Recently I’ve been playing too many games and I thought it would be kind of nice to make a little roundup of the last couple of weeks:

Supreme Commander 2 was somewhat disappointing as a singleplayer experience, although I suspect that it’s multiplayer gameplay is varied and continually interesting. I don’t really do multiplayer though, so I evaluate games by their singleplayer experience and in this case it’s not that good really. It does have a story, contrary to the first installment in the series, and the gameplay is relatively large-scale (when compared to C&C-like games).

The scale of things has been turned down a bit, building stuff happens a lot faster and a proper research tree has been neatly integrated into the game, but somehow I was just not as much into the game as I was in the old SupCom. It’s decent, but not all that good. I finished all of the campains in two days, which was a bit short.

I’ve also completed the new expansion for Borderlands – General Knoxx’s secret armory. It’s a high-level expansion featuring new enemies, new maps, new weapons, new vehicles etc. The level cap was also raised, which was kinda nice but not really needed. At the higher levels the differences between the classes become glaringly obvious and while some are somewhat suited to become a one-man-army (siren/hunter) the other ones are not quite up to par. I’d rather see a new class (or class specializations) in the expansion… The new areas have the same issue as the zombie island expansion: too much plain traveling, absence of teleporters. The new vehicles are pretty much all useless – the monster has a decent weapon but is far too slow to cover the distances in any sort of reasonable time, the lancer is way too slow and also has a crappy weapon, and the racer is really the only useful method of transportation (because of the absence of teleporters) but it’s really fragile.

The gameplay is very repetitive, although not really more so than the original game. So I guess that if you enjoyed the original game you’ll enjoy knoxx aswell, but I’m shelving the game and am not expecting anything good to come out of future expansions and such. It’s better than either of the other expansions available for Borderlands, but if you’re hoping for variety and/or a challenge you’ll be dissapointed. The only challenge was the kind-of-secret boss, which was just about impossible to defeat. Completing that challenge really lengthened the games’ lifespan, although I did not really enjoy the experience. Basically I had to complete the entire game from scratch because of the level requirement. Grinding with a purpouse I guess, but definately not in a good way. Anyway, the entire thing took a weekend of dedicated gaming to complete.

That’s it for today, next time more!