I probably wouldn't have wasted that many words.  I was pretty disappointed.

...has you starting in a room full of crates...

Enough said.

I don't agree with the consensus here.

The game is mostly MOTS. But, it's a load of fun. It's got a difficult to describe quality to it that reminds me of nothing so much as the original Half-Life.

The artwork, animation, and special effects are first rate. The dialog and voice acting, while not that special, are better than 95% of the rest of the games out there.

It's exactly what Unreal 2 failed to be, a GOOD action shooter.

I agree it isn't as bad as certis makes it out to be. I liked the first elite force a lot and although this one hasn't hooked me yet I did like a few of the things I saw. It is a good looking game though.

I made a brief second run through of the demo to see if there's something here everyone else sees that I'm missing.  While it's clearly seen high production values, has plenty of scripted events, and plays smoothly, the actual game just doesn't inspire me.  The weapons feel soft (though, admittedly Ritual's going to hold the big guns back), the aliens feel like walking targets and exhibit no interesting behavior, and there are so many FPS cliches in just the demo that I wonder how many they could have packed into the whole game.  I'm glad many of you were impressed, because I sure wasn't.

I agree with Elysium.

I actually enjoyed the demo. I liked the searching and the idea of the "structural integrity" searchtool on the tricorder. I liked the "System Shock 2" puzzle.

Sadly, it ran like crap on my system. I guess the new version of the Q3 engine has overloaded my poor PC.