I guess ~4-6 hours a week since late June.

Yeah that was a tough level.

Dropping game resolution to 1366x768 (IIRC) full-screen is giving much better performance all around, no choppiness with little apparent degradation of image quality. I dropped back a few levels and working my way back so dunno if it will help with the hard crashes in next-to-last level yet.

I finished it this morning. That last level is so disappointing. The climax is lots of underpowered mutants and 1 minigunner/pulse cannon guy. I didn't even use the shiny new weapon you get, thinking I'd save it for the 'boss'. Unfortunately, the boss seems to be a switch. :|

Also, I'm not sure why you couldn't save mid-map. I bound a key to quick save, and it worked fine...

Yeah I worked out the mid-map saving thing. Very handy! There seems to be limited number of save slots, so you have to keep pruning or it will keep overwriting the last save.

You managed to complete it yet?

I made it through the blowing up the bridge (next to last level) after skipping the multi-vehicle battle at the end and high-tailing it back to Wellspring. Will probably try to finish today.

Well it turned out a lot tougher than you said it was for you, even with using the fancy pulse gun thingy against those damned pulse gun-wielding apes (and utterly hopeless without). I shall have to try again tomorrow.

Yeah do it. The ending is /so/ worth it. I'm pretty sure I used one of the auto rifles to beat that last level.

I remember stocking up with a ton of the armour piercing rounds and using those to take the big bad guys out.

You can take 'em down with 2 or 3 headshots with the pulse gun, or as many clips of armor-piercing bullets (and risk getting killed between reloads).

Me, I'll take the pulse with basically all the free ammo you can use and save on bullets.

All the pulse gun fx in the final mission are stressing out my pc, or there's a memory leak on multiple reloads. It seems to mess up the ata bus on my mb, so my pc won't boot from optical media (for an fsck) until a cold shutdown after a hard crash.

I may have to give the finale a miss, based on your description it's not worth the bother of reinstalling fedora again (a refresh was long overdue, I went from 19 --> 26 in a single bound). The crash last night actually nuked the rpm database, but luckily I found online instructions on how to repair and rebuild.

Oddly enough the ntfs partitions came through relatively unscathed, and I was able to hot-reboot into xp no problem. I did run chkdsk from the recovery console as a precaution though.

Definitely worth the price of admission, and I'll be replaying it again, just not the last level, until I get a beefier pc.

I liked the game, but was disappointed I couldn't go back and roam the sandbox after finishing it. There were more races I'd like to have done and the sewers DLC that came with it. Definitely worth the £2 I spent, but I don't think the story's got replay value.

I thought I read somewhere that you can go back and do stuff. Can't remember where I read that, or how you can do it though.

The combat is mostly meh, with some exceptions -- I liked the jackals in particular. The boss battles are just tedious.

What I really like are the mad-max environments and characters, that right there gives it loads of replay value IMHO.

Hmm, the Jackals were indicative of that sort of problem I mentioned towards the beginning of the thread. In this case, scantily clad warrior type people, who were some of the toughest enemies, taking multiple hits to take down. It's an odd design decision, and I'm not getting on my high horse with it, 'cos realism is as close to a bedfellow with this game as Simon Cowell is to talent; it just seems a little strange to have the least armoured enemies towards the end of the game, when the bigger Gearhead dudes are a level or two before.

 

Speaking of games (and I think you may well have seen this deal before) the Walking Dead's free for a limited time at Humble Bundle.

I tried to get that last night and I've got something called "uplay client" windows app in my hb library.

Ah, sounds like it's only available through Uplay then, it's Ubisoft's version of Steam. I got that unceremoniously dumped on me when I got one of the Far Crys a while back.

Sounds like you can only carry on playing once completed if you have the Scorchers DLC:
 

Yeah that's it. It's still pretty cheap, I might get it.

OK, I got an email with a link to steam key on humble. And now with our new isp we got no data cap  :-O~~~

Dunno what's up with that uplay thing.