So yeah, here it finally is - my GME report. Like @m, I won’t be writing too much blabla about my trip and blabla. Though, I do want to thank my niece and her fiancé for giving me accommodation at their place. I really enjoyed my time spent there; they are both very kind persons!! A BIG THANKS once again!!! 

Now, as you might have already read in @m’s report, we were about to meet at 10 at the event. I didn’t make it on time because I got confused with it since we live in a different time zone in the Netherlands… ok, ok, I came up with this reason just now. The real explanations is that I was simply too lazy to get out of my 2-person most comfortable bed, even though it was extremely warm there (+25 C.) So, when I finally arrived to the event, @m was already behind closed doors with Michael Souto (Eidos chap.) The stuff I’ve missed during my absence can be read in @m’s report. In fact, everything explained there can be read in @m’s report. That’s not to say I have nothing new to write about. 

The thing is, @m only stayed there in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon (he spend more time travelling than at the expo…) I myself stayed some days longer, so I could also go to the second day of the event and of course tour London a bit.

On the second day I played the PC version of game for a full hour (thanks Souto) It was the level with the crashed plane on the map (I’m sure you’ve seen it in screenshots.)  

The mission starts with a nice briefing, which tells you how you got in your current situation (I’m not going to spoil anything here.) When the briefing ends, you start with the Spy, standing behind a truck. From the first moment, my fear that you couldn’t have the strategy from the original games in a FPS was proven wrong. I feel ashamed to say that it took me like 5 minutes to kill one enemy guard and get to a better hiding place, not even 10 meters away from my starting position…

The thing which I had problems with was staying undetected. Most of the times I didn’t even notice myself and enemy soldier got suspicious, but had to hear that from Souto many times (let me quote: WATCH OUT!! GET OUT OF THERE!! HURRY!! NOOO DON’T DO THAT!! THAT GUY SPOTTED YOU!! And each time I had this humiliated feeling when he started laughing when I died. C’mon, where’s the British humour in that!? ;) 

As I progressed trough the mission, I got to see some nice stuff here and there. Remember the screenshot where you see two soldiers in a brawl? Well, one of them is allied soldier in disguise. If you manage to kill the surrounding enemies, he will come and give you assistance in the mission. Unfortunately, due to a bug, he didn’t come to help me. But ah well, I prefer having the entire honour for myself, rather than having to share it with some silly, low ranked soldier. Another possibility is that he just didn’t have the guts to come and assist me. In any case, I had to move on alone.

The missions can be finished in many different ways (the open map thing Pyro has been talking about.) Like in the original game, you can decide which objective you want to do first, how you want to get to a certain location (via the streets, trough buildings, going underground, etc…) and so forth. It’s your choice!!

You can also bring up a map of the area, which doesn’t only show you the locations of your objectives, but also pinpoints interesting areas. I’m not going to tell you what those could possibly be, let me just tell you they can be very useful for completing the mission.

Something which endangers your Commandos’ survival is that enemy soldiers come to check out your position when they think something suspicious is going on. This is not like in the original game, were the alarm sets of and the area is immediately swarmed with Jerries. When an enemy sees or hears you, he will check out what’s happening. In the original game this only happened after a couple of seconds (remember the flickering Line of Sight in C2 and C3?) This can be very handy though. For example, when you want a Gestapo’s uniform, you can lure him towards you by standing in his FOV (field of view) for a short period of time. Then, when he comes towards you, and he’s at a place where no one will see you when killing him, you take him out from behind and you have a nice new outfit, which makes you able to freely walk past lower ranked soldiers.