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To
tell you the truth I’ve been looking forward to this game, quite a
lot. Being a big fan of the Metal Gear series and recently
finding the joys of Splinter Cell, I thought the title’s
mixture of WWII stealth action and RPG element would really pull
together the mass of recent First-Person-Shooters  set in WWII, the
evolution of the Stealth genre over the past few years and add in
many needed RPG elements to this role-playing type of game.
This
isn’t the first attempt at a game like this from Wide Games, their
debut title Prisoner of War although different in terms of
actual gameplay has the same basic concept, escape and survive. Pilot
Down: Behind Enemy Lines really puts a new edge on this concept;
you are William Foster, an American Airforce Personnel, put into a
situation every WWII pilot dreaded: being shot down over enemy
territory. During World War II over 180,000 allied airmen were shot
down in enemy territory, only 300 of them made it to
Switzerland
and freedom. You get to decide which set of numbers your character,
Bill, makes up. Everything in the game is set against you getting
out alive - there are more enemies than you, they’re better armed
than you and if they don’t kill you the cold of middle
Europe
winter will.
The
first thing you notice that’s against you in this game is the fact
you have two health meters to watch, one standard health bar and one
of which is an Endurance meter, this goes down quicker the colder
you get. Not only does this mean you have a constant phobia of icy
streams but also that you have to keep yourself warm, more  so than
anything else. If the bar is too low for too long you can get a cold
and sneezing is never helpful in a stealth game, or if you let the
bar drop completely it will start to eat at your health bar, slowing
your progress and making you more vulnerable to enemy attacks – a
technique ripped straight from The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of
Time, but entirely fitting in it’s new guise.
Fighting is generally the stealthy option of a quick strangulation,
though there is a full authentic collection of WWII weaponry for
when you feel there isn’t another option but full on assault -
ranging from the tiniest pistol to big powerful assault rifle. The
use of these weapons increases the variety of gameplay but because
of how outnumbered you are, full on assault is never really
possible. What you generally end up doing is hiding with your back
against a wall, or shed, or some random pile of logs, then swinging
out when the barrage of machine gun bullets stops, trying to hit one
of the four or so blasted Germans that now have you pinned. No, this
game definitely pushes for the stealthy option, even the opponents
AI seems to be tuned for letting the stealthy man get away with it,
countless times have I sniped a guard standing next to someone and
his mate just wanders off after taking a couple of drags on his
cigarette allowing you to sneak up and hide the body somewhere then
worry about taking out the blind idiot.
The
unintuitive AI is something else that plagues Pilot Down: Behind
Enemy Lines, it’s something that many Stealth-based suffer
from but annoys me a great deal; the enemy can only ever see about
four feet in front of them! This has been partially improved in Pilot
Down: Behind Enemy Lines with the inclusion of detection meters
above people’s heads which starts when a person first becomes
aware of your presence; a
little red or yellow bar that slowly gets bigger the more they
notice you, yellow representing if they will hear you and red is
when they will see you. This does give you a fare amount of warning
to remove your presence from their vicinity but this doesn’t stop
you from jogging round a corner into a guard because you’ve simply
got bored of creeping at a snails pace through German countryside or
because it is killing you.
The
title is very slow paced; it’s not that you can’t move at speed,
you just don’t want to. There’s also a lack of mid-Level
checkpoints; you die, you go back to the Loading  Screen and get
treated to the, actually rather cool, comic book strips describing
how you got to that Level, then you start it all again. The Level
structure and character placement and movement are all heavily
scripted, so it’s relatively easy to get back to where you were,
but it’s the time you have to spend repeating the same movements
and moments sitting in the cold waiting for that one guard to get to
his place on his patrol where you can tap the logs to get his
attention, then try to sneak round behind him without him seeing you
this time.
The
RPG element is just that, an element, you put up a selection of 9
stats generally one point at a time after the completion of each
Level, when the Experience is awarded. Putting up a stat, let’s
say pistol shooting for instance, by one point only really increases
the amount of times Bill shoots at what you’re telling him
to. Whereas putting one on health or endurance gives you a visible
extra portion to your bar. I would really recommend that everyone go
for the inventory expansion at the beginning because the size of the
one you start with makes it seem like you’re storing everything in
a sock down your pants.
Now
graphically with this game they’ve tried to do something a li ttle
different, which is a shame, they’ve tried to set this game within
one of the old war comic books, this is blatant from the Level
Intros, which are dubbed comic book pages shown to you frame by
frame. But you can also notice it in the colouring of the
surroundings and in the strangely brightly coloured sky. This
doesn’t do anything bad for the game, but it is a grand step down
from what is considered plausible graphics today. Even games based
on notorious comics have fully updated their approach to graphics
now, either giving it the full graphical whack or going for the
rather cool looking cel-shaded approach. The sound has a good effect
on the game allowing you to hear the footsteps of the soldiers move
closer and giving a few orchestrated bursts when the action hots-up,
but just what’s needed to make the game work, not anything that
really gets you immersed to the fullest effect.
That’s
my personal problem with Pilot Down: Behind Enemy Lines,
there isn’t really anything special about the game. All the
stealth bits have been done before, generally to a much better
degree, and although the gun fights can be lots of fun and are
really good for this type of game, there isn’t anything I
haven’t seen done better within other genres. The whole game had
the potential to be one of few that tried to combine genres and make
it work, but instead this has turned out to be a game that doesn’t
do a lot at all. I’m glad a title like this was attempted, it’s
just a shame it really isn’t the game it could have been.
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