After holding down A to charge forward, the camera instantaneously flicks from a static over-the-shoulder viewpoint to a tracking shaky cam by your character’s feet. The shift embellishes the experience rather than detracting from it, as you race to the next cover point. What results next is a bloodbath. You’re aware of the escalating battle around you as the two sides clash in the middle of a debris filled street, as bullets whiz by your head and a balcony explodes in front, body parts flying everywhere, indicating someone has found the rocket launcher. Grabbing some cover either side of a nearby archway, I watch as a comrade leans round the corner and has his head taken off in one shot. The other side has answered back by finding the solitary sniper rifle on the map.
I swung under the archway just a opposing Locusts does the same. Even at such close range their panic means wild gunfire goes over my shoulder. Tapping B I charge them, an unmistakable sound roaring to life at the end of my rifle. As chainsaw meets flesh and I bellow a dark laugh as my Marine pulls the serrated metal through the twitching body and ends with a sickening twist, splattering blood across my screen as the remains fall apart on the floor! Kicking aside an arm, I cock my gun and head for the nearest piece of cover. It's easy to understand why developer Epic Games is riding proud on an 18 certificate rating...
Each character is fantastically realised. Huge but limber, you’ll find there’s a real sense of physics when a Marine slams into cover by a nearby wall, sending billows of dust from the brickwork as he grunts with the force of it.....
Run with A, holding the button down and directing your character with the left thumbstick towards a jutting fragment of wall will slam them behind it and they’ll automatically adjust to the size of the cover. Slide up to either end by pressing left or right on the stick and use the right stick to pan the camera round. Pull the left trigger to step out of cover, right trigger to fire, alternatively hit right trigger first to blindly fire round the corner. Continue holding your chosen direction and tap A at a corner to either slide across to another piece of cover, or roll out of cover in that direction....
t may sound similar to the Ghost Recon set up, but in reality it’s a completely different beast. The two maps on offer were relatively small, but this actually improved the gameplay, as it meant teams were constantly jostling for the best positions, sliding round cover in the small courtyards to get a better firing angle on each other. There were no safe areas to hide until only the stragglers were left, and the better vantage points required a lot of guts to storm and successfully hold.
Weapons selection was mapped to the D-Pad, with shotgun, rifle, pistol and grenade all within easy reach. The grenades, whose throwing arc is designated by a neon targeting indicator, can be doubled up as a melee weapon, extended spikes on each meaning they can lodged into the chest armour of a foe before the pin is pulled. It’s not known yet if players have a few seconds to try and rip free the explosive, but if it’s like the chainsaw attack, then the first successful tag is usually fatal....
The rifle is great at both long range and short range fire fights, but a lot of the closer combat employed the shotgun, perfect for tagging a passing enemy with a surprise attack from behind a corner. A series of cement blocks in Gridlock lead to a number of tense cat and mouse games as opposing players tried to second guess were each were going to appear from. The loser ended up squatting on the floor, blood emptying from their wounds... but not necessarily dying. Downing a player doesn’t mean they’re finished. Epic have devised a system to give you the chance to revive injured team mates. Once you drop, a heart icon will appear on screen with the A button you can keep it pumping with repeated tapping. Hold out for long enough and a nearby ally can come along and revive you. Too long, or don’t hammer the button enough, and you’re dead, same if you take another bullet.
Incorporating this gameplay mechanic yielded some interesting strategic possibilities, were we deliberately left a wounded enemy and hide nearby until his comrades came to rescue him. Then, stepped out of cover at this moment, it gave the team the perfect surprise attack. But mostly we couldn’t help but try out the neck-stomp execution, slamming our foot down onto someone’s unguarded head with a tap of X, or holding a shotgun to their noggin and antagonise them for a few seconds before pulling the trigger!...
