So I Reviewed Every CI Games FPS Ever Made

Wow! Just... wow! As someone who actually worked on a bunch of these games (in some cases, running the projects, no less), I'm very impressed indeed by your noble sacrifice! Boy, the stories I could tell about development. But there are some topics that really can't be discussed without alcohol ;). A couple of bits of trivia concerning the games, though. Firstly, you mention another engine at the start as being used in some of the early games (e.g. Code of Honor) - what you're actually looking at is an earlier iteration of the Chrome engine. Second - yes, you got City's modus operandi exactly right: it was all about recycling as much as possible. These games were sold at bargain bin prices in the first place, so I don't think anybody on the team ever felt like we're screwing anybody over - but I don't think anybody ever had any delusions of working on a great game, either. I will say this, however: I think most people did genuinely try to do the best job possible given the resources at hand. It's just that these resources were always calculated for the absolute minimum. Some of those games were literally done in 3-4 months. It wasn't until Sniper: Ghost Warrior that the company made a deliberate shift away from the budget sector. Even then, you can plainly see that while the company marketed SGW as a genuine AAA game, it... wasn't exactly that, was it? :) It is a slight pity you chose the alphabetical order for this video, as I think chronological order would have made for more interesting viewing. You would be able to see more clearly the different phases in the company's history - first, the rail shooter games developed on their own internal engine, then a second stage with Chrome, then the third with Jupiter EX, and finally, the "AAA" era with a new Chrome version and then Cry Engine. I can't say much about the first and last eras, but with regards to the middle two phases: Chrome was a remarkable engine to work with, because it had the worst AI known to mankind. Actually, it really didn't have AI to speak of - the enemies would move straight from waypoint to waypoint, and oscillated between deadly accuracy and total incompetence. It was possible to make a decent game with this AI - Techland did it with Call of Juarez, for instance - but obviously making good gameplay with such a system was a time-consuming, iterative process, which wasn't possible at City. As for Jupiter EX - that was a genuine barrel-load of fun. I had the pleasure of managing Terrorist Takedown 2, which was our very first project on Jupiter. The project very nearly drove me crazy, as the deadlines were impossible (though long by City standards - the whole thing took eight months, I think. But that's including everyone learning the new engine...), and I recall one particular night towards the end of the project where I just lay there in bed staring at the ceiling until morning, because my brain couldn't stop trying to figure out how to get the game finished on time (so, I guess we did care, though I'm not sure if you can call that love ;) ). Nonetheless, when I say it was a pleasure, I don't mean that sarcastically - for us, working on the project, it was just a fantastic feeling, leaving Chrome behind for a good new engine, and figuring out all the cool things that could be done with it. This was followed by Code of Honor 2, which was even more fun, because we actually knew what we were doing with the engine. But there's a great irony about Code of Honor 2 - namely, from the production perspective, there was so much innovation in the gameplay and level design, but from the player's perspective, it turned out to be one of the most underwhelming games we did on Jupiter. The problem was that our key innovation was modular level design, which we thought would allow us to make a bigger game with less effort, and concentrate more on good gameplay while we're at it. Unfortunately, upper management saw it as an opportunity to simply make the game faster and cheaper, so the end result was utter blandness, and none of what we wanted to achieve. Also, the snakes: there we are, crunching to get the game done on a crazy schedule, and management decides they absolutely must have snakes in the game, because... well, just because. I'm kind of surprised you didn't pick up on the snakes in the video, as they must have been the most ridiculously shitty element in the game - but then again, they were also lousy in that you could basically not notice them, so maybe that's what happened ;). Later Jupiter EX projects were all about recycling, and they got more and more demoralising, because there was no longer any satisfaction: we knew what we were doing, and we knew we could make a good game on Jupiter given the opportunity, but we also knew we wouldn't have that opportunity. Each new game had environments basically re-cut from existing assets (well, that was the theory at least: in practice, the environment team did their best to rework the recycled assets to make things feel new), and the guns, of course, would transfer from game to game, with just a couple of new additions each time. And yes, they got briefer and briefer. Although on that last point, I actually felt at the time, and I still do, that their brevity was actually a good thing, both from an end-user perspective and from a marketing perspective. No one agreed with me, of course, as everyone was too busy feeling ashamed about not having 20 hours of gameplay. But the way I saw it, we were selling a movie-length gameplay experience, which is actually a cool thing, precisely because it's a game you can finish in one evening, when most people actually finish very few of their games, precisely because they drag on and on. Most video game stories are two hour narratives artificially stretched out to twenty hours through repetitive gameplay, so it would have made sense to embrace the two hour experience as a sort of unique selling point. And it comes at the price of a movie ticket (sometimes less), so it wasn't a rip-off, either. Oh, one other bit of trivia: although I can't for the life of me recall if the American accent of our hero in Code of Honor was intentional or not, it actually would make perfect sense. As the name indicates, the French Foreign Legion is a formation where soldiers are all foreign citizens. It's a very unique force, with a kind of romantic charm to it (you know - these days, of course, they screen their recruits very carefully, but in the past, that was the place people would go when they escaped their country wanted for murder and the like). It's really very unfortunate that it only ever shows up in Van Damme films and City Interactive games. It deserves better. Thanks again for your efforts on this video! I'm actually pretty amazed it only took you two months. And you deserve a bloody medal for getting through Sniper: Art of Victory...

now do it again

This is a great blast of the past! I've worked at Ci for a while, as an environment artist, on Mortyr III: Operation Thunderstorm and SAS: Secure Tomorrow, and a short time on The Royal Marines Commando. I can confirm many things Jakub Majewski mentioned in his excellent post. I'd especially like to mention that, in those days, AAA games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) and Call of Duty: World At War (2008) were extremely expensive for Polish people (like as much as 1/6th of a monthly salary). Basically, City Interactive offered clones of such games, with similar locations (A CoD game had a level in an airplane, and I remember working on one as well), at a fraction of the price, so that everybody could afford them. As Jakub mentioned, the trade-off was copy-pasting lots of assets. I remember, as an environment artist, I could request a few new props at the beginning of building each new level, but the rest had to be made with the assets which were already available. Though the games we worked on weren't probably the best, I do have fond memories working on them, as there was a strong sense of cameraderie between the team members. On a side note: one of the Ci games not featured in this video I worked on as well was Logic Machines (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fRvZSLgfao), a Nintendo DS game.

27:38 "It has eleven missions; that's enough to count on two hands..." - I'm guessing you were born close to a nuclear testing area? @_@

The truth is, that here in Poland we used to kinda love and kinda hate CI games - they gave lowspec pc gamers a chance to play some FPS back in a day, whatever it was, but it's true that they were doing "copy/paste" kind of work, some of the games were enjoyable, some were not, but those games costed us something about 3$-5$ for a game, so that wasn't that bad of a deal - I remember when I was younger, I was always exchanging those CI games with my classmates and we were like "Bro, you played Rajd na Berlin?" - YEAHH, SOO COOOL " BUT HAVE YOU PLAYED RAJD NA BERLIN : CIEŃ STALINGRADU??" - will you lend me this one?? I will give you Terrorist Takedown! --- and then someone got Call of Duty 2 or Medal of Honor Airborne and we forgot CI games - good old days to be honest

Nice, you've managed to review half of poland, absolute madlad

"Mom, can we have Sniper Elite V2?" "We have Sniper Elite V2 at home." Sniper Elite V2 at home: Sniper: Art of Victory

"Theres also a version for wii, but to review that Id have to dust off my wii, set up my capture card and you know really be some kind of loser" So anyway That was the smoothest transition Ive ever seen

Reviewing every CI games fps: "A task nobody has tried, and nobody probably should have."

Look at him, he doesn't play Beauty Factory! LOOK AT HIM AND LAUGH

The accent of this dude makes him sound way angrier than he actually is

10:16 The "I WILL" gets me every time

This is 45 goddamned minutes. AND you broke out the Wii. You're a true champion, sir.

Small detail but French Foreign Legion soldiers consists mostly of uhhh foreign recruits. That's why they're called the french foreign legion. So don't be surprised to hear diff accents other than french in a game about the french foreign legion.

The Sniper Ghost Warrior games are meant for my type of people - the people who'd sleep with a sniper rifle under their pillow if it was possible. I mean EVERY SINGLE FPS game i come across i take the first possible sniper rifle and don't let it go till the end. Even in HL2 i finished the game mainly with the crossbow once i got it. I love the art of taking your enemies from a great distance w/o them knowing what hit em while you stay in the shadows. Sniping mechanics in FPS games add a certain strategy to it. It's not fry your brain strategy like in Star Craft, but if you play the mission for the side bonuses like "don't raise any alarm" and so on it really makes you do a lot of scouting and thinking ahead; not only making it rain with the machine gun that has the highest capacity of bullets. You have to choose the right moment and right enemy to shoot which for me has some appeal the usual type of FPS games don't offer. And i hate games where the mechanics doesn't let you play your snipe style and lets all enemies on berserk once you kill one of them despite the rest never heard or seen anything. P.S I also of course played Sniper Elite series, but the main difference between both is that Sniper Elite feels like a bad console port for PC with its' 3rd person and weird controls while Ghost Warrior gives you the full FP experience and as a whole feels like a much more complete game.

"Wolfsschanze" doesn't translate to "wolf slayer". "Schanze" in German just translates to "a human made pile of earth". It can either describe a "Sprungschanze" which is a ski or car jump. Or it can describe a wall or an entrenchment used to hide from enemy fire. But a military bunker or base wich is protected by covers or trenches can also be called a "Schanze". In this case it described a military headquarter for Hitler and the leaders of the Wehrmacht. The Wolf part comes from Hitlers first name Adolf which means "noble wolf". So a more correct translation would probably be "Wolf's Lair". If I am not mistaken, this is also where the name for Castle Wolfenstein originated.

It wouldn't be unusual for an American to be in the French Foreign Legion.

9:20 "John, you must be careful"... I WILL

From 2007-2014 a truly good Hungarian youtuber FreddyD played through almost all of the City games of that era. He made tons of quality content and reviews about these and to be honest I am glad City created these because without them the early Hungarian YT would not have been the same 😊

"Many tried but none has succeeded" I dunno... Játékpartizán did :D