Project: Snowblind (2005)

Project: Snowblind was alright. It is a First Person Shooter, set in the distant future of 2065. It follows a linear path with classic kill walls you need to complete in order to progress to the next part of the stage.

In Project: Snowblind, you play as Nathan Frost, a soldier that fights against the Republic Forces and is almost killed in action. To save his life, he is engineered into a superhuman with special powers. He and his team need to stop the General of the Republic Forces set off a massive EMP Bomb that will wipe out all electronics on earth. He storms the secret bunker of the General, defeats him and travels to the Tower Base where the EMP Bomb is located. He successfully destroys the base and saves the world.

The graphics in this game are a mixed bag. It looks great for its time, but many cinematics and visuals are smeared in “Vaseline” if that makes sense. The facial animations of some of the soldiers are also straight out of a nightmare.

The sound effects and soundtracks are good enough. They are solid and enhance the full warfare feeling that you get when progressing with your squad.

The controls are terrible. The standard layout does not make sense, and the menus, interfaces and double assigned buttons are a pain in the ass. The biggest problem is the number of items, weapons and skills you have. They make navigating the inventory feel like a chore.

Besides being your standard shooter, Project: Snowblind offers some unique mechanics, like using certain skills (shielding, see through walls, slowmo etc.) to help you out. These skills come in very handy, although I never used anything, besides the Shield.

Like mentioned, this game follows a linear path. The game offers you some alternate routes to your objective, but it is always parallel to the main pathway. It also offers you the ability to go “stealth”, although this is very misplaced because all of your weapons are full Rambo with explosions and heavy feedback, making it feel pointless.

This game is very short. When playing through it, you finish it in about a few hours. It has 16 chapters/stages, but every one of them is done within ten minutes or less.

Although I, surprisingly, played Project: Snowblind on my modern-day PC, it still had a lot of issues. This is no doubt because of the age of the game, and I do not know if these issues were present in the old days.

For starters, the crashes. When you do anything to hurt the game’s feelings, it will crash. This is mainly when you press ALT + TAB. But the absolute worst issue is the Rubber Banding. You walk towards some ruins and are teleported back instantly many times. It was infuriating.

But overall, Project: Snowblind was not a bad game, just a little mediocre. It was just a short, nice diversion and one of the many games from my youth that I still needed to finish one day as a grown ass man.

I would still recommend it; even though I doubt that anyone would know or care about its existence.

Played on PC (Steam version)

At first, I thought this game was criminally underrated, but after spending more than an hour with it, I understand why that's not the point. This would be so much greater if it was originally developed for PC. Unfortunately, cool ideas and huge potential were lost in the PS2's limited specs. The game needs bigger levels, better AI, and an overhauled combat system. A truly great game crippled by PS2 limitations. I never managed to finish Project Snowblind because of how unchallenging and easy the PC version is.

It was released back in 2005. Don't expect a masterpiece or hours upon hours of gameplay, but if you like a short single-player focused sci-fi shooter with a cool setting, then give it a try.

The setting is a near future and from what I've heard, it was initially planned to be a sequel to Deus Ex, but later turned into a standalone title. You play as military commander who gets injured in battle and implanted with combat augmentations, which become available for use over time.

This is what I really enjoyed about the gameplay. It's not just your bog standard corridor shooter relying on twitch reflexes. It has a bit of a strategic edge, as you acquire a number of interesting augmentations throughout the game, such as the ability to slow time, ballistic shielding (temporary protection from bullets), cloak, enhanced vision, and so on. In addition to augmentations, you also find some cool gadgets to use in battle too, such as spider bots to act as your little pets and aid you in combat, deployable force field to act as cover, a large variety of grenades (most of the ones from Deus Ex), and even a nano boost, which is like your emergency revive that you can choose to use if you die in battle.

The game seems to have only one difficulty mode (I didn't see how to change it), but overall it's paced really well. I didn't come across any difficulty spikes and the game never throws anything unfair towards you. In some levels it's just you infiltrating some facility, in others the combat takes on a large scale assault and you have many of your squadmates with you and witness battles between large groups of soldiers. It's all really well done, even if graphically the game aged a fair bit.

Overall it was a fun game. I thought it was well done and would certainly recommend it if you like FPS games with a story and a bit of a tactical edge.