Rewriting Shire History
Got the BFME2 demo. I didn’t play the first game so I have nothing to compare this second part with, but I was impressed by the screens and ingame videos published earlier so I gave this demo a try. Well, I started from the tutorial mission which was easy and straightforward. You learned how to comand your army and how to attack enemies there. Also I hired Boromir (omg) to help me with my war. The gfx is impressive beyond words, but (!) only if you set all the gfx options to high (pixel shader 3 enabled). When all is enabled the game just shines. But it has tendency to slow itself down to some kind of slow motion if there’s alot of things happening at the moment on the map. The gameplay is generic: build town, gather army and defence/attack. One of the big differencies from the AOE games for example is that 1 unit is not a single soldier but entire platoon. So you just click on it selecting entire bunch of warriors. That easies things when gathering an army. Also I liked the way you build your town, how building process is animated. It’s all very impressive and funny to observe. There were some problems with the sound though, it tended to get stuck and repeat endlessly, but I’m sure they’ll fix that in the final version of the game. I didn’t explore much into the game though. Because of the sound and performance problems. I’ll try the final game as it appears here though. Hopefully EA will fix all those engine related things. The game looks promising, there’s alot of features that require extensive testing in actual gameplay.