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Video Game Review: Project Snowblind

First thing's first, let me just say I probably don't qualify as an "expert" when it comes to the first-person shooter genre - the last "Quake" I had the joy of playing was Quake II. Having moved that out of the way, I kind of loved this game.

Project: Snowblind is set in the future, and begins with you playing a mediocre lieutenant in some "Coalition" force that's doing peace-keeping duties in futuristic Hong Kong. At least, that's the story up until the end of the first act - when you die. You're then brought back to life with several "augmentations" (more of which come online during the course of the single player game) and have to do a bunch of dirty work for the Coalition.

The whole thing's surrounded in quite an involving experience - though not anywhere near to the depth of Half-life - that involves you returning to the same locations at least once and you become sufficiently involved that you find yourself thinking "woah, this place has gone downhill."

The controls and gameplay are similar to what you'd expect from a PS2 shooter - one analog stick walks, the other aims. The shoulder buttons enact primary/secondary firing of weapons, as well as - sigh of relief 0 throwing grenades. Yep, you don't actually have to put down your primary weapon toss a grenade.

The weapons are quite diverse, interesting and occasionally cool. Oh and I didn't mention the coolest part: the vehicles. You can either abscond with some vehicles, or use your "icepick" (a remote control hax0ring gun) to take over certain vehicles (death dealing robots and gun turrets anyone?) to positively wreak havoc on enemy lines without putting yourself in danger.

The AI is - unfortunately - not up to par with today's first person shooters. They appeared to me to even lack so much as a decent pursuit skill, and hiding around the corner with any of the larger weapons is generally enough to take them out.

As I've come to expect on any half-decent PlayStation2 software, Dolby Pro Logic II is supported, and sounds quite fantastic. The post-death "intro" sort of feels like the beginning of "Half-life" but without the massive tedium, though to be fair to HL, it's not as immersive either. It'd have been nice if the voices were lip synched a little better, but that's not a huge deal.

Considering the PS2 is owned by the Xbox as far as graphical aesthetics are concerned, this game is pretty gorgeous. The levels actually do feel quite epic - though the navigable area is often times small, you aren't constantly thinking "well why can't I walk over there?"

I did notice a couple of points where the engine had some noticeable slowdown, which is always a huge disappointment to me. Slowdown to me is acceptable only under certain situations on the PC platform, and it's my humble opinion it should never ever be present on commercial console software. Thus, it really irks me when it happens - especially on an otherwise decent game.

My other complaint? Well this is a pretty large one I'm afraid: It's too damn short! I began playing the night I got it, though space on my memory card was insufficient I figured "ahh, I won't play that long anyway." About three hours later I reasoned I could just start from the beginning the next day - and besides, I was enjoying myself.

I began playing again at around noon, from the start of the game, and (not counting an hour break in between) I'd beaten the game by about 8:30pm. That leaves us with give or take a day of serious one-player gaming. Personally, if I had spent $49.99 on this game and gotten a day worth of play out of it, I'd be quite mad.

A possible saving grace from me trouncing this game despite it's bargain-box pricing is the online multiplayer. If you're armed with an ethernet adaptor and broadband internet connection, you can join the always-there group that are still playing this game despite there being a sequel released (so I'm told). All the favorite modes are there, including a pretty nice implementation of capture the flag - but unfortunately there really isn't anything super creative about the online play if you overlook the augmentations thing.

The augmentations and a couple of the clever weapons make it a reasonable online frag-fest, but it's not sufficient to make you run out and grab the game on it's own. Single player is fun, but somewhat short lived. I do still get the feeling that if I'd paid full price for this game I'd still be ticked off, so I'll give it three out of five stars if your local store wants anything more than $25 for it. If you can pick it up for around ten bucks, I give it five out of five stars - there's a lot worse things you could spend ten bucks on.

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