I picked this up really dirt cheap for the PC today (among other games at Big Lots, too).
First off...who in their right mind would label a damn tough difficulty like this one I started out with as say "NORMAL?" Are they out of their mind? This difficulty sounds more akin to a "HARD" or "VERY HARD" than anything else; not "NORMAL."
The game throws waves of enemies at you, regardless of difficulty. It's hard to keep up, sometimes -- which is fine. Many shooters have done that before and succeeded -- see Painkiller. Having waves of enemies come at you is not a problem (if the game still runs okay, performance-wise). It's just this game is as tough as nails on NORMAL difficulty. Enemies are not brilliant here with tactics like say a FEAR or a Crytek game, but they definitely have the STALKER syndrome of hardly ever missing. Taking a cue from COD2, if you take too many shots in a row (or a big shot somewhere), you're basically toast. On NORMAL though, this happens very quickly -- b/c they hardly ever miss and b/c you're always flooded with enemies.
This NORMAL difficulty might not be so tough, if there was a Quicksave system you could abuse to highly hell (a la STALKER). Nope, a checkpoint save system is all you got here. With having only a Checkpoint system, this also makes the game ever tougher on NORMAL. Reloading a checkpoint numerous times, for a few hours, can be very aggravating -- to get nowhere or barely to the next checkpoint.
Now, EASY difficulty lets you take a bit more shots for a bit more time. And this difficulty feels about right here for me -- and I'm a veteran at these kind of shooters. A newbie at shooters might find a very good deal of challenge on EASY here, as this game is still challenging a shooter veteran like me quite a bit still. Regardless, a newbie to this game might be wishing there was a "VERY EASY" difficulty listed here.
This PC game unfortunately doesn't have any graphical options you can turn on and off, in case you might be say barely meeting the requirements and wanting to try to get better performance or whatever by turning on or off some features. For graphical options, all you got are resolution sizes, basically -- very lazy there. The graphics and environments look very good though, to say the least -- with lots of full dynamic lighting going on and everything. Looks really good. Regardless, it runs fine on my PC (see specs in my sig) and I have yet to notice ANY slowdowns, so that's a good sign
If you like this kind of old-school action of you're basically just shooting anything that moves and trying to keep up with the explosions and violence, you'll like that as it does it very well. If that's your kind of game, you'll like it. And of course, yes, SOF still has some of the best violence and bloody deaths you'll see on screen -- Payback definitely shows that off no problem. Sound effects are pretty good, as well. Even the music sounds good, surprisingly.
So, what's that leave us with? Eh, the voice-acting is all over the place, so far. The dialogue and script are okay, but nothing to basically blow you away, either -- so far. But still, I'm enjoying blasting anything that walks, watching body parts fly, and looking at the pretty good looking graphics -- now that I'm playing on (a still challenging) EASY difficulty.
