Alright guys. I've been playing for well over 3 hours since my last post, and stopped right after I got to the incredible Omaha Beach level. I haven't finished the level yet, but here are my thoughts on single player thus far (**NO REAL SPOILERS SO DONT WORRY**):

First level (not talking about the training) will blow you away RIGHT FROM THE START.
Some of you may have seen a video of it earlier, but regardless, when you are actually sitting there playing it, watching it go by, screen by screen, it's fucking fantastic. The graphics on the first level are so great and polished that my fps dropped down to like 10 when looking at certain aspects of the level (and I'm on a Pentium III 850 w/384 RAM and a GeForce 2 GTS that has 32 megs), but that was because I had all settings set to highest. The lighting on this level is better than anything I've seen on RTCW. The way the game just starts out is great.

Unfortunately though, things start going downhill a bit over the next level or so as it starts turning into a find item/shoot your way through Nazis...but this doesn't last very long because shortly after this brief period of boredom you are rewarded with an extremely entertaining level that shows you what the Quake 3 engine can actually pull off (I'd be more specific but I don't want to spoil anything).

Next couple levels are alright, nothing that spectacular visually or gameplay wise (except for one of em), and then there's a real pain in the ass portion that comes up which would probably have been fun if I weren't playing on HARD difficulty.

And now I'm on Omaha Beach. Playing it for the first time, you will be impressed as shit. You'll die a hell of a lot of times as well until you figure out how to survive (which I'm not going to tell you). Unfortunately, this isn't a good thing because you start to realize that the game is HEAVILY dependant upon scripting. Not only do the comments you hear become repetitive after your fifth death, but you start noticing how the "AI" on the level shoots at you only when it sees you run out in the open, and the firing bursts always last for the same amount of time.

Fortunately, this ugly scripting is not as apparent on other levels, that is, of course, until you play them again.

If the game wants your squad mates to die, there's nothing you can do to stop that from happening, even if you kill all nearby Nazis; they will just magically appear to be shot and drop dead. Really cheesy if you ask me.

I imagine that the problem will be the same conversely. All of you who played the single player demo know that there was no way for the Captain you ran around with to die until after you reached the lost Airborn Soldiers.

The reason why is obviously because they didn't use ANY character development whatsoever for your character (Powell). You never get to hear "your" voice, you never get to respond to anything verbally. "You're not here to do the right thing, you're here to follow fuckin' orders."

Because of this sorry fact, they had to use scripts that couldn't be adjusted based on whether or not the friendly AI lived, therefore there's no way for certain AI to die until they "play out their scene" and there's no way for certain AI to live.

Makes the game linear as hell, I know, but heh, we're dealing with the Quake 3 engine here folks. THEN AGAIN, one could argue that they could have tweaked the game to have multiple occurences, but I guess that would have been too much of a pain in the ass and would have required another delay.

The graphics in the game for the most part is just stunning. Some of the ground textures are a little bland though and detract from the rest of the level, but if you ignore it and just continue on, it won't bother you that much. The thing that will though is that THERE'S BARELY ANYTHING YOU CAN DESTROY/TRASH! On the levels I have played, I could interact with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Major turn off considering RTCW had tons of objects you could shoot up and destroy. This doesn't seem to be the case with MoH:AA. Hell you can shoot a wine glass or wine battle and it will stand there as if it were wearing bullet proof armor instead of popping open like in Max Payne. It doesn't make sense either, because you can shoot canisters filled with oil and the holes will make leaks that slowly ooze out the liquid, yet you can't destroy a simple bottle of wine. Bah.

With the exception of this annoying flaw, the graphics is still great. There's tons of lighting to be seen everywhere thanks to their shader system. The models look great too, they have various facial expressions, and lip synching is decent (not as good as Soul Reaver 2, but better than RTCW's poor attempt at lip synching).

Oh yeah, and one more thing before I end this post. The AI is WAAAY too fucking accurate.

I am playing on HARD, and in multiple instances the AI can see you before you can see them EVEN IF YOU ARE STANDING BEHIND BUSHES, and this means you have to look forward to reloading the levels MANY MANY MANY times until you (well at least me) finally have memorized where all the AI is standing and can kill them all without getting scratched.

Not very cool if you ask me, that's why I suggest you play on Medium. Then again, most people aren't going to want to play this whole game over again just to beat it on a harder difficulty, so maybe you should just go ahead and play on Hard. But since I've heard that the ending to this game is going to suck, maybe playing on Medium instead of Hard is acceptable.

All I know is that on one level early on, I reloaded a particular section over 20 goddamn times until I finally figured out a way to lose only a minimal amount of health and advancing to the next level. This was because the game's autosave feature which you cannot turn off placed a save when I only had 10 health left. Since I didn't want to replay the previous part all over again, I just said screw it and went on, forcing myself to get through the rest of it with only my measly 10 health. NOT a very smart idea, as this caused me over half an hour of RELOADING.

Many times the AI behaves realisticaly, but during other instances, the AI seems to act more like a Quake 3 bot that always hits you unless you hit them first and sometimes always know when you are coming. For instance, with the Silenced Pistol, I kill ONE PERSON, and the other Nazis are unrealistically aware that I am present. I'm not sure how they fouled this one up, but it's definitely a disappointment.

Overall however, the AI is superb except for these tiny flaws due to scripting and the likes, and this game certainly has superior AI to RTCW. I'm sure if 2015 delayed the game for another 4 - 6 months they could have polished it to make it a bit better, but for this final product the AI is fine.

Oh yeah, and I wanted to mention that on the Omaha level, MY FPS GOES DOWN TO SHIT! I've already tried tinkering with graphics settings, but still haven't managed to see my fps go above 20 while running through the beach.

At any rate, I'm going back to the game now. So far, I'd say the game is worth a score in the lower 90s, but I still haven't even tried multiplayer yet so this may go up or down. Still waiting to get to a tank driving level too..

I'll be back later...

[This message has been edited by Jesta (edited January 22, 2002).]