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GameSpot editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Mediocre
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 01/19/2005
- Released on: 01/07/2005
- Originally published on GameSpot: Airborne Troops: Countdown to D-Day (PlayStation 2) Review
World War II shooters are a dime a dozen these days, so there's no good reason to waste your time with a game as haphazardly produced as WideScreen Games' Airborne Troops: Countdown to D-Day. Airborne Troops was actually a Europe-only PC game released way back in late 2003, yet it's just now finding its way to US shelves on the PS2, with a silly new subtitle to boot. Even by 2003 standards, Airborne Troops is an extremely uninspired shooter that borrows endlessly from other World War II games, yet still manages to get almost nothing right. Thus, by 2005 standards, Airborne Troops is a wholly poor effort.
The title Airborne Troops is actually pretty deceptive, since there's only one troop, and he's airborne only in the opening cutscene.
In the beginning of the game, we are introduced to our protagonist, John Welsh, an American paratrooper who speaks with a vocal cadence resembling that of the guy who narrates all those movie trailers. John rambles on at length about an important mission he must embark upon that puts him in the heart of German-occupied France, though after a while, it all kind of turns into a form of white noise, as his melodramatic voice ceaselessly continues on about attractive female French resistance fighters, Nazis, and so on. There ultimately is no story worth caring about in this game, nor any characters worth sympathizing with, so it's tough to really get involved with any of what Airborne Troops puts in front of you. It's all just a slapdash excuse for you to run around shooting Nazis.
At heart, Airborne Troops is a third-person shooter with some exceptionally clunky shooting mechanics. You have a variety of period-correct pistols, rifles, and machine guns at your disposal as you navigate your way through many perilous French cities and landscapes, as well as a great deal of Nazi resistance. The L1 button works as a form of auto-aim, and the R1 button fires. Unfortunately, the auto-aim doesn't work the way you'd want it to. It veers off in weird directions, away from your closest target, often leading to a few extra hits you wouldn't take otherwise. The good news is that you can still manually aim your weapons, though even this doesn't always work. Pistols and machine guns get only a microscopic dot for an aiming reticle, and they often require almost ridiculous precision to hit a target properly. Rifles, on the other hand, are given a comically large reticle, and as long as a given enemy--no matter how far away--is in the reticle, you'll hit him 90 percent of the time. Even the method for switching weapons is silly, as you have to hold down the triangle button, which brings up a menu of weapons to select. You then have to press the left analog stick in the direction of your desired weapon to select it. In the heat of battle, with a group of Nazis shooting the hell out of you, this obnoxious method of weapon switching is at best inconvenient, and at worst painfully stupid.
And boy oh boy do the Nazis like to gang up on you. Of course, it's only natural that an enemy army would bear down on a single combatant such as yourself, but the trouble here is that even if, for example, you manage to shoot your way through what seems to be all the soldiers in a particular building, the game will simply spawn more at random intervals. This means that you have no hope of eliminating all the enemies in your path--that is, unless of course you can avoid drawing their ire. The game expects you to do this by remaining stealthy. The analog stick is pressure-sensitive, so if you lightly move the stick forward, you'll creep forth, and you can also press the L2 button to put John into a crouched position. You even have a stealth-kill move you can perform if you sneak up on an enemy. The problem, however, is that remaining undiscovered is often an utter impossibility. Enemies are constantly patrolling, many areas are heavily guarded, and there are never enough solid hiding spots, so there really is no way to properly sneak your way through the game. Ultimately, you're better off just taking the run-and-gun approach and hoping for the best.
All these gameplay elements really only equate to an experience that is thoroughly mediocre, so you may be asking yourself what pushes the game over the line into markedly poor territory. The answer is the game's almost incomprehensibly dumb mission design. Initially, you may not even realize how bad it is. You mainly just have to run through each level, getting from point A to point B, shooting bad guys, and achieving certain level objectives. These objectives are never exactly difficult, as all you ever have to do is find a specific objective icon in a level, walk over to it, and press the action button. The problem arises when you inadvertently finish a level without completing all the required objectives, and are forced to do the entire thing over again.
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Airborne Troops: Countdown to D-Day (PlayStation 2):
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