Contract JACK -- not so good?

[Doug Erickson]

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/contractjack/review.html


Brett Todd doesn't think so. Anyone else wanna confirm the suckiness?

Me, I hate stealth with a passion, and love mindlessly shooting stuff, so is there any chance I'll enjoy it single-player?

[Charles]

You are the exact target audience, I think.

[Mark Asher]

According to the review, the game can be finished in four hours. Max Payne 2 was a 10-hour game. Is this the new trend to save on development costs? Hardly develop?

[steve]

Me, I hate stealth with a passion, and love mindlessly shooting stuff, so is there any chance I'll enjoy it single-player?
No.

[Doug Erickson]

Man, if the guy who likes Dungeon Siege hates it, it REALLY has to be dull.

Guess I'll stick with Tron 2.0, eh?

[mtkafka]

According to the review, the game can be finished in four hours. Max Payne 2 was a 10-hour game. Is this the new trend to save on development costs? Hardly develop?

The new trend is called 'mcshooter', hire a bunch of enthusiastic mod makers to make a shooter with generic gameplay.

etc

[Kevin Grey]

According to the review, the game can be finished in four hours. Max Payne 2 was a 10-hour game. Is this the new trend to save on development costs? Hardly develop?

Well to be fair, JACK is a stand-alone expansion and priced at $30 (soon to be $20 I'm sure). Max Payne 2 and CoD are both full price.

[Jason Becker]

According to the review, the game can be finished in four hours. Max Payne 2 was a 10-hour game. Is this the new trend to save on development costs? Hardly develop?

Well to be fair, JACK is a stand-alone expansion and priced at $30 (soon to be $20 I'm sure). Max Payne 2 and CoD are both full price.


And their all overpriced IMO.

[Toddy]

It's a hard game to enjoy even if, like me, you felt that the NOLF games would have benefitted from a more bloodthirsty approach in spots. At times, JACK feels like Serious Sam. There are loads of enemies, everywhere. You walk forward a few feet, get blitzed. Walk forward a few feet, get blitzed. Find a way around a locked door. Walk forward a few feet, get bliztzed. End level. Begin again.

I described the game as numbing in the review and that's really the best word for JACK. It's a real shame, too, because if they'd blended a little of this approach with all the things that made NOLF and NOLF 2 so much fun, they'd have had a great basis for a game. But this? And you can't even tell you're in the Sixties most of the time.

[DrCrypt]

This is really disappointing. Ever since I didn't realize that the race neutral skin tone of Jason Hall - so closely resembling the coconut scented liquid tan popular at all the muscle bunny beaches - actually meant he was "black" and referred to his transparent shilling of products like Sanity and the Blood 2 mission pack as a "minstrel act", I have been a slightly abashed fanboy of the NOLF products. NOLF 2 was the best shooter I played this year, hot-spot-stealth-for-idiots aside, and the first game is a classic in its own right. So I was looking forward to Contract J.A.C.K. but I'm not buying it when everyone indicates it is missing all of the things that made the first two games great. Too bad Monolith didn't decide to pull a Nightmare Levels Redux cash-in on one of their less respectable franchises... like, um, anything else they've ever done.

[sluggo]

We reviewed CJ last week, and it looks like Brett and I were on the same page. Most of CJ just felt uninspired. It was as if they built the levels and said "let's spawn in groups of enemies every 30 yards."

I'm sure they're looking to give the series a kickstart, but after NOLF 2, I was hoping for something a little more interesting than this. Doh. :(

[Gordon_Bleu]

So the question is: why?

[DennyA]

So the question is: why?
I'm sure suits were involved.

"Boys buy games, and they don't want to play a girl. And look at what sells -- they don't want humor or stealth, they just want to shoot stuff. Make us a MAINSTREAM game."

[Charles]

I can't honestly bring myself to believe that the main character being female was the reason for this travesty of a game. I just can't. Better to nuke everything from orbit than to believe that people can be so pathetically superficial.

[steve]

I'm sure suits were involved.
Those suits were worn by Monolith employees.

[Doug Erickson]

When I was at Monolith, they were honestly excited about the title, and really felt they were headed down the right track with the game.

Sad, because this approach isn't gonna sell to the teenaged boys, either, who want "realistic tactical special forces action" or, at the very least, some theme so deadly serious (like WW2) that they can pretend the games they play aren't geeky.

Do you think having a (much) wider range of enemy types and boss encounters might've made this game better, ala Serious Sam?

[Charles]

Well... I'm just not sure how they felt that killing 30 of the exact same guy in a row was going to be fun. Seeing enemies that look the same can work if used lightly... but when you are killing ten at a time as they file through the door (clipping with eachother the whole time), it breaks any kind of immersion the game might have been able to achieve otherwise.

[DennyA]

I'm sure suits were involved.
Those suits were worn by Monolith employees.
I just said suits, never claimed they were being worn by anyone outside of Monolith. :)

Even if it was the dev team's design decision, it still strikes me as an attempt to create more "typical" subject matter in an effort to get better sales, after the undeserved lackluster response to the NOLF titles.

[quatoria]

I'm sure suits were involved.
Those suits were worn by Monolith employees.
I just said suits, never claimed they were being worn by anyone outside of Monolith. :)

Even if it was the dev team's design decision, it still strikes me as an attempt to create more "typical" subject matter in an effort to get better sales, after the undeserved lackluster response to the NOLF titles.

Well, I think people just assume that they're being worn by people outside Monolith. I mean, Hall would need at least two suits, and those would just be to wrap around his incredible biceps.

(Just kidding, Jason. Please don't break me over your knee)

[yossarian]

According to the review, the game can be finished in four hours. Max Payne 2 was a 10-hour game. Is this the new trend to save on development costs? Hardly develop?

Max Payne 2 was about 30 hours for me.

Call of Duty, now, was about 6.

[Matthew Gallant]

Max Payne 2 was about 30 hours for me.
Were you playing using Dragon Naturally Speaking for the controls? It took me six hours.

[Jason Cross]

When I was at Monolith, they were honestly excited about the title, and really felt they were headed down the right track with the game.



I honestly don't think it's the track they were headed down, but how they went there.

The general idea is fine. It's not like making a balls-out action game in the NOLF universe with a gruff lead guy is a bad idea. The problem is that making a bunch of boring obstacle courses in which wave after wave of enemies burst through doors and get mowed down by you isn't exciting action. In order to make the action exciting, they would have had to seriously change the enemy AI, mix up the types of enemies more, have a lot more set-pieces (the tornado level in NOLF2 is the kind of thing that would fit great in JACK), and make JACK's personality come through more while you were playing. Perhaps through the occasional quip or hand gestures or something.

Contract JACK is a game that could have really benefitted from some real focus testing.

[sluggo]

In order to make the action exciting, they would have had to seriously change the enemy AI, mix up the types of enemies more, have a lot more set-pieces (the tornado level in NOLF2 is the kind of thing that would fit great in JACK), and make JACK's personality come through more while you were playing. Perhaps through the occasional quip or hand gestures or something.
I agree, and I'd bet Monolith knows it, too. My guess is that this was simply too ambitious a plan for this expansion pack, especially if they had to meet a 2003 deadline, and so they had to keep things simpler.

Which, in the end, is a bummer, because I also agree that there's a great full-on shooter to be made in that universe.

[Doug Erickson]

Sounds like a fair evaluation, Jason. Well, I'll pass on it: sorry, Monolith, I'd love to support the franchise, but JACK sounds misguided all around.

Dominions 2, here I come.

[yossarian]

Were you playing using Dragon Naturally Speaking for the controls? It took me six hours.

How'd you know that one?

I kept dying, and wound up quicksaving and reloading just about every 5 minutes.