Ok, so I was VERY close to reaching the end, but then a glitch occurred in which (spoiler alert) after pushing Kaileena into the portal, I was unable to do the same. I couldn't find the solution, so I just decided to look up a playthrough to see how the story ends. On one hand: Thank God it was just the last few minutes. On the other hand: Why only the last few minutes????

So what's my overall opinion? Well, I'm honestly shocked to report that... I kinda love it! However, I wouldn't blame anyone if they hated it. I was originally really sceptical about its bizarre tone shift, and it took me a while to get used to the combat (if you couldn't tell by my original review), but after giving it a second chance, it ended up winning me over. The parkour platforming is more fun and exciting than ever before and the way the story interlays with its timeline makes me look forward to playing it again just so I can pick up the details. That's not to say the story itself is anything really that interesting. It's mostly just a constant series of loopholes with characters that aren't nearly as interesting as what came before. I still vastly prefer its predecessor for doing so well at the little amount it set for itself and just being generally more charming, but I see Warrior Within as more of an alternative to that game than a legitimate follow up.

Sands of Time is a platformer with an amazing story but basic combat.
Warrior Within is an action game with amazing platforming but a basic story.

Nothing about this experience was fun. It's arbitrarily difficult to a point where you have to save every half a minute to load whenever you get hit by literally anything, which includes a bullet that's just 5 pixels shot from an enemy just a split second after he spawns in the middle of the screen (not from the side, but right in the middle). And trust me, I'm the first to enjoy a game that requires serious skill to beat, but when you deliberately program your game to not let you make it past one section without being blasted by 3 different objects being thrown at you all at once, all it really seems to do is trying to get a rise out of me. By the end, I didn't feel like I've accomplished anything, I felt like I was being gut punched by the prolonged passage of time.

Funny how little amount of stealth games I play, because it's one of my favorite types of games alongside survival horror. Don't worry about that tho because in a few weeks I'll be playing the shit out of Metal Gear Solid, but I digress.

While the greater issue with most of the games in the genre is that they give too many gameplay features, this one has the exact opposite problem. I know that it's an amateur project with an uneven price on Steam, and it does have a pretty fun art style for something of that pedestal, but it straight-up lacks some of the most fundamental aspects of what makes a stealth game good. For one, ammo is shockingly scarce. The classic trick of shooting light sources to hide in the shadows is very much present and NPCs are killed instantly with headshots, but you're generally given just 10 bullets from the beginning, and ammo boxes are almost nowhere to be found. In fact, there's just nothing to explore besides the main objective. Searching behind every nook and cranny doesn't offer any results besides finding your target, and all you have to do at that point is just killing them while they're already down. Guards can still be taken down by holding them hostage and then choking them, but for one, doing so doesn't grant you anything so you're better off sneaking further unless they get in the way, and two, this gets repetitive real quickly since the enemy AI seems to hardly spot you so it's not like getting to that point is all that difficult. When you do get spotted, it's pretty much game over from there on out because the guards have this weird sixth sense by which they always seem to know where you are hiding, I even had two of them stand still at a corner right next to me and start firing at the wall because they just hadn't reached the angle to hit me. Once you die, there is no save system to back you up so you have to do the whole mission all over again. It's not as infuriating as it sounds because each mission is relatively short, but doing the process all the way from scratch each time gets boring after the third attempt because the only major difference is the route you're taking. The gameplay just kinda boils down to the bare minimum of how these games work, and additional features to immerse yourself further into the stealth are severely lacking.

While I refunded this game within just 45 minutes, I learned a lot from its subpar design. I wouldn't be complaining if niche games like this dominated the home store page.

Plot-wise, there's almost NOTHING to complain about! It might as well be the only instance of a game trying to replicate film that actually works. Great characters, immensely strong themes for such an old game, and some of the best voice acting in the business.
Gameplay-wise, I'm torn. The design itself is amazing, with so many funny details to immerse you into the world, but the way it's utilized feels confused about what kind of game it wants to be. It's marketed as a spy-thriller stealth game, but it also has an obscene amount of schizophrenic boss fights and sequences where enemies chase you down while you're collecting assault rifle ammo like a fat kid eats his MacDonald's chicken nuggets.

I don't want to be too harsh on it, because it is a classic of the fifth console generation, but I wasn't there to experience it at the time so I don't have the nostalgia to back up my enjoyment. I still have two more sequels waiting to be played, and who knows where the quality goes depending on how they evolved with the platform? I'll be looking forward to seeing these characters again (for a while at least before they get replaced by an albino twink).

This is a hard one to review for me. I feel just as mixed about this game as with MGS1, but can't sum it up as easily. The tonal clash between the stealth and the action is completely fixed but comes with the caveat of the pacing being all over the place, which is confusing to me because the pacing was one of my favorite things about the original. The ways you can approach the stealth is a lot more varied with the first person view and enemy AI, but it also goes too far in the opposite direction because now enemies can miraculously spot you even when you're standing outside their field of view. The boss fights and backtracking sections are far less tedius and evenly spaced out, but the tedium now comes from how ridiculously easily you're spotted (as previously mentioned) and having ridiculously little space to hide because the environments now mostly consist of narrow hallways as opposed to complex, wide open rooms.

You're probably also expecting me to bring up Raiden in some way, but weirdly enough, he's probably the only new thing that I actually liked unconditionally. Would I have preferred it to keep Snake? Of course, but watching fanboys create this outrage over playing as a different character will never not be funny. A bit of uniqueness is always needed in a sequel, not so much letting me sit through even MORE cutscenes. I didn't mention the Codec calls previously because they really only lasted more than 3 minutes during dramatic moments, and while part of me is trying to have the patience I had there, sitting through half an hour of characters talking is starting to get on my nerves. That's not to say the ending didn't completely throw me off-guard, because holy fuck!

I got a new computer a few months ago and all my progress on my emulated games is gone. Not that I'm "that" bummed out by it, but what struck me while I was installing everything here again is that THIS is the game I wanted to play first. This one? Pretty weird considering that I don't even consider this the best Silent Hill game, and yet, it's the one I'm always looking most forward to replay because it absolutely could've been the best.

The way this game opens and how the story is set up is genuinely amazing. This is the first game in the series where the rusty and wet horror that Silent Hill is known for occurs in a place other than the titular town, and my god is it scary and fun at the same time. However, I'm going to have to be upfront here and admit that as I'm writing this review, I have only made it to its midpoint. I want to express the absurd amount of love I have for this game's first half while it's still fresh in my memory before moving the second half, which I'm only dreading to get into again. Once the characters actually make it to Silent Hill, the game becomes so lazily designed, poorly written and infuriatingly tedious that it hardly even feels like the same game anymore. I don't want to act like all of it is bad, but it keeps getting worse and worse the longer it goes on until it all spirals into one shitstorm of final boss fight. There is SO much to talk about here to make an entire video analysis just explaining why the climax simply doesn't work, but sadly I don't have the time to get into that now.

I still recommend playing this game for all that good stuff alone, but all that bad stuff waiting at the end of the tunnel always leaves a sour taste in my mouth. It really is one of the most conflicting pieces of fiction I've ever witnessed.

It's so friggin' awesome that it's bad for me. No, literally, this game is so much fun that I think it's best to stay away from it. I have a bad habit of getting easily addicted to video games, and when I get hooked to a game like this, where the experience is essentially spending hours grinding to 100% rather than telling a story with a clear ending, I basically sit there playing it all day long without knowing when to stop. I think it's best to put it aside for the time being, because I have a lot of stuff to do irl and I can't get myself distracted by something like this. Just know that I'm only complimenting it by doing so. If you don't suffer from this problem as much as I do, get your hands on a copy as soon as possible!

The more these games improved in their combat and platforming, the weaker their stories became. Not that Two Thrones' story is bad, but it's a noticable downgrade and you can absolutely tell what kind of production hell it went through. The prince and Farah don't have the charisma that they used to, the vizier is incredibly underused as a villain, and having Kaileena narrate the story over the prince himself kind of disgusts me, considering how nice it was to see Yuri Lowenthal return after his shocking absence in Warrior Within. But I'll be damned if this isn't the single greatest platforming I've ever witnessed in a game! The jumping off ledges, sliding down walls and swinging off branches that defines this series has never been more acrobatic and non-stop fun as it is here, and I could play it all day for that reason alone.

If there was a way to somehow combine all these games' strengths into one, then we'd have quite possibly the greatest game to ever seize this industry. Yes, that quote is blatantly stolen from Yahtzee Croshaw, but it's true.