Customer Reviews

Instinct

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This example, another from Eastern Europe, specifically Russia, is a

Very good, long and absorbing First-Person-Shooter.

Game-site critics have little positive to say about it; I suspect a bit of

negative-post-cold-war bias on their part and also surmise that many of

these critics did not play the game clear through.

CONS: Somewhat dated graphics and a stuttering story-line that is

difficult to follow.

PROS: Exciting and fun to play, with excellent replay value, mindful of

other top-drawer games such as F.E.A.R.[though not as scary] and Iron

Storm.

Would highly recommend this game to any and all FPS fans!

This game would probably be ok if it came out in 2004 and if some of it's shortcomings were rectified.

Basically, it takes place in kind of an underground bioweapons lab environment. Stuff went wrong, so now the place is crawling with zombies and bad guys. All speaking is in Russian and you have to bring up a "journal" to translate it. I would have preferred subtitles to the journal thing. I read much of the translations and watched most of the story-board style cut scenes, but you could probably play the game without knowing much of was said.

You play three different characters, one after the other, that are in different places, but in voice contact with each other. However, time jumps around, so you repeat some time frames as a different character in a different place. You hear the same things being said on the radio, but this time from the perspective of the person on the other end. While the time stamps are hard to follow, the game plays like a simple linear FPS. I thought the switching of characters was novel way to introduce a bit more variety to the game. Each have different weapons, too.

Graphics and setting were dated. You'll notice that there is a distance slider in the video setting menu. I thought that might be a "field of View" setting, but it doesn't change field of view. I noticed there's a check box for DOF, which would be Depth of Field, so it must be for that. In any case, I didn't see any change when I moved it. I might have been doing something wrong, though. In any case, distant objects all seemed a bit fuzzy which I found to be a little annoying.

I had a lot of trouble getting the game to run. The Starforce security system asked for a "disc key" and there was no disc key included with the game. After many emails, returned games, I found out that the game is not supposed to ask for a key. It's supposed to read it from the disc. I found that out by loading the game successfully on another computer. I finally got help from Starforce who sent me a link to a program that read the key from the disc. I sent them that key and they sent back a key that I could enter manually to run the game. Everything worked fine after that (sort of). This is not an uncommon problem because in searching the web I came across several complaints of exactly the same thing. I think it has to do with an incompatibility with Vista and Starforce or something

Overall, I'd say this game is ok for $10 or less. I didn't find it particularly long or challenging, but it was still fun in a mindless kind of way. I played the game right out of the box without checking for or installing any patches and had no crashes or lockups. I didn't get stuck in the game where I couldn't move. Overall, it played fairly smoothly.

I haven't finished playing this XP based game yet, but so far it is OK. It is a typical XP style game with FPS characteristics. You are some sort of a Russian commando and you have missions to accomplish along with another one (or two) helpers (sort of like Soldier of Fortune) that show up and drive trucks so you can shoot the bad guys. They are speaking in Russian and it has English subtitles so the language hasn't been an issue. Pretty much straight forward shoot, move, pull levers, shoot, shoot. A decent game I bought out of curiosity as the XP game era is closing out but I'm keeping my old XP platform for posterity.