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Shogo: Mobile Armor Division
Monolith
First-Person Action
REQUIREMENTS:
- Pentium 166 or equivalent (Pentium II Recommended)
- Pentium 233 or equivalent for software rendering
- 4MB (or greater) D3D compatible video card recommended
- 32MB RAM
- Windows95/98
- DIRECTX6
Quintin Stone
I've played Shogo: Mobile Armor Division all the way three times: the first two times with each of the alternate "endings", the third time after installing the Alpha patch. I've got a lot to say about Shogo and their LithTech engine. Not all of it good, but in no way is it all bad.
Good Points
I like to start with the good stuff, so here goes:
Every game that comes out nowaday seems to have greater detail than the last. Shogo is no different. There are potted plants, bathroom fixtures, personal computers, all kinds of neat stuff. Character models are comprised of several separate sections, unlike the one-piece models of games like Quake II. This makes it easier to have a full range of movement, as less pre-stored model distortion info is required to do it.
Your hand-held weapon images are 3-D models, like most shooters nowadays. Shogo's are very well-designed, and they provide an option to display less of the weapons if performance is an issue (a lot less rendering is required, giving you a small amount of a speed boost). Most of the personal weapons are very contemporary, which as a gun enthusiast, I greatly enjoyed. A pair of pistols, shotgun, submachinegun, and bulpup assault rifle are all available. Muzzle flash seems very realistic, from the burst of the shotgun barrel to the tell-tale five-point flare of the assault rifle. Sounds are even better. Fire away and hear the brassy ding! of empty casings hitting the pavement. As a shooter, I can tell you that there's nothing quite like the sound of empty brass ringing against the floor. Even with the first four guns being contemporary slug throwers, they all still have their own distinct sound. The submachinegun has the quiet cough of a suppressor, while the assault rifle roars with automat
ic fire. I'm always thrilled when a game gets their sounds just right. The rocket launcher (TOW) is fast to fire, but slow to reload. It's nice sight to see that rocket speed away from you (a hell of a lot better than seeing it streak towards you). You even have to reload your weapons. The pistols reload after about 11 shots, the assault rifle after 50, and I don't recall how many for the submachinegun.
Shoot a metal surface and you'll see a cratered indentation. Shoot a plaster wall and a small hole appears, surrounded by tiny cracks. This attention to differentiating surfaces is a wonderful touch. The spread of a shotgun leaves holes that are smaller than those of the submachinegun. A nice, realistic detail! Pretty much everything can either be destroyed (such as desk lamps, desktop computers, and, hell, the desk too) or shot up and covered with bullet holes. The few exceptions are doors and other moving, non-destroyable surfaces. It was upsetting that you could shoot the donuts but not eat them... ah well. Bodies can be hacked up or shot to bits, leaving messy giblets and lots of splattering blood (the gore doesn't quite splash up to the level in the game Blood, but there's still a lot of it). The different weapons also have different accuracy. The submachinegun is a short-range weapon, like the pistols, and fires in a group around your point of aim. The assault rifle, however, is a
fire precise weapon. In zoom mode, it fires only three-round bursts.
Some of the newer weapons in human and MCA mode make nice use of 3-D and transparency effects. The energy and kato grenades throw up shockwaves of translucent energy that thins as it spreads. The MCA plasma cannon throws out a ring of light when it strikes. Fire a Juggernaut and you'll have to peer through the haze of smoke for a second until it dissipates. The pillar of fire that the Spider leaves behind is impressive to say the least. There's a lot of splash damage in MCA mode, so "almost" usually does count here.
Apart from the details, there's also a refreshingly coherent storyline. Every level has a specific mission; you know exactly what you're doing, and you also know why. Your contacts throughout the game explain everything to you, so there's never the sense of "Oh, I just have to run around and shoot everything." You know, everything has a purpose, which is a nice change of pace. There are characters, events, disasters, and decisions. The latter, though somewhat rare, provide you to control your own destiny even in a fairly concrete plotline. On one level, you can choose to help Ryo Ishikawa by disabling some security systems in an enemy building, or you can blow him off and rescue your lost love by yourself. On one level you need to get through an electrified fence, run by a little old lady who lost her cat. You can agree to rescue her missing cat, and she'll open the gate for you when you return it. Or you can decide to blow her and her husband away and open the damn gate yourself! The final dec
ision actually determines which levels you will end up playing. If you agree to help the mysterious Gabriel by stopping the Admiral from destroying the planet, you are attacked by your own forces and you later have to capture the ship by killing the Admiral's loyal troops. On the other hand, if you refuse to join Gabriel, you have to keep fighting the Fallen, kill Uziel, and finally face Gabriel himself. It's nice to have a real choice, even if it's only one.
Finally, there's the opening sequence. This game was designed with an Anime (Japanese animation) feel to it, and the opening sequence really personifies that. You could swear it was taken out of the intro to the prototypical manga cartoon, right down to the upbeat japanese music and song. I'd say these guys know they're subject matter!
The Bad Stuff!
As good as I thought Shogo was, there are still some problems with the game. The LithTech engine is really quite new, so no doubt many of these issues will be fixed through downloadable patches (only an Alpha was available at the time of this writing, which fixed a couple of my concerns listed).
The game ran a little slow at times on my machine (P233, 128 RAM, Orchid Righteous 3D card). My box certainly isn't top of the line, and performance benefited from me turning off a few options (like shadows). Speaking of shadows, before I turned them off, I was able to see some enemies' shadows through walls, which was obviously a Bad Thing (tm). In addition, some enemies continually tried to shoot me through walls, ceilings, and floors, and a few actually would succeed. I believe the Alpha patch may have rectified this, as I do not recall it occurring during my last game.
I was VERY disappointed that there is no co-op mode available in multi-player! The last decent co-op shooter I've played was the original Quake! (Quake II just had something lacking.) Shogo seems like a great platform for a co-op level, as a team of players fights off the terrorist forces holed up within a sprawling complex. Alas, this was not to be! Please, Monolith, release a co-op patch!!
More than once I was crushed to death by a door that opened inwards. (I'm also none too fond of this trend towards opening doors by merely touching them instead of 'using' them with a key or mouse button.) A couple of times I would destroy a crate that was beneath a second crate and the crate on top would not fall to the floor, even though there was nothing supporting it. Usually the crates would fall, which indicates that this is obviously a bug. It wasn't uncommon to see a bullet "hole" that extended off the edge of an object and kind of floated in space. A few holes even sat the smallest fraction of an inch off of the surface they were supposed to be set into. These are problems with the engine itself which need to be resolved.
Levels are really long to load. Even short ones, and sometimes you have to sit through a minute or two of loading just to watch a pointless "cinematic" in a level you don't actually play. This could get a little frustrating. The "quickload" function was anything but quick until the Alpha patch. With the patch, loading saved games that occur on the level you've already loaded is rather speedy, and for that I am thankful.
While the levels are fairly detailed (explaining why they take so long to load), there are some slight oversights that I found. On a couple of levels where you had to walk through water, the water surface did not reach all the way to one wall. This gave a rather odd effect where there was water on one side of the hall, but not the other. In one room, I got stuck between a sloping wall and the ceiling. Not pleasant! Several of the MCA levels allow you to jump up to buildings that sit at the edge of the city. Once there, there is no visible physical barrier stopping you from moving off into the background, but you're stopped all the same. Edges of the map should not be so easily accessible if you can't go any farther.
Now for some miscellaneous issues. It was annoying that, though reloading your weapons was necessary, not only could you not see how many bullets you had left before you had to reload, but you could not reload manually. I don't know how many times I'd encounter a second enemy after dispatching a first, and after firing off just a few shots, I would pause to reload my weapon. Reloading does not take an insignificant amount of time! I like the idea of reloading. It adds an aspect of realism and was one of the biggest reasons I liked the game Outlaws. But if you can't see when you'll need to reload, and you can't force a reload, then the aspect is just frustrating.
In conversations with other characters via radio, the game prints their words, but not your own. I like to be able to read both, in case I have the game volume turned down.
On the few occassions you have allies following you around, they are generally ineffective. They follow to close and rarely shoot. They tend to get in the way and have a nasty habit of dying from friendly fire. More than once Kura blew a hole in my midsection with her shotgun when she tried to mercilessly take out a crying civilian. Man, she's brutal.
I really don't like the idea of having a "reverse" command. This action, linked by default to the Backspace key, immediately turns you around. Instantly. What? Is that realistic? It works in both MCA and human mode. Didn't like this at all.
The pitiful cries of civilians follow you around levels. It makes you regret being merciful! This strange effect may have been fixed in the Alpha patch because I don't recall it happening on my last game. Then again, I left fewer innocents alive. Worse than that, though, is the problem with some enemies not reacting to your presence at all. Though rare, this seemed to happen at important moments in the plot, and mostly occurred when you were a simple human fighting an MCA. It's kind of disappointing to easily kill a huge battle robot with a shotgun just because it never shoots back.
The Spider gun left behind by fallen MCA's has no skin. It is all black.
Finally... what's with the ending? I won't spoil it for those who have played all the way through, but, like, huh? Those Monolith people are really weird.
Conclusion
All in all, I would recommend this game. There are a lot of little problems, but they're all very minor and shouldn't really detract from the game itself. If you like first-person shooters, you should really enjoy Shogo. I can't say anything about multiplayer, because I haven't really had a chance to play it at all.
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