This is the final chapter about this game that I kind of regret impulse buying when I was drunk. It was on some sort of crazy discount like 80% so it's not like I broke the bank getting it, but I found myself very bored when I was playing it because this game isn't something that you really "play" but rather just watch it an occasionally hit a button here and there or choose dialogue options.
Warning! I will completely spoil the game in this chapter so if you want to play it, turn back now!
While there are no official "acts" in the game as in nothing is ever put on the screen to indicate that there are certain acts in the game. There are 3 very distinct sections of the game where you return to this library where a narrator speaks to you and therefore I decided to make up my own acts.
In part 3 things take a strange turn that doesn't make any sense given the backstory that we are provided with up to this point and it totally deviates from the brief history that we are given at the very start of the game where a huge battle happens between warring tribes something like 2000 years ago.
Up to this point our team of marines and scientists have been wandering from room to room in this gigantic underground palace and encountering bat-like creatures that seem to be immune to gunfire - but this doesn't stop our marines from continuing to fire at them in vain. I don't think a single kill has ever been accomplished with a rifle but yet our heroes fire off magazine after magazine I suppose hoping for a different effect than they have managed up to this point. The only person who kills them successfully is a guy who has a giant iron pike that he thrusts through their chests and this, combined with all the bit of information that you find and collect along the way indicates that these creatures are vampires, which is something that is kind of confirmed as the story continues.
The new twist is the discovery of an area deep in the ground where all of these creatures are hibernating en masse in a large cavern with and are surrounded by futuristic looking technology and green "goop."
While I was pleased that we were no longer dealing with what was becoming an extremely repetitive story of "run to this room until the baddies knock the door down and then run to another one right next to it" I also found the notion that the area underground housed an alien population to be very different than the story we had been told up to this point including and especially the small part at the beginning of the story that is meant to define the entire game. It seemed very Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull because it just seemed a bit lame that this was what was causing all the trouble in the first place.
At one point we are even shown some footage that no one could have possibly been privy to where their spacecraft crashed into earth however many years ago.
I know I've basically spoiled the entire game by saying this but I really don't think that anyone should buy this game anyway because it is dreadfully boring. I've been told that multiplayer is more interesting but I can't imagine how that could be the case. I'll just take the person's word for it that told me that because now that I have gotten to one of the endings of this game, I'm going to delete it and never play it again.
When you finally make your way out of the "dungeon" and conveniently just in the nick of time, we end up escaping via a hole in the ceiling that many members of the group had access to several acts ago and to me, this was just frustrating because it doesn't make any sense that they didn't do this from the start since the entire objective was to get out of there in the first place.
Once you get out of the caves, there is one more section that occurs that I can only presume is impossible to lose unless you simply decided to not hit any of the buttons that they tell you to hit. I now wish I had tried just to see what would have happened. I kind of believe that this game is impossible to lose. Maybe I'll fire it up and intentionally make all the wrong choices just to see if it makes any difference. From what I experienced in every decision-making section of the game, what choice you made seemed to have very little effect on how the game would progress, so I this is really the only intrigue that remains for me.
Apparently there are a ton of different endings for this game and I managed to finish it with only 2 of the members of my crew dying. I don't even remember how one of them died but his death seemed unavoidable since the only two options we had was to "leave him behind" or "help him" and I chose "help him."
I think the only people I could recommend this game for is non-gamers. There really isn't much of a game here and this could be played with a remote control rather than a game controller since you really don't have much to do with any of what is going on aside from making broad choices.
I finished the game only out of a stubborn "well, you've come this far" sensation and I'm sure that all of you have been there at one point in your gaming lives.
I guess that this game type is popular to some point because there are several of them. I know that I wont be participating in any future (or past) releases of this franchise, regardless of what sort of discount is applied to them. Hell, I don't think I would play it for free.