Meet Kodiak, Copperhead, And Tank
The new playable episode in the GAC Pack is known as Assault on the 87th Precinct. If you’ve played through the campaign, you will recall a significant portion of the latter half of the game saw Jack fighting to take the 87th Precinct back from the GAC. Now, players get to play the other side, and actually partake in the assault of the 87th Precinct.
You’ll do this through the eyes of three different characters — Kodiak, Copperhead, and Tank. An opening cutscene tells us that Kodiak and Copperhead are friends and decided to join GAC (along with many other mercs) for the money. While apparently ‘bad’ mercs in the past, Kodiak and Copperhead saw this job — which they thought was to help end crime in Grant City — as a way to do something good for once. Moments after these brief introductions, Redwater appears over a comm screen and tells them what’s going on. At that point, players are given control of Copperhead, a GAC Tactical Sniper.
You’re tasked with picking off Grant City Police Officers from a flying helicopter, a task made much easier with Copperhead’s built in vision mode that clearly highlights enemies. It may be worth pointing out that you’re using non-lethal rounds at this point, as per the story, the GAC are trying to overtake the GCPD without arousing too much suspicion from the government. After dispatching a couple dozen officers, Copperhead is dropped off to disable two comm systems and a generator. Copperhead carries a side-arm pistol in addition to his sniper rifle which also fires non-lethal rounds. If you pistol runs out of ammo, you will need to grab another one just like it or use melee, because you aren’t allowed to kill more than four or five officers (otherwise the mission ends).
In just a few minutes, Copperhead gets through a few waves of GCPD officers and plants C4 to take out comms. A brief in game cutscene later, and suddenly you’re playing as Kodiak, one of the CQB specialists that were fun to fight against with Jack in the original campaign. I thought the transition from Copperhead to Kodiak was nicely done, but I thought I would see more of both. Anyway, whereas Copperhead had a special vision mode, Kodiak has electrical charged gauntlets. He can use weapons as well, but he’s a fast runner and a powerful hitter. You’re encouraged to use these abilities, and to help you out, the game drops in several GAC agents with guns, including Redwater himself.
Kodiak’s main purpose in his short playable stint is to capture police chief Iness and put him in a cell (which Jack opens in the original campaign). I experienced an issue during this sequence though that actually forced me to restart my last checkpoint. I had the police chief in cuffs, leading him to his cell. Along the way, you trigger several scripted events which send officers at you. At first, I would release Iness and fight the officers alongside my GAC buddies. But, after hitting the chief four or five times, he wouldn’t get up. In fact, his body was not only on the floor, but clipping through a door and a wall. His character was completely unresponsive and I couldn’t trigger the next event. So, after reloading a checkpoint, I just walked right past all of the GCPD, and triggered the cutscene automatically when I got close to the cell. That’s the kind of sketchy game design that makes you roll your eyes, because in a word, it’s broken. Fortunately my checkpoint wasn’t that far back and it was easy to figure out how to avoid doing that again, but it just isn’t good to see…
I was at about the thirty minute marker now in playtime. A third cutscene showed Redwater and Iness talking, and Kodiak and Copperhead’s suspicion of Redwater had reached new heights. They think that maybe Redwater’s intentions aren’t as pure and good as he let on. In a true showing of ruthlessness, Redwater sends Tank out to kill GCPD reinforcements.
The Tank mission, as it turns out, is the final one. It’s actually a tough one too, because as one of the GAC heavy-gunners, you’re an easy target for snipers and RPGs — of which there are a lot of. The goal in the Tank mission is to simply kill all of the officers and destroy their SWAT vans. This is easier said than done though because coverage is sparse and the snipers and RPGs are on top of you constantly. Getting through this area took as long as the rest of the episode. But what really caught me off guard was what happened after the cutscene following Tank’s mission: the episode ended. Looking at the clock, I played maybe an hour? And the ending was really abrupt too; the entire episode was rather unsatisfying.
Riot Control, Etc
With the new campaign episode behind me, I loaded up Riot Control. In this mode, Jack and Shadow must defeat wave after wave of GAC forces. You are on Danver’s Island, a location from the original campaign. It’s a fairly large ‘arena’ in which Jack and Shadow get to work in. Enemies appear randomly from different areas and attack you. As you fight back, you continue to increase your score which is automatically uploaded to the Leaderboard. A narrator voice, not unlike something out of Mortal Kombat or Unreal Tournament, says things like “Command Kill” and “Headshot” and things like that whenever they happen. Getting a variety of kill types and just playing fast and with style to earn the most points is what Riot Control is all about. After a certain number of enemies, the round ends, your points are totaled, and the next round starts seamlessly.
Just like other games that include a mode like this, it’s fun for a while, but I’m not the kind of gamer to go nuts over leaderboard rankings. Furthermore, each time you restart Riot Control, you’re at the same location facing off against the same types and numbers of enemies as the previous attempt. I always thought that in these modes, some kind of checkpoint system should be allowed so that you don’t have to go through the same waves time and time again.
The other content included in this DLC are gameplay changes you can toggle from the menu. These include turning on Noir Mode, which gives the game a black/white/red look that’s kind of cool. Also, you can enable explosive ammo for your guns in Action Mode, GAC armor for Jack giving you more HP, and enhanced camouflage for Shadow making it easier to remain undetected when playing as Shadow.
That’s what you can expect in the GAC Pack. Let’s get to the summary…