Audio

Weapon sounds are nice and sound "heavy", when you use the suppressed submachine gun it feels just perfect. Explosions (and some gun shots) are violent and you'll have an urge to duck whenever you here one nearby. The .44 is particularly dangerous sounding.

The enemies and any other NPCs in the game have a varied range of sounds at their disposal, from screaming in pain (when you use a flame thrower on any bad guys it is quite disturbing to listen to as the burn), to various comments in different dialects, these taunts actually sound fairly convincing too. The Russian well, sounds like Russian and so on.

Music is a mixed affair, good in some levels, poor in others. I ended up just leaving it off most of the time, although the music at the start of the second level is great. It is probably best to leave the music off anyway so you can get into the atmosphere of the game and enjoy all the subtle audio effects.

Support is included for EAX and A3D. I had a few audio problems at times although I believe this was due to the fact that I was running Windows 2000 and a Sound Blaster Live! (buggy Creative drivers), it was not a game problem itself. Installing the patch clears up a few audio problems too.

Weapons

"All" of the weapons are real world (or in the case of the microwave/lightning gun type weapon, potentially real). The weapons physics are also real meaning that damage is obviously influenced by a few factors, those being where the weapon hits the model (location based damage), whether or not the enemy is wearing Armour too. Of course the power of the weapon affects what the weapon can do to an enemy too, your 9mm pistol won't be blowing any limbs of here, on the other hand a close up shotgun blast will tear off a limb with frightening easy.

To be fair however there is some unbalance in the weapons. It is extremely unlikely that you will use the knife very much for a start, although that is to be expected in some ways. The sniper rifle is once you get used to it, the best weapon in the game by far. Why ?? Well, using this, thanks to the great zoom feature and equally great hit location system you can see a tiny part of an enemy that’s around a corner and shoot at them like that until they fall dead. A bit over powered ehhhh ?

Other than that weapon balance is pretty much ok. Raven has the game setup so that by default you can only carry so much weapons. You can of course change this in the Options menu, but its nice and you must think out weapon choice before deployment. I made initially bad weapon choices before deployment in Germany, which made it ultra-hard for the first 2 levels.

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