Modern Combat: Domination Review (EU)

When you think of network titles, you generally think of lower tier games or a classic game a company couldn’t recharge you full price for. It’s easy to forget that downloadable titles can be amazingly fun games that just didn’t have enough content for the discs. A few of these titles even rival retail titles like Castle Crashers, and Spelunker. In a rather gusty move Gameloft has decided to bring their latest title in the Modern Combat series “Domination” to the console world. Will it be a classic that you can play endlessly, or is dud that sucks more than rooms where you get spawn camped. Find out in this edition of Hot or Not.

Hot

Diversity

A sad cliché in this day and age is to have the game in the same places, or doing the same thing. While most combat might happen in some desert that no one cares about, or a generic Congo level. Most people are looking for something else! While Modern Combat does have some genericish levels, there are some wonderfully diverse ones too. There’s a fun little ship yard where you have some buildings to explore and underground tunnels to get the best of your enemies. There’s also a fun little office with several floors of openings to nail someone out of the blue, or get blown away like a plastic bag in the wind.

Not only are the levels quite abstract, Gameloft went one step further and added unique game modes for an exact map. They can be fun for example trying to save a hostage from the enemy or activating a missile. You might be disappointed that your favorite just might not be the most common but you will agree it’s better to have levels DESIGNED for the game type, over making something fun into a €50 loss.

Run And Gun Shooter

Shooters can become very annoying when most players are sitting in a room waiting for you to pass by, so they can snipe you. I’m not going to lie sometimes I get sick of it, but Modern Combat is not like this. You see the size of each map makes it very hard to snipe on most of them; it also gives you very few places to hide. You can’t cover the stares with C4 and sit up there waiting to rack up the points, in fact they’re so well designed you can camp the same spot all day and get zero kills. Since there’s nearly endless small hallways, little secret openings, and things you just can’t predict you’re forced to run around shooting and having a good time.

Offline Combinations And Trophies

For anyone who likes trophies or might give them a glance, you would know online ones rarely fair well. Usually there’s some sort of stipulation which makes the game a bit harder to play to earn them. Modern Combat however does NOT require you to ever play with anyone if you don’t want to. If you’re online in a room you can just play with bots and level. This works well for people whom might want to get a feel of the game without wasting time, or see if the move controller is right for them.

You can play with as many or as few people as you wish and still rack up points for trophies, or your level in game. I am quite happy to see that gamers who might not want to play with others, or avoid possible Modder’s will always have a viable and simple solution to this problem.

Not

Move Support

Don’t get me wrong, move support is great to see and works very well here. The only issue with it is the increased difficulty in playing like that. I had no issues killing people up close and personal but at mid-range or better I just could not kill anyone. You might want to play online with some bots to see if its right for you, but I just found the controls to be working against me, and killing was harder and almost impossible at a distance.

Don’t worry though, if you choose to play with the Playstation Move it’s manageable enough to pull it off, and with enough fine tuning you can easily be decent or better, it’s just not going to be for everyone. For anyone wondering how much of an impact it made for me…

With Move: 22 kills, 4 deaths

Without: 34 kills, 1 death

Money System

Since players have to buy equipment, doing better or worse will have a direct impact on how much players can do later on. All it takes is a few unlucky moments to be down to a grenade and pistol. This isn’t too bad if you have to skill to come back but with questionable team mates, you might see people wasting their money, or complaining about lack of good weapons. While players can always pick up someone else’s weapon things like armor and grenades can’t be.

Verdict

There are a lot of great things to keep you playing Modern Combat, but it lacks a certain spark that brings you back on a later date. You can easily have fun with the run and gun system but the game doesn’t really evolve past that, and can get boring with the minimalistic tactical aspects past learning the map.  All things considered it’s a good value next to other things on the market.

[Editors Note: The review was done with a Dualshock 3, and the Dualshock 3 Move combo. In addition the game was supplied by the publisher for review purposes.]