First impressions are everything these days – with the industry saturated by so many “me too” titles or offerings so horrible that they make you wonder how the developers who unleashed them can even sleep at night, a game truly has to be something exceptional to offer that comfortable, euphoric feeling right off the bat. Well, okay, not exceptional; in fact, my jaded attitude towards the industry as of late has forced me to drop my first impression requirements into demanding that a game simply not suck within the first five minutes of me playing it. Sadly, my “first impression” of Project: Snowblind after wading through the menus and watching the intro cutscene was something to the tune of “hey… this is a lot like Red Faction 2!” One will, of course, note that Red Faction 2 was not a particularly awesome game for its time, which goes on to explain why my initial feelings of hope in relation to the hype this game had received quickly turned to ashes. Let’s delve into Crystal Dynamic’s latest FPS offering for the Xbox and uncover why this is a game I consider “pretty nifty, but hardly what I was expecting”.

Actually, my above comment about the game’s resemblance to Red Faction 2 turned out to be a short-lived thought, as the more I played it, the more I realized what this game truly was. If Deus Ex had all of its RPG elements, fancy, elaborate storyline and sense of immersion stripped out and was turned into a generic-feeling first person shooter, one might end up with a game not entirely dissimilar to Project: Snowblind. In fact, the more I played, the more crazy notions I got that I had somehow stepped into an alternate universe where the Ion Storm developers had gotten drunk and developed this as some kind of “Bizzaro Deus Ex”. Truly, a lot of the gameplay elements match up, from hackable security cameras and turrets, throwable objects that turn semi-transparent when they’re in your hands, and alarm panels that look almost exactly the same as the ones from Deus Ex. Perhaps it’s just some kind of freak co-incidence, but I kept running into little situations and environments that seemed like they were ripped right out of a potential Deus Ex situation, which surprised me to quite a degree, and made me sincerely wonder if any of the Ion Storm people actually had a hand in this game’s development.

Unfortunately, despite the game’s resemblances to Ion Storm’s legendary FPS title, Project: Snowblind is hardly an exemplary release. The game takes place far in the future, focusing on a conflict between the “Liberty Coalition Army” (the good guys) and “The Republic” (the bad guys). The player assumes the role of “Nathan Frost”, a 2nd Lieutenant in the LCA who ends up being the victim of a horrendous disaster. Caught in the middle of an enemy assault right after his arrival in the war zone, Frost ends up having a bomb dropped on his head while vainly attempting to pull a wounded comrade out of the line of fire. Curiously enough however, his body isn’t reduced to a loose assortment of atoms, and his blast-ridden corpse is quickly hauled off for surgery so Frost can be converted into the latest-and-greatest model of bio-augmented uber-soldier. After an admittedly cool little sequence where Frost gets his augmentations installed and activated and he wanders around the LCA base for a bit, the player embarks on a journey to save the world from a superweapon of disastrous proportions, or something. To be honest, there didn’t seem to be much thought or effort put into the game’s plotline, and the game seemed to be all-too-eager to thrust the player right into the action without bothering to really explain anything – which for some gamers may not be entirely necessary, but I feel that to attain a proper level of immersion for the player, a game requires a certain amount of backstory to be presented, which really isn’t the case for Project: Snowblind. Unfortunate, because I can tell this game is at least trying to be a novel, immersive experience, but it really doesn’t achieve the mark.

Snowblind’s gameplay is of the “run-and-gun” variety, but sadly just doesn’t quite feel all that convincing or fun. Perhaps I’ve simply grown up a bit since my earlier gaming days, but I no longer feel that throwing hordes of generic enemies at the player is a good way to make the action fun or exciting, and most of Project: Snowblind’s tactical encounters indeed involve cramming hordes of enemies all with the same general weapons and appearance. Of course, Nathan Frost has a number of tricks up his sleeve thanks to his augmentations, which, combined with a rather generous high-tech arsenal, allow him to cut down numerous enemies in a variety of ways. A few of the augmentations include a “bullet time” module (take a guess at what it does), ballistic shielding, invisibility, and a number of other options. Augmentation usage is limited through Frost’s bio-energy reserves, although in an interesting implementation the player doesn’t actually have direct control over how much power a given augmentation consumes. Unlike Deus Ex, switching on an augmentation always eats up a specific chunk of energy, with the augmentation itself only lasting a pre-set amount of time until it runs out and is activated again. Whether this was done for balancing reasons or just as a quirk design choice, I’m not sure, but it sometimes made it feel like a waste when I used a huge chunk of power for the single, lengthy use of an augmentation just to take down one or two enemies, and just landed home even more the point that the game is built with a combat style involving many enemies at once in mind.

But still, for a game revolving around the repeated act of en-masse killing, is combat in Project: Snowblind actually any fun? Quite a bit of thought seems to have been put into giving the player options for taking down his enemies, as a decent number of weapons, grenades, and other tools are added to Frost’s arsenal over the course of the game: each weapon has an alt-fire function to expand its usability (such as a sticky-bomb launcher for the shotgun, or a neat little nano-virus launcher for the sniper rifle that turns enemies against each other), and the grenade types include generic flash and frag grenades, as well as spider grenades (which spawn a little deployable buddy to follow you around and zap foes) and deployable shields, useful for making quick-n-dirty forms of cover. The development team even put in a limited number of vehicles, though I never encountered a situation where they were really put to the test, and ended up opting to go on foot more often than not. Additionally, the game’s level design is a lot less linear than I was expecting, with lots of handy little side passages (primarily ventilation ducts) and alternate approaches to a given situation. Exploration isn’t exactly Snowblind’s strong suit, but it was nice having a few alternatives to simply running into the enemy’s gunfire blindly. Another thing worth mentioning is the “Icepick” tool, which allows players to hack into distant security cameras, turrets, and general terminals and take control of the object in question, allowing for even more flexibility.

That said, Project: Snowblind just wasn’t a very satisfying game to play. My aforementioned beefs involving the lack of a cohesive storyline hurt the sense of immersion I kept expecting the game to provide, and the overall combat system itself just isn’t really fun to experience. Enemies do a decent job of taking up cover and using available gun emplacements rather than just milling around like idiots, but they also had a certain level of precision that made them frustrating to fight against (especially when I had low health) because they had instant reaction times that allowed them to fire at me the very second I poked my head out from behind cover with surprising precision. While this did a good job of encouraging constant use of augmentations I would have otherwise never really bothered with, this quickly led to a huge deal of irritation when attempting to deal with one of the game’s largest problems: the save system. Snowblind suffers from the typical console annoyance of relying on save points, and I don’t comprehend why developers continue to rely on such an irritating approach to game progression, especially with occasionally difficult FPS titles. As I’ve stated many times in the past, there is no faster way to turn me off from a game than requiring me to repeat long segments over and over again, and Snowblind is no exception. The only points where the player is allowed to save is either between levels or at pre-designated “save terminals”, and a player’s death instantly forces him all the way back to the last save point. The game occasionally provides players with a bit of a safety net in the form of a “nano-boost” capsule that can save his life when his health reaches zero, but these are a bit too limited to be relied upon for every situation. This, combined with the game’s other combat-related quirks and some interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying weapons led me to keep thinking the word “mediocre” all the while I was playing.

Another thing that annoys me about Project: Snowblind is its control scheme. Immediately after I started up the game, faults began manifesting themselves in the form of a shoddy menu control system, which is restricted solely to the D-pad – there’s no way to navigate the menus using the natural analogue stick method, which struck me as an incredibly odd and cumbersome limitation. But more importantly, the default control scheme didn’t feel very natural and was difficult to settle into – no doubt the result of a recent Halo-high, but I was immediately annoyed that I couldn’t perform the usual functions (like crouching or grenade throwing) in the manner I was so used to. There are a number of alternate pre-set binding configurations that can be used, but none of these were quite up to my standards, and there is no way to manually reconfigure the controls. I of course managed to warm up to the inputs eventually, but I definitely feel a little more thought could have been put into how the inputs were handled. Like it or not, Halo is basically the defining baseline for how an Xbox-based FPS title should feel in terms of smooth controls and playability, making it all that much worse of a situation when a new release doesn’t quite live up.

Project: Snowblind’s graphics engine, much like the rest of the game, is adequate, but not exceptional. The levels are fairly sizable (especially when rated in comparison to other recent titles, which practically have loading zones around every other corner), the bloom effects look quite appealing, the HUD looks fairly nifty, and the framerates stayed consistently high. That said, a lot of the game also looks somewhat under-detailed, with repetitive environments that are hardly interesting to look at, character models that are somewhat unconvincing (especially the animations, which are sometimes a bit choppy and jumpy), and weapon models that don’t feel nor look particularly amazing to use. A lot of the distant scenery in the game also has a strange fuzzy, degraded look to it which, while not terribly distracting, still detracted noticeably from the game’s graphics quality.

The game engine also offers a standard physics suite, although the developers didn’t really go out of their way to exploit it in any noteworthy way. Certain objects in the world can be picked up and flung at enemies (there’s even a dedicated weapon for this, as is the running fad lately it seems ever since Half-Life 2 came out), but the level designers seemed to be incredibly particular about which items could and could not be thrown, meaning that most objects I was expecting to be able to manipulate ended up being simple static props, such as garbage bags and assorted pieces of debris. Also, I noticed a surprising lack of ragdoll physics during my killing sprees – perhaps it does actually exist on a certain level in the game, but if it does, it utterly failed to manifest itself during the numerous times I witnessed some poor bastard’s head or arm sticking into a wall. Corpse cleanup and world object destruction is also handled in an unsatisfying manner (exploding tanks, for example, disappear into a complete fireball that leaves no wreckage whatsoever), which I found to be a glaring fault in the game’s graphical design. We’ve reached a time in gaming where things like corpses that don’t disappear in front of your eyes and ragdoll physics are expected out of modern games, making it more of a glaring problem when a hot new title comes out with these features suspiciously absent.

The first thing I want to comment on in regards to Project Snowblind’s multiplayer is that the friends list sucks. Perhaps I’m missing an option of some sort, but the organization of the game’s integrated friends list is really poorly done. You know how most Xbox Live titles organize their friends list by putting all active, online contacts at the top, with comrades playing the current game taking priority? Apparently that isn’t the case here, as the game seems permanently stuck on sorting my list in alphabetical order, regardless of who’s online or not. Given how huge my list is, it proved to be a huge pain to check up on my friends to see what they were doing and / or send them invites, just because I had to scroll through my entire list just to see who was online. On top of that, there’s no way to scroll page-by-page, so a lot of unnecessary button-pushing is needed. I’d love to find out who was responsible for the XBL UI design. Speaking of UI problems, the only way to see who’s talking over the communicator headset during a match is to take note of a small blinking icon above the player’s head in the game world – which is fine if you’re looking right at somebody, but how are you supposed to know for off-screen players? Oversights like these are something I consider totally unacceptable in a modern game, and definitely hurt my enjoyment of the game’s multiplayer component.