By: Phire
Terrorists strike and you must use force to counteract. You have
various weapons and equipment at your disposal to take care of
these bad guys and it's shoot on sight. Vigilance has sort of the
same concept of Rainbow 6, yet Rainbow 6 was tactical and there
are no tactics to Vigilance, you just go in and get the job done at
any cost. Vigilance is displayed with a 3rd person view which
shows the current character you control very nicely. To give you
more understanding of the 3rd person view, let me tell you that it
is nothing like Tomb Raider's camera. In Tomb Raider it was very
hard to manuever, your own person model sometimes blocked the
view of where the enemy was: Vigilance takes full advantage of
3Dfx's transparency effects and fades away your character so that
you can see.
The control to this game is pretty hard but not something you can't
get used to. The default keyboard settings for Vigilance is
something like I had for my Keyboard + Mouse combo in Quake 2.
W, S, A, D is used for moving around (keys can be remapped) but
in Quake 2 you could turn your body using the mouse to move left
and right, in Vigilance you may be able to do it by turning
Crosshair lock on, but otherwise the Crosshair moves in free
motion across the screen. In Quake 2 the crosshair stayed
stationary until you moved your actual body. This makes the
control pretty hard but with a little practice you will be able to get
it down.
The graphics to this game are very good, and the levels are huge.
This means you need a lot of ram, about 64 megs should be
enough for this game to work good. 32 megs of ram does not work
well with this game, it will take a very long time to load
the levels and you will have a hard time moving around because
of the swapping going on. I currently have my Windows swap set
to 125 megs and it still swaps bad causing the game to trip
because of HD activity. It only swaps bad once per scene though,
once it's swapped it should not go as bad as it did when you first
entered an area. The player models to this game are designed
very nice and they walk and move their arms in a life-like motion.
Level design is very good, though some textures are not nice. For
example I saw an area where water was supposed to show but it
basically just looked blue, no water look or waves like
Quake/Quake 2 has.
There is a large number of characters to choose from (15+) and a
large selection of weapons and items you can get. So far one of
the items I saw was a CD that I had to use in the mission I was
playing to insert it into a computer which would give it a virus and
destroy vital computer files so terrorists can not obtain it. The first
weapon you start off with is a pistol-like weapon, it's very nice and
has a nice shooting sound to it. I also found a machine gun,
though I didn't like the sounds to it because I heard no shell
dropping sounds and it just sounds like it stops abnormally. The
crosshair in Vigilance is quite large but can be changed in the
options menu to small, but its default large size is about the size of
a person's thumb and when it is aimed at an enemy then the color
of the crosshair turns green (much like SiN). Not only can you get
guns but you can also get bombs to throw, and also an enemy can
be carrying a keycard so that when you kill him you may use it to
open doors.
Most of Vigilance is 3D, but there are still some 2D things to it:
when weapons and armor are on the floor they are shown as 2D.
There are also some clipping problems in the game but that really
happens with a lot of 3D shooters, and this game didn't come from
an expierenced company at making games like this. One of two
problems that I found was that when you run out of ammo there is
a character animation of the guy reloading; well the problem is
when you have nothing to reload with, he
does the same animation, just no *click* sound for the reload.
Second problem is that I see no way to defend yourself if you have
ran out of ammo: I tried to use my fists but I saw nowhere how to
do that so I was basically a sitting duck. One of the good things is
that you are supplied with a radar: it shows a variable of how near
you are to the point of destination or enemy. Even though the
radar does that, it will not show a variable at long distance, only
about when you're somewhat near.
From what I know, you are able to use pistols, automatics, rocket
launchers, bombs, and sniper rifles. There are more in the game
you can find. Vigilance does not have a very good blood system
but it's better than not having blood at all -- it looks like the Quake
blood, and for those of you who don't remember that then let me
refresh your memory: it looks like a bunch of box-shaped pixels in
red color of different shades, it doesn't look so bad. But one thing
that Quake didn't do that Vigilance can is that it stains blood on the
wall. Another cool thing is that when you're hit in specific areas of
your body you can see the bullet holes and blood stains on your
player model.
The A.I. to this game varies depending on the difficulty you
choose: I chose Rookie and the enemies basically stand there to
get shot and it's very easy to dodge their fire. Also when you climb
a ladder in Vigilance you are still able to shoot, a nice addition to
the genre. It also matters where you hit terrorists: head shots are
usually a one-shot kill. You also have
to remember that some characters are better suited to some
weapons; SegaSoft says there are 27 available deathmatch
characters to choose from, including: Sniper (allows zoom with
ANY weapon), Recon (can determine distance of the next target
which is displayed on the top right), Demolition (causes extra
damage with grenades), Speed (runs faster), Stealth (moves
silently and NEGATES recon), Tough (additional Health and/or
Strength), Armor (always starts with Armor), Ammo Cache (carries
more ammo), and the Assassin which can do more damage when
using the G20 Silenced Pistol, and when you hit an enemy from
behind it does even MORE damage.
Not only can the game be 3rd person but it can also be 1st person
by pressing the F12 key. A suprising thing I noticed was that
enemies can pick up items like a gun or health box on the floor.
And enemies react to sounds so it may be a good idea to crouch
and then walk near them to shoot. There are over 25 weapons in
the game (yes, 25!) but you can only carry 10 at a time. And
carrying alot of items makes you walk/run slower, and when you
drop your gun you also drop the ammo out of it.
I really have to say this was a great attempt of SegaSoft's to make
a good 3rd person shooter. It has nice graphics, very good level
design and is pretty fun, there are only a few problems but it is still
a great game. And you can even connect to a remote server or go
over HEAT.NET.
Graphics: 16 / 20
Sound: 11 / 15
Gameplay: 19 / 30
Fun Factor: 14 / 20
Multiplayer Play: 3 / 5
Overall Impression: 5 / 10
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