But then the AI gets involved and completely destroys any hope of strategy, or even fun, that you might have taken out of these encounters. If the game was intentionally puzzle-based, and brought more to the table as such, things would be fine, but as a strategy title, it only partially works. A strategy title should let you think for yourself and set up your own tactics, not solve puzzles. Still, given that this is an equal parts action and strategy game, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for the title to force you into maneuvers. There are many games out there that thrive on scripted sequences, and in theory, some of Earned in Blood's "scripted" encounters are actually pretty good. Some of these encounters do work reasonably well, with some even providing an adrenaline-soaked experience as you haul ass for cover. Once they're dead, you move onto the next section, take a look at what you're being forced to do again, and repeat. So you set up your men, have them throw down covering fire and head off on your own (or with your second squad, if you have one) and attempt to flank the enemy. From there, you usually only have one or two possible places to safely set up your men, though there isn't generally a massive difference between your options. With all of the short walls, bushes and whatnot around, you figure you could just hop past them and essentially start from scratch with your own plan, but you're constantly funneled into a pre-planned fight scenario. The levels are so linear that there is almost always only one entrance into an encounter. For whatever reason, the PlayStation 2 version of the game is quite action-friendly and you're able to storm numerous bunkers, fox holes and such, wiping out enemy after enemy before you finally bite it.
Well, in the other versions of the game that is. Sure, you can pull off some crazy stuff now and again to mix things up, but running Rambo-style into an enemy nest isn't the intention here and you'll very likely be killed doing so. One problem is that the game's levels, or should we say individual encounters, are set up in such a linear and practically forced manner that you don't have all that many viable options of what you can do. This is the rule of thumb for how things work, and in a perfect world, this would work quite well given a varying number of setups and options with which to perform this maneuver. You find your opponents, set up suppressing fire in order to keep them pinned down, and then flank them to take them out. The gameplay is designed to be something of a chess match. Fair enough, and in theory this would be a reasonable design decision, except that the strategic elements don't work well at all.
You don't have pin-point precision aiming, as Earned in Blood sways you to rely just as much on strategy as you do on headshots. Now granted, the action-oriented segments of the game can't exactly stand on their own without the strategic elements, and that's by design.
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