Completed Original Mode with both Reco and Palm.

This version resolves some of the issues I had with the original (1.5 version) Futari, mainly the character balance, which is better here (also due to the fact that there are only two of them) and the laughably easy stage 1 and 2, which have been decently buffed in this version. In fact, basically everything got buffed in this version, including the playable characters (since they are an amalgamation of their Normal and Abnormal counterparts from the OG Futari), and this leads to even crazier moments and more intensity. Patterns are more intense and enemy composition has been slightly altered to offer more variety. The scoring system also got better, since you need to change your shot type less (and an added sound cue to signal when you need to switch) and you are even more rewarded for playing aggressively. The only added problem is an increase in slowdown, which was already present enough in the regular version, and this makes certain stages feel a lot longer (even though it adds to the chaos mentioned earlier).
This will probably become the main version of the game for me.

As usual with my writing, this review is going to be focused on Final Fantasy VII Remake’s gameplay, an aspect of which I regard highly but might be easy to overlook for most people who play the game, mainly due to the game’s own fault. I did enjoy the game’s other aspects enough that it motivated me to play the original game to completion and I will leave it at that.

I played this game on a whim during the PC release, so I never got to experience the original PS4 release from which Intergrade apparently made many adjustments (changing animation canceling, adding unblockable telegraphs, changing how some materia work, adding quick retries).

When I first played it, I didn’t expect to like the combat much, I was just here to look at pretty characters and listen to good music cuz I was bored by everything else at the time, but was very pleasantly surprised by the combat system in play, so much so, that after reflecting back on it and replaying it multiple times since, I can easily say that this is best new combat system created within the last decade. A focus on resource management, controlling multiple characters at the same time and coordinating their actions, giving each of them compelling action mechanics that can feed into a game plan involving your full party, and nuanced defense compared to most action games make this one stand out from most of its peers. To try to describe why I like this combat system so much, I’d actually first want to talk about my biggest issue with it:

Enemy Health is too low.

Final Fantasy VII Remake’s battle system was designed by Teruki Endo, a Capcom game designer who has worked on the Monster Hunter series since Monster Hunter Tri. Given that Monster Hunter contains my favorite combat in video games bar none, it’s not a surprise I ended up liking this game so much. There are some shared elements in the design enough to make me suspect something after fighting the Type-0 Behemoth. For one, both of these games go out of their way to de-emphasize i-frames as a defensive mechanic, with Monster Hunter having very few to make you to consider many variables when trying to i-frame attacks, and FF7R choosing to have literally none, thus forcing you to heavily consider which attacks are dodgable and which you are better off blocking, and making your choice of direction and situation really matter when it comes to how you use the roll. The current trend of action games thrives on timing-based mechanics and challenges, this game and Monster Hunter are the only modern action games to my knowledge that deliberately make it so that good timing can’t nullify most attacks in the game, and that’s a breath of fresh air unlike any other for me.

To get back to my criticism of the game’s balancing, another similarity is that both of these games are designed with tanky enemies in mind. Much of the depth is placed in the realm of damage optimization. When the enemies are big damage sponges, players are forced to actually interact with the mechanics that allow them to maximize the damage they get from their openings. It’s an easy way to add a lot of depth to fights and make them really replayable as you learn how to take advantage of the patterns better to set up the perfect punishes. Whereas Monster Hunter creates the depth in its damage-dealing through complex weapon movesets that require precision and monster behavior knowledge to take advantage of, FF7R does it through a bevy of system mechanics that govern enemy states; a Stagger system that borrows heavily from FF13 but adjusting its dynamic to be more suited for a real time action game. However, when the enemies die too fast, most of that depth does not come into play.

So let’s get to the nitty gritty: How does this combat system work and how does high health make the game better?

The core mechanic of the game is ATB, a real time translation of the ATB system from the original where you waited for a bar to fill up before being able to perform any actions (spells, items, so on). In Remake, instead you fill up the ATB bar by controlling a character and hitting enemies or blocking attacks. Your choice of character to control is also the choice of who you are giving ATB to, as the other characters only gain ATB slowly when not being controlled. Carried over from the original, defensive and offensive actions both compete for ATB, but with Remake being more of an action game, damage is generally avoidable (but not always) and thus allowing yourself to lose a lot of HP means losing attack opportunities in the future with spending ATB to heal, as well as Mana which is a limited resource on Hard Mode.

I find it important to note the value added by attacks not always being avoidable in this system. Most action games stick to completely avoidable damage because heals/HP often represent a number of mistakes you can make before a Game Over, and healing commitments ala Souls usually just means needing to miss on an attack opportunity before commencing with the regular game, which is good for tension. But in FF7R’s case, the fact that healing takes from a dynamic resource which you actively create with your in-game actions gives it enough depth that it justifies having enemies be able to pepper you with chip damage or giving some bosses unavoidable attacks that make you consider protective spells and pressure you to keep your characters always topped up in health.It makes the resource management all that much more demanding when damaging enemies properly isn't the only thing you are thinking about, and the game goes the extra step of giving you a variety of different healing abilities with varying benefits and costs, allowing you to adjust the way you need to play around Health as a resource. An example would be the difference in using Cure, the regular heal that consumes ATB only heals one character at a time, or Pray, which requires two ATB but uses no mana and acts as a wide heal, letting you save mana for other actions but requiring a bigger commitment to use and smaller healing numbers offset by being an AOE heal.

To get into offensive uses of ATB, it’s mainly used to interact with the Stagger system and it’s what makes using all the characters effectively so important. The basic rules of this system is that all enemies have a Stagger bar under their regular health bar, which starts empty and when filled up puts enemies into a Stagger state (BURST in the Japanese version of the game) where the damage dealt is multiplied for a short period of time. The way in which the player increases the Stagger bar is something that can change completely depending on the enemy, but generally to really Stagger efficiently you need to put the enemy in Pressure state (HEAT in Japanese) where the enemy takes multiplied stagger damage. For most enemies hitting them enough or using elemental weaknesses can put them in Pressure state, and then using certain abilities that deal high stagger damage puts them in Stagger very quickly, and from then you use your pure high damage abilities to take advantage of the multiplier…
But an issue arises! Using your ATB bar to induce the Stagger state as quickly as possible often means you don’t have any ATB left to actually do much damage during your short burst window as your regular attacks don’t actually do much damage, making it feel wasteful and causing you to go back to square one trying to fill the stagger bar again. Careful management of all characters is how you play around this.
An example situation early in the game would be to have Cloud induce the Pressure state with his flurry of attacks, but not before you are sure Barret has a bar of ATB ready to hit them with Focused Shot once Pressure is induced, while Cloud saves his bar to deal big damage in the burst window. Another option would be delaying when you induce the stagger, use character specific mechanics or materia setups that give you additional ATB when you need them, and many other possibilities. But the point is that you can easily overspend ATB to achieve Stagger, and the ways you can prevent this and balance this create very compelling moment-to-moment decision making and planning.

All the characters have extra mechanics that add layers to this Stagger system and ATB management. Barret has a big attack on a cooldown which gives an ATB on use, a free bar on short notice whenever needed while the cooldown is up, but it also makes you constantly need to keep Barret’s cooldown in your head while you switch to the other characters who are more efficient at dealing damage on their own so you can be ready to switch back to him when the time is needed. Tifa has a system where she can buff herself and expend those buffs to perform attacks that increase the Stagger damage multiplier, making you need to spend ATB stock her up with buffs before the Stagger is induced and having her do her attacks early in the Burst window in order to give other characters the chance take advantage of the increased damage.

But here’s the thing…optimizing ATB usage, becoming proficient at staggering enemies, and needing to consistently learn how to avoid attacks before their damage burns through your MP reserves isn’t something that will matter if the enemy dies too fast. For FF7R’s normal mode, that is the case most of the time, and even in its Hard Mode I’d say enemy health is still too low.

I think what I find amusing about this flaw is how it really is just enemy health that is the issue. The damage they deal is fine, the underlying mechanical design of nearly all the enemies and bosses is excellent, and the systems of the game scale very well. Installing a mod on the PC version that simply doubles the enemy health, making no other changes, actually makes the game a lot better in my opinion while still feeling very balanced and well paced combat wise. It shows how strong the core design of this game is that you can simply beef up stats like that and the skill ceiling is more than high enough for it to work, giving you the room to push yourself and letting you actually get exposed to the design of the enemies when you need to contend with them for much longer.

I get that this combat system can be pretty difficult to play properly and apparently people complained about bosses taking too long even in the vanilla game normal mode but It’s a massive shame that the game locks hard mode behind a full playthrough and it doesn’t give you many variables to adjust your own difficulty, since level ups are forced and your damage/health is always scaling with it. This wouldn’t be a problem if more difficulty options were present, but if the game really didn’t want extra difficulties, items that limit XP growth could have been cool too. Regardless of this, I still loved the game’s gameplay, and the existence of many challenge mods on PC allows the game to realize its full potential and I really recommend trying 2x HP even on your first playthrough.

Now I wanna get to the enemy design. While the regular encounters and enemies can be very fun too, the game shines brightest during boss fights, of which there are many. The game demonstrates very strongly how the mechanics of staggering change heavily per encounter with its first boss, the Scorpion Sentinel, who changes to a different method of stagger in each of its 4 phases. Initially it works like a regular enemy who just needs to be hit with regular attacks and thunder magic until it goes into Pressure state, before using the ATB you stored to use staggering attacks in the pressure window. Then in the second phase you need to hit a weakpoint on its behind to break a shield that makes attacks bounce off otherwise, successfully breaking the shield puts the boss in a very long Pressure state until the shield regens, allowing you to get multiple Staggers if you use the window correctly. The third phase has him only entering Pressure after performing a highly telegraphed laser attack, making you stock up bar in preparation for the attack and take advantage of Barret’s ability to use two ATB for single powerful attack that fills up their Stagger bar, compared to Cloud who cannot fit in two ATB attacks during the Pressure window to stagger the boss. In the fourth phase the boss begins healing itself and requires you to break its legs in order to induce Stagger and stop its self-heal. It’s a crazy demonstration of mechanical variety and maybe one that happens far too early as most players don’t really get the system yet and sadly the balancing means you can beat it with all this stuff going over your head.

This stuff only gets expanded on with more unique and demanding gimmicks. Two notable ones I wanna mention in this review are Hell House and The Valkyrie.

Hell House requires the player to hit the house with elemental magic based on which attack its using, as each attack it performs will change its attunement to a different element. The interesting thing about this is that often the character being attacked does not have the time to cast said magic after dodging the elemental attacks, so it’s up to the other character to cast the spell while the aggro’d one dodges, meaning your opening is not after the attack but during it. The player actually very directly controls the aggro of enemies in this game since they will always target the character you are controlling upon the start of their attack, and due to the different defensive options available to each character, you have to be very careful about when you control a character as Aerith or Barret have much more limited defense to trade off for their ranged attacks and utility, but you still need to find the right time to control them and generate ATB with them but switching back to a more mobile character in time for the next attack.

The Valkyrie is a very interesting boss in Hard Mode, its a flying robot (with an amazing boss track from guest Ace Combat composer) whose final phase adds an orbital laser that tracks the currently controlled character and detonates upon catching up to them, which is something you’re supposed to use to your advantage as the Valkyrie also shields itself during this phase preventing it from taking much damage or stagger but one can break the shield by hitting it with its own laser. On normal mode its a fairly easy task of simply letting the laser catch up to you during the attacks that leave the Valkyrie floating still, made more interesting by the fact that all of the robot’s attacks control space by leaving sleeping gas clouds and fire spots around the arena limiting the way you can move while dodging its attacks and escaping the laser. However on Hard Mode, the behavior of the orbital laser changes completely, instead it now refuses to detonate even when it reaches your position until the Valkyrie hits the controlled character with another one of its attacks and locking said character in hit/block stun, and the laser will detonate inflicting heavy amounts of unavoidable extra damage. It creates a much more interesting dynamic where you either need to forget about trying to bait the laser entirely, needing to rely on much harder tactic of trying to punish it during certain attack animations that turn on Pressure state, or you can also be creative and try to give Barret a buffet of defensive materia and buffs and to allow him to tank the laser at full health and score a stagger that way, but setting up the situation for that is not easy either and requires heavy investment and sacrifices in other areas.

These are just some of the examples of the creative boss design in this game, but there is so many that test you in so many ways, creating new problems with a system that offers many creative and compelling solutions for you to execute. I would be here all day if I were to write about all of them.

Instead I will move on to touch on the Materia system and my few gripes with the game.

Materia serves as your way of having many different builds and possible playstyles for each character, changing your available toolkit and stats to a considerable degree. The most interesting materia are the ones that let you change the flow of ATB in combat, there are ones that allow a character to spread ATB to other characters by spending ATB themselves, or get a free bar by performing three different ATB commands in sequence. Paired materia and its rarity can also lead to interesting playstyle changes, like one that makes a specific character always do a spell of your choice automatically regardless of their available ATB gauge after the player-controlled character does an ATB command.

As far as magic spells go, I really appreciate how the different magics have different properties attached with variable base damage, making them useful for more than just hitting an elemental weakness. Ice is a delayed bomb attack meaning you can’t use it on a moving target without a plan but it deals the highest damage making it useful even on things that aren’t weak to it, Fire is shot as a projectile and thus the angle needs to be considered if you want to hit a certain part of a boss, while Lightning is hitscan and strikes from the sky, allowing it to hit any enemy part with perfect accuracy but it does the least damage as a tradeoff.

In the Intergrade version, the game handles the need to restart fights to change your materia setup to suit the battle pretty well, giving you a quick restart button for every individual fight. However, what sucks is that the game doesn’t have a Materia preset system which I think the game would really benefit from, having to re-arrange your team’s entire materia setup can be kind of a drag sometimes and it would be great if one could save presets and reuse them quickly.

I also don’t love how the game chooses to teach its enemy mechanics, which involves you casting Assess to get a brief description of the strategy you are supposed to use against them. Sometimes even this description is very vague and not helpful. I honestly think this game would benefit from Doom Eternal style tutorialization, which might be an unpopular opinion but I really think for a game as complex as this one having prompts that give you a general idea of what you’re supposed to do works out a lot better than hoping players bumble their way into understanding the mechanics. I also think many of the move descriptions are lacking and make it easy to miss out on the extra mechanics and nuances of each ability, which you can actually find on the Final Fantasy fandom.com wiki which populates its gameplay pages for the game with detailed info taken from the Japanese Ultimania (god bless whoever translated all that info and put it there). Like did you know that Barrett can press his ability button to cancel the recovery of every ATB command with a quick reload that cuts a couple seconds from his cooldown, or that the transition animation from Operator mode to Punisher mode contains a guardpoint that allows Cloud to his Punisher Mode counter attack without needing to be already in Punisher? There are a lot of hidden details to every character’s mechanics.

One final gripe I’m gonna mention is the aerial combat, though its a minor one as not many enemies fly in the first place. It feels pretty awkward and usually your goal is to use ranged attacks and put them in the ground anyways but I wanna bring it up because the sequel to this game, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has already been showcased and is overhauling that aspect greatly, making it so characters cannot go into the air automatically by attacking flying enemies and instead you must use specific new synergy attacks or ATB moves that put your character in the air and allow them to go for air combos and dodges while also giving them the ability to cast many abilities in mid-air. One of the bosses they’ve shown explicitly takes advantage of this and is a flying boss from the original that before acted as a way to make you use long range materia, now acts as a way to force you to use all the new aerial combat mechanics to hit it. It’s already making me giddy with excitement for all the potential these mechanics bring.

I really love this game, so much that I find it difficult to write about and describe properly with how many ways it layers its mechanics to create the kind of fun I enjoy. I think it’s already very polished and deep as is, but I am excited to see how they will be refined and expanded upon in the upcoming entries. And if you didn’t feel this way about the combat when you first played this game then I hope reading this has given you some insight into the sheer amount of quality design and inventiveness that I find hiding in its combat system….now if only they would give us better difficulty options in the next game.

the swinging package here is sewn up by three mechanics: the boost, the web zip, and the charge jump. in a modern design, the boost would inevitably be restrained by some kind of resource like a meter or a cooldown thanks to the idle nodding of designers seeing a chance to add an explicit limitation to the system. spider-man 2 doesn't need that; the boost's only mechanical restriction is that it can be used once per swing with no other catch. simply obtaining the speed that it comes with using it adds enough danger to traversal to avoid any need for an artificial check on its power. the web zip (once obtained) defrays this by opening up an escape hatch when you need to bail out. its ability to quickly change your angle and briefly cap your speed reins in runaway or unexpected swings. the charge jump overlays all of this with the ability to influence height out of the swing and weave in ground movement without losing momentum. it gives the player a variable amount of impulse based on how long it's been buffered, and it sits completely independent of the other moves, making it chargeable in the background while simultaneously swinging. these three beg not only multilayered decision-making, with fingers working independently to control different systems, but also robust split-second decision-making that keeps the player constantly juggling the three as the micropositioning constantly evolves.

that's primarily because the micropositioning (partially) controls where spidey's webs go, and it's nuanced to such an extent that you'll often have no idea what exactly it'll attach to or how you'll swing around its fulcrum. watch this quick speedrun of the pizza missions and you'll see even a world record holder overshoot objectives, muddle with awkward climbing angles, and get stuck inside a fire escape. this chaos persists even at lower speeds, so there's no point to holding yourself back; boost as often as you can and be prepared for disaster. the game's challenges accept this fact and run with it by featuring generously sized rings to run through without many "tricks" involved. in fact, most of the challenges would feel like filler if not for the volatility of the swinging system giving much-needed variety to what otherwise are checkpoints slapped inside city blocks. you're never expected to plan intricate routes through these because accepting inconsistency and learning to work around it is the core of the game's unique movement system. even simple additions to a challenge such as mandating wallrunning, loop-de-loops, or landing on the ground inside particular checkpoints wrinkle the necessary traversal in such a way that you'll remember one-off challenges days after you originally played them. these nuances are the crux of the game's appeal.

whether this sounds appealing to you in the long run depends on how much intrinsic enjoyment you can get out of this system without much structure surrounding it. its these challenges and the pizza missions providing most of your sustenance, and luckily they're available from mere minutes into the game. however, to further upgrade your base speed, expect to pay the piper by sleepwalking through ~4-5 hours of story-driven setpieces. it shockingly does little to play with your swinging chops and instead alternates extremely lax "get to the objective" segments with dull beat-em-up combat that rarely escalates beyond spamming the air combo and the contextual dodge. it luckily rarely veers into true frustration, but the fact that you have to engage with it all was a rather sore point to me. having to eat my veggies to enjoy my traversal dessert doesn't hit quite as hard when the dessert itself is a bit of an acquired taste, riddled with its own frustrations and inconsistencies. holistically the experience feels often more like something I enjoy dissecting in theory and less so in practice.

the similarities to gravity rush occurred to me while playing, as I outlined in my review of that game that it was also a bare-bones open world experience buoyed by its exciting traversal yet limited by rarely leaning into it outside of optional challenges. spider-man 2 is an even purer expression of that sentiment, with a washed-out, flat version of manhattan replacing the anachronistically rich hekseville and an even more wild and disorienting swinging system replacing the comparatively straight-forward gravity control. a game I see myself continuing to pop in to pick away at the remaining challenges, but not necessarily one that kept me enthralled.

Doom Eternal is the best action FPS game to this date. It’s challenging, but also provides a good amount of freedom to the player for them to creatively express their skill. To clarify, an action FPS is an FPS that focuses more on mechanical skill (aiming, movement) over strategy (resource management, positioning). Contrary to the old style, which uses finite resources, Doom Eternal resources are cycle based - you regather resources in a cycle similar to arena FPS games. Because of this you are forced to use your entire arsenal at once. You need to find the best usage of each weapon in the given situation for each cycle. This is contrary to the retro style of fps, where the resources are distributed for the whole level instead in a timeframe. Similarly the damage you are allowed to take is also based on cycles. While you can keep regaining health though Glory Kills, the armour is still locked behind this cycle based gameplay.

One of the core aspects of the game is the movement and how it is used for the gameplay. Usually in those types of games the main idea of the movement is to allow the player to dodge attacks and projectiles, and while this is true, there is an even more important aspect to the movement in Eternal - the map traversal. You need to keep relocating if you want to survive in Eternal. While you could skillfully deal with a handful of enemies through dodging and being efficient with your damage, you will inevitably be overrun by a lot more than you can handle if you stay in the same place. Combine that with the enhanced movement of the enemies compared to previous titles and the intricate arenas created to emphasize your ability to traverse them, and you get a very interesting mix of platforming and FPS combat. This serves to intensify the combat even more, by making each second you stand still dangerous and also forces you to shoot while on the move, making it harder to aim. One thing that the map movement does not work with is the cycle based resource gathering. To gather resources your best targets are fodder demons that spawn in specific locations. This makes the resource gathering process itself rather uninteresting, as you just cycle through one location on the map every time. While with interesting level design and ambushes that could work better, it is still very limited to what you can do with it. This was a place where the game could have taken more from the arena FPS genre and bring respawning resources in the arena itself. This would bring more strategic decisions, since now you don’t have just 1 spot to gather ALL kinds of resources, but rather you need to go to different spots on the map to collect different resources. This would make the movement more interesting outside just of enemy management by adding a resource management aspect to it. It could also be used in plethora more interesting ways compared to the current system in the level design itself.

What is easily the biggest strength of Eternal is the enemy roster. Almost every enemy does its job extremely well. Early on the fodder enemies you fight provide decent challenge until you gather your better equipment and abilities, and later on they still have use, not as a threat, but rather for resources. You could easily dispatch them if you need, and you will easily dispatch them while fighting stronger demons due to the use of explosive weapons, however a lot of the time this won’t really be a good thing for you - you want to keep them alive. The hell knight and the dread knight are another good insensitive to put you on the move, and especially the dread knight with its area denial ability. The Arachnotron and the Mancubi are great long range enemies that most of your time will be one of your first targets, or at least their weak points will be. The Pain Elemental similar to the original game brings time to the equation of the combat as the longer they are left alive, the more dangerous they become similar to the original games. Still contrary to them, they don’t have a lasting effect even after they have died like the original, however they are also way more dangerous upfront, so even without many lost souls spawned they are still a big threat. The Carcass is easily one of the best supporting FPS enemies. They are scripted to spawn the shields in very dangerous locations and hinder any plans you currently have. They try to prevent you from shooting at the target you are currently prioritizing, and spawning a shield in your face makes it risky to use the Rocket Launcher because of its splash damage. They can also use shields to prevent you from Glory Killing enemies. Carcasses force you to be even more adaptive to the situation, especially because they’re not that easy to kill; they are often placed in spots you can’t easily get to, and they are one of the few enemies with a tracking ranged hard knockback (albeit they use it mostly in defense), which on hit briefly stuns you, and in a game about constant movement this is even more dangerous. The mobile enemies, the Whiplash and the Prowler, can be really devastating. While they don’t have that much DPS and cannot easily kill the player by themselves, they specialize in hindering your movement, which allows the other demons to sneak attacks in. The Whiplash is especially dangerous - it is harder to kill than the Prowler and you are forced to actually dodge mindfully to not get hit by its hard knockback. Their speed and aggression is also essential to this, making them an immediate threat as you can’t keep running away from them and evading them constantly. The Prowler on the other hand is much easier to kill and does not have hard knockback on its attacks, however their ability to teleport behind you and bodyblock you serves as a hard counter against camping and backpedaling. This could potentially make them extremely dangerous. An issue with them is that they also look similar to the Imps, so you might try to Chainsaw a Prowler for ammo thinking it’s an Imp, only for the unskippable Chainsaw rev animation to play because Prowlers take three pips of fuel to Chainsaw instead of one. The weakest enemies from the heavy demons roster are the Cacos, Revenants and the Pinkies. The Pinkies are rendered almost useless compared to the previous game because of your expanded vertical movement, which let you spend way more time in the air and making their ground attacks pathetic. The Cacos, while dangerous if left alone, can be easily stunned into a Glory Kill state with only 1 Sticky Bomb (ammo for which you will almost never run out for) in their weakspot. The issue with the Revenants is that they are ineffective at pressuring the player on either time or space, leaving them devoid of a niche in the enemy roster and a reason to ever prioritize them. They just feel like a heavier fodder enemy.

Last but not least are the super heavy enemies. They are the biggest threats in each encounter. The Barons of Hell are essentially super duper Hell Knights. They are extremely tanky, so even though they are an extreme threat, they are still very low on your priority list because they take significant commitment to kill but aren’t good at directly damaging you. By the time they’re introduced, you are already used to moving around the arena a lot, and their aggression would never let you stay in the same place.. The Tyrant/Cyberdemon is another tanky enemy, but instead of focusing on chasing you down, it is a slow ranged powerhouse. If you are not careful, you could very easily die to its laser attack or the artillery shots. However, he has one glaring weakness - his attacks are also slow. This allows you to very easily dodge those attacks, but there is an even more important aspect to his attacks - monster infighting. Because of his slow attacks and inaccuracy, he is extremely hazardous not only to you, but to other demons as well. This could lead to much more interesting usage of the Tyrant, than dispatching him when you can. The Doom Hunter, who is originally a boss, is one of the best enemies in the game. He has 2 phases, one is more tanky with a shield, which could influence your weapon choice, and the other phase is mobile, but easy to kill. He could also deal significant damage covering both close and long range, and his general mobility keeps him a threat all the time. He doesn’t have a main goal as most other enemies and is instead an all around enemy. Because of that he would never take all your attention to fight him and also that he can play any role allows him to synchronize with all the rest of the enemies. The Archvile takes the place of the Summoner from the previous game, but is way tankier. It also presents a bigger threat since instead of just spawning fodder it can also spawn buffed Heavy demons in large numbers and even other Super Heavy Demons. This makes them the enemies with the highest priority. There are no more Super Heavy Demons.

The Doomslayer in this game is way stronger than his 2016 counterpart. On top of having a rechargeable chainsaw and a way to gain armour from enemies, the movement abilities of the Doomslayer have gone through the roof. Even though the movement speed of Doomslayer is slightly lower than before, being able to dash more than compensate for that. You would be flying through the map like a mad man, especially with well time dashes. Not only that but this brings a new form of dodging outside of circle strafing and baiting attacks to make dealing with enemies more interesting. The grapple hook on the SSG also makes the movement incredibly fast in the game. It allows for making a super jump, by using any enemy, which is essential for the vertical movement. Though some more skilled use (and the air control rune), it could also be used to gather a lot of momentum quickly. The game also offers a lot of bounce pads and money bars, giving you even more ways to traverse the arena. On top of that the current version of the Ballista boost (formerly the Gauss boost ) allows you to preserve momentum even after a double jump, allowing for way more lateral movement. This with the vertical height you can gain, would allow you to clear any arena in 1 Ballista boost.

Another important aspect is the arsenal of the Doomslayer himself. The starting shotgun quickly loses its usefulness after the start of the game. Later on it can still be used to kill fodder enemies quickly, but as we established that isn’t really a good choice most of the time. However it can still be used to get enemies into glory kill state instead of outright killing them. The only other usage is for the sticky grenades against the Cacos and against some other weak spots. Sadly it lacks the damage to be useful for anything else in either variation (the automatic variation is completely useless after the early game). The rifle on the other hand has become a stronger weapon both for its primary fire and also for its Sniper mode. Not only is the Sniper mode good for dealing with weak points, it also deals considerable damage, so it is a good choice in combination with reload canceling for long range DPS. The Plasma rifle is another good weapon for continuous DPS, however it is overshadowed by other weapons when they are used with the reload canceling ability. It is effective at dealing with fodder, but that isn’t really something you should be thinking about. The biggest use of it is actually the microwave variation, as it allows you to crowd control all the demons with carefully calculated damage on a single enemy (if you damage the enemy just enough for it to be close to death and to not enter the glory kill state you can almost instantly blow it up with the microwave). It can also be used to quickly stun any enemy with just a momentary beam, which could open up the defense of some enemies like the Mancubi, letting you get close to quickly kill them, without them using their AoE attack. The Rockets are an essential weapon of your arsenal. They are one of the main weapons you can use to maximize your DPS thought reload canceling. The lock-on mod is also great for dealing good amounts of damage and dealing with more dangerous mobile enemies quickly. The self-detonate on the other hand is important for its ability to stun demons. The SSG is the other heavy damage dealer of your arsenal, and it is extremely sensitive to range. In midrange it is already really weak, but at point blank is the most devastating weapon in your arsenal. The Ballista is the other DPS weapon you should use. What is good about it is that you can use it at ANY range, making both a good pick for reload canceling on long range, mid range and close range. It is also strong against flying enemies, and it has the mobility option we talked about in the previous paragraph. Last but not least is the chaingun - it can quickly shred enemies, and more importantly stun chasing enemies like the knights and the Baron. The effective usage of your arsenal is obviously thought switching between weapons to cancel the reload, and also it is about managing the stun on tankier enemies you try to combo to death. This could be done through a grenade (which you can shoot while shooting a weapon), the remote detonate, the microwave tap or explosion, a glory punch (boosted punch, which recharges from glory kills), or shooting a weak point. By chaining those stuns together you can be close to an enemy to maximize your DPS without getting damaged yourself. However one important thing about those ways to stun an enemy is that they involve AoE damage (except the weak points and the microwave tap). This would lead to killing off fodder enemies, which could be a damaging decision to you in the long run.

This paragraph will be about some miscellaneous things and issues with the game. First I would like to mention that the pacing on Doom Eternal is way faster than 2016 in terms of progression. You start the game with the double jump, and you very quickly gain access to your abilities and the meat of your arsenal. The collectables are fairly easy to get, and even if you don’t hunt them, you are still likely to have full upgrades towards the end of the game. Important to this is the fast travel feature, which allows you to backtrack more quickly though a level after you complete it, to hunt down all the collectables. However this can’t be used when revisiting missions. This could be problematic both if you wanted to gather the items later on, or if you just wanted to play again a specific encounter of a level. The platforming is another weak point of the game. While the movement in the game is very strong, the game is littered with invisible walls. There are so many places you could reach through an alternative path using your movement, but often that place is specifical locked with an invisible wall, and you are forced to get through it, by the clear path set by the developer. This makes the puzzles and the platforming more Zelda-style in the sense you do not have the freedom to apply your own solution through interesting usage of the mechanics. Most of the bosses are also a big disappointment, some being just basic timing puzzles, and even the good ones lack diversity for their many phases. Another issue with the game is the HUD, important information such as the cooldowns on your Chainsaw, Flame Blech, dash and your Blood Punch are tucked away in the corners of your screen. While this is standard for many games, for a high speed game like Doom Eternal that just isn’t suitable. Having an option for a center bottom HUD, and more importantly small indicators for health/ammo, and the availability of your abilities around the crosshair, are essential for such a high speed game. The lack thereof means people are either going to underuse their abilities, or make a bad call thinking their abilities were available.

Now let’s address the elephant in the room - the Marauder. This enemy is mainly hated for 2 separate reasons. One is the lack of freedom you have for dealing with him, which feels like an antithesis of what Eternal is doing. You do have options to kill him in 1 or 2 cycles, or even use grenades and remote detonate, to not even have to deal with the parry, but compared to how you can play around other enemies it is just lackluster. On another side is the fact that you always deal with him in the same way, which becomes tedious for a while - you need full commitment for this enemy (contrary to the Doom Hunter), which leads to lack of any meaningful interaction between him and other enemies. And not only that but fighting him is not interesting enough by itself. What is even worse than the issue with killing him is that he does not really present a threat, until you decide to fight him. He does not excel at anything - his projectile attack has a tiny hitbox and is slow, so you are unlikely to get hit by it. He and his dog struggle with verticality and your movement, so he ain’t gonna catch up to you majority of the time. Most of the time you can safely ignore him, while you kill everything else and then just finish him at the end of the encounter. This is what really makes him the worst enemy of Doom Eternal, he does not contribute almost anything to the encounters, and it is just a tedious thing you need to kill eventually.

Last, but not least I need to talk about the tutorialization of the game. Many people have been left with the impression that Eternal does not give them a choice in how they want to play the game, but that is quite the contrary. However, while someone could just blame this on those players themselves, I believe the main issue is actually in the tutorialization of the game. While it is great in a sense that it gives the player a lot of information, the place it fails is the emphasis. Doom Eternal is an action FPS, which is a fairly new genre, and most people do not have any expectations of how these games are supposed to be approached. And this is where the game tutorial failed I believe, it lacked the vital information about how the game is supposed to be played and instead focused on trivia about Weak Points. Weak Points are important, but not that important, as the emphasis on them even leads some people to believe that they are the best way to kill enemies. The reality is that Weak Points are just about quickly reducing a threat - if you want to kill an enemy you shouldn’t even consider the Weak Points. On another side, elements like the refilling first pip of the chainsaw aren’t emphasized, as well as the cycle based nature of the resource management (and the HUD contributes to that as well), which then leaves many players with very low resources to work within the long run. Last, but not least the map traversal was also something that should have been pushed into the players, way too many people are used from other games to just circle-strafing in place, backpedalling and dealing with enemies one by one, including the previous Doom games. It is natural that they would try to do what they are used to, so it is another very important point that should have been emphasized.


Special Thanks to Durandal and S.G.S for helping me with this review, as well as the discussions we had around the game, and sharing of ideas.

iD Software should probably go down as one of the best set of devs in history, because they have made a work so excellently crafted in its design and innovative in use of arena fps mechanics that it's easily the best game that has come out of this year so far as well as one of the best of all time. It manages to take every single lesson that needed to be learned from Doom 2016's failings and applied a perfect fix from a top-down level.

I've never played a singular fps that kept my adrenaline pumping at full blast for most of the way through, with encounter design so phenomenally set teeming with particular enemies that make true on its core gameplay loops. Doom Eternal juggles loops of resource management, enemy prioritization, and utilization of movement all intertwined to each individual enemy. From the Arachnotron, probably the best enemy of the lot that forces you to utilize its weak points while it dodges your fire and pressures you down, to the Cyber Mancubi, each enemy makes use of your weapon variety and asks for the best play you can muster especially on Nightmare difficulty (which I played on the whole way through). The waves are also set perfectly to where as you take heavy enemies down there's new challenges to surprise you, with especially the slayer gates and later levels showing the best of this wave design.

The weapon balance and depth is also excellent, with two alt fire mods you can swap with that each bring their own costs and benefits, as well as the resource grind constantly asking you to use your entire loadout. Good play isn't just tuned to dodging enemy fire and spacing yourself correctly, but also utilizing every single weapon to their fullest extent while keeping track of loot pinatas to keep yourself in the midst of carnage. You'll know when you're in the zone when you're hook jumping into the air and constantly keeping yourself up above them dashing and jumping as you pelt rocket damage down upon your foes. If you have a single thing not on cooldown you're not using everything that you have.

That's probably the most ridiculous component that iD managed to do, the huge complexity that the game slowly eases you in before letting you become a walking one man army of rip and tear. The pacing of unlocks is fine tuned to where you're always getting something new from level to level to play around with, with excellent tutorializing that makes sure you have the knowledge you need to play efficiently and work on mastering your kit.

Music and aesthetics are also fantastic, with every single level looking amazing compared to Doom 2016's mostly same-y color palette. This is probably Mick Gordon's best work too banging in the background, especially with its remixes of 2016's great hits and the final level keeping that blood pumping. Probably going to be listening to it long after I'm done replaying the game.

There are of course, some miscellaneous and weak components for a game so ambitious in its design and extremely accessible. The platforming serves as nice downtime to let your blood cool down, although some of it especially the swimming portions being kind of boring if not impeding on the nonstop joyride. Ideally I'd probably layer the mostly-and-intentionally-nonsensical codex-loaded story to be cutscenes between combat to give you downtime if you need it and allow them to be completely skippable, with some walking if out of dev time. Not that I don't appreciate some of the environments and sense of scale that you walk through, but one specific level i.e. Sentinel Prime seems almost like a weird pacebreaker that could've used way more over time development.

There's also some overtuning and balance issues in some places. The Marauder, while I can find him somewhat inoffensive, makes you play a different game. When you've killed all the rest of the heavies and he's the last one left, you play Sekiro and just time your shit to kill him. He's not an interesting enemy and I'd prefer better use of Archviles to force you into a "deal with this enemy while you fight the others" instead. Also some of the weak point exploits are too powerful, with Cacodemons especially taking one sticky or rocket to make them nothing. The bosses also ALL SUCK, and either need complete reworks or wayyyy more dev time to make them interesting and fun to fight. I give a pass to the Icon of Sin for being an amazing spectacle but even his fight is twice as long as it needed to be, serving as a bfg dump that's one phase too long.

Other combat issues: The BFG, Unmakyr, and Crucible are underdeveloped, although at least they're easily ignored. I can kinda get it with the BFG and Unmakyr, one's pretty much a get out of jail free card that requires no skill to use other than uhh don't hit a wall loser, and the other is a close range meltbox. I just wish the ammo was either one per level at MOST or in a different mode entirely (like a survival mode! they'd work like shmup bombs), because while they don't exactly make encounters entire jokes they do undercut the design by a significant margin. The crucible especially is probably the biggest disappointment. You have a whole level building up this sword that you craft over time, and all it does is IK for 3 pips, a get-this-heavy-off-me weapon with only one move. It could've been a way more fleshed out weapon with more utility and less breaking the game.

At the end of the day though I can't deny that this is not only the best fps game I've played but maybe even my all time favorite action game. These issues are something I can tolerate on my own, and the game gives free reign to fine tune a lot of the elements yourself. It's ridiculously accessible. I look forward to the dlc, and I think the rest of this year nay the decade has a lot to live up to after this. (10/10)

the monster damage effects are seriously very impressive, the game looks great and runs very well. the technical side of this game is utterly stunning

however, having to press the "flame belch" button before the glory kill button is not the great leap forward in maximalist game design that people seem to claim it is.

no matter how many sloppy mechanics or square-peg-in-square-hole commandments they add on top, almost every fight in this video game plays out in a very similar fashion. no main enemy is capable of exerting actual pressure upon the player, no not even the marauders -- the result is a one-note masturbatory power fantasy broken up by vaguely annoying jumping puzzles and a truckload of key-jingling upgrade mechanics

games about demons and shotguns are capable of a lot better than this

All the problems I had with 2016 got worse except now there's flow-breaking tutorials, weird weapon progression, 'stylish' cinematic flow breakers, shitty inertia-less dashes, intense gimping to justify a bloated upgrade system, railroaded combat arenas with environmental hazards, and 'platforming' gimmicks. Even the enemy designs are kinda worse compared to 2016. This gets a lot of praise for its combat philosophy of forcing players to use every tool available if they want to survive, and the different weapon upgrades offer some decent variety. The enemy weaknesses also give some strategic element to combat, a significant and logical progression from 2016's enemy design. All good improvements, sure, but its still bogged down by 2016's hallway-arena formula + glory kill system, in addition to the new roadblock of how absurd the upgrade system is in this game. I don't see it.

"Hmm? Ah, hello there. Come down to explore these beautiful old ruins? Don't mind me.
I've a fondness for exploring myself. Getting lost and finding your way again is a pleasure like no other. We're exquisitely lucky, you and I." ❤️

Throughout my journey in Hallownest it felt as though a timetraveler went back to write the game to specifically mock me at several points, to terrify and sadden me at others; something I can't say I expected to feel from Hollow Knight, but the game has multiple moments instilling every type of emotion in me within a world so full of death with life that persists in decay. There's a nearly overwhelming sense of melancholy to nearly everyone and how they conduct themselves, but they all handle it differently. Some seem blissfully unaware, but even the seemingly arrogant and naive Zote has a deeper motivation buried in his being beyond fame and glory.
I simply adore the writing and attention to detail, Elderbug at the beginning of the game for example has 3 different greetings depending on if: 1) you greet him immediately, 2) you walk past him and come back, or 3) you walk past him, enter the well, then come back. He's far from the only example of this, the game is utterly chock full of flavor text and worldbuilding in such an unobtrusive way that I'd wager the casual gamer who isn't an autist like me who tries to exhaust every dialogue exchange will end up missing 2/3 of it. I find that absolutely incredible, and as far as any game goes I've only seen this level of care put into every minute detail rivaled by Supergiant's Hades.

Mechanically speaking this is perhaps the simplest part to talk about, but let me get it out of the way: The start is SLOW. Like, REALLY slow. It's not the slowest I've ever played but it's almost zen-like in its pacing for the first few hours until you find the dash ability and not too long after the walljump. Everything else is anything but slow though, for what I can only describe as MegaMan X/NES platformer kind of movement where your momentum is (practically) fixed pace and jump height is dictated extremely granularly by how long you hold the jump button. The act of exploration, uncovering more of the map, finding new or recurring characters is always exciting; it's a little bewildering just how massive the map is yet it's navigable with a fairly sparse quick travel system.
One system I'd like to highlight in particular though because it seems to be a weird point of contention is the Shade. Upon death, you leave a "Shade", which contains all of the Geo (the game's currency) you had on your person similar to bloodstains in the Souls games; difference here is you must attack it to absorb it. Again, similarly, if you die before doing so that money is just gone. I've seen a number of people complain about this but despite losing nearly 2k(!!) at one point it never really bothered me, because secretly this game keeps handing out items you can sell for 200, 400, 800, even 1000 geo to a vendor you meet at the halfway point (when geo starts to become relevant at all). I personally do not understand the frustration with this system, it's far less important than in something like Dark Souls which I know y'all love and the game periodically hands out a way to bypass having to manually collect it anyways (once per use, but by the end of the game I had 15~ of these lol). It incentivizes me to think about how I'm picking my wallet back up once in a while which is more than I can say about mashing X (Sony) while sprinting over a funny puddle. Even Zote knows better.
The combat is snappy and tight, very clearly designed around the instantaneous or otherwise fixed-distance movements; in a similar vein of dismissiveness I see nobody mentioning how you can adjust your playstyle dramatically through the use of Charms, if you want to be a spell-spamming glass cannon there's nothing stopping you and it's perfectly viable. Bosses are almost all excellent, with the finale being one of my favorite in any video game. (spoilers) "GIT GUD!"

Artistically probably one of my all-time favorites, in every department. I will say though, I became progressively upset in the latter half with each new area I found--BECAUSE Y'ALL KEPT TELLING ME THEY LOOKED THE SAME?? THEY LITERALLY DON'T?! THEY'RE DIVERSE AND BEAUTIFUL IN BOTH TRADITIONAL AND HAUNTING WAYS??? Seriously what the fuck!!! Game has a callout for this seemingly LOL
Real talk though it's incredble how cohesive the art direction is while still maintaining clear identities of each region. I have no problem distinguishing, without opening the full map, (minor spoilers start) that I'm at for example Greenpath, Fungal Waste, or Fog Canyon (minor spoilers end) despite these looking vaguely similar and all in approximately the same area. I also have no problem distinguishing the "edges" (no way to be more specific without giving away one of the coolest parts of the entire game imo). On a far more personal level I adore the character designs for the sole reason that they are simple yet extremely identifiable, which makes them encouraging to want to draw myself!

I want to put in so many different quotes from the residents of Hallownest, but if I put in the ones I "liked" I could fill out three more of these reviews. I opened with the one I did because I think it most accurately reflects my main joy in the game, or tied at least; I also just think that the game brilliantly shows all the different outlooks on the same circumstances people can have. My depression is not the same as yours, we have different struggles even if we potentially have the same trauma. It's as confounding as it is beautiful, right? Maybe... I don't know how to eloquently close that. The music and art and writing all come together to aid in that perfectly. I could have ended my playthrough 15~ hours earlier than I did, but I chose to delve deeper into the game and that only made it better as I learned more about each characters, their plights, their relationships and bringing the gay couple together.

In a world a world where every AAA studio is racing to see who can fit the most absurd amount of filler sidequests per dollar, even going so far as to start pondering the use of rancid A.I. tools to inflate this even more, (archive link), it's hard to see Hollow Knight as anything less than incredible.

One more.

“In every heart, there is nobility. Proof of this lies before us, dormant within you, when you’re blinded… but only by its grace may you ascend to that plain where truth and essence lie.”

...One more.

“Are we not all just wandering souls in search of purpose? To find meaning in this vast existence… It is the greatest quest of all.”

...Just one more.

“To protect the weak, that is this kingdom’s last and only wish. Where life might have ended, hope has remained.”

...

“Maybe dreams aren’t such a bad thing after all.”

In one word: Remain.

Favorite track from the OST

I'm constantly fascinated by the transition from 2D to 3D. How designers approached this with, literally, an entirely new dimension to consider. The sacrifices they made in doing that. The contrast between A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time is held up as one of the clearest examples of a team iterating on ideas they introduced in 2D and attempting to flesh them out in 3D, but Metal Gear Solid had its own 2D predecessor that was possibly even more influential to its design. It's just not a game that nearly so many people have played. A lot of Metal Gear Solid and Hideo Kojima's specific eccentricities are a direct result of where they came from. I think if you really want to understand the series, it's quite helpful to have played the originals.

I don't want to make Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake sound like an early prototype, or a demo recording of what would go on to become a classic song. It's an elaborate technical achievement in its own right. While other teams were struggling to draw multiple moving sprites on the fairly rudimentary MSX2 hardware, Kojima's team were creating a dense military base with distinct locations and patrolling enemies actively swarming off-screen. This was still 1990, and if Konami wanted a complicated action game, they'd ask their arcade or Famicom teams. The MSX was more associated with visual novel-style adventure games and conversions of early 80s arcade hits. They were underdogs, attempting the impossible. Metal Gear 2 on the MSX2 is like if they'd made Super Metroid on the Commodore 64 (and back with the schedules and budget constraints of the time, not some endless homebrew project).

I think I ought to talk about Metal Gear 1 a little. That was the result of a lot of compromises and inexperience. Hideo Kojima went into the games industry, excited to find a job that would allow him to express his own ideas and thoughts about the world around him. He was hired by Konami and dumped into the undesirable role of "planner". After some success working on Penguin Adventure, Kojima was tasked with designing a war game for the MSX. Kojima hated war, and it was a challenge to do intense action on the hardware. He decided to subvert the task he'd been given. Inspired by The Great Escape, he came up with a game where you try to avoid conflict and prevent the war from starting. Metal Gear was rushed and crude, coming from an inexperienced team. It controlled like an old Falcom RPG, and the stealth mechanics didn't go much further than having enemies who would fight you if you stood in front of them. There were some really great ideas in it, though. The cardboard boxes and remote-control missiles immediately became hallmarks of the series, though the sequels would make much better use of them.

Kojima went on to create Snatcher, which better allowed him to indulge in his passions of worldbuilding, science fiction, and tales of corporate deceit (a theme that has bitterly mirrored his own career). It also brought him closer to the home computer adventure games he was playing himself, like Yuji Horii's Portopia Serial Murder Case. He was able to explore human drama and complex, multi-layered conspiracy. He put more of himself into it, and each game he directed from that point on would carry a much stronger sense of its creator's voice. It was public demand that pushed him to revisit the Metal Gear concept, and it greatly benefitted from his newfound confidence and insight.

Much of Metal Gear 2's tone and logic is straight out of those 80s adventure games, only with a unique political bent. The age of nuclear deterrence has ended, but Zanzibar Land, a rogue state in Central Asia has been attacking international disposal facilities and amassing the unused warheads. Global oil shortages have caused an energy crisis, and the Czech biologist, Dr Kio Marv has developed a microbe capable of synthesizing petroleum to solve the problem. Dr Marv is kidnapped by Zanzibar Land soldiers, hoping to become the dominant nation in this era of peace. FOX-HOUND sends their top agent, Solid Snake, to recover the scientist and prevent the terrorists from launching a strike.

Metal Gear 2 is equal parts pet-project sincere and blurping moonman whimsy. It can often feel like someone bulked up their Warhammer army with GI Joes. You trick a guard into thinking it's nighttime by hatching an owl from an egg and making it hoot. In a sombre moment, Snake comforts a woman in her dying moments with ludicrous ice skating puns. Snake taunts a horde of poisonous hamsters with cheese rations, and shoots them all dead so he can recover an MSX cartridge from a mousehole. This is the game for those who thought Metal Gear Solid's scented handkerchief and diarrhoea guard didn't go quite far enough.

I think a lot of the reason that this is one of the least played entries in the series is how close it plays to the sequels, while falling short of a lot of the stuff their fans take for granted. Despite all the 90 degree angles and how closely you perch yourself behind each corner, there's no wall-hugging here. You can call for advice on your radio, but your contacts' messages are very rarely relevant to your situation, and most of them barely ever answer your calls. So many of MGS1's big setpieces are ripped straight from this game, from fighting a former comrade in a Cyborg Ninja suit, to the HIND-D battle, to the stairway chase and elevator siege. It's all far more rudimentary in this, though, and not as justified by the surrounding scenario. I can see why many people would skip this and just go to the time they got these ideas right, but there's far more to the game than what MGS copied, and there's an appeal to seeing it all attempted on such early hardware.

As much as I love MGS1, a lot of the ideas that it iterated on fit better within MG2's structure. MGS is focused on keeping right on top of the narrative drive, and it tries its best to avoid backtracking, despite how much the surrounding design seems to suggest it. In MG2, you do have to keep track of armouries and ration locations. You'll probably have to come back to them to stock up before a boss. In MGS, the spawns are generous enough, and the combat is flexible enough that you can likely brute force your way through any encounter with enough ingenuity. MG2's approach is more tedious, but more consistent. The knowledge of the work associated with reacquiring health and ammo plays into the tension of avoiding detection. MG2 is a more bitter game, but an acquired taste appreciates that about it.

You know what? I kind of like backtracking. Maybe it's something I appreciate more in old games, when the new ones are busy forcing you through a bunch of single-purpose environments that their designers and artists broke their backs to give us, but I do enjoy feeling like I'm "in a place". Becoming familiar with the layout and the safe routes. It's part of what I like about the old Resident Evil games. Metal Gear 2 is an embarrassment of riches for backtracking fans. MGS1's structure is largely modelled on MG2, with its three main buildings, connecting bridge that gets blown up, and delivery vans to fasttravel between each of them. You don't really have much use for that ability in MGS, though. You never have any reason to go back from Sniper Wolf's snowfield outside the final building. I suspect the game's original plan was a little closer to Metal Gear 2, in that respect. Here, the first building is littered with locked doors you won't have access to until the very end of the game. There's no way to tell what level of key card you'll need to open them, but trial and error will get you there, eventually. The PAL Card heating/cooling bit is straight out of MG2, except it's far more brutal here. You have to traverse the entire map for it. It's divisive, and this may be Stockholm syndrome talking, but there's something I enjoy about it. I like reflecting on how far I've come, and finally accessing those mysterious rooms I've been held out of for so long.

Story and characters are much less of a draw in the first two games. There's moments, but few and far between. You get Gray Fox and Big Boss, but their motivations and backgrounds are far less well-developed than the following games would have you believe. Anyone who thought Snake and Meryl's relationship was rushed, adolescent, and perhaps even a little sexist, are not prepared for Holly White's dialogue. Look - It's the height of life-or-death instinct. These people don't know if they'll see tomorrow. They're incredibly horny. Cut them some slack.

There's iconography in the game that's still unique to it. Metal Gear D's design came from kitbashing Kotobukiya military vehicle sets and drawing the resulting experiment as an in-game sprite afterwards. The game's cover art was drawn by model kit illustrator, Yoshiyuki Takani, and that 80s helicopter otaku vibe is all over the game. It's an entirely different vision of near-future war than the one KCEJ would explore little over a decade later. There's a style to the HUD and in-game tech that reminds me of the fanciful, far-out depictions of military tech in 80s films I grew up with on home-recorded VHS, like Commando and Short Circuit. Even just seeing Solid Snake in green combat fatigues is a little interesting, given the high-tech Sneaking Suits and Octocamo he's become associated with since then. As much of a Yoji Shinkawa stan as I've become, I still feel a little ennui from seeing his sprites in newer releases of the game, replacing the blatant Sean Connery and Albert Einstein portraits from the original. There's less visual consistency, with the rust and exposed wiring of the 1990 game. Metal Gear 2 is a very different idea of what this kind of top secret mission should look like, and it resonates with me more than the slick, semi-organic nanotech of the more futuristic titles.

The atmosphere in Metal Gear 2 is so rich, and that's largely owed to the soundtrack. The music is consistently brilliant, and researching this iteration of the Konami Kukeiha Club helps paint a picture of how much talent was in the team. Composers who went on to score games as diverse as Demon's Souls, Kirby's Epic Yarn, GuitarFreaks and Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius, though it's likely Snatcher and Policenauts composer, Masahiro Ikariko, whose style is easiest to pick out. Kojima got a lot of shit on MGSV for abandoning David Hayter in favour of Hollywood talent, but I'd suggest the precedent was set when he sacrificed Konami's legendary in-house composers to butter up Harry Gregson-Williams on MGS2. That Escape from New York influence didn't stop at Snake Plisskin. The soundtrack is dripping with John Carpenter pulsing, electronic dread. I don't know if there are many people who Metal Gear 2 is an easy recommend for, but if you love MGS1 and Snatcher, I'd really encourage you to give the game an earnest effort.

The aesthetic isn't mere window dressing. It affects your attitude. Your acceptance of the task at hand. Slotting your rigid body in the enemies' blindspots, and entering undecorated boxy room after room of ammo pick-ups. It feels right, and it's the tone and atmosphere that convince you of that. You really want to play Metal Gear 2? Try it on an MSX with inch-high keys that give you carpal tunnel before the first boss.

I accept all of Metal Gear 2's flaws and readily present them at face value. I get a little anxious if I hear someone else is going to try playing the game. I doubt that anybody could see this awkward, ramshackle collection of ideas the same way I do. I can't deny my affection for it, though. It's the game that made me an MSX2 owner. To give it anything less than a perfect score would be disingenuous on my part. I first played it in the early 2000s, and I couldn't stop thinking about it as I started each new sequel, vibrating with glee if they ever did anything that so much as resembled something from this early entry. There's outposts and road markings in The Phantom Pain that mean the world to me. Back when in my early internet days, I used to frequent fansites from MSX-era Metal Gear fans, who would cover MGS as well. Somewhat reluctantly. Those guys were my heroes, and I still think of them as the authority on this stuff.

I can't shake my personal history with Metal Gear 2. I'm forever biased towards it. It's clear whenever I touch it that its effect on me hasn't diminished. It's still pretty much the definition of what I think of as a "real game". No polish, no concessions, just running around big square rooms and looking for stupid items. There's an elemental purity to it. Stick the cartridge in the slot and press the power button. This is The Game, and I fully expect you'll find it very boring.

Double caveat for this write-up, because this is still in Early Access and because I have the nagging sense that I’ve missed some critical aspect of the game that’ll tie everything together (got a “B” rank on both missions, for example.) Speaks to how hard this is to pin down- with the devs citing immersive sims like Deus Ex and E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy as inspirations, and a kit that includes wall running, an extensive melee system, akimbo guns, and a host of inventory items. Not sure if the Early Access section quite capitalizes on all these elements though, a trek through an impressively-realized space station (akin to a miniature Talos-1) that’s a little too claustrophobic to be a great sandbox. The cramped environments make incorporating your movement and getting bold with your more complex melee attacks hard to pull off, especially given how hyper-lethal the combat is.

Catch a stray round of projectiles, and it’s game over, the game heavily encouraging you to quick-save often and to use your slo-mo power to correct your positioning. Despite being tutorialized, it took me a long time to appreciate that it’s not something that’ll carry you through gun fights, and is far more similar to something like MGSV’s brief window of slo-mo upon being detected. This punishing approach had me shooting through a lot of this section- especially during the bosses, which seem to be some of the most interesting encounters in theory, with the potential to weave between and deflect their shots, and to get some real use out of your melee attacks, but I oscillated between instantly dying to them and breaking the fight entirely.

Felt especially bad in the last fight, which I was never able to legitimately beat, just stunlocking it with the shotgun on my first attempt and getting it to trap itself in a section of the arena on another playthrough. Don’t know if it's simply a matter of a skill issue on my part, the kind of steep challenge that players will love and rise to the challenge of, or if it speaks to a game that’ll need to be reinvented at some point down the line, altering some of aspect of the game to help everything gel together.

It wasn’t until trying the ‘22 demo, which has been rolled into the Early Access release, that I felt comfortable dipping into the range of systems, the verticality of its cyberpunk sprawl and wider range of enemy types, including a shield-wielding SWAT unit that’s vulnerable to kicks, bringing everything into focus. Level design in general also seems more open, with crenelated environments offering a wider range of paths to the objectives, and set against a backdrop of two rival factions in massive shootout against each other. So, if you are getting the Early Access release, I’d encourage you to try this section out as well- it even seems to be the next portion of the game chronologically, just yet to be re-worked to reflect the narrative changes.

Weird one, but nice to see a game of this ambition in active production, even if its ideas don’t fully coalesce yet. Would rather catch up to wherever this is headed, than drag it back down into the familiar.

This is the first proper arcade shmup that I played, just to to test things out. I completed Original, Maniac and Ultra Mode in Novice, and Original Mode 1.5 with Abnormal Palm, without caring for score outside of getting the two extends (so only did light scoring in the first two levels).

The main gimmick (if you can even call it that) of Mushihemisama Futari is bullet cancelling, which creates this rhythm of “oh shit I’m going to die” to having the screen cleared, without having to spend a bomb, multiple times per level (with stage 2, 3 and 4 especially). It rewards good routing and makes for some exhilarating moments. Aside from this, the structure of the levels leaves something to be desired. Stage 1 and 2 are absurdly easy, with bullet patterns that are slow and not that dense, and you can get away with bad routing as long as you are decent at dodging. Stage 3 picks up the pace, but you get a huge jump in difficulty starting from the second half (if you played it you know exactly the spot). Stage 4 is pretty good, but it relies too much on popcorn flanking you from the side. Seriously, that’s like 80% of the stage. S5 suffers from the same problem as S4 (plus being a tad too long), but it’s a lot more chaotic, which can be viewed as both a good and a bad thing depending on who you ask to.
Proper routing is important but a lot of the time you can just wing it and try some crazy dodge, adding to the chaotic nature of the game, coupled with the insane slowdown during the more crowded parts of a stage and a OST that accompanies the action well. The game is also decently generous with bombs, allowing you to skip a lot of harder parts. Some bullet patterns are varied and interesting to dodge, even if I was expecting something a bit more crazy, while lots of them are very straightforward, even from the bosses. For these reasons Mushi Futari isn’t that hard, but Original Mode still remains engaging and will likely take more than a few hours to get the 1CC.

You can choose between 4 ship types, but the balancing leaves a lot to be desired. The two best ones are Normal Reco and Abnormal Palm, with Normal Palm having a weak laser (that you also need to adjust by moving up or down) and Abnormal Reco having absurdly high movement speed while using the laser, but also requiring you to lock onto an enemy while lasering and the lock on range is very small, meaning that if you want to let go of laser to slow down you’ll also need to come back to the enemy at basically point blank range in order to do damage. This sort of dance can be engaging in its own right, but I prefer the straightforwardness of Abnormal Palm and his broken laser.
As for scoring goes, the one in Original Mode is pretty interesting, requiring you to use the appropriate shot based on how many gems you got, and killing enemies at close range.

Lastly I’ll talk about the M2 port of this game done for the X360, which has lots of features but falls short in a couple of key areas. Novice Mode might be useful for getting inexperienced players into the genre, but it’s way too easy. You get autobomb and double the amounts of bombs, while also nerfing the bullet patterns to an absurd degree. I managed to clear all 3 modes first try, without really learning anything about the game. It would have been nice to have an option to activate autobomb even in 1.5, but no such thing exists.
Practice Mode is also kinda barebones. It features stage select and boss select, but there are no savestates nor the possibility of starting the stage at any other point, so practicing certain sections becomes a pain.

As a beginner friendly arcade shmup you could do a lot worse. Even if the difficulty curve, level structure and ship types (and even bullet patterns to a degree) could be better, the game is a blast to play throughout thanks to bullet cancelling and the insanity that comes on screen. Coupled with the great visuals and a unique setting that isn’t just giant mechs, it’s hard not to like Mushi Futari, even if you’re just starting out with shmups.

Halo Combat Evolved is a solid enough fps with a couple limitations slapped on, but ultimately it's not one that aged too well. Despite this, it actually still ends up being the best campaign on offer in the series, mostly due to how the enemy AI and projectile design works on Legendary, with most arenas being excellent playing grounds for weaving between bullets. From elites who dodge shots and flank, to flood that overwhelms you, this plus your limited toolbox makes movement and positioning really key and emphasized. It's also attached to a schlocky somewhat fun if a bit tonedeaf story.

Unfortunately, even though it reaches grand as hell peaks, it doesn't help that a lot of it is simultaneously flawed. About 1/3 of the levels are uninteresting rehashes, and The Library especially is full on awful, with continuous open areas for enemies that use hitscan weapons. It pushes it to a cover shooter of the worst regard, and even though it never reaches a low as big as this, it's a stark contrast that demonstrates how weaker the latter half is (other than Keyes, that mission slaps).

The multiplayer is similarly busted, with actually garbage maps and stupid fundamentals. Specifically, the way spawns work turns multiple firefights into grenade camped hallways, absolute mayhem that will end up with team fights that are incredibly one sided. It's definitely the part I think should've been left behind when it came to PC.

As the first of a long line of the series, its age is definitely going to show in some spots. It ends up fairly well in scrutiny but it's definitely a flawed experience under the highlights overall. I still recommend playing it, it's a good shooter. But even with the best campaign of the series, the highs from games after in 2/5 multiplayer are better off exploring.

Firefights in shooters are usually defined by positioning more than anything. Where your Zombiemen and Imps are pretty much defines how the whole thing is gonna go down, and just pulling out the right weapon for the job is pretty much the big decision the player makes when engaging. Halo is different. Positioning matters, but it's not always due to the designers hand that the player and enemies end up in their positions - it's the aliens themselves choosing where they go. Reloading a save for the same encounter will still often see it going drastically differently each time, and this is due to a multitude of factors: Master Chief has a limited arsenal at all times, and the enemies you fight directly tie into this. You will actually need to consider which weapon you want to keep as you can't predict which enemies will be ahead of you, or what they'll be equipped with, or where they'll be. Master Chief also has a shield system that will work alongside your healthbar, with which you get a brief window of protection from oncoming strikes but not full-blown protection; giving you just enough time to perform any risky maneuvers you may need. Everything you do is slightly delayed; from jumps to grenade throws and explosions to reloads delaying your fire to punches landing, giving you a constant need to think about every action you take. The real icing on the cake here though is the intelligence of the Covenant enemies, and how they interact with everything else.

The Covenant has, by no stretch of the imagination, probably the best artificial intelligence ever seen in the genre. The designers have claimed they merely attempted to make them seem smart rather than be smart since they weren't sure how to do that, but I'd argue they hit two birds with one stone. The real trick is that they're reactive, and equal. Reactive in the sense of emotionally expressing reactions to almost every situation, but reactive also in the sense of seemingly playing alongside the player for each gunfight. They'll flank you, toss grenades whenever you get into a comfy position too long or just overwhelm you with numbers. For almost every strategy you have, the Covenant have something up their sleeves to counter it usually. Each Elite has a shield system of their own, so every single fight you get into with an Elite will likely lead in you both taking cover to regenerate since Halo knows to also give the foes some self-preservation instinct. Want to charge in and just damage the Elite? They'll probably do the same; get pissed off and charge at you just hoping to kill you before you put them down. Hell, you might try sniping an Elite only for him to hop in a Banshee and start circling you in the air, and the thing is; this is only the Elites, and while yes: they are the most intelligent Covenant enemies, the true magic is emergence. This is only describing one Elite, what about two? What about his squad of Grunts? Well if you leave the Elite alive they'll have the confidence to charge in and try attacking you on their own terms, but if you take out the Elite first you'll be opening yourself up to them and the Jackals fire. Your assault rifle will make short work of the Grunts, but can it counter the Jackals and Elites shields? That's something new to consider, so you'll want to keep multiple types of weapons on you at once for this situation. What if there's too many to take out? Well there might be a Warthog nearby which you could straight up crash into them with, or just have a Marine fire for you as you strafe around them. Every single encounter requires you to rethink and preplan how you'll handle things, and you'll always need to keep on top of ammo/charge per weapon too; so you can't rely on, well, old reliable, forever.

Just when you've gotten comfy, the game throws the Flood at you. As divisive as they are, and as arguable the Library's quality is, I'd wager they're a necessity. They're a great shake-up to the more strategic combat centered around the Covenant, requiring you to pretty much treat every encounter with them as a gauntlet as they eat up bullets and plasma but just don't go down, and will revive other enemies as more of themselves. But just as is the case with the Covenant, emergence is their true strength. Late-game Halo: Combat Evolved has you overseeing armies of Flood and Covenant fighting to the death and it's your job to just get by while the games systems play their own little RTS as you go off shotgunning more zombies.

The truth to Halo's design is it's multifacted, and it makes the most out of very little. Compared to your average shooter there's not much variety in the enemies or weapons but the core behaviors are so nuanced and dynamic that they change moment-to-moment, encounter-to-encounter. It gives you a sandbox of weapons and vehicles against decently tough enemies (though this will vary depending on the difficulty you pick, but I recommend Heroic as it seems to be the intended experience) and asks how you will deal with it. Halo gives you tons of ways to play, but the enemies can play at that game too and utilize basically anything you can. It leads to an immense creativity in encounters that comes from the most fun form of problem-solving that makes it, in my eyes, one of the crowning jewels of the genre. None of the sequels rivaled the quality of the combat, because it's already the pinnacle of evolution.

didn't really talk much about the combat in my last few classic RE reviews because so much of it boils down to pressing aim and shooting until the zombie goes down; the main appeal is the resource consumption, where every shot counts and evading enemies is often preferable. on its face re3's combat focus seems to violate this core appeal, as the increase in enemy counts across the board comes with a corresponding increase in heavy weaponry. shotgun shells weren't even sparse in re2, and in re3 you might as well just use your shotgun as your daily driver given how lush the ammo haul is. between this, chokepoints with explosive barrels, the contextual dodge, the wealth of gunpowders, and the grace pushdowns you get if you've previously been bitten in a room, it really feels like jill is nigh invincible in most regular encounters. with the more claustrophobic corridor design and increased enemy limit in rooms, there are certainly more times that the game pushes you into one of these options instead of going for straight evasion, but at the same time the core conceit is still the same: click aim, click shoot. a lot of mechanics to defray what is still relatively rudimentary gameplay.

however, the devs went out of their way to keep the routing intact. the addition of nemesis as a mr. X replacement so thoroughly trumps its predecessor that it feels a bit shocking they didn't get it this right the first time. mr. X was a effectively an ammo conversion spot; this lumbering beast you could pump full of cheaper ammo to get drops of the nicer stuff. nemesis completely flips this on its head by offering a real challenge between all of his different mutations, with attacks such as full-screen lunges, tentacle whips, and a rocket launcher. tackling him requires a much stronger focus on positioning and dodge acumen than mr. X (or even many other early RE bosses), and fittingly in return for choosing to fight you get parts for specialized weapons. granted, actually mastering the dodge in these fights plays up the issues with its seemingly random outcomes and directions, but at the same time tanking hits or controlling his speed with the freeze grenades gives much-needed leeway in what is probably the hardest boss up to this point in the series. unfortunately, killing him in optional encounters doesn't seem to influence rank at all, and I never got a sense that these optional kills help make his later obligatory fights easier, but his presence still gives the benefit of influencing your ammo route. killing nemesis isn't cheap, so if you're interested in his weapons, the regular fights that are so easily trivialized by the bounty of grenades you receive becomes moments for you to tighten your belt and conserve ammo.

small variations to the campaign are also more prevalent in this entry, from randomized enemy layouts and different item locations to subtle route-dependent event trigger alterations. the least interesting of these are timed binary choices that are occasionally given to you during cutscenes, which generally are nothing more than knowledge checks, especially when you can get a free nemesis kill out of it like in the restaurant or on the bell tower. occasionally these actually affect routing, as on the bridge prior to the dead factory, but more often than not the difference seemed either negligible or not a real tradeoff. the rest of these do affect routing in meaningful ways, from things as minor as changing a room from hunters to brain suckers to major changes such as the magnum and the grenade launcher getting swapped in the stars office. this plus the plentiful ammo fosters a nice "go with the flow" atmosphere where reloading a save and getting thrown into different circumstances is often a worse choice than just limping along through mistakes. on the flip-side, the actual effects of this feels like it would be most relevant between many separate runs, so I really haven't played around with really planning a route for this one as much as I would have liked. it already took me a year to play through this short game lol, hopefully next year once I'm done teaching I'll come back to this one.

with that in mind, the real thing that elevated this for me over re2 was the area design. re3 sticks with general design thrust of the first two -- bigger early areas, smaller later areas -- but it moves away from interconnected inner loops and major-key gating of the mansion or the police station in favor of something more akin to spokes coming out from a wheel, where each spoke has its own little setpiece and order of exploration feels more loose. the best example of this is easily downtown, which implements an item collection challenge similar to chess plugs or medals puzzles from previous games (get supplies to fix a cable car). each primary location in this section is a building, whether a sub station or a press office, all connected via alleys and streets with interactables strewn along the way. does a good job both corralling the player into fighting enemies in narrow spaces as well as providing many separated nodes with their own little sparks of action and intrigue. not really as genius as the mansion's taut, intertwined room layout, but it's cool to see them try something a little different. the later game devolves into mini-puzzle areas on par with the guardhouse (or even smaller in the case of the park or the hospital), but these are a significantly improvement over the undercooked sewer from re2. the puzzles themselves are pretty fun too; I like spatial puzzles more than riddles, and they lean into that more here with stuff like the water purification check near the end of the game.