Well, you got the idea..
Damn, well, this was an awsome concept and the art utterly kicked ass, but it's a shame that so many bugs plagued it. For the sake of providing a good review I'll actually walk through it all.
The first half was great, but not entirely fullproof. First I really hated how, in the under water sequence, you could only stab right where the knife was. It was a pain when the shark thing hugged the floor and basically ate my guts out. Also, though I hate to admit it, it took me awhile to figure out that you could jump into that walker during the fight with the big guy. One of those nice little "in" arrows could have saved me a couple of lives. And that's another thing, the walker part was a real disappointment in that it was too easy. Your gun had infinite shots and did a lot of damage, but to make matters worse you didn't even have to aim in order to hit a target, allowing me to simply hold down the fire button and walk. The only hard part was jumping the gaps with the walker all the way towards the left of the screen when going back. Plus the cheats didn't work on any difficulty after I activated them.
Oh boy, then came the second half.. The fighter part was really a pain. There was no difficulty in that you had to do everything perfect unless you died. It was that simple. You absolutely had to get every single powerup and kill everything as fast as needed. Plus there was no way to dodge anything. I thought doing a barrel roll would block attacks like in Star Fox, but to no avail. Their only use was to shake those bugs off of you. Then came the part that froze for everybody. The first time I got there it froze when I went to the ladder which pissed me off a lot. Course I went back to try again. This time, before going on the ladder, I ran across the entire board, threw all of my grenades, and shot off randomly. Something clicked and let me climb up. I didn't get that spider just hanging over the door for no reason. I was expecting it to grab me or something, but it just sat there. The hydralisk looking thing.. I wished I could have fought that instead of just getting my ass kicked by it. The jailbreak sequence was cool, but there was something said about things that patrolled the jail cells. I waited around and never saw any of them. Anyway, I got the gun and stuff and was figuring to hold off a horde of guys with my new awsome gear. I ended up running across a completely open space until I reached a boss. Come on, I wanted to kick some ass with that stuff. So I get to the boss. Would have totally kicked ass if it weren't for the other guy shooting (which did literally nothing) and for the boss getting stuck, twice. The first time it happened he got stuck standing on the door he came from after I lead him back that way. The second time he went all the way to the right and got stuck there. I just kicked the crap out of him; no contest. Then the guy threw the grenade.. Did anybody else notice his arm was detached? Hmm... So, I finish that scene to find the place blowing up. I find no enemies and just an indestructable cannon that I have to get shot by it in order to move past it. Well, ok, that's fine.. But why was there nothing happening when I picked the other guy up in the ship? There was no epilogue, no dialogue, or anything. It immediately went to the credits and then a "See you next mission" screen ala Metroid. Plus the text on the page which told you how you could help out was cut off at the bottom. A real help to be sure.
Another qualm I had was the sound. I could clearly hear someone's voice for the ship's rocketing off sound effect. Also, the Europa Vet had no voice at all. After seeing everyone else with one, it was unexpected to say the least.
It could have kicked so much ass, but those damn little quirks ended up spoiling it. I honestly can't see how your beta testers missed all that. I'd really like to help make the next one if I could. I love this series.
