BLURRRGGHHHH
Okay, just kidding. This is actually gonna be a somewhat in depth review of my feelings of the... Maligned Strike Force Heroes 3. I'm gonna talk about what I feel it did right, and what I feel it did wrong. Because believe it or not, I do feel as though SFH3 did SOME things right. So let's begin.
also fair warning there's gonna be swearing up the ass
WHAT SFH3 DID RIGHT[]
So SFH3 may be a soulless and crap game compared to its predecessors, but did it do anything important for the series that advanced and improved gameplay even slightly? Well, yes, actually.
One thing I'm very glad they fixed in this game is how inventories work. In SFH2, your inventory for a class was tied to that class. So say my General has a Perfect Flawless Sexy Butt Fucker +2000% Damage Judgement, but I don't want him to use a Perfect Flawless Sexy Butt Fucker +2000% Damage Judgement because I use the magnums for him. Can I just give the PFSBF2KD Judgement to my Juggernaut?
NO! AND FUCK YOU FOR ASKING THAT!
It baffled me why the heroes' can't share their inventory. There could be a situation where my Sniper is sitting on a pile of super mega flawless awesome SMGs, and he can't give a single fucking one of them to my Engineer.
SFH3 surprisingly fixed all that; Inventory is tied directly to a universal inventory menu, so there's no more situations where one class can have all sorts of godly weapons he/she will never use because I didn't pick a sniper to use a fucking SMG. Also, the infinite(?) inventory is also a mild plus.
Another idea I really liked was the concept behind upgrading weapons. You can make your weapons better by visiting the workshop... But uh... Sadly, they fucked this concept over. Royally. And... That's all the positives I can think of.
WHAT SFH3 DID WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG BLAAARGH[]
So remember that upgrading thing? WELL! They decided to fuck that idea right up by making it a random goddamn chance of it failing! Which is a pisser in an of itself, but they ALSO added the random chance that, if you fail, YOU LOSE A GODDAMN UPGRADE, so you get to blow your damn money on the last upgrade in hopes that it'll actually work so you can get a chance to try and upgrade the stat you were trying to upgrade before and GRRAAAAAAA-
I think you can see why this is a pile of arse. Random chance for things like this is bad enough, but a random chance to downgrade your damn weapons adds a whole new heaping of bullshit on what could have been a great idea.
Another thing SFH3 did oh so terribly wrong was the story. Oh god, the STORY.
60+ missions, the game boasted! Unfortunately for the game, it didn't learn the values of quality over quantity. Let me tell you exactly how the plot of SFH3 goes.
Your platoon of pillocks fight through fourty+ stages with absolutely zero plot, have a random "Fight With the Creators" at the end, and then that Scientist guy gets mad and kills his allies. Oh, and the GlobeX Leader may or may not be alive again.
That's it. Fourty+ levels to explain THAT. Suffice to say, 99.9% of those missions have absolutely zero story whatsoever. It's just a slog, fighting random people who aren't even fucking GlobeX to begin with, occassionally getting new weapons and possibly classes. It's about as interesting as a cardboard covered in fecal matter. It feels like a holding pattern, for a much bigger and more interesting game. Like the devs were making the super mega action packed sequel to SFH2 that would have been the dog's bollocks, but people were getting irritated and impatient so they threw them this cobbled together thing to try and hold them over. It failed.
Another thing that boils my piss is how this game bizarrely feels like a friggin mobile game at times. And no, not the good kind, either. The kind that feels like a penny pinching Free 2 Play game that constantly beats you about to make you relent and pay your damn money. Only, and here's the hilarious bit, from what I can tell, there aren't any microtransactions! Now I'm not saying microtransactions would have improved the game in the slightest, but, you're left with this bizarre game with bizarre game mechanics that feels like it should be trying to penny pinch you, yet it isn't. It's uncomfortable feeling, to say the least. Most of the game mechanics just get in the damn way of the game. Like the stupid fucking "Tired" mechanic, or that goddamn cunting "recruiting" mechanic. The whole idea behind Wesley having to recruit heroes to help him battle GlobeX COULD have been interesting, if this game even remotely had a story. Alas, it didn't. So it just becomes annoying.
And that's what I'd call SFH3, really. Annoying, soulless, and just plain bleh. It feels like the SFH core trapped under layers of bullshit, mobile game esque mechanics, and more bullshit. There's a good game trying to fucking happen, and yet it just can't.
So what would I do for SFH4? Throw out the goddamn mobile game mechanics, go back to the format 1 and 2 did, have there be an actual goddamn story, and keep the universal inventory thing. There! That's all they'd have to do.
Let's just hope they do. DMS, out.