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Wednesday 21 June, 2006
Well, I finished the game with the guy character on the default difficulty setting. Very standard anticlimactic ending - the designers clearly were de-emphasizing the story in favour of Blowing Things Up In Interesting Ways, a decision which I must agree with in this case. The final level, though not excessively difficult, is very impressive, but I won\'t spoil it here. The real payoff is that the game appears to give extra weapon unlocks as a reward for beating all the levels on a given difficulty.
EDF2 also rewards \"sequence breaking\" of a sort - whenever you unlock a level by beating the previous one, it\'s immediately available at all difficulty levels. Using this, it is possible to pick out some of the easier levels and beat them on harder game modes, as doing so will generally unlock higher-quality weapons. There\'s a catch to this, though - some levels, particularly on higher difficulty, practically mandate that you have to have a certain amount of HP in order to clear them (or mad skillz). Hence you would probably have to grind lower levels for \"armor\" powerups (which increase your max HP). This isn\'t a problem, as there are so many levels that just going through the whole game on Easy and Normal will give scads of armor - more than enough for Hard level, which will then give enough for Hardest, etc.
Other levels, however, are really dependent on the chosen weapon - especially one particular early level which features a cameo appearance by a single very famous monster. The creature\'s AI is scripted to attack a bunch of houses at the beginning of the level, so you can get free hits on him. With a strong enough weapon, it is possible to kill him before he can even attack you. On harder levels, you just need a stronger weapon - but it so happens that by clearing a later level on Hard mode, I managed to unlock a ludicrously powerful short-range weapon, and so I cleared this level on Inferno mode (the hardest available) without coming under attack at all, and unlocked some more very cool guns. Rather broken, yes, but this is the sort of game where balance can take a back seat without destroying the fun factor.
I\'m planning to start work on a weapon FAQ sometime...
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