Shooting blanks of pure testosterone

On the surface its a dumb corridor shooter, but deep down hides a mediocre concoction of modified Halo and F.E.A.R mechanics

The story takes place at a mining colony. There's an incredible demand for Hubbardium, whatever that is. Is it even a mineral? Out of utilization alone it seems more like a chemical, with many recreational uses as drug.
Most miners seem to drink it, like booze. Large amounts seem to drive humans insane.
This is not the case for Arnold Weiss, a top of his game, 50 year old man. That can drink Hubbardium beer without getting intoxicated.This bothers me more than it should, it's not like people smoke because of the thrill of getting cancer, but non-alcoholic beer? just drink something else man.
More importantly, he can take larger quantities entering Slow Mo state, without the inconvenience of losing his sanity.
This make him the perfect hero for any story but more importantly missions that involves finding the source of this specific drug, before the main bad guys/future junkies.
And yes, the men are right. There is a not so natural source that transforms rock into Hubbardium. They all call it the heart of Glomar, which makes them suspect in my book. How do you even know this?
ofcourse having a great adventure, uncovering the truth, is all reason enough for any common hero. Thankfully Arnold over here has a heart of gold. All he wants his to rescue his ex´s boyfriend in a way that proves himself the superior male. There is nothing more relatable than that.
That was all i could take, i ended up skipping through a lot of overexposure, redundant dialogue, and a few stereotypical characters.
The one exception was the italian guy, i was glued to the screen during those cutscenes.Give them a watch. The stereotype is a poor representation of Italian people, but you can tell its an italian. My theory is that they got an italian to play an American, in order to get these results

Gameplay:
It's an awkward corridor shooter with poorly thought out ideas, poorly added to an unpolished experience, to the point where, unless your met with such a difficulty wall, you will likely forget to use them. However, it's still what makes it stand out. I was more interested in finding more uses for these mechanics, instead of looking at it as a corridor shooter, because at that its just bland and incopetent
Strictly as a shooter, most of the level design is claustrophobic. All you win from the corridor level design, is cover. The AI only lose from it, because unlike F.E.A.R these are total aimbots. So instead of both parties move around and flank, its mostly a case of cutting a corner and shooting first. Which also trivializes the slowmo, you can't really take anyone by surprise, you just try and kill enemies before they kill you.
it's like that for the entirety of the game, rather than fixing the AI, they just add health stations pretty much everywhere. In very few areas enemies are scripted in like crashing through a window or run back to their squad, no doubt because F.E.A.R did it. Though these are pratically events where the AI acts the same way every time. I have never seen them run away from grenades, i've seen them shoot doors when they cant unlock them, it's like the aimbot is always on. in terms of real combat tactics, they sort of can go into cover.
The other main mechanic is Hacking. And i find this to be the most interesting aspect of the game, even though it's not as useful as there are utilizations for it.
It's one of those things you forget to use due overall fast paced nature of the action, except for when it is crucial.
I appreciate they did not force the player to use the ability, except for a couple locked doors and forklifts, but damn, there's so many rooms that you can analyze, things to hack for instance robots.
The physics are the same both outside and inside the facilities, apparently the consensus was to make things floaty on the planet Alpha Prime, that in itself would not be a problem if it didn't make platforming so frustrating. Sliding and losing momentum when jumping near boxes and walls.

Weapons:
The flamethrower is absolute nonsense. I have gone through plenty of low budget FPS and ive never seen anything like this.
It's a random weapon with a short area damage, it doesn't like the environment on fire, it doesn't have a burn stat on enemies, it doesn't stagger, it just does a fixed amount of damage for as long as the enemy is in range. Its not the most underpowered weapon, but it sure puts you really close to an enemy that can still shoot at you.
The hammer is ridiculously fast, it could be a fun weapon to try out, if close range combat wasn't so deadly against aimbots
The sniper doesn't get much use, it could be worth it if either, damage was increased or the zoom animation wasnt as long as it is. It's a strange inclusion considering even the open areas don't have the long range combat to make it a necessity, You will find the pistol is incredibly accurate for the job at hand.
The Shotgun! the shotgun is rather good in this. Probably not that surprising if they were influenced by FEAR.

Graphics:
it's a mixed bag, the art style is not entirely awful, it's more the quality of the faces and some textures that don't look particularly great for 2007. While weapons and the interiors look much closer to average.
Increasing the FOV to 90 seems to bring a few graphical glitches. And as far as i know you can't change the weapon FOV, so it wont look pretty. Even though i didnt, i would advise keeping it closer to 80

Other issues:
Not only are the vast majority of cutscenes exposition and briefing, they are made in-game engine, on a weird top down angle. Most of them are barely animated
They had a model of a man cut in half, and he is pretty much everywhere
There is only one final boss and it's a cakewalk compared to the rest of the game, its almost like a victory lap, or several...you do a few laps across the room to take him down.

this...this is why it took me so long to check Assassin Creed, there are boring and tedious games in this franchise but the original was bad beyond my expectations.
This complete overall almost killed 2 franchises at once as Ubisoft was still banking on Prince of Persia
2 games, that shared the same issues, of what essentially was prototype of the modern "game as a service" ubisoft model
Yet, the original Assassin Creed was the less polished of the two, while also being offering more content at a slower pace, which truly made it as bad as it was.

Pacing:
To the question "Which games force you to complete sidequest?" I raise you this. A game where the side quests are part of the main quest, which in itself is a gameplay loop
Altair is an Assassin, which are enemies to the Templars. Each of his quests work as follow
Get a contract, travel between near locations in israel, once there, the information hunt begins. You must climb viewpoints to have side quest be shown on the minimap, and you do those side quests to get information about your current target. Once that's done go to the local guild and devise a plan. There's a small cutscene after you kill your target, which makes Altair question the guilds decision, often ending with him returning back to Al Mualim in search of answers
you repeat this loop without major changes to the gameplay itself, other than another piece of equipment
which should have been there since the very beginning, anything would help making the game less monotonous. It's a new take on POP, but there's nothing particularly difficult to learn that would require learning skills bit by bit. Assassin Creed 2 does this to a much lesser degree

Changes:
The control scheme is different, the main focus is to favor a more automated movement, that lets Altair grab, hug,jump nearby objects, like walls and poles, without require timed presses on the players part.
POP reboot kinda gets away with it. But Assassin Creed not only goes hard on its implementation, it has many crowded areas within the city walls, with interactable objects that can be climbed pretty much anywhere.
So, the game is janky, sometimes Altair snaps to nearby objects, The issue also comes from its control scheme
You will also get reused buttons for different actions, it took up to Brotherhood, to actually build a control layout for mouse and keyboard
Swift is your permanent drop down button, that on occasion works as a grab ledge when falling down...fair enough
As far as i know you can't even hold shift to quickly go down a ladder, but you can fall and grab it again mid fall, much like any wall as long as there is something to grab directly below
Space is a jump button, that gets more use combined with RMB (RUN), it turns to a faster run + grab and climb near objects automatically. this can lead to some unwanted movement on ground level where the character can snap on to objects if its close enough, though it works fine jumping from rooftop to rooftop
Swings, also don't require a timed button press, instead you hold jump button + direction and the game does it for you

Weird issues with gameplay decisions:
Having to lock on to enemies, for trivial things
It's the case with pickpocketing, that locks the camera for no reason, sometimes against walls.
This animation was removed from later titles of the Ezio´s trilogy, where you just press space in the middle of a crowd to steal, which i also dont like
same happens with the camera lock during combat, its janky to the point of not being able to put execution moves in frame, due to walls or objects blocking the camera. Also generally slow and clunky when you want to unlock and leave combat

One of the biggest issues with the original is trying to expand a game that doesn't have a lot of content.
its notorious for reusing the same type of obstacles. The most frustrating being the sick and poor, that attack you on sight and try to expose you during stealth missions. No joke, there are spots with 3 of the same women begging for money. This gets less annoying in the Ezio games, where they even switch the women for musicians, so the same models dont stand out as much
The original is exceptional worse, just by reusing the same voice line for each NPC type.
They are also more aggressive here than in later games, it's possible to fail a mission due to NPC interactions, especially when im so tired of them i just casually stab them in the back
I actually had to murder an NPC before starting a side quest. Because he would push me agaisnt some guards that where blocking the exit, during a stealth mission.

Optimization:
it's not Assassin Creed unless its poorly optimized.
It's not one of the more problematic games in this franchise, but it as a highly unstable frame rate
I didn't lock the frame rate out of pure laziness, what i got was really high 200 fps to sudden drops at around 60fps. Especially when jumping from ledges to haystacks. It feels stuttery, though that could be just from the cluncky gameplay

Finished the main campaign,i had i quick look for extra content which is actually the main selling point of the project, but wasn't quite tempted to spend more time, due to not so enjoyable handling and physics
Perhaps in the near future i can give it a fair shot and review it accordingly, but even the workshop looks deserted for what it is
Going through the main campaign, it is exactly how i remember it. It just doesn't stand out these days when compared to BeamNG and Wreckfest, at least on the technical side of things
New edition or not, the biggest differences are to lighting, shadows, textures, the usual deal for "remastered" versions
The main advantage this holds over BeamNG is that, crashing simulator aside, it offers multiple gameplay modes for a series of party games
Wreckfest is a better game, with a good workshop. BeamNg is a serious simulation, that gives no help in the creation of different gameplay modes and it doesnt even offer multiplayer support, though an option does exist
But Crashday is european jank, unfortunately while not a bad game, its good for just a few hours.