It might be a bad idea to drop back a few years for another game in the same genre after playing through a high-budget modern title like Call of Duty: World At War, but that’s what I’m doing: starting “Project: Snowblind”, a game which has extremely tenuous connections to the Best Damn PC Game Of All Time, and which makes me wonder if the project managers started every planning meeting with the following speech:

“Folks, we’re going to make something OK.  We’re not going to push the envelope, but we’re not going to really SUCK.  We’re shooting for “decent” or “passable” or “has a nice personality if you get to know it”.  Just remember that, and we’ll get through this development cycle and get put on something else.”

This is perhaps a little harsh – I’m barely through the third level, so really I’m still in the training levels for the game, and it’s not like I’m disliking it or anything, but it really seems like the dev, art, and story teams kind of phoned it in.

Whoever wrote the little incidental conversations that NPCs have with each other, though, did a bang-up job.  It is, perhaps, not the best testimony for a shootery game that the most enjoyable bits so far have consisted of standing around near NPCs waiting for them to talk to each other, but whatever else I may say about this game, it has that going for it.

Then again, there are a lot of games that don’t really pick up for a while and then wind up kicking all kinds of arse, so we’ll see what happens.