Killzone 2 has been out for a bit, and the game received nearly unprecedented media attention due to the hype surrounding the title and its perceived importance for the console market. The reviews came out strangely unanimous, even though some differed in scores. They all said the plot was weak, the multiplayer was deep, the graphics were amazing, and the single player is great but unoriginal. Typically the emphasis was on technical details of the graphics. After playing this thing, I realized that almost no reviews gave me any sense of what the game actually feels like, so I thought I'd give it a try.
After the first couple paragraphs in the plot section, I'll be referencing the source material a lot, and there are spoilers. This is your heads up. Also, my apologies, but it's a bit long - this is my first attempt at this stuff. If you're just interested in one bit or the other the sections are: game play, storytelling and multiplayer.
Game Play
Killzone 2 is an intensely frantic and claustrophobic experience. The game's pacing is perhaps too feverish. Your character never gets a moment to reflect on the games beautiful surroundings, or a chance to quietly explore a landscape. The vistas of a Ratchet and Clank or a Half Life are noticeably absent. If you pause to admire the view for more than a few seconds, odds are you'll be restarting from the last save point. The game swings from crisis to crisis with NPCs screaming at you to move forward - and rightly so since a failure to take immediate initiative in each new encounter is often fatal.
To survive in KZ2 you must always either be running or taking cover. The result is that you seldom have time to recall that you're playing a game. The highly immersive experience is heightened by realistic damage tolerance, motion blur, loss of accuracy for prolonged firing, and inertial character movement. The game is actually best played without a HUD. Controls can break immersion for a bit, but it should only be an obstacle for those who are overly used to other conventions.
While the pacing can be tiring the game's execution of this dense game play is excellent. The graphics engine seems to focus on action elements - particle effects from debris, death animations, and gun fire. There is a constant sense of chaos with bits of dust and concrete obscuring the screen adding to a sense that your character is trapped in battles. The frantic game play actually helps play down the visual shortcomings of the title (distant environmental effects, the medic gun, and close range combat) since they only occur when your likely to be preoccupied with some immediate threat. The game creates a real sense of danger, which is heightened by the fact that you will die a lot in this title. Some of these deaths feel cheap: You will get hit by random headshots in the single player campaign; explosions do significant splash damage and often occur off screen; and enemies can occasionally hit you even when you're in cover. Fortunately, large battles, a surprisingly credibly and highly adaptable AI, and crafty level design presenting multiple strategic possibilities ensure that you can have a fresh experience on each try. Frequent auto-saves also mitigate the frustration.
There are some missed opportunities in the single player campaign. While the personalities of the Helgast are interesting and varied, the barks of friendly NPCs are extremely repetitive (more on this later). The cover mechanic works well when you?re ducking behind an object. However, it is clunky for popping out horizontally, and you will often die before the pop-out animation ends on higher difficulties. You?re better off just strafing. Turning to the side while in cover can expose you as well. The camera is also slightly too close to the ground for comfort. The game also makes poor use of visual cues, forcing the player to use an immersion breaking pointer system to figure out where to go next. Speaking of visual problems, this game follows its next generation predecessors in having text that is totally illegible on a standard definition TV. Last, while the weapons in this game appear interchangeable at first, they behave very differently when fired from different stances or for different durations. A little time to learn the guns in low stress environments would make the strategic choice of weapon more intelligible from the get go.
Story Telling
Most KZ2 reviews were overly critical of its story, which is unfortunate since it's actually the place where the game takes the most risks. Among the complaints were that the plot was generic, the dialogue was juvenile, the voice acting was mediocre (except for the fellow who voiced Visari, the game's charismatic villain), the ending was poor, the world was poorly fleshed out, and the game ignored the war in Iraq. All this is about half true.
The game does have an unoriginal setting. While details are sparse (and occasionally meted out in loading screen captions that read like a military history book's footnotes) the vague outline is this. A military entity called the ISA is invading the home world of a rival military entity called the Helgast. While the protagonist is a member of the ISA, and the ISA more closely resembles our culture, we're really given no reason to prefer them to the Helgast. Instead, the game alludes to the deep conviction and pride of the Helgast while balancing it against a penchant for inhuman cruelty and eerie discipline. This is the typical space marine scenario, which is necessary to dehumanize a game?s enemies and justify the incredible amount of violence the player is about to do. However, there?s a hint of welcome moral ambiguity here. The game also nods towards Middle East conflicts - Helgan is an inhospitable land that supplies energy resources and has seen tremendous political unrest. However, the game never dwells on this point.
Killzone's story, unlike its setting, is not traditional for videogames. Videogames tend towards awkward exposition of the game world, and they usually feature a character that is at the heart of the game?s conflict. When games do this well, we get something like Half Life 2. There, the player has an extended period of time to muck about in the game world seeing the sorry state of things before the action begins in earnest. After that, the player assumes the role of the game world's messiah and is thus privy to all relevant information relating to the game?s central conflict, and he is present for all the major evolutions of that conflict.
Killzone tells a much smaller and more personal story. You get precious little back story, though what's there is actually quite credible. The player takes the role of a soldier named Sev whose only real significance is his proximity to a character named Rico. For the most part, you follow Sev through some inconsequential roles in major battles giving you only a snapshot of the larger conflict. Rico is actually the focal point of the story, and he's an unusual protagonist for videogames. Rico is deeply flawed. He is not likeable, and most of the characters in the game are well aware of this. He is annoying, simple, amoral at best, impulsive, and borderline psychotic.
Unfortunately, the power of this story is undermined crucially by horribly written dialogue and the lack of any characterization for the supporting cast.
The pacing of the game doesn?t give us time to watch and become attached to the characters. The game gives us a little bit of insight into character personality from watching scripted sequences while still in first person a la Half Life, but the game does not do a great job of making sure that the player is in a position to watch these sequences when they happen (except in Suljeva Village). We really only hear from the supporting cast during firefights, when they simply bark the same three or four generic lines. This was a huge missed opportunity to flesh out the personalities of the soldiers without breaking the intentionally frantic pacing of the game.
Multiplayer
Another surprise I found from the reviews for this game is that, while various sources claimed to wait for multiplayer to actually get underway before reviewing it, almost no one commented on the game play. Instead, they simply recounted the nature of the class system, said that the multiplayer is ?deep? (whatever that means), and provided general comments on the format. Typically, they compared the games class system to Team Fortress due to the similarities in class abilities.
The first thing to note about KZ2?s multiplayer is that it?s really three separate experiences. When you begin the game initially, you?ll only be able to play as one sort of character with two weapons. Play here is actually very balanced. The maps always force you to trade vantage point for vulnerability. Success at this level depends on planning your position and movement relative to the other members of your team, and learning the situations in which each gun is useful.
The next level occurs where various players have different abilities available to them, but where only a few players have earned the highest level classes. The multiplayer is actually quite broken for this phase. Certain classes are clearly more powerful than others, and without offsetting abilities, the lower rank players are sitting ducks. For example, some matches involve only pistols. However, there are two pistols in the game. One requires four to five body shots for a kill. The other kills in a single hit. In order to earn the better pistol, you must achieve ten kills in a single round with the lesser one. Getting these kills against players with superior firepower can be a real grind. Likewise, until you can sweep for enemies with cloaking devices, invisible snipers are pretty difficult to deal with, especially if the other team has nine or ten players mining for a headshot medal.
These issues are exacerbated by some of the multiplayer?s other short comings. It is significantly easier to meet certain difficult medal requirements against disadvantaged foes. For example, it is much easier to kill lower level characters with a melee attack when you have higher mobility and greater health than your opponents. Invisibility doesn?t hurt either.
Another issue is the level of extemporaneous strategic cooperation available in the game. KZ2 does not make good use of visual cues to differentiate classes. Classes are usually only visible on close inspection. This makes it significantly more difficult to predict the movements of your allies, and thus more difficult to complement their decisions. Second, the game limits the number of turrets and spawn points by team rather than by player. As a result, a class choice often becomes a matter of guessing what your teammates will do, and a poor engineer can undermine the efforts of a crafty one. Lastly, KZ2 has very low damage quotas, large maps, and high player counts. This means that you will seldom have action stay in the same spot for very long. As a result, while selecting a class you typically have little or no information on what your team?s strategic needs will be. Where as a slower game like Team Fortress plays like a pick up game of basketball, where you learn and adapt to the skills and habits of your teammates, KZ2 plays like pick up (American) football ? it?s a chess match when teams coordinate, and a clusterf-ck otherwise.
The result of all this is that the only group strategy that seems to work in non-clan matches is spawn camping, and this is very common in the middling stages of the game. Higher level players can easily block off the exits from a spawn room - unless the other team happens to have a technician that places a new spawn point right off the get go. Since technician is a higher level ability with little firepower, and since points are primarily kills, this is seldom the case at middling levels. The real trouble here is that, in order to get points, one must get kills. So even players who find spawn camping distasteful are forced to choose between simply sitting idle for fifteen minutes receiving no points or being a part of the problem while ranking up. It is not uncommon to go for stretches where everyone dies within two or three seconds of spawning due to grenade spamming, which itself happens because everyone is wants to get a few kills even if they live only two or three seconds. Radec Academy (body count) and Corinth Crossing (search and destroy) are the key offenders.
The last issue in the middling multiplayer occurs due to the point system. Kills are significantly easier to come by than points for achieving mission objectives, but the scoring system does not take this into account. Kills always net one point whereas completed objectives yield only two. Simply setting up in an out of the way location with a good weapon will net you about two kills every thirty seconds. If you?re far enough from the mission objectives, you?ll likely be left alone. So the incentive for those grinding through ranks is to ignore team objectives and pick off foes from a distance.
Once everyone has leveled up, a lot of these issues go away. All players have all classes available, which means you can expect a diversity of classes at the outset - no more over crowded engineers and absent technicians. As a result of the ranking up grind, everyone is also familiar with all classes. So spawn camping stops happening as often, and the play becomes more predictable since everyone knows the most strategic positions. The drive to score points also fades, and games start to center around objectives. While certain classes are still a bit unbalanced, the player is able to better predict what roles will be helpful in the match and choose a weapon that compliments the role she wishes to play. Inexperienced engineers and technicians also stop being such a liability. It?s good when you get here, but it takes an incredibly long time. The game still lacks the strategic dimensions of a slower game with better defined class roles, but it also stops being roulette.
Apart from the issues with the rank system, the game play is quite good. The maps are expertly designed. Each requires slightly different tactics, and no advantage is ever gained without a trade off. You are constantly making interesting choices about how to proceed. The rotating objective system works wonders ? keeping the game fresh and allowing you to use a lost round to set up a winning plan for the next. The play is seamless, exciting and genuinely addictive even without the point-based payoff. You?ll find yourself learning typical patterns of play and constructing counters measures. The squad system also works very well. If a player is willing to learn a conservative play style, she gains a ready made set of allies. Likewise, more aggressive players avoid having long treks to the action. The game allows players to vote for the next map between games, but, since the game defaults to the first map on the list, players seem to have a collective action problem selecting any other map. The result is that you never get stuck playing in the same location over and over.
The game does a great job of avoiding down time. KZ2 allows you to tweak or you character and set up squads while waiting for all players to enter a map. Even the time spent between respawns is interesting since you are waiting in hopes of a revival. Load times are also minimal. The one downside here is that, in avoiding visible lag, KZ2 appears to have slight disparities between the games each player sees. The upshot is that if someone shoots you on their screen, you might have half a second to respond before the kill registers on your screen. This results in an unreasonable number of mutual kills. This exacerbates the shifting focus problem in middling play, but overall, I think it?s a better choice than laggy movement. The only real issue here is that the game could promote more interesting cooperative play throughout with some adjustments to the scoring system.
If you actually got through it, thanks for reading.
After the first couple paragraphs in the plot section, I'll be referencing the source material a lot, and there are spoilers. This is your heads up. Also, my apologies, but it's a bit long - this is my first attempt at this stuff. If you're just interested in one bit or the other the sections are: game play, storytelling and multiplayer.
Game Play
Killzone 2 is an intensely frantic and claustrophobic experience. The game's pacing is perhaps too feverish. Your character never gets a moment to reflect on the games beautiful surroundings, or a chance to quietly explore a landscape. The vistas of a Ratchet and Clank or a Half Life are noticeably absent. If you pause to admire the view for more than a few seconds, odds are you'll be restarting from the last save point. The game swings from crisis to crisis with NPCs screaming at you to move forward - and rightly so since a failure to take immediate initiative in each new encounter is often fatal.
To survive in KZ2 you must always either be running or taking cover. The result is that you seldom have time to recall that you're playing a game. The highly immersive experience is heightened by realistic damage tolerance, motion blur, loss of accuracy for prolonged firing, and inertial character movement. The game is actually best played without a HUD. Controls can break immersion for a bit, but it should only be an obstacle for those who are overly used to other conventions.
While the pacing can be tiring the game's execution of this dense game play is excellent. The graphics engine seems to focus on action elements - particle effects from debris, death animations, and gun fire. There is a constant sense of chaos with bits of dust and concrete obscuring the screen adding to a sense that your character is trapped in battles. The frantic game play actually helps play down the visual shortcomings of the title (distant environmental effects, the medic gun, and close range combat) since they only occur when your likely to be preoccupied with some immediate threat. The game creates a real sense of danger, which is heightened by the fact that you will die a lot in this title. Some of these deaths feel cheap: You will get hit by random headshots in the single player campaign; explosions do significant splash damage and often occur off screen; and enemies can occasionally hit you even when you're in cover. Fortunately, large battles, a surprisingly credibly and highly adaptable AI, and crafty level design presenting multiple strategic possibilities ensure that you can have a fresh experience on each try. Frequent auto-saves also mitigate the frustration.
There are some missed opportunities in the single player campaign. While the personalities of the Helgast are interesting and varied, the barks of friendly NPCs are extremely repetitive (more on this later). The cover mechanic works well when you?re ducking behind an object. However, it is clunky for popping out horizontally, and you will often die before the pop-out animation ends on higher difficulties. You?re better off just strafing. Turning to the side while in cover can expose you as well. The camera is also slightly too close to the ground for comfort. The game also makes poor use of visual cues, forcing the player to use an immersion breaking pointer system to figure out where to go next. Speaking of visual problems, this game follows its next generation predecessors in having text that is totally illegible on a standard definition TV. Last, while the weapons in this game appear interchangeable at first, they behave very differently when fired from different stances or for different durations. A little time to learn the guns in low stress environments would make the strategic choice of weapon more intelligible from the get go.
Story Telling
Most KZ2 reviews were overly critical of its story, which is unfortunate since it's actually the place where the game takes the most risks. Among the complaints were that the plot was generic, the dialogue was juvenile, the voice acting was mediocre (except for the fellow who voiced Visari, the game's charismatic villain), the ending was poor, the world was poorly fleshed out, and the game ignored the war in Iraq. All this is about half true.
The game does have an unoriginal setting. While details are sparse (and occasionally meted out in loading screen captions that read like a military history book's footnotes) the vague outline is this. A military entity called the ISA is invading the home world of a rival military entity called the Helgast. While the protagonist is a member of the ISA, and the ISA more closely resembles our culture, we're really given no reason to prefer them to the Helgast. Instead, the game alludes to the deep conviction and pride of the Helgast while balancing it against a penchant for inhuman cruelty and eerie discipline. This is the typical space marine scenario, which is necessary to dehumanize a game?s enemies and justify the incredible amount of violence the player is about to do. However, there?s a hint of welcome moral ambiguity here. The game also nods towards Middle East conflicts - Helgan is an inhospitable land that supplies energy resources and has seen tremendous political unrest. However, the game never dwells on this point.
Killzone's story, unlike its setting, is not traditional for videogames. Videogames tend towards awkward exposition of the game world, and they usually feature a character that is at the heart of the game?s conflict. When games do this well, we get something like Half Life 2. There, the player has an extended period of time to muck about in the game world seeing the sorry state of things before the action begins in earnest. After that, the player assumes the role of the game world's messiah and is thus privy to all relevant information relating to the game?s central conflict, and he is present for all the major evolutions of that conflict.
Killzone tells a much smaller and more personal story. You get precious little back story, though what's there is actually quite credible. The player takes the role of a soldier named Sev whose only real significance is his proximity to a character named Rico. For the most part, you follow Sev through some inconsequential roles in major battles giving you only a snapshot of the larger conflict. Rico is actually the focal point of the story, and he's an unusual protagonist for videogames. Rico is deeply flawed. He is not likeable, and most of the characters in the game are well aware of this. He is annoying, simple, amoral at best, impulsive, and borderline psychotic.
Midway through the game, he makes the conscious decision to sacrifice one of his teammates and another hostage in order to save the life of a third teammate with whom he is closer. Later, he is totally unapologetic. In the end of the game, he kills the leader of the Helgast, thereby dooming thousands upon thousands of ISA soldiers, simply because he is vengeful.
The game is actually a tragedy. Instead of following some otherworldly hero, we're simply placed in the shoes of a character with a good vantage point to watch it things unfold but who is unable to change them. By the end of the game you do not like Rico, but you understand his decision and why his flaws of character compelled him to make it. Until that last moment, the game had held out a sliver of motivation for your fight against the Helgast - they had seemed to act without empathy. By the end of the game, that distinction has been removed. The game is actually a fairly subtle statement about war, its morality, and its effect on participants. It?s just not beating you over the head with it like your typical politically or philosophically oriented videogame.
Despite previous reports, the voice acting is really very good. For example, there?s a moment where Garza ? the character who Rico sacrifices chides Natco for being tardy after an especially difficult firefight. Natco replies in a bland and dismissive way, but his voicing expresses both his frustration and resignation. Ultimately this (along with a loading screen footnote) helps paint Garza as idealistic adding to the tragedy of his demise. Visari and Sev also have excellent voice work.
The game is actually a tragedy. Instead of following some otherworldly hero, we're simply placed in the shoes of a character with a good vantage point to watch it things unfold but who is unable to change them. By the end of the game you do not like Rico, but you understand his decision and why his flaws of character compelled him to make it. Until that last moment, the game had held out a sliver of motivation for your fight against the Helgast - they had seemed to act without empathy. By the end of the game, that distinction has been removed. The game is actually a fairly subtle statement about war, its morality, and its effect on participants. It?s just not beating you over the head with it like your typical politically or philosophically oriented videogame.
Despite previous reports, the voice acting is really very good. For example, there?s a moment where Garza ? the character who Rico sacrifices chides Natco for being tardy after an especially difficult firefight. Natco replies in a bland and dismissive way, but his voicing expresses both his frustration and resignation. Ultimately this (along with a loading screen footnote) helps paint Garza as idealistic adding to the tragedy of his demise. Visari and Sev also have excellent voice work.
Garza is really just a foil for Rico, and we learn more about him from the game?s loading screens than anything else.
When Garza dies, we know that Sev is upset and that Rico does not care. This could be troubling on an emotional level, but the problem is we don?t care about Garza either. Likewise, the demise of the ISA ship fails to pull on any heart strings, since we?ve only heard one or two lines from the characters that we watch perish. Finally, there?s the matter of the cursing. Killzone 2 battles tend to watch like scenes from Saving Private Ryan, and I can believe that one would curse a lot during a battle gone wrong. However, the game continues the trend in and out of battle. This upsets the flow of the dialogue and adds to the problem that all the characters, save Rico, seem to speak with the same voice. No one?s personality really comes through. The plot has some interesting and novel ideas, but the execution muddles the message.
Multiplayer
Another surprise I found from the reviews for this game is that, while various sources claimed to wait for multiplayer to actually get underway before reviewing it, almost no one commented on the game play. Instead, they simply recounted the nature of the class system, said that the multiplayer is ?deep? (whatever that means), and provided general comments on the format. Typically, they compared the games class system to Team Fortress due to the similarities in class abilities.
The first thing to note about KZ2?s multiplayer is that it?s really three separate experiences. When you begin the game initially, you?ll only be able to play as one sort of character with two weapons. Play here is actually very balanced. The maps always force you to trade vantage point for vulnerability. Success at this level depends on planning your position and movement relative to the other members of your team, and learning the situations in which each gun is useful.
The next level occurs where various players have different abilities available to them, but where only a few players have earned the highest level classes. The multiplayer is actually quite broken for this phase. Certain classes are clearly more powerful than others, and without offsetting abilities, the lower rank players are sitting ducks. For example, some matches involve only pistols. However, there are two pistols in the game. One requires four to five body shots for a kill. The other kills in a single hit. In order to earn the better pistol, you must achieve ten kills in a single round with the lesser one. Getting these kills against players with superior firepower can be a real grind. Likewise, until you can sweep for enemies with cloaking devices, invisible snipers are pretty difficult to deal with, especially if the other team has nine or ten players mining for a headshot medal.
These issues are exacerbated by some of the multiplayer?s other short comings. It is significantly easier to meet certain difficult medal requirements against disadvantaged foes. For example, it is much easier to kill lower level characters with a melee attack when you have higher mobility and greater health than your opponents. Invisibility doesn?t hurt either.
Another issue is the level of extemporaneous strategic cooperation available in the game. KZ2 does not make good use of visual cues to differentiate classes. Classes are usually only visible on close inspection. This makes it significantly more difficult to predict the movements of your allies, and thus more difficult to complement their decisions. Second, the game limits the number of turrets and spawn points by team rather than by player. As a result, a class choice often becomes a matter of guessing what your teammates will do, and a poor engineer can undermine the efforts of a crafty one. Lastly, KZ2 has very low damage quotas, large maps, and high player counts. This means that you will seldom have action stay in the same spot for very long. As a result, while selecting a class you typically have little or no information on what your team?s strategic needs will be. Where as a slower game like Team Fortress plays like a pick up game of basketball, where you learn and adapt to the skills and habits of your teammates, KZ2 plays like pick up (American) football ? it?s a chess match when teams coordinate, and a clusterf-ck otherwise.
The result of all this is that the only group strategy that seems to work in non-clan matches is spawn camping, and this is very common in the middling stages of the game. Higher level players can easily block off the exits from a spawn room - unless the other team happens to have a technician that places a new spawn point right off the get go. Since technician is a higher level ability with little firepower, and since points are primarily kills, this is seldom the case at middling levels. The real trouble here is that, in order to get points, one must get kills. So even players who find spawn camping distasteful are forced to choose between simply sitting idle for fifteen minutes receiving no points or being a part of the problem while ranking up. It is not uncommon to go for stretches where everyone dies within two or three seconds of spawning due to grenade spamming, which itself happens because everyone is wants to get a few kills even if they live only two or three seconds. Radec Academy (body count) and Corinth Crossing (search and destroy) are the key offenders.
The last issue in the middling multiplayer occurs due to the point system. Kills are significantly easier to come by than points for achieving mission objectives, but the scoring system does not take this into account. Kills always net one point whereas completed objectives yield only two. Simply setting up in an out of the way location with a good weapon will net you about two kills every thirty seconds. If you?re far enough from the mission objectives, you?ll likely be left alone. So the incentive for those grinding through ranks is to ignore team objectives and pick off foes from a distance.
Once everyone has leveled up, a lot of these issues go away. All players have all classes available, which means you can expect a diversity of classes at the outset - no more over crowded engineers and absent technicians. As a result of the ranking up grind, everyone is also familiar with all classes. So spawn camping stops happening as often, and the play becomes more predictable since everyone knows the most strategic positions. The drive to score points also fades, and games start to center around objectives. While certain classes are still a bit unbalanced, the player is able to better predict what roles will be helpful in the match and choose a weapon that compliments the role she wishes to play. Inexperienced engineers and technicians also stop being such a liability. It?s good when you get here, but it takes an incredibly long time. The game still lacks the strategic dimensions of a slower game with better defined class roles, but it also stops being roulette.
Apart from the issues with the rank system, the game play is quite good. The maps are expertly designed. Each requires slightly different tactics, and no advantage is ever gained without a trade off. You are constantly making interesting choices about how to proceed. The rotating objective system works wonders ? keeping the game fresh and allowing you to use a lost round to set up a winning plan for the next. The play is seamless, exciting and genuinely addictive even without the point-based payoff. You?ll find yourself learning typical patterns of play and constructing counters measures. The squad system also works very well. If a player is willing to learn a conservative play style, she gains a ready made set of allies. Likewise, more aggressive players avoid having long treks to the action. The game allows players to vote for the next map between games, but, since the game defaults to the first map on the list, players seem to have a collective action problem selecting any other map. The result is that you never get stuck playing in the same location over and over.
The game does a great job of avoiding down time. KZ2 allows you to tweak or you character and set up squads while waiting for all players to enter a map. Even the time spent between respawns is interesting since you are waiting in hopes of a revival. Load times are also minimal. The one downside here is that, in avoiding visible lag, KZ2 appears to have slight disparities between the games each player sees. The upshot is that if someone shoots you on their screen, you might have half a second to respond before the kill registers on your screen. This results in an unreasonable number of mutual kills. This exacerbates the shifting focus problem in middling play, but overall, I think it?s a better choice than laggy movement. The only real issue here is that the game could promote more interesting cooperative play throughout with some adjustments to the scoring system.
If you actually got through it, thanks for reading.
