But back when I WAS playing the single-player game, it was making me re-think my opinion of it. The Berserker sequence was a good enough idea, but it was a total drag to play.

And the bit with the bird-things that kill you instantly if you step out of the light — there’s nothing in the game that TELLS you that they kill you when you step out of the light, until you stand in just the right spot to trigger a cutscene. Which, of course, doesn’t happen until you’ve walked through about a dozen dark patches. Which, of course, means that I had to die about a dozen times — having no idea what was going wrong, and having to watch a non-skippable cutscene EVERY time — before the game told me the solution. That’s just bad.

After a week of Thanksgiving with no Xbox 360, though, I’ll probably be in the mood to play it again. And get back to Final Fantasy XII. I should be back down to only one job at that point, so maybe I’ll have time to play.

1.) The character design - yeah, they’re WH40K space marines. That’s cool. I love WH40K space marines.

2.) The game is *so* well designed, I have to respect CliffyB. maybe that’s a negative, maybe not. Honestly, where Halo eventually felt repetitive, as much as I loved Halo, this game is basically insane from start to finish, and it’s not drawn out, or overly long like Halo sometimes felt. The pacing is great, the mechanics are awesome (even if they’re largely stolen from kill.switch).

3.) It’s gorgeous. And the graphics really take the game up a notch - it looks so good that what would have been “hey! A field of waist-high boxes!” in many other games looks good enough to be believable.

4.) The multiplayer is totally awesome, and different than your standard deathmatch dreck, even though it *is* standard deathmatch dreck. The mechanics are different enough that it’s great fun.

5.) Chainsawing someone in two is incredibly satisfying. When you end the match that way, and drop back into the lobby, where everyone who was killed earlier was spectating, and they’re laughing and *cheering* because you really snuck up on your poor two-piece victim, it’s a pretty sweet feeling.

It’s a great game. I didn’t have any negative impression of Epic/CliffyB, but if I had, this would have to make me seriously reconsider them.

Not to mention, from MS’s perspective, the timing of the release was awesome. The PS3 looks so utterly bland and boring in comparison, I can’t think of a single reason to get one at all.

But if the game lets you play co-op with friends, my GamerTag™ is “ZombieGrundy.” Even if they don’t, my GamerTag™ is “ZombieGrundy”.

–Matt