Boiling Point

[markgreyam]

Just picked up a copy of Boiling Point today while pre-ordering my PSP, now that the 2.0 patch is out. Has anyone else played this at all? The impression that I get is that it's a lot like a South American verison of Gothic, in that it's a bit clunky to use but if you get into it you just get lost in it and play until you've completed it. It sounds really good, and I have a machine that will handle the spec, so I'm hoping that it will tide me over while i count down the last 7 days before I own a PSP

[PeteJ]

Has the 2.0 patch fixed all the bugs? The game has always tempted me but the horrible reports I've read on the poor programming really put me off.

[Friction]

I had this game when it first came out and whilst it could have been really good and lots of fun it was just simply awful!

I realise I never had the 2.0 patch but I don't think a simple patch can save a game with terminal problems!

The game was slow, jerky, prone to random crashing, kept locking up and looked quite frankly awful!

I thought I had the right spec to do the game justice but clearly not - all these problems, and it looked crap on my P4 3.4gig, 1gig Ram and a 256meg X800 XT Platinum graphics card.

It might be worth a look if you can get it on 10 day returns or something but I really wouldn't bother to be honest.

HTH

[mid]

Everything I've heard and seen suggests that it's closer to a South American version of that hideous Jurassic Park game; i.e. something that wants to be a sprawling epic adventure in a first-person sandbox, but terminally crippled by lousy controls and too many game-killing physics accidents/bugs.

[AlonzoUK]

2.0 patch (europe) is out - http://www.uk.atari.com/index.php?pg=game_...l&productID=172 - see patches in the right hand pane.

Combine this with the following tweaking guide and you should manage to get the game to run at a fairly decent speed. http://www.boiling-point.net/index.php?for...p?read,20,15982 - make a backup of your game.ini first incase it makes things worse for you.

You might be lucky - some people have been able to run the game without any issues straight out of the box. It should never have been released in it's current state...not surprising Atari is in financial trouble (again).

[eastyy]

Pc games are a shambles when it comes to bugs.One game i played X2 the threat on its original release it was unplayable thankfully eventually most problems got fixed hopefully they can do the same with this game

[lei]

I installed the patch onto mine, but it didn't seem to improve any of the technical problems, only scripting errors. I think the game would be good if you got into it

[markgreyam]

Okay, it's 24 hours later, and in summary, the game is back on the EB shelves.

It's times like this that for all EB's crapness, I really appreciate their 7 day return policy.

(Deep breath)

The game COULD be good, but when the

250 square miles of area to explore

is 90% ****ING NOTHING, it's hard to get into the game that much.

It was fun for about 30 mins, driving around and checking everything out, until you realise that there is virtually nothing to actually check out. It's just endless forest, with the odd snake or swarm of bees, and a rare Jaguar. The only bits of the map that are not forest are either specific faction bases or towns. The rest is featureless forest that is fun to drive/explore through for a while until you realise that there is nothing else TO explore.

Say for example Morrowinds camps or dungeons or Gothics caves or farms etc, there is nothing like that in Boiling Point. Even the bases and towns are sparse and boring. Civillians are rare in towns, cars even rarer, and the faction bases are just a few buildings chucked together with guards standing around idily. The majority of buildings in towns aren't accessible anyway. And the ones that are have marginally more internal detail than Dungeon Lords (i.e. next to nothing as opposed to absolutely nothing).

It would actually be quite fun to trek around the place checking stuff out, problem is there is nothing to check out. It seems like a living world, except on closer inspection there isn't much living in it. And I tried a few missions, and while they were vaguely intriguing, it's not like anything can really happen on the way too and from a mission, given everything is so sparsely populated. And then the faction A.I. is a black and white affair.

On the one hand if the relevant faction is pissed at you their members will shoot on sight, and you'll have to fight your way to the mission objective. On the other, the factions couldn't give a rats about you and will let you stroll right up to the objective. But then the millisecond you tell the hostage it's time to get out of here, or steal the target item off a desk or get into the car you are there to nab, all hell breaks loose as the psychic ability of the entire faction kicks in and you have to fight your way out.

In the hope of some excitement, I parked my car near the building that contained the object I wanted (because I was neutral towards them they were indifferent to what I did), grabbed the item, bolted out the door and into the car and sped off. Hoping for a chase, I looked behind me to see that after about 5 seconds I was clear of the base and back to empty jungle to simple drive back to the mission source. Not exactly the height of excitement. No chase cars, no helicopters, no nothing.

And the psychic ability extends to all situations. Find a faction member out in the middle of nowhere in a pair or alone, or follow a civillian until they are in a corner well out of sight, kill them, even silently, and your faction rating instantly goes down. Even the purely arcade Grand Theft Auto games wouldn't trigger a police response unless you kill a lot of people in view of other people.

Also, with regards to bugs/performance, my P4/3.0 + 6800GT + 1G ram handled it okay, at times there was periodic jerking/slowdown, but it was mainly quite well behaved. I never saw any mission break, but I wasn't enjoying it enough to bother continuing thru more than a half dozen or so. The game never crashed per se, but once it did freeze up for 30 seconds before dropping right down to 0.5 FPS, which required a quit/reload of the entire game. The driving/on-foot/aiming controls were all good, which from reading reviews was not the case pre-2.0 patch. The only 'bug' I experienced was the occasional lack of voice to go with text, but I wasn't waiting for them to speak text I could already read anyway so that hardly concerned me.

I'd go into more detail, but this isn't meant to be a review, and I've rambled on enough. The game shows so much promise but as you excitedly begin your adventure you are quickly afforded a closer inspection and you discover that it's little more than a pretty linear game in what tries to give the impression of an open ended world. With some extra side missions or other non faction/mission related content to explore, a much more populated world car and civillian wise, and a refinement of the faction control, this would have been awesome.

But this end result as it stands isn't worth AUS$80. When it inevitably hits the bargain bins, I'll probably buy a copy again, and I would suggest anyone else that wants to check this out does the same. I got my refund and ordered Killer 7 from VG+ today, which has dropped to CAN$40, and I'll put the other $40 towards a copy of either Star Soldier or Virtua Tennis on PSP.

[PeteJ]

Thanks, saved me the bother

Remember: 9/10 in gamesTM!

[John Beaulieu]

2/10 in Edge is closer to the truth

[AlonzoUK]

I installed the patch onto mine, but it didn't seem to improve any of the technical problems, only scripting errors. I think the game would be good if you got into it

If you are are having framerate issues then try the tweaking guide in my message earlier in the thread - it made a huge difference on my machine.

[eastyy]

How can Several reviews have such hugely different opinions on this game.Think pcgamer gave this game 70%+

[PeteJ]

That's the very reason I'm curious about the game - just to see what I feel. I was expecting it to be morrowind with guns, but the above details have really put me off.

[eastyy]

I think if its morrowind with guns you are after.Stalker might be the game to look forward to

[John Beaulieu]

How can Several reviews have such hugely different opinions on this game.Think pcgamer gave this game 70%+

didn't Keiron Gillen give the game 3 seperate scores - ranging from 2/10 to 9/10 .....

the games concept is deserving of a high score - but its execution leaves a bad taste in the mouth. it feels rushed, if Atari had given it a bit longer to iron out even the most apparent of bugs the game would have been improved ten-fold .... and thats without ironing out all the little niggles which they could have caught up with via a patch or three. As it stands, they are releasing patches in order to catch up with the major bugs (and failing imo) and people who may have been interested in the game are either taking it back, or giving it a complete miss ....