As far as shooters go, IGI 3 The Mark can head toward the bottom of the list.
IGI 3 The Mark wants to be like a Hollywood style buddy movie
in this case, a US Marine and a British mercenary who must team up to
stop London from being nuked by terrorists. It's a fairly generic but
passable plot device, but the game manages to get everything else wrong.
The plot itself is overly contrived and makes no sense. For example,
before they nuke London, the terrorists need to kill the marine and his
sister because they're the only people who can identify the missile they
plan to use. But wouldn't the missile be vaporized by the nuclear
explosion? There's also the fact that the bad guy's father, a
gazillionaire, finds out about the plot and wants to stop it. But
instead of picking up the phone and calling, say, the British
government, he hires a mercenary to protect the marine. Because as long
as he's alive, the terrorists won't launch their missile because he
could identify it!
But
wait, there's more. The characters are like badly drawn caricatures.
There's Steve "Fletch" Fletcher and Austin Hawke, a couple of manly hero
names if there ever were any. They like to spout inane dialogue that's
terribly delivered. They also fly around in a small, one man jet, which
apparently defies the laws of physics because the jet already has a
separate pilot. At one point, the two heroes, their pilot, and the
sister are all on board. There must be a lot of sitting on laps in
there; how cozy.
The
plot as silly as it is could easily have been overlooked if IGI 3 The
Mark delivered a decent shooting experience, but it doesn't. This is a
game that makes the act of shooting a gun a chore. As you advance
through each level, you'll battle an almost endless stream of bad guys.
Oftentimes the game "surprises" you by having them pop out of corners
and cut you down without warning, but after the 20th or 30th such
encounter, this gets old. So you'll die a lot, memorize the location of
bad guys, and then get past a choke point on the third or fourth try.
Getting through the game requires the frequent application of quicksave
and quickload, as well as having the willpower to continue.
IGI
3 The Mark muhammadniaz.blogspot.com tries to mix things up by letting
you choose which hero to play as throughout the game. This lets you
experience a slightly different route through each level, but the
differences between the characters are negligible. You can also play the
campaign cooperatively with another player, though trying to find
someone to play with online is going to be very difficult but more on
that later.
If
you're looking at the screenshots, you may think that the game looks
decent. Sure, there's a glossy slickness to surfaces, and some of the
environments look interesting. However, the game falls apart when it's
in motion and can cause eye strain because of the badly selected color
palette, the poor frame rate, the jerky animations, and the over the top
blur effect that you need to tone down to the absolute minimum to avoid
migraines. IGI 3 The Mark constantly recycles the same character
models, so each level basically has only three or four different bad
guys, and you see the same guys all the time. The level design also gets
old fast, particularly in an aircraft carrier where you have to open
the door to compartment after compartment and wage a firefight in each
one. Things get particularly bad in the aircraft carrier because the
frame rate drops to a stutter on a high-end PC. The sound effects are
completely generic, but they're the best part of the audio, as the voice
acting is third rate, at best. After seeing this screen for the 40th or
50th time, you won't care anymore that the evil ones win.
When
it comes to multiplayer, IGI 3 The Mark serves up the standard
deathmatch mode, in addition to the aforementioned cooperative mode, as
well as a map control mode. However, you'll need luck trying to find
other players online. This isn't a popular game, and considering the
fierce competition for multiplayer shooters, that probably isn't going
to change in the near future.
IGI
3 The Mark isn't a humorous or fun game in any sense of the words. It's
also a tedious game that taxes your patience and your endurance. When
you get down to it, there are simply far too many other shooters that
you can spend your money on, and most of those will offer a more
enjoyable and fun gameplay experience than IGI 3 The Mark.
RAM= 512MB
Video Memory= 128 MB
Size= 308 MB
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