Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops Reviews

I don't understand why so many negative reviews. I didn't have any problem with the game and I liked it. It isn't one of the best games but It's good. Sometimes, there are some small bugs but It is playable. 6/10 Good

Controls are bad. It's like if the sensibility of the mouse changes between normal aiming and aiming trough the scope. You can "fix" the problem by having a pro gaming mouse that can adjust the sensibility on the fly. The gameplay have a few goods ideas but everything is executed poorly and you will not care for the story.

Ok, if the developers would even take a minute to fix the technical issues, then this game would rock. First of all its frame rate is so low i't s almost unplayable, the main problem here is that if you go to the developer's site and forums for some technical support the guys there (Who are obviously paid employees) will do nothing but praising this game and then criticize you for not liking it!!... There's a very interesting idea behind it and and a great concept, but the game just sucks because of technical issues.

I often factor metacritic scores and user reviews into my game purchase decisions. Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops is one of those games I put off buying because it was hard to find anything positive about it. To me a 34 metascore means this game is absolutely atrocious, something that isn't even ready for public release. I have to testify that isn't the case. That's not to say the game doesn't have faults. I have yet to find a game that doesn't have faults--ok maybe Call of Duty 4. But I've played some pretty bad games in my time and this one comes nowhere close to rock bottom. It's a traditional cover shooter, but you get to play two different characters, similar to Conflict: Denied Ops. There's a run and gun rambo character and a sneaky, stealth character. Both have their uses in each mission, but the stealth character is by far the more fun of the two for gameplay. Her crossbow works very well and was enjoyable taking out unsuspecting AI from distance. Now there are a couple areas where the run and gun guy gets to control a battle mech which was pretty fun as well (kind of FEAR 2 style). Overall I liked the shooter elements and thought they were good. The story is okay, but feels like it should have been longer--almost like they just had to get the product out the door and kind of wrapped up all the loose ends in a nice bow rather than finishing it properly. Many of the negatives don't even have anything to do with the gameplay. Stuff like separate volume controls for voices, background, and music don't exist. And you can't turn the music off. This makes it hard to hear voice dialog during some of the missions. The graphics and graphic controls are also bad--lots of tearing and jagged edges. There is a bloom option and when it's on, there's too much bloom where a lot of scenes are just a white blur, but when it's off, the environment is so dark, it's hard to see. The framerate gets pretty bad when a lot of things are blowing up simultaneously as well. The cover system is decent, but annoying. It's automatic and you often end up in cover when you don't want to be. The voice acting is obviously not top quality, but doesn't stand out as being bad. All in all, most of the elements of Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops are average or below average. I had fun with it and would recommend it as a bargain bin shooter. It's right in line with bargain bin material like Sniper: Ghost Warrior. I'm glad I looked past the bad publicity and gave it a shot.

I generally don't like making bad reviews, I like to go into a game and try and take something from it to convince myself it was worth someones time to make the game and for people to play it and judge it fairly, but I can honestly say there is nothing worth harvesting from this 'game'. Firstly this game struggles to decide on it's identity on what it tries to be. It's like the director looked at a handful of some of the popular titles at the time (Modern Warfare, Splinter Cell, Army of Two) and tried to combine all of them into one game whilst stripping the 'inspirations' of their magic that made them fun. From visuals and sound to gameplay and story, it will let you down at every turn and you can easily sense that in the first five minutes of playing. The graphics are nothing to write home about, but the biggest offender is it's lighting and bloom, luckily the game is short otherwise prepare for some intense cataracts. There are 3 different locations in the game: Somalia, Cuba and Dubai; You wouldn't know this if the game didn't say since they basically just 'copy and paste' the enemies and buildings in each map, you go through the street and it feels like you are in Scooby Doo running through a hall passing the same stuff over and over. (If you could run in this game). The game is not just a strain on the eyes, oh no, your ears also get the equal amount of joy. The sound department is on a very low budget, (atleast I hope that was the reason) music, voice acting and sounds are all bland and uninspired and on different volumes from one another. You notice this in the first 2 minutes of playing; Your driver is giving you a mission briefing then suddenly your ears are violated with the deafening sounds of helicopters flying past, all the while your driver is still using his indoor voice. Not that the briefing is worth hearing, the voice acting and writing are quite bad which makes you completely detatched towards these empty husks of characters, you don't root for them or want to help them in their cause, storywise it's quite uninteresting with no originality and just seems tacked on at the last minute, I mean the male protagonist is called Aaron, did they just pick the very first name that came up in the book of babyboy names? For the female protagonist, she seems mainly to be there for the devs to play Barbie with her, dressing her up or getting her in her undies to do a stripper dance to put a tracking device on some warlord (For real, There is a quicktime event to do a sexy dance for him and if you fail he shoots you. which seems the most reasonable response if you ask me) They also try and give the game an 'open ending' in hope for a sequel, fat chance. The sound effects also give no chance for players to feel immersed, even all the guns sound like they are made with plastic, each time I have to reload it sounds like I am fondling Buzz Lightyear. The A.I. are also super clunky, especially for the stealth sections, The Elder Scrolls A.I. with "It must of been the wind..." has got nothing compared to these guys. The gameplay has as much fun as using Piranha's to give yourself a Brazilian wax. It has a myriad of problems too numerous and painful to justify buying, from performance issues, save/load checkpoints, health and ammo and a useless bullet-time mode which was not introduced or knew about until 3 hours into the game when missclicking during a fight and so...so much more...*sniff*...so much... Overall, unless you are some Youtuber/streamer who likes torturing yourself with terribly bad games, then you could probably milk a few vids out of this game. The game does not even deserve a review of this length, only as a warning to others to not waste money on this product. At the time of writing this review the game is 90% off at £0.69 and I still do not believe it is worth getting...unless you want to buy a few copies to gift to people you don't like.

When i was younger i really wanted to play this i honestly have no clue why this game is terrible when you have to spend about 20 minutes trying to get the control's to work i have had less problems playing mortal kombat on the keyboard also your character handles like a sack of potato's. DO NOT GET or do get if you want to gift something to somebody you do not like.

I would recommend this game as a "so bad its good" game but unfortunately 2 things hold it back, 1 the horrid stealth sequences at about the half way point that insta kill you if anyone so much as smells your breath, yes you can cheese it in many ways but your resources are slim and the controls are ass. and 2 the absolute inconsistent dogshit checkpoint system, sometimes its fair, and sometimes you get oneshotted from around the corner by a sniper and need to redo 5-10 min of gameplay (made worse if its during the stealth sequences) In general, the graphics? laughably bad, so much bloom, god rays, depth of field, and muzzle flash that everything looks laughably bad gameplay? laughable as well, the ragdolls upon getting shot are pretty funny, enemies die super easily and like most bad thirdperson shooters, you can shoot through walls easily voice acting? meh kinda silly at times Other comments: the female is just there for sex appeal, to the point its laughable, 2 qtes in her parts of the campaign, one is where she sexily moves over lasers and the other to do a lap dance. OH and dont look directly down or up, I don't think the developers know what a spine or shoulders look like when you do that. Overall: if it weren't for the stealth sections this would have been a laughably bad romp, with it? well if you can suffer through like 5 sequences and its cheap, then go for it I guess

Well, graphic is normally. Story is good. But, Gun fire sound is terrible. and Game play is really, really Bad. I'm going to refund.

Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops is your typical first-person modern shooter game. The gist of the game is you work for the United States Army and you have your enemies that are fringe organisations. You, the player, play as both Cpt. Myra Lee and Cpt. Aron Alvarez and switch between them in the later stages of the game, but mainly switch between both in solo missions. Well let's get straight to it. The game isn't very good. This game isn't an AAA game, but not being AAA does not mean you can't have good games. It does have its positives in a above-average storyline that covers a wide variety of settings. I will admit that due to how bad the game is performence and gameplay-wise, I did not finish the campaign. However, I finished about four hours of the campaign, with How Long To Beat.com noting the length of the campaign is seven hours. Again, the campaign isn't that bad. I will note that I had not played this game in many months and coming back to this game, I remembered why I never finished this. The main issue is the UI and graphics, performance and the gameplay. To begin, I don't find the gameplay to be appealing. The default control layout is odd to a normal typical first person shooter, but regardless I don't like how the mechanics work. The mechanics include running into cover to go into the cover system, which is annoying, the AI is odd, and the choice of weapons in the game is poor. Also, the graphics are bad for a 2011 game. The performence is very poor. With my specs listed on my profile, I can't get a stable 60FPS with max settings on this game, which is appalling. So mainly, the graphics, performance and gameplay was a major turn-off for I. The game has its fair share of glitches too. Overall, I'll be blunt, I do not recommend this game. The gameplay is poor, the graphics are bad, the game is unoptimised, but the story is above-average. If you do wish to get the game, get it at a very steep discount, otherwise do not bother as their are other great games worth your time. 2/10 ---- Thanks for reading my review! If you like my reviews and care to read more, feel free to join Antwog's Analysis (Reviews). http://steamcommunity.com/groups/AntwogReviews If you have questions comment below or post in Antwog's Analysis (Reviews) general discussion page. If you liked it, give it a rating.

In spite of the mostly negative reviews, and low metacritic scores, I bought this based on a handful of positive comments. I went in with low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised. While this is not a AAA title, it is nevertheless a good game. The low budget does show sometimes (copy paste environments, and typos in the subtitles), but it also does many things right. There are some interesting gameplay mechanics and it does a very good job of changing the pace up. Sound design (especially explosions) is solid, and the gunplay is also quite good. I also had some graphical problems at the beginning, with my framerate jumping between 30 and 60 (and this on a 4790K and GTX 970), but after some tweaking in nVidia's Control Panel, it sat at 60 all the way through. This was on Windows 10 Pro x64. Definitely worth a buy on sale.