When I criticized the linearity Nimsky I was meaning it more along the same lines as Grobut. I understand it's a design choice, but there are moments where the game pushes you along when you want to have a bit of a poke about, when you get to 'curse' is a perfect example.
Yeah that's an issue every time you're not alone, the game really forces the need to scavenge all the ammo and items you can find, and it's scattered about in many semi-hidden places, which is good, only your AI companions have nothing but disdain for your desire to stay alive, and will charge onwards at a relentless pace.
Now granted, they have provided a few places where the AI will stop and wait for you, only there's to few of them, and if you let them run ahead, they might run into a scripted mutant attack and die, or they will deliver some scripted dialog you needed to hear when they get to one of the stop points, only you wont hear it because you are trying to loot corpses and traincars so you have enough ammo to survive the next fight aswell.. and if you just follow them, they wont stop, and you wont get any ammo.
This creates a really annoying mechanic whenever you have a buddy with you, as you have to run ahead and not only kill anything in their path so they don't die, but also try to search everything for loot before they run off ahead and get themselves killed or make a mess of the story by telling you importrant things you arent there to hear.
Also do you guys wonder why killing someone by throwing or stabbing them with the throwing knife (yes you can stab with the throwing knives secondary fire) kills an enemy silently. Yet if you use your regular knife, even if you get a clean head swing and instant kill, it treats it like a gun shot and alerts everyone?
Yeah that's an odd one, but i'm also not fond of how only a clean headshot seems to count as a stealth kill, all that should matter is that he died before he could yell out to his buddies or fire his gun, but often, if he doesen't die in one shot, then sound or not, all his buddies will somehow have heard it and go into alert mode.
This is why stealth really doesen't work in this game, you can't lean so that makes it hard to make a sneaky kill, and you have to get it right for every enemy, only, even the best guns lack power and accuracy, and sometimes the enemy wears helmets that will shatter instead of you getting the kill (and other times they die and the helmet doesen't shatter, i think it may be random).
I can nitpick the hell out of this game, there's lots of small but very dumb design choices in there, but you know, the only reason i care about them is that the game is really good overall, it's the whole "the clouser you come to perfection, the more glaring any error seems" thing.
So far, I think it's a very good game. One thing that I don't like is that you can't use the iron sights on the shotguns, and I have the crosshairs disabled. That makes aiming a bit difficult sometimes.
