Gamespy's Review for RO2 is Up

[Strafbattalion21]

Most fun I've ever had with a 'broken' game. If people think this launch is a disaster...well, maybe I've been immunized by CoD (IL2 Cliffs of Dover). Yes, this has some issues and I guess some of them are serious, more or less according to the capricious whims of fate, but I'm just pretending my character was on a bender the night before battle. He can still fight it up a storm. I would like my day-1 unlocks though. And a working ranking system (I hunger for medals and stuff).

I shall now make use of the patch-waiting time and return to building my RO2 website, details of which will soon appear in the clan section. Oh yes, I like RO2 that much I'm building a unit for it. Yay!

 

[Pentekont]

If other gaming websites will give RO2 similar score, we can expect a lot of new players soon

 

[Richey79]

TWI got a bit lucky here.

What I really mean is that circumstances conspired to allow them to get the score their game deserved on this site.

Gamespy just took a new guy on a couple of months ago who has a genuine interest in PC gaming: anyone else noticed the hardware reviews and reviews of PR Arma 2, Minecraft news and various other PC mods?

Bravo to Gamespy, anyway. When they have a reviewer who knows which dev teams patch and support their games, they show themselves to be of a higher quality.

 

[Nenjin]

He went easy on them for the technical side of things, but that's because he knows Tripwire. I agree they mostly got the score from GS the game warrants. He just waxed over the parts of the game that are buggy or that are in desperate need of polish (squad everything) by saying pick it up in a month or two. I suppose that's reasonably fair.

 

[Sensemann]

Ok, good to see some positive feedbacks from magazines. I for one, don't trust any of the magazines reviews.
I loved RO1, which got a 78 on a big german game magazine. Since then, every CoD got scores over 90s all the time. I hated all of them.
One of my former classmates happens to work for that magazine and when I met him again last year, he told me that the tests of the games are not reliable at all. Many testers are bound to give good scores to games like CoD, because it's them providing them with the money that comes through advertising. No big magazine can risk losing CoD-developers marketing money for the 2 pages full advert in their magazine by simply giving them a below 80 score due to lack of content or scripted gameplay.
Furthermore, I was told that many testers simply have to test so many games that they cannot put more than 5-10 hours of real game time into the game for which they still have to write an article about. Now CoD and many other games are so easy to learn and to control (thanks to the need of being able to play it with a gamepad on console), that testers are judging accessibility not just as that but sth like: "within 5 hours of game testing I was good at it and saw so much, this is an intense game...".

I for one go via recessions from players that write their feedback online. Those guys are usually more critical to gameplay and so-called "innovations" that EA etc. advertise, but that common people would call "dumping down gameplay".

RO 2 is installing at the moment and I hope it's finished when I am back home. If I get screwed by bugs/CTDs or performance issues, then I wait for patches. It's not that I don't have a life that offers me nothing else than gaming. I know however, that TWI will optimize and debug the game.

 

[Verluste]

For a pressional gamecompany like TWI the cons are pretty shameful and serious.

 

[Thaelyn]

For a pressional gamecompany like TWI the cons are pretty shameful and serious.

Not at all, in my opinion. I've played much buggier releases from far larger development teams. Many of those still aren't fixed yet. Given the size of the Tripwire team and the scope of what they've tried to do, this release has gone smoother than experience has taught me I have any reasonable right to expect. I generally expect, as a result of said experience, that if I get a game on launch day I shouldn't expect to play it for at least a day or two (hence why I rarely by on launch day). I was in game in RO2 within minutes of it being activated on Steam and I haven't crashed in the release build at all. The crashes that some people are still getting, though, are of concern even if I am lucky enough to not have that particular issue.

 

[Sir Roderick]

LIGHT machine gun, dammit!

 

[Pinball Jones]

Really good review.

I am glad he touched on some features that haven't been getting a lot of love yet: the excellent music, voices, suppression, morale system and how it all combines to immerse the player into the most brutal battlefields of ww2. Not only is there some great game innovation here, but some wonderful artistry as well.

 

[OnCrack]

I think the correct way would have been waiting for a bug fixing patch and then do the review, 4.5/5 seems a bit too much considering the game is live from 1 day and it has been released in the current buggy condition. Technical aspects of a game are very important. I am not a big fun of reviewers who give away high scores too early or bad scores too easily, also you review the game no the company. So this vote seems to me a bit rushed. a 4.5/5 after the game had been patched would have been deserved and correct, but now I wouldn't rate it more than 3/5. But still opinions are different!

 

[casmeo]

Nice score

 

[dazman76]

LIGHT machine gun, dammit!

heh, good spot A lot of non-military people, who also don't play many military games, make this mistake. Hell, when I was at school, everything that appeared to be automatic was a "machine gun" - while that's technically accurate, I didn't hear or see any distinction between the types of MG until I started playing the relevant FPS games. Even then, I cared little about it!

Getting into RO:CA changed my attitude towards that, and I do now have an interest in the weapons and technology of the time. I'd love to get a Mosin Nagant, but I doubt that's going to happen heh

 

[Domingo_Chavez]

Very good review. TWI should be proud. Well written, fair and reasonably accurate critique. This is a very good assessment of the game.