Not every character will be equally enjoyable for everyone but it trades that for a fantastic amount of variety.
It does however negatively impact the difficulty balance, making some mini games a lot harder/easier than they should be, some levels will feel designed for your character and some others ridiculously frustrating with little sense to make of it all.
The randomness of the game doesn't help either by making it hard to strategize your team if at all.
You would think several play style would help the good "figure it out on the fly" feel signature of Wario Ware games but it at best adds some replay value and at worse makes it just a little bit less intuitive, which does matter a lot for such a fast-paced game with so many different mini-games.
It's also worth noting that the story campaign falls a little short even by Wario Ware standards but it mores than makes up for it with a fantastic multiplayer mode with up to 4 players once you're done with the main story which is where you're truly getting your money's worth.

Overall i'd say a quick pick up and play multiplayer game feels more than welcome on the Nintendo Switch and a worthy addition to your library if you often find yourself playing with others.

final thought: Touched! is still the goat

zero mission feels neither here nor there to me, trapped in the dead center of two schools of design that are constantly capitulating to the other. it structurally reminds of fusion in its suggestive design but lacks the exploratory atmosphere of super. everything in zero mission feels sterile; it is not a culmination of but rather a reminder of what came before it. the spritework of fusion, perfectly attuned to that titles cold and impersonal circuitry running rampant alongside a biomechanical nightmare, cannot hope to replicate the uncanny loneliness of the original metroids subterranean freedive. and the decision to backpedal on the comic book art style, remnants of which still remain in the game, does away with the opportunity to mythologize samus' original fearless adventure, which could have lended a differing yet nonetheless genuine weight to the proceedings. instead it's a story retold, a greatest hits remix of a game with awkward and needless additions to the affair. neither a game about regaining control nor a dread inducing descent, all that's left is for zero mission to succeed on the merits of its systems. it can, but that's largely besides the point

Mascot character platformers are one of the most exciting genres in gaming to me. They have the potential to be an intriguing concoction of every visual, aural and story element that normally goes into games, but benefit strongly from their bend towards the main controllable character being the mechanical focus. Characters like Rayman, Ratchet & Clank, Hat Kid, their games are informed by their personalities and rulesets in a way that contextualises the player’s involvement in their worlds. Conceptualised well enough, the degree of exploration and interaction afforded to the characters can elevate these titles to surprising degrees, and give them a unique voice with a sense that they really have something to say.

This is pretty much where Psychonauts comes in. The first game came about in the full swing of the mascot platformer craze of the 00’s - and with the help of Double Fine’s history in sharp character writing and adventure exploration, concocted a game where the themes are both broad and accessible: Psychics exist and can explore people’s mental planes to empathise with visualisations of their own unique psychological issues.

Part of my adoration for the first Psychonauts comes from its strong visual direction, with off-beat and illustrative takes on individual character’s mindscapes. Psychonauts goes above and beyond with its core concepts by allowing its cast to express themselves through clever writing and impressionistic environmental caricature. Likely inspired by Rankin Bass stop motion movies and the artwork of Tim Burton, who’s styling has roots in ideas of eccentrism, depression and nonconformity - as well as have a level of cheeky humour that complements its attempts to depict darker themes. It sets the perfect stage for what Psychonauts is setting out to do; to let its cast express themselves in unique and personal ways of which the player is tasked with physically navigating, a visual metaphor for the therapist and the client. All these abstractions never go too far into sheer chaos because they’re balanced wonderfully and grounded with stereotypical visual metaphors that help keep things grounded, like “censors”, “emotional baggage”.


Psychonauts 2 is great, I’m amazed that it not only delivered on its promise of being a follow-up to the original title, it also exceeded it in almost every aspect. My main complaints are that I simply didn’t find it anywhere near as laugh-out-loud funny, and that the climax is a little contrived to the point it simply wasn’t satisfying. One of the strengths of the original was the level of interaction you had with the world in the form of use-items and environmental objects, and character count… something Psychonauts 2 seems to have made an effort on trimming down. I think a lot of my disappointment in the humour of this game stems from how little there is to reveal, by comparison? Still, it’s a fun story to see unfold - I’m hugely fond of how there is a throughline across the levels in the form of a kind of shared trauma within the cast.

This is simply one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen from a technical standpoint. Uses, and masters every trick in the Unreal Engine book while also inventing new ones. Unbelievable work with gravity tricks, false scale, shaders and portals. Every area is simply stunning. I can’t believe how good it looks. Oh my god. Platforming feels wonderful and mercifully there’s an easy mode for the less-than-stellar combat.

This review feels bad to me so I'll just end it here.

This was exceptionally strong and really surpassed my already high expectations. I love this game!!!!

This works much better than similar material like Inside Out because the writers choose to fiddle with so many more themes and so much more political and emotional material within every extended metaphor. Exceptional writing, art design, and voice acting really shine here, but this time the mechanics almost entirely meet that level of refinement.

It defies crystalline reading and prioritizes being a story about MANY characters processing the convergence of past mistakes and present challenges. It is extremely heartwarming and feelgoody while still evoking the vibes of a more cynical game. I was just really tickled by this, I really think it blows the original game out of the water.

I'm ruminating a bit about the Alice in Wonderland material here - I think there's a really shrewd irony within Psychonauts - I'm greatly appreciative of how very few worlds can be distilled to a theme or a single message being sent - even more in the sequel, writing and art design hammers home an internal world that defies legibility and is about a whole bunch of thoughts and things at once - more decorative both aesthetically and literally. The Sisyphean Alice in Wonderland-ness of it all - back in the rabbit hole - hammers home the concept of the therapist and individual, collaboratively and consistently doing the work to stave off harmful thought cycles ....

and even then, I don't want to overanalyze. I mean, I'm beyond deadened by the endless proliferation of thought pieces that are like, ~[GAME] is a beautiful treatment of [INSERT THEME]~ - were Psychonauts 2 easily summarized in that way, I'd like it far less. There are many character ideologies here I didn't totally grasp, yet I walked away from those levels with ideas, images, and enough of a portrait to move the plot forward .... way more observational and contemplative while still driving forward big plot and feelings - again, totally ironic how NOT prescriptive this game is about some of its bigger ideas and plot beats. The level design fucking rocks, also.

I constantly forget Raz is supposed to be 10. A kid this into brilocage is far too unrealistic, I imagine.

How do you make a sequel to a cult classic game 15 years later?

You put all of your heart and soul into it, and make it a spirtual celebration of its developers long and storied history.

Psychonauts 2 is way better than it has any right to be. The original game is famous for being a bit of a forgotten gem, maybe too ambitious for the Double Fine of 2005, a gem with just enough sharp edges to put off the average player. It's a game I myself bounced off of, partly for aesthetic reasons, partly because it is rough. Psychonauts 2 takes that scratched disc out of its case, polishes it in one of those fancy machines you used to see in Game - then goes absolutely fucking wild with it.

I cannot overstate how regularly I was surprised by the creativity on display here. Every mind presents something new and exciting, some incredible technical trick, something smart or elegant or just plain funny. Mechanics get introduced, iterated on and remixed constantly. The writing is deep and broad, challenging complex issues head-on, with the subtlty and nuance that maybe 2005's outing lacked. And it is funny. It's the Tommy Cooper effort - you probably won't laugh at every joke, but they come thick and fast enough that you'll crack eventually. For me it was a throwaway line from the dentist in the hub after the first mission that charmed me and from then on it never stopped.

Platforming feels as tight as the best of Mario - Raz's breadth of skills affords elegant movement almost as versatile as Odyssey's, and just as it starts to get dull that mechanic creativity kicks in and you get a new toy to play with. There's a Rare game's worth of collectables available, far more than would be reasonable to collect - but each is so enjoyable to grab that you'll be sorely temped anyway.

It's not all totally rosey - combat comes up a bit too often or my liking, and would often be greeted with a sigh. It's not like the creativity doesn't extend to it - each of your skills has a use in combat as in exploration - but ultimately it does largely boil down to what feels like filler. Bosses are hit and miss - most are fine, if a bit rote. Some are overlong, and if you happen to die during them, there's no checkpointing. Some are absolutely sick. Raz really loves to hammer stuff home - you'll hear lines about emotional baggae so often you'll start whispering it in your sleep. The game's way longer than one might expect - in a worse game, this would hurt it more, but the creativity amok atones for it. Putting in 3 separate Points of No Return makes things a bit weirdly paced in the last act, mind.

But by and large these are nitpicks. I can't recommend Psychonauts 2 highly enough - it came out of nowhere to immediately become my second favourite game I played this year, and it's propelled me straight into having another crack at the original. Do youirself a favour and enjoy 15 hours of pure anti-AAA antidote.

jeff tremaine crushes his balls on a fire hydrant and it's up to you to step in and direct a season of jackass

CONS: - misses some of the homoerotic camaraderie that defines the franchise in favour of an assortment of kind of puerile minigames that you chuckle at once or twice before they become grating and lose a lot of their potency. no breakneck editing and no physicality (both of which are replaced by a kind of virtual uncanniness) render a great deal of its charm null. youre just here to see steve-o's tattoo rendered in sixth-generation glory
- bam was contractually barred from appearing so he could not manifest as a force of evil in the game

PROS: - this game is nostradamic in that it predicted twitch streamers and v-tubers years before their inception by often placing the character model of your chosen jackass in the bottom left where they face react to the havoc they wreak. this also functions as a health bar. steve-o looks the happiest ive ever seen a human be, and also the most totally cognizant of his own mortal coil.
- bam was contractually barred from appearing so he could not manifest as a force of evil in the game

It's hard to imagine that I'll end up being as disappointed in another video game this year than I was with Twelve Minutes. The potential of utilising a timeloop with a mystery based point and click game would seem like a great mixture of genre and mechanics (and I still think it could be), but you'd be forgiven for thinking the opposite based on this.

The obvious problem here is that you're likely going to have to repeat your actions every now and then, something which has the potential to be a little bit monotonous. And alongside that, the game falls into the genre trap of having very specific solutions for certain puzzles which leads to potentially having to redo the loop entirely. There are a couple of ways to skip ahead but these are very specific and they don't save as much time as you might think.

Even then there was potential to come out of the game with a more positive outlook. Games of this genre can overcome issues like these if story is still intriguing, or the game's writing is able to keep you interested in what might come next. Unfortunately it doesn't take very long to realise that Twelve Minutes has neither of those either.

Part of the reason why these elements don't hit is due to this repetition, where you're provided with info dumps in one loop and then spend the next few working out how to apply that information, meaning there are sizable chunks of gameplay where you're learning nothing other than that a specific way to progress doesn't work. The other major reason is the reliance on multiple twists to further the plot, as well as relying on some of the more cliché mystery/thriller story elements, neither of which are earned. Sure they may theoretically explain away some of the unnatural and flat dialogue (I don't blame McEvoy, Ridley or Dafoe for this, to be clear) but in no way does it come across intentional.

All in all, it's just a massive shame that such an interesting concept ends up being bogged down by an amateurish story. It's not quite David Cage levels of bad but it's also not exactly streets away either...

Unironically the first genuinely great Halo game.

I very much so disliked all previous Halo games, but this one finally struck gold. All the weapons are fun to play with, movement has been brought to its most fluid and enjoyable, the level design is the best its ever been. Massive open expanses with ridiculous wasted space are a thing of the past, replace with much tighter and well designed levels. Exploring is no longer worthless, you'll be rewarded either traditionally, or with something comedic (a favorite example of mine being in one of the earliest levels, where a guard is locked out of a door and has a conversation about passwords, it's really funny). Vehicle sections have been greatly improved, with their design being greatly improved and made much less tedious.

The game also has frequent, incredible setpieces across every level. There's almost always something crazy happening, some major objective you're chasing. New giant enemies to put down, it's enthralling and infinitely more captivating than anything Halo 1 or 2 ever could have hoped to offer.

The enemy AI is also incredibly improved, Brutes are no longer annoying ass enemies with two states of being, they're actually competent and fun enemies that play into the game's combat loop quite well.

Speaking of enemy AI, Halo 3 finally gets right what I've wanted the series to perfect this entire time. In every Halo game, there are multiple factions, and they'll in-fight. Leading to interesting scenarios where you can be the 3rd or even 4th wheel in a battle. Until now, they were never really expanded upon properly or utilized to their best effect. Here though, huge battles become much more dynamic due to the introduction of new enemy forces, new allegiances, and previously ongoing fights. Your allegiances can change multiple times per mission causing the battles and enemy types to constantly shift.

The game still lacks in well made boss encounters, with the final boss of the game essentially coming and going like a wet fart. The final mission outside of that however is an incredible rush that ends with a callback to Halo 1, that invalidates Halo 1's ending purely by being a better version of it.

Ultimately, Halo 3 is the culmination of all of Halo 1 and 2's mismanaged and mishandled ideas, finally put into proper, fun form in an FPS that I can finally understand the legacy of. Halo 3 is actually great, and I may even consider playing it outside of co-op someday.

jaws still clenched, brains still wired, the tetrominos are still dancing in my vision, i need a glass of water

less about the mechanical expression of tetris and far more about the transcendental flow state that can be achieved from playing such systems driven titles, hence its appropriate title. as such it's content to settle for the basic template with little in the way of formal experimentation beyond its visuals and aesthetics but good god are they pulling their weight here, imbuing the experience with elegance and ephemerality. it's this unique concoction that immerses subtly, the endless tides of puzzle pieces washing over me and rejuvenating my soul with each minute spent in the playing field, narrating the story of life itself through descending blocks. impressively, each stage in journey mode seamlessly cycles the player through varying tempos of play before they even realize what's happening; the seasoned players mind quickly grows accustomed to the affair and instantly switches gears in their head, like it's all some locked away second nature. half the game is reconciling with the part of you that is made to operate solely on instinct and thats an experience you cant really get in other mediums and always makes me happy to sit down for a while

Unreal Gold poses an interesting question: "what if enemies in a singleplayer FPS behaved like multiplayer bots?". Instead of large groups of predictable and squishier enemies like in Doom or Duke Nukem, here you get to deal with smaller groups of unpredictable yet tankier foes. They dodge your attacks, move while shooting, lead their shots, and can even use the same weapons that you do. A fight against a single Skaarj Warrior is more dynamic and unpredictable than, say, a Hell Knight from Doom. Yet despite Unreal’s more complex enemy behavior and 10-weapon arsenal with alt. fire modes on everything, it fails to deliver combat with the same level of depth compared to games with more simplistic enemies and weapons such as Doom or Quake 1. Nonetheless, there are still lessons we can learn from this experiment of trying to give FPS enemies “good AI”. Whatever “good AI” means.

Perhaps the most important one is that having complex enemy behavior is not a substitute for good encounter design. Unreal’s levels are on the whole decent when it comes to non-combat elements like exploration and pacing, but the actual combat scenarios themselves tend to be very repetitive. The key reason for that is because for the game keeps throwing encounters with only minor enemies at you (i.e. the enemies that don’t exhibit much complex behavior, like the Tentacles, Slith, Krall, Gasbags, insects and Brutes) while refusing to throw more than one Skaarj (the “good AI” enemies) at you at once up until the last third of the game. This is part of the reason why the ISV-Kran levels being a constant string of 1v1s/1v2s against the Skaarj starts to feel exhausting after a while.

While there’s certainly more ways an encounter with a single Skaarj Warrior can play out compared to, say, a single Hell Knight in Doom, there is still a limit to that. The Skaarj are not that unpredictable; their primary behavior still boils down to “get in your face”, “dodge your attacks if possible” and “keep my distance when I’m on low health”. They’re not going to do any high-IQ flanking or strategic camping. Nor should they, as making individual enemies more unpredictable tends to involve making them more RNG-dependent or making it impossible to keep up with them (such as by having enemies move obscenely fast or giving them too many behaviors to keep track of)--making them frustratingly inconsistent to deal with no matter how good you get at the game. Instead, this inherent predictability of the Skaarj should have been compensated for by making you regularly fight groups of Skaarj or Skaarj paired with minor enemies, thus increasing uncertainty without resorting too hard to the inherent inconsistency of RNG. A little RNG is necessary to create uncertainty at higher levels of play when you have every facet of the game already down to a T, but too much RNG makes the game incredibly inconsistent to play on low/mid-levels of play, and reduces the relative depth of the game on all levels of play in favor of a few consistent and safe strategies that largely mitigate RNG, as we will see later.

Now, while the last third of the game does regularly throw groups of Skaarj at you, the spaces in which these fights take place fail to make good use of the Skaarj. It’s either because Unreal reuses the same “some Skaarj in a tight corridor” or “a group of Skaarj in a wide flat open field” setup for the umpteenth time, or it’s because of our old friend, The Door Problem. A lot of fights are going to turn into the same “backpedal behind a doorway and bottleneck a group of enemies to more safely pick them off” if the space allows for it, which becomes an especially enticing option if the enemies have explosive weapons. In these situations the complex behavior of the Skaarj ceases to be relevant: in tight spaces they (and you) do not have any space to dodge and it becomes more of a battle of who can out-damage the other first, in large open spaces there’s so much space to let you safely keep your distance from enemies and pick them off with your hitscan weapons that they don’t have an answer against, and neither do the Skaarj have a good answer against you camping a doorway. Once again we can see that “good AI” is not a silver bullet that will magically improve your game--levels must provide enemies with the opportunities to let their unique behaviors shine.

Such an ideal combat space with the Skaarj involves a relatively constricted area that prevents hitscan weapons from becoming too dominant, it involves plenty of cover to give both player and enemy room to outmaneuver each other and avoid explosive splash damage, and most importantly, these spaces should essentially lock you in so as to prevent you from backpedaling away from any threat. That’s right, I am talking about the a-word.

There are a handful of such arenas in Unreal which, while badly executed, show a glimpse of potential of what could have been. The first arena in Demon Crater highlights this neatly where you have a space with tons of cover and varying height levels for you and the Skaarj to juke it out. While held back by being able to run past everything into the corridor leading to the basement, it is still conceptually interesting because (ignoring the basement) there is no perfect position in this arena. As you and the Skaarj move about, some positions become more (dis)advantageous and susceptible to explosive splash damage or providing one no space to dodge projectiles. So the northern rim of the arena is raised and allows you to get a good vantage point on the center, but at the same time that rim is narrow and has your back close to the wall, which means that while you can easily dodge incoming projectiles, you can’t easily dodge the splash damage from incoming rockets. The warehouse areas in Dasa Mountain Pass and ISV-Kran Deck 4 also feature similar constricted cover-dense arenas against multiple Skaarj where macro-level positioning matters more, but the former is hamstrung by having too much free space for backtracking, and the latter doesn’t have enough enemies to apply proper pressure on you from multiple directions.

Now contrast all this with the final arena of Demon Crater, which is this big flat donut space with some cover here and there and Skaarj Officers sparsely placed around. Because there is so much free space, you don’t need to be worried about splash damage or being boxed in, and the element of map control is non-existent in favor of circlestrafing being the definite solution for avoiding damage. Were the enemies in Unreal designed in a way where they could prevent you from circlestrafing from long-range or in an open flat space, then this might have worked, but as it stands the enemy roster is best suited for close-quarters arena combat, while the arena design itself is incredibly lacklustre.

Having enemies dodge your attacks like a human opponent in a multiplayer match does make them come off as more intelligent, but in terms of gameplay, it also comes off as bullshit. Namely, the way enemies in Unreal dodge your shots is by RNG. The exact moment that you press the fire button, nearby enemies check if shots from your weapon is something they’re allowed to dodge, and then they roll a dice to see if they can do an instant dodgeroll away. In practice, this means that there’s a N% chance (all dodge chances listed here onwards are not accurate and just my best guess) that one shot is basically a waste of ammo. For rapid-fire weapons such as the Stinger or Minigun this isn’t a big deal, but considering most of your workhorse weapons are projectile-based with a low rate of fire, the RNG dodging makes the effectiveness of certain weapons inconsistent, or just makes them plain not worth using at all. For the Eightball this means that your primary fire will get instantly dodged half the time and is usually only any good for its splash damage when charged, whereas for the Flak Cannon primary fire it’s just plain wasted ammo 40% of the time. And when you consider that the time-to-kill on Skaarj is already fairly high (it takes like 3-4 rockets or two Flak shells to kill the lowest ranks), it makes this annoying inconsistency even more pronounced.

Instead of bothering with this game of roulette, what you’ll more likely do is use weapons that enemies aren’t hardcoded to dodge to begin with. So the Eightball alt. fire, on its own useless due to its low projectile speed, now becomes surprisingly useful for one-shotting Skaarj Warriors (after charging 3+ grenades) because they are hardcoded to never dodge grenades. The Flak Cannon alt. fire becomes one of your best options since it kills most Skaarj in 2-3 quick shots from mid-range that will never get dodged, and without needing to be charged like the Eightball alt. fire either. The Razorjack can also decapitate most Skaarj in 2 shots and almost never gets dodged. And instead of bothering with projectile-based weapons, you can simply use your hitscan weapons such as the Pistol, ASMD primary, and the Rifle. The Minigun, despite being hitscan like the Pistol and Rifle, will get dodged, but since it’s hitscan you can easily correct your aim when an enemy dodges. Dodgerolls are just a very ineffective method of dodging hitscan attacks because of how the recovery after a roll leaves enemies stationary--having enemies dodge hitscan through erratic strafing would have been more effective. Given how all weapons have their own ammo pools (except for the Pistol/Minigun) and how each ammo type is equally scarce (Flak Cannon ammo is a bit rarer, and bullets are more common), you will always have enough ammo to use a weapon that renders enemy dodging behaviour redundant, which begs the question what the point of using RNG for triggering enemy dodging is.

Before we continue, it’s worth considering whether dodgerolling is the only means an enemy could theoretically react to your shots being fired (not to be confused with enemy reactions after getting hit). I mainly talked about dodging here because that’s what most Skaarj in Unreal do, but that’s not the only possible enemy reaction to your shots in Unreal. Skaarj Officers can react to your shots by putting up a shield instead of dodging out of the way, which I’ll touch upon later. To avoid making it come off like dodgerolling is the only possible on-fire reaction an FPS enemy can have, I’ll henceforth refer to enemy dodging/blocking/etc. as simply “reacting” unless I’m specifically talking about dodging or blocking.

Another thing to consider is what the point of having enemies react to your attacks in any action game like this actually is. The immersion-level goal of enemy reactions seems to be to create the illusion of unpredictable opponents that fight like actual human opponents would. I suppose the intended gameplay-level goal of enemy reactions then is to keep combat fresh and exciting, which, more specifically, is achieved by making certain weapons more situational to use. Because enemy reactions usually involve nullifying/countering your attacks somehow, then naturally your weapons won’t be as effective depending on their nature and that of the enemy’s reaction. So projectile-based weapons are more likely to get reacted to from medium range, while hitscan weapons work at most ranges. In this regard, enemy reactions serve a similar purpose to damage resistances/weaknesses and locational weak points (think headshots or weak points on the back). The difference is that while resistance/weaknesses apply on hit and locational weak points apply depending on the angle you’re facing an enemy (you can’t really shoot their head if you’re right below them), having enemies react to your shots depends more on your relative distance, position, and their state. This gives designers another tool to balance out weapons when other tools wouldn’t be as adequate.

For example: the Shock Rifle alt. fire fires a ball which can be detonated with the primary fire to create a shockwave for massive damage. This Shock Combo is incredibly strong, which is why it’s balanced out with enemies having a ~90% dodge chance against it. This doesn’t make it useless--what you have to do is create a situation where the enemy cannot dodgeroll away from the ball. So if they’re next to a wall, then shooting an orb to their other side means that no matter where they dodge towards, they’re always going to be within range of the Shock Combo. This way a Shock Combo can be strong in certain situations instead of almost every situation. Giving enemies a damage resistance against the Shock Combo (so it can gib some enemies in a group, but not all) to prevent it from becoming a dominant strategy would work if enemy groups were more diverse, but considering most enemy encounters in Unreal are fairly homogeneous, this wouldn’t really work. Having enemies only be vulnerable to Shock Combos from a certain angle (such as from behind an enemy) is most certainly a valid way of balancing it, but because not every humanoid enemy in Unreal has a means to block frontal damage, the Shock Combo’s usefulness is better mitigated through dodging, which every humanoid enemy is already capable of. Technically you could give every humanoid enemy a means to block frontal damage and it would work just as fine, but I suppose that having enemies mitigate your shots through movement makes them appear more intelligent than the alternative.

Taking all this into account, it would have been preferable if enemy reactions were made semi-random at the very least. So the conditions for a reaction to happen are deterministic, whereas how the reaction executed is partly random. A dodge could be triggered deterministically, but the exact direction of the dodge is influenced by chance. This way the designer has tighter control over weapon balance, while there’s still a degree of uncertainty that prevents the game from becoming too predictable. So the player could also devise more strategies using more weapons instead of relying on chance or a smaller handful of weapons that avoid chance completely. Taking projectile-based weapons for example, having enemies only be able to react to your projectiles after they travel a certain distance would mean that you could consistently use those weapons up close, but whether you would want to depends on if said weapon can inflict self-blast damage, or if the enemy is very dangerous to stay close to. Alternatively you could create a situation using a combination of weapons so the enemy cannot dodge projectiles even at long-range (such as having other weapons bait a dodge or cripple enemy movement).

Unfortunately, the weapon switch speed in Unreal is too slow to allow for any weapon combinations that aren’t two fire modes on the same weapon. If you wanted to use the ASMD alt’s ~90% dodge chance to bait Skaarj into dodging to land a guaranteed Flak Cannon shot, or if you managed to launch a Skaarj into the air by shooting a rocket at its feet and want to finish it off with the Flak Cannon mid-air, then by the time you are done switching to the Flak Cannon, the Skaarj will already have recovered and is ready to dodge anything. On top of the slow weapon switch speed you also have long refire times (the delay between shots) on several weapons in Unreal. So if you’re trying to switch weapons right after firing your current weapon--a use case that comes up fairly often--you’re forced to wait for the firing animation of your current weapon to finish before the weapons actually start to switch. With high-RoF weapons such as the Pistol and Stinger this isn’t as noticeable, but with workhorse weapons such as the Eightball, ASMD and Flak Cannon, it certainly is.

The slow weapon switch speed is a problem for Unreal in particular, but first it’s worth explaining what kind of a weapon switch speed fits a given FPS, and why not every FPS needs instant weapon switching. Basically, it’s about whether a game emphasizes split-second decision making (ULTRAKILL, Doom Eternal), or thinking ahead into the future (Final Doom, Serious Sam). In the former a small mistake is highly damaging, but you have more means to mitigate and recover from such mistakes. In the latter it’s the exact opposite; mistakes aren’t as damaging, but they’re harder to recover from in the long-term as they slowly build up to a point where recovery is impossible. This is also reflected in the enemy design of these games: in the former they tend to be agile and harder to predict, whereas in the latter they tend to be slow and predictable. After all, predictable enemies are less likely to push you into making constant split-second decisions when you can see what they’re about to do from a mile away, whereas unpredictable enemies are more likely to do the opposite. Thus, the weapon switch speed (and whether you can cancel the firing animation of a weapon by switching weapons) serves to reinforce the player into either thinking ahead or thinking fast. With a slow weapon switch speed, the player needs to always keep in mind that switching to another weapon leaves them temporarily vulnerable because of the weapon switch delay, and that switching to the wrong weapon can potentially screw them over. With a fast weapon switch speed, it’s simply a matter of whether the player can react fast enough to switch to a more suitable weapon as the situation constantly changes.

Taking this into consideration, one can see why the weapon switch speed in Unreal is a bad fit: the enemies are designed to be agile and unpredictable, but you cannot switch weapons fast enough to keep up with them as the situation changes--which it does constantly. This is not to say that you won’t ever switch weapons during combat--ammo for your current weapon isn’t infinite after all, but the slow switch speed biases your selection away from more situational weapons towards all-rounder weapons that work in most situations, which especially stings in a 10-weapon arsenal as some weapons end up feeling underutilized. Really, the only reason that the weapon switch speed isn’t a more noticeable issue is because of how limited in scope most Skaarj encounters are. Had the encounter design been more daring and engaging w/r/t enemy composition and the amount of enemies, you’d have many more reasons to keep switching weapons--where the slow weapon switch speed would have most certainly been felt.

It’s not only the weapon switch speed that makes it hard to keep up with the Skaarj, but the movement as well. Skaarj are overall faster than you, and when they’re within melee range of you it’s very hard to shake them off. Your best chance of pushing them away is by forcing them to dodge away using a high-dodge chance weapon, which, again, would have been a more viable option had the weapon switch speed not been so low. Otherwise you just have to hope that the Skaarj don’t try to chase you, or that you can cheese them out using level geometry. Jumping as an evasive maneuver also doesn’t really work because of the lack of air control and the pitiful height it covers (which also puts a damper on how vertical combat spaces are allowed to be; there’s no point in verticality if you do not have the mobility options to reliably move vertically). Lastly you have a dodge move as well (basically a short dash), which is pretty much useless because it covers only an incredibly short distance. Dodging is also done with a double-tap input that you’re more likely to do on accident than on purpose, especially in a game like this where you’re constantly changing strafing directions. While there’s unfortunately no one-tap dodge option, you can disable dodging altogether to prevent such misinputs.

Unreal’s direction w/r/t escalation of encounter design isn’t feasible for the long term. Its encounters had to be limited in scope, otherwise the player would be overwhelmed because of the player character’s limited ability to keep up with the Skaarj (like a Souls player character being pitted against Bayonetta enemies). Yet this limited encounter scope also means that the encounters become too repetitive across Unreal’s 8-10hr runtime. Here there are two options for expanding the encounter scope without over/underwhelming the player: either the player character can be given more means to keep up with the Skaarj (greater mobility, faster weapon switching, etc.), or the Skaarj themselves can become scaled down in terms of HP/aggression/reactivity/mobility so that they can appear in greater numbers without proving too much for the vanilla player character’s abilities. Although either option could work, I’d still lean towards the former considering it preserves Unreal’s unique edge compared to other FPS games on the market, what with its deathmatch bot-like enemies.

To sum things up, having enemies behave like deathmatch bots does make for good marketing and an interesting surface-level experience, but it doesn’t necessarily make for engaging gameplay. Enemies, be they complex or simple in behavior, need to be designed around the player’s abilities, and the encounter design should use these enemies in varied and engaging ways. Complex behavior isn’t a substitute for level design, because no matter how complex that behavior is, there will always be a finite range of actions an enemy can potentially perform. While Unreal most certainly stands out with its complex enemy behaviors, they end up feeling inevitably repetitive when the same enemy set-ups keep getting repeated throughout the game.

There are a bunch of other of Unreal’s failings I haven’t talked about yet (the redundancies and imbalances in its weapon arsenal and the design/usage of the minor enemies), but quite frankly I find that is more going into specific implementation details that aren’t as interesting in the grander scope of things. There is also a lot of praise to be written about Unreal’s immersive worldbuilding and implicit storytelling, and the way it does so by respecting the player’s time and intelligence (especially without locking them in a room waiting for NPCs to finish talking), but this is a part of Unreal that has been already extensively covered by others#Further_reading).