Shooting Games #1
So I recently finished Halo Reach. It was quite good. The fact that Halo has been around for almost 10 years, has barely changed gameplay-wise, and is still pretty good, says something about the shooter genre.
I think I have now played enough shooting games that I know what's good and what isn't. I could probably make a fantastic shooting game with this knowledge, but I don't want to so I won't.
What I will do, however, is occasionally list one good element and one bad element of shooting games in general. So here we go:
GOOD ELEMENT: Recharging health.
Remember when shooting games used to make us collect health packs to restore our health? Yeah, it was shit. It used to break the flow of the game, and led to some massively annoying checkpointing issues. Well done Halo for a) inventing regenerating health, and b) justifying the recharging of the health by calling it a shield. Less well done all the games that came after, where the protagonists magically recover from bullet wounds after 10 seconds for no real reason. But hey, at least its not as annoying as having to collect health packs.
And yes, I know the more recent Halo games reintroduced health packs, but this made them a bit more shitty so we'll ignore that for now.
BAD ELEMENT: The bit where you wait for an elevator or something while baddies infinately spawn at you.
Almost every shooting game does this at some point, and it's one of the worst bits of gameplay filler ever. Halo Reach does it 3 or 4 times. You know the bit; where you press and elevator button, and the elevator starts coming, but takes an excruciatingly long time, and then a load of baddies turn up and you have no choice but to shoot them all while you wait for it.
Halo's version has one character hack...something, and you have to 'defend' them until they're finished. It's still shit. Developers: please never put this gameplay mechanic in your games ever again. Is it too much to ask to press and elevator button and have the elevator actually arrive, like, on time, and without four hundred baddies appearing?
