3DsoundSurge: Shogo:MAD Review


	Mikael Hagén shares his views of Shogo:MAD. This award winning title is put through the paces using five different soundcards testing RSX, A3D 1.x, DS3D with EAX and DS3D! Read on for all the goods.

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Shogo:MAD

Gameplay
Score: 9

In Shogo you either play on foot like any other action game or you place yourself in a Mecha. In both modes, the controls are almost identical and very similar to other action games like Quake2 but lacks the use key you have in Half-Life, something I miss a bit. What differs is that when you're in the Mecha you can take a lot more damage and you are about 10 meters (or 30 feet) above the ground and got a lot more powerful weapons then you got when you're on foot.

The Mecha isn't slow in any way, and you can still jump, run and duck. However, now when you jump it's on top of a building rather than just a table. The game-play both from within a Mecha or on foot are more fast paced than most other first person shooters. Usually when you play in a Mecha you fight Mechas that are about the same size and the same weapon power. At a few occasions you will meet foot soldiers when you're in the Mecha and you will have a blast and can even kill them by just stepping on them. The reverse may also occur and then you better get the hell out of there as quickly as you can or at least make sure you stay away from the Mechas fire.

The Mecha can also be transformed to a vehicle in which case you don't have any weapons but you're much faster speed makes up for it, so if you rather run than fight turn the Mecha into a vehicle and see the enemies flash by. You will also have the option to play the game from a third person perspective very much like JediKnight but unlike JediKnight there’s no weapon that makes that mode useful in my opinion.

You have 8 different weapons for the Mecha and another 8 when you're on foot. The Mecha weapon is of course, as mentioned, much more powerful than your usual weapons but I wouldn't say any of them are much different than what you found in other games like Half-Life, they are just scaled by a factor of 10. The 16 weapons consists of weapons using bullets, rockets and a few more futuristic fire balls kind of weapons. You also get the now very popular choice of a weapon with a zooming feature in both Mecha mode and on foot, which really is fun to use.

The game consists of several missions, which often consists of several levels usually at least one on foot and one in the Mecha. Before each mission you get a text screen on what you should do, fortunately the instructions don't stop there. During the missions you also have radio communication with the HQ, usually with your new girl friend, where you get instructions what to do when something doesn't go according to plan. Some other discussions also takes place over the radio both jokes and serious discussions about what have happened and what needs to be done part of just completing the missions as ordered from the HQ. There is also several occasions of scripted events occurring between missions and during missions. They are not like Half-Life where you can always interact with them. Here you lose the control of character during the scripted sequences / movies but unlike Half-Life you hear your voice and can at some points make a choice what to say which can affect how the story unfolds. You can also decide during some missions if you will help someone or if you should use force or not which also affects how the mission will play out. As far as I cant tell the end of the game is pretty similar no matter what decisions you make but what happens before the end, what levels you will play and where the end will take place will depend on what choice you make.

In some of the missions you will interact with people like in Half-Life and even together carry out missions where the mission will fail if your friend dies. In some missions you will also have help right from the start by some anonymous soldiers in Mecha that can be of help taking down enemies but you never need to care if they die or not. There is also a lot of civilians that don't carry weapons that you can bounce into but they never say anything interesting and it's also very rare that any enemies say something.

Overall I would say the story is more complex than in Half-Life and I found it more interesting and unlike Half-Life you have several individuals that you meet several times during the game rather than the anonymous scientists and guards you meet in Half-Life. However, the way you interact with them isn't so much part of the gameplay as they are in Half-Life but much better than games like JediKnight. I would like to see a combination of the more interesting story in Shogo with several individuals being part of the story but still the way you interact would be more like Half-Life, maybe with the addition of hearing your own voice. Maybe Shogo 2 will do that.

When it comes to AI I found it lacking. I thought it would be fixed with the first patch but maybe it slipped back into the latest patch or I just got spoiled with how Half-Life works. In Shogo, I rarely got the feeling of any teamwork and often the guards didn't move even though I shot down the guy next to them. However, the sheer number of people sometimes made the game a bit challenging. The enemies are placed well, so you better watch out before you round that corner. Still, only on a few occasions did a get the feeling that some soldier actually did anything clever.

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