Imagine playing a game that is so amazing, all you think about all day is going home and playing it. Imagine a game so breathtaking, that you are drawn into its realm, feeling as though you really are a part of this virtual world. Imagine a game so enjoyable, it is almost orgasmic. Now that you are salivating over Gears of War, let me bring you back down to reality and tell you about a game called The History Channel Presents: Civil War.
This game isn’t just bad, it’s bad bad. This is literally, without question, the worst game I have ever played. It’s games like this that make me wonder if I am in the right field of work or not. Let’s start at the beginning, and work our way through this cataclysm of trash step by step.
Okay, the disc didn’t look too bad. It definitely looked like this would be a thriller of a game. Come on, a first person shooter set in the Civil War? Sounds interesting enough to me. Imagine the thrill of shooting someone, having to find cover to reload, hoping and praying you weren’t ambushed or someone didn’t pistol whip you in the back of the head. So, I’m looking at the disc, and thinking to myself “Self, this game might not be too bad. I mean, it is made by Activision afterall…” Boy howdy (don’t ask what just possessed me to say boy howdy) was I wrong on that one.
First of all, the game feels very broken. Everything from the controls to the graphics just feels unfinished, rushed, unloved. They say a room full of chimps with typewriters would eventually churn out Shakespeare… I’m thinking more along the lines of the programming code for this game. Apparently, the game is running on a beefed up version of the Call of Duty 2 engine. Let me be the first to call out shenanigans on this one. There is no way this game is using a beefed up version of that engine. Call of Duty 2, while not photo realistic, was a decent looking game. Maybe not exactly next gen, but it still looked great! This game, well, I had more fun pouring sulfuric acid in my eyes than looking at it. Where I got the acid from is none of your concern. You should be asking what possessed me to play this game!
The graphics are washed out, with environments that would feel right at home on the PS2. In fact, I think I recognized some of the textures from Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The characters are bland, generic, lifeless human beings, kind of like Republicans. And just like Republicans, they keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again. Hmm, that was a pretty good segway into the A.I. discussion.
The A.I. is where the game really shines. And I mean shines like a rusted fork you find buried beneath your grandmothers rose garden. You know, the kind you touch and you feel like you need a tetanus shot. Yeah, it was kind of like that. That’s how shiny it was. It is probably the most broken part of the game. The game plays kind of like this; you run up behind cover as an enemy soldier runs up to you as well. You shoot, miss, and have to reload. That crazy southerner just stands there looking at you, his gun pointed at your face. You duck down for cover while reloading, all the while the enemy is standing right above you, on the other side of that cover, still looking at you. You stand back up, he continues to look at you. You do a little jig, juggle some bowling pins, stand on your head, make some long distance calls, and he just continues to stand there. He doesn’t shoot, he doesn’t swing at you, he just stands there, as though God just suddenly decided to perform a lobotomy on him at that given second. You then point your gun at him to shoot, in which case he finallydecides to do something. He then takes a swing at you, instead of shooting obviously, and takes a bullet to the face. This is no lie, no exaggeration. This literally happened a good fifteen times during the course of the first level.
