The lights are on
This game fails in so many ways it is amazing that Treyarch and Activision released this. It's no wonder they spent tens of thousands of dollars pampering professional reviewers, there is no other way they would give this game a good score. CoD Black Ops is just a plain bad game, and I'm ashamed of the high reviews a lot of companies gave this, they are feeding money to a company that just keeps putting out crap games, but gets good reviews because they pamper the reviewers.Black Ops does nothing really new. The only real exciting thing about Black Ops is the extra layer of customization available for the online multiplayer. Dedicated servers for the PC version was a good way to win over the hearts of the anti-Infinity Ward group, but they should have probably done at least SOME testing, since it's obvious the server and clients just aren't on the same page. Using dedicated servers is actually worse than the P2P connections of Modern Warfare 2. As far as gameplay is concerned, it's the same ol' respawn and shoot 'em up. I really don't mind that, as I didn't expect this game to be anything different, but given its other flaws, they needed to do something new.
I play a lot of MMOs. I try to play them all, WoW, Star Trek Online, EQ, EQ2, SWG, FFXI, you name it, I've played it. Apparently no one at Square Enix has that same experience.
So, I was among the great many who pre-ordered this game on STEAM, and waited for an hour while Valve got their act together so that I could unlock and play it. But that was no biggie, I have come to expect delays and cancellations as a gamer who spends an overwhelming majority of my time playing online games. But that's just a minor gripe and has nothing to do with the game, onto the good stuff!
I've never had such a bad first impression with a game as I have with Modern Warfare 2. I pop the DvD into my drive on my computer, and to my utter dismay, STEAM pops up and handles the installation of the game. I knew the game was going to use VAC, but for some reason I didn't think I'd be forced to play the game through STEAM.
I was totally psyched about this game, I watched videos, read forums, looked at screen shots, you name it, I did it. I'm glad to say that I was not disappointed, at least. Borderlands is filled with amazing guns, some of which I literally laughed manically to the sight of what was left in their wake (body parts and loot). Add on some hysterically devious grenade mods and incredibly helpful class modifiers, and you have yourself a full blown RPG-Shooter.