F.E.A.R. is late 2000's slop. It's grey-and-orange mush that wastes your time almost as much as it insults your intelligence. It's not a good game, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're dead-set on a F.E.A.R. series playthrough.

Sorry, I had to get that out of my system.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin fails as a sequel in nearly every way. F.E.A.R. isn't a perfect game, but it's a fun, impressive little romp that's charming in it's own right. With memorable locations and fun AI, it makes a great impression. F.E.A.R. 2 removes most of the complexity, turns the game into a brain-dead shooter, and fails to tell you why you're doing half the stuff you do.

Leaning is gone, and you've been made into a tank to compensate for it. A few solid shots would kill you in F.E.A.R., meanwhile you can take a dozen bullets and not even lose a third of your health. Enemy AI has also been toned-down. Instead of waiting in cover, trying to flank, or doing anything smart, nine times out of ten they simply charge at you, spraying and praying. As a result, the gun-play feels limp and shallow.

The bad horror is back, and now it's even worse. Bloody skeletons, bloody hallways, and quicktime horror sequences abound. None of it got me a single time. And there's zero horror ambience to make up for it this time. F.E.A.R. 2 cannot keep a tone, and it's frankly embarrassingly shoddy at times.

Also, I'm not sure where to put this, but this game feels bizarrely misogynistic all throughout. I know it's a 360 era game and shit writing was the norm, but it really stood out in comparison to the original game's seriousness. The way Alma is sexualized and portrayed as a whole feels really gross, and not in the intended way. The ending especially is just...uncomfortable.

Overall, I have nothing nice to say about F.E.A.R. 2. It's just bad. Don't play it unless you're (somehow) nostalgic for it, or you're on the F.E.A.R. series playthrough like I am (in which case, good luck).

Starting to realize that I just don't gel with Remedy's style, be it 20 years ago or today (up to Control, I haven't played Alan Wake 2 yet). I'd only ever played the first Max Payne prior and found it pretty mid but assumed that the sequel would deliver the experience everyone claims to have had back when. It was, against all odds, a bit worse.

I could write an entire diatribe taking MP2's story apart, why it fails at being noir or whatever sort of subversion it believes itself to be, and why its legacy is entirely a product of nostalgia for a time when games that so much as attempted any kind of consistent tone were a rarity. Maybe I will someday, but not today. Point is what's here is stupid. Max is a moron. Mona sucks. Everyone else is irrelevant.

The tour of locations you go on is less visually varied than the first game's while also playing worse. You like hallways? What if they were in a funhouse that only a tween gifted an M-rated game would find impressive? How about escorting an obnoxious stereotype in a mascot suit? Sometimes you're given a bigger space to get shot in, which only serves to make you wish the hallways would return faster.

And god, the gunplay. I know good and damn well there were better third person shooter options in 2003, I played them! No amount of slow-mo or John Woo dives makes this gunplay feel good, and the platforming can go straight to hell. Fucking Dead to Rights has a better system and that game shouldn't be a benchmark of anything beyond how to handle animal companions (functionally an airstrike).

I remember people being super pissed about MP3 being completely different. Maybe that one's actually good. I won't be in a hurry to find out.

To the people who have been coping for years over this game and convinced themselves its "better" than New Vegas. Please do yourself a favor and play through it again. It's been a decade plus and I promise you its not how you remember.

Everything about it is skin deep, Bethesda should thank Obsidian over fixing every bad design decision. They effectively overwrote how skin deep everything about this game is in memory. Every quest is some variation of go in a room, shoot 3 guys, hack a terminal or reload until you win a speech check (and that's where they all end there's fucking nothing more to them), DC is a collection of poorly dressed rooms that are a slog to navigate, every dungeon feels like mush.

The bible quote thrown at you 3 times has no bearing on the plot and was most likely them googling "bible verse about water". Genuine embarrassment for video games as a medium, fucking actual dogshit.

if you think this game “plays weird” and don’t get the hype i beg you to play 5 other NES platformers then come back, relax, and feel the lushness of the first true strand type game.

super mario bros is not the primordially simple jumping game it is often introduced as. platformers had ages to mature in the hypercompetitive arena of the arcade throughout the 70’s and early 80’s. aside from its understatedly elegant aesthetic, the ambition in SMB is in the elevation of movement from merely a mode of traversal to a gymnastic, expressive activity.

megaman, simon belmont, and ryu hayabusa are all transparently simple state machines— the amount of possible actions they can take is finite and countable. super mario bros did not invent momentum in platforming, nor was it the first to leverage the additional complications that a more involved system of movement entails. the friction between the player avatar and the ground. the acceleration from a dead stop to a full run. the short moment after taking your finger off the jump button before the character truly starts to fall. all the little intricacies and details compound to make mario a much more expressive vessel for a player to inhabit. what sets SMB apart is that the movement is honed to the extent it becomes even more natural than the comparatively simple systems of the above games.

mario’s body doesn’t literally move like the human form does, but negotiating the balance of a jump in mid-air, trying to establish steady footing on unhelpful terrain, and wheelin and dealing with newton’s first law in general is central to the human experience. in super mario bros, nintendo squarely refocuses the platformer from a cabaret of obstacles to a celebration of acrobatic motivity

and so, it became the bedrock upon which their castle was built

this game sucks compared to kart, bunch of overly complex changes made to the game making it extremely overwhelming, the tutorial it makes you go through doesn't helps with that feeling neither, and this is coming from someone that has been playing Kart v1 since version 1.2

also, to the dev that thought changing arle's voice to the puyo pop english voicelines was a good idea: go fuck yourself

oh, did i forget to mention that most basic stuff that wasn't locked in kart is now locked behind dumb challenges? THE ABILITY TO LOAD MODS AND PLAY ONLINE IS LOCKED BEHIND CHALLENGES, WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT??? anyways here's a save that has most of the stuff unlocked, grab it while it lasts
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/857867797874212865/1232898299904786462/ringdata.dat?ex=662b2184&is=6629d004&hm=84eb18fc0dbedeae71ae4cc0fd91506e8a705f28243eaf92bafe818c2e8ed22b&

Addendum (4/26/24): A 2.1 patch dropped and gave the game another honest try, while there's still some pretty big problems with the overtuned difficulty of the emerald challenges, the kart handling, and very misplaced GP courses (really that first GP is a mess compared to the rest), there is a MARKED improvement as a whole with the way the game plays now.

This still needs some hefty lifting and work on its backend and I'm still not over the moon with it, but its a step in the right direction. I'm at least happy the devs seemed to have gotten over this attitude from older comments I've seen and actually taking the criticism to heart to make it better.

ORIGINAL REVIEW: Between the hour long tutorial with constant info dumping mechanics, a mess of visual components making seeing the tracks difficult, and the mechanics of racing itself being overly complex with both a ring currency system for spending to keep your top speed up...

This game's a complete mess. I really enjoyed Sonic Robo blast 2 Kart for the fact it was heavily skill based but still goofy enough that it was in line with how Mario Kart plays. This is just overkill in the audio/visual department without much of a second thought given to the actual core gameplay of the game. So much focus went into shoving so many mechanics like fast drops, ring spending, tricks off springs, etc. that it feels less like I'm racing and praying to god I do finger gymnastics to even stay on the road.

I hope they strip back some of this game or better balance it because in its current state, it's a frustrating mess that isn't very fun to play and its tutorial is a FUCKING HOUR LONG that I spent that I genuinely didn't enjoy.