Katiopeia
Silent Hill 2 and 3 happen to be two of the finest games ever masterfully created. Silent Hill 2 is going to be 20 years old this year, and Silent Hill 3 is approaching 18 years old.
I've actually played Silent Hill 1 and 3, and I know people are probably going to be triggered by this, but I have never played Silent Hill 2.
I got Silent Hill 3 as a Christmas gift in 2019, and I was lucky enough to get an original PS2 copy for around $45. And I consider it not just one of the best Survival Horror games I've ever played, but one of the best games I've ever played period. So I can now understand and fully appreciate just what all the fuss was about with this game.
So if I enjoyed the living hell out of Silent Hill 3, I can only imagine how good Silent Hill 2 is. I wish to write reviews for both games in the future.
I am desperate as shit to get my hands on Silent Hill 2, because I know everyone calls it the best game in the franchise, but it's literally impossible for me right now because I don't have a PC, which would be both the easiest and the best way to play it. And if I wanted an original PS2 copy, we're talking $80-150, even more than that, on Amazon and Ebay, which is just insane.
It's just not possible to grab a copy without spending an absolute fortune. And I bring this up because I absolutely refuse to play the HD version of Silent Hill 2.
The fact that we are in the year 2021, and the HD Collection is STILL the most accessible way to experience Silent Hill 2 and 3 really speaks volumes of just how much Konami has completely neglected them. Konami is basically the equivalent of that meme where that girl gets gorilla glue in her hair. They're just complete fuckin' brainlets.
Imagine the public's excitement when back in 2011, Konami announced that Silent Hill 2 and 3 would be returning in an HD Collection. But already there was a problem.
First of all, where was Silent Hill 1 and 4?
Tom Hullett, who was pretty much in charge of Silent Hill at the time, stated that Silent Hill 1 wasn't included in the collection because it's a PS1 game, and porting PS1 games to current generation hardware was "difficult."
Yeah, bullshit. You were just lazy just like with the rest of this collection but I'll get into that.
But then he states that Silent Hill 4 wasn't included because of how polarizing it was to fans. Which I don't see why that means that you can just leave it out entirely. It's a game that you either love or hate, but me personally, I think it's a really good game and it deserves the attention.
This collection is without a doubt one of the most disappointing broken messes ever released that completely disgraces the legacy of these beloved games. I've never played Silent Hill 2 but while looking at footage for the HD version I did my best not to spoil myself from any story details.
{Everything Wrong With Silent Hill 2 HD}
So, one of the most obvious things: Why are the roads so clean and paved? They're not supposed to look like that. They're supposed to be all dirty and grungy. The paved roads actually makes it difficult to see the blood marks in the town, which is a visual clue on where you're supposed to go at first.
And another thing that's immediately fucked up is that the fact that there is barely any fog. In the original games, there's so much fog that you can barely see a couple feet ahead of you, but that's the whole point. It creates a feeling of tense claustrophobia.
But in the HD version, the fog has been utterly butchered. When you get to the town, there is no fog surrounding you. The only fog you see is in front of you, it's like a bubble of fog that you are infinitely chasing. And it's always got a straight line on the ground depending on where you're facing, it looks god awful.
But it's even worse in the cutscenes. There are scenes where the fog is supposed to cover up areas you aren't supposed to see. But guess what? The fog is completely gone. Know what that means? You can see where the game environment cuts off in some areas. Wow. Fuckin' wow.
There are two major issues that affects both games in this collection as well as the Maria Story Mode. Everything is way, WAY too dark. Even if you put the brightness setting all the way up, it doesn't help much. You literally can't see anything without the flashlight, and even then, it's still too dark when it's on. It's so fuckin' dark that you can barely see the character model turning to face items.
And some of these items you need to get to progress, and if you can't see them, you're gonna miss them. And it's even worse in Maria's scenario, because she doesn't ever get a flashlight. So you end up running around in rooms where you can't even see the doors that you're supposed to be going into because it's almost pitch fucking black.
And the other major issue is the slowdown. The majority of the time you are playing, there are freezes and slowdown, and this can make the experience even more unbearable than it already is.
There are also other huge issues like missing sound effects, misplaced sound effects, scratched out sound effects, music not playing where it's supposed to, major frame drops when getting achievements, it's just so so bad.
Before you start the game, you get the option to choose the voice overs. For the HD Collection, there are new actors for the characters. But since you get to use the original voices for Silent Hill 2, complaining about the new voices is pointless.
But Silent Hill 3 forces you to play with the new voices and oh ho ho ho I will get into it.
It's honestly disheartening to see this game reduced to such a state and has never been officially remedied.
But if you thought Silent Hill 2 was bad, good fucking God is it nothing compared to Silent Hill 3. Silent Hill 3 HD is without a doubt an absolute disaster by every definition of the word.
{Everything Wrong With Silent Hill 3 HD}
The first thing that you will absolutely notice is that there are a shitload of voice syncing problems in the cutscenes. Almost nothing is synced up properly. It is abysmal. And there are many instances where the subtitles do not match with the dialogue being spoken. They can also lag behind or skip forward. It is all so sloppily put together.
Also for some fucked up reason, there were changes done to the script, and now the cutscenes are fucked up even more than what they already were. There are lines of dialogue that were straight up changed merely for the fact that Tom Hullett wanted to change something to make it his own, which is straight up disrespectful to the people who fuckin' made that game.
But the funny thing is, they changed the dialogue, but they kept the subtitles the same. Which just shows how lazy these people were when it came to this port.
So about the voices, Silent Hill 3 does not give you the option to play with the old voices. So what do I think of the new voices? I do think they're pretty good, I like them.
Except for Heather and Claudia. They sound nothing like the characters they're supposed to represent. They sound way too old. Heather sounds like a middle-aged woman who is being heavily directed instead of a distressed 16 year old girl. It sounds fuckin' terrible.
And Claudia sounds 20-25 years older than what she actually is. It's just.. ugh, I fucking hate it.
There are also instances where textures don't load up properly, shadows are glitchy, there is a bad motion blur glitch going on, and the sound effects bug out as well. The SMG comes to mind. When you shoot it, it just makes the sound of static. I am not joking. And the fog can also glitch out as well. The game also crashes. A lot.
Silent Hill 2 HD is really bad, but it actually makes me sick that Silent Hill 3 HD was and still is in this bad of a state. I can't believe this was even put out in stores. I can only imagine the sheer disbelief of the people who actually bought this trainwreck.
{ Who is responsible? }
There are two major reasons why this collection is so botched.
When you boot up the game, you see a developer named Hijinx Studios in the intro. It turns out this studio were given the responsibility of porting these games. I've never heard of these guys before, but I think I know why after doing some research.
Wanna know what games these guys have made prior to Silent Hill HD Collection? Well we got...
- A series of Tony Hawk mobile games
- Two PS3 games called Frogger Returns and Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement
- A single Nintendo DS game called TouchMaster 3
- And THREE Karaoke Glee games for the Nintendo Wii
But you wanna know what these guys specialize in? Porting old video games to MOBILE platforms.
So now with a very important question: Why in the holy mother of shit was this studio given the task of bringing SILENT HILL 2 AND 3 to current generation consoles? See, this is one major issue, but here's the other problem:
It turns out that Konami fuckin' lost the original source code for their games years before the HD Collection was even a concept. But for some reason, they still had their BETA source codes. So they actually decided to take their incomplete Beta versions of each game and port those.
So it's no wonder why they're so fucking bad. What boggles my mind is the fact that you don't keep your original source codes safe somewhere for when your fans want you to bring them to modern platforms.
You could have also done what Square did with Final Fantasy VIII Remastered and just rebuild the game from the ground up if you lost the source code. But no, you had a developer studio whose only credibility is fucking mobile gaming take the broken Beta versions of each game, slap them onto a Blu-Ray disc, and then shove it out there for the world to see, with some unnecessary tweaks here and there.
Everything that could have possibly gone wrong with this collection has gone wrong.
If you thought for a moment that Konami can't be any more reckless and non-caring when it comes to the Silent Hill IP, this should be all you need. Metal Gear, Silent Hill, Castlevania, all of these franchises are in complete standstills now, and have been reduced to Panchinko machines. Konami are more worried about their god forsaken Pachinko machines than the good will of their most respected franchises.
Because that's all these games are to these fucking people now: money and cash grabs. And it's depressing.
This is the worst thing that Konami has ever done, yes I'd say even worse than Metal Gear Solid 5 and Metal Gear Survive, and at least all of the Metal Gear Solid games are still relatively easy to get your hands on these days, especially with the Metal Gear Legacy Collection, which is an awesome package. But I just can't say the same for Silent Hill. And that's just sad.
And yet they continue to be scummy and neglectful to this very day. Seriously, fuck Konami now and forever.
1/10
I've actually played Silent Hill 1 and 3, and I know people are probably going to be triggered by this, but I have never played Silent Hill 2.
I got Silent Hill 3 as a Christmas gift in 2019, and I was lucky enough to get an original PS2 copy for around $45. And I consider it not just one of the best Survival Horror games I've ever played, but one of the best games I've ever played period. So I can now understand and fully appreciate just what all the fuss was about with this game.
So if I enjoyed the living hell out of Silent Hill 3, I can only imagine how good Silent Hill 2 is. I wish to write reviews for both games in the future.
I am desperate as shit to get my hands on Silent Hill 2, because I know everyone calls it the best game in the franchise, but it's literally impossible for me right now because I don't have a PC, which would be both the easiest and the best way to play it. And if I wanted an original PS2 copy, we're talking $80-150, even more than that, on Amazon and Ebay, which is just insane.
It's just not possible to grab a copy without spending an absolute fortune. And I bring this up because I absolutely refuse to play the HD version of Silent Hill 2.
The fact that we are in the year 2021, and the HD Collection is STILL the most accessible way to experience Silent Hill 2 and 3 really speaks volumes of just how much Konami has completely neglected them. Konami is basically the equivalent of that meme where that girl gets gorilla glue in her hair. They're just complete fuckin' brainlets.
Imagine the public's excitement when back in 2011, Konami announced that Silent Hill 2 and 3 would be returning in an HD Collection. But already there was a problem.
First of all, where was Silent Hill 1 and 4?
Tom Hullett, who was pretty much in charge of Silent Hill at the time, stated that Silent Hill 1 wasn't included in the collection because it's a PS1 game, and porting PS1 games to current generation hardware was "difficult."
Yeah, bullshit. You were just lazy just like with the rest of this collection but I'll get into that.
But then he states that Silent Hill 4 wasn't included because of how polarizing it was to fans. Which I don't see why that means that you can just leave it out entirely. It's a game that you either love or hate, but me personally, I think it's a really good game and it deserves the attention.
This collection is without a doubt one of the most disappointing broken messes ever released that completely disgraces the legacy of these beloved games. I've never played Silent Hill 2 but while looking at footage for the HD version I did my best not to spoil myself from any story details.
{Everything Wrong With Silent Hill 2 HD}
So, one of the most obvious things: Why are the roads so clean and paved? They're not supposed to look like that. They're supposed to be all dirty and grungy. The paved roads actually makes it difficult to see the blood marks in the town, which is a visual clue on where you're supposed to go at first.
And another thing that's immediately fucked up is that the fact that there is barely any fog. In the original games, there's so much fog that you can barely see a couple feet ahead of you, but that's the whole point. It creates a feeling of tense claustrophobia.
But in the HD version, the fog has been utterly butchered. When you get to the town, there is no fog surrounding you. The only fog you see is in front of you, it's like a bubble of fog that you are infinitely chasing. And it's always got a straight line on the ground depending on where you're facing, it looks god awful.
But it's even worse in the cutscenes. There are scenes where the fog is supposed to cover up areas you aren't supposed to see. But guess what? The fog is completely gone. Know what that means? You can see where the game environment cuts off in some areas. Wow. Fuckin' wow.
There are two major issues that affects both games in this collection as well as the Maria Story Mode. Everything is way, WAY too dark. Even if you put the brightness setting all the way up, it doesn't help much. You literally can't see anything without the flashlight, and even then, it's still too dark when it's on. It's so fuckin' dark that you can barely see the character model turning to face items.
And some of these items you need to get to progress, and if you can't see them, you're gonna miss them. And it's even worse in Maria's scenario, because she doesn't ever get a flashlight. So you end up running around in rooms where you can't even see the doors that you're supposed to be going into because it's almost pitch fucking black.
And the other major issue is the slowdown. The majority of the time you are playing, there are freezes and slowdown, and this can make the experience even more unbearable than it already is.
There are also other huge issues like missing sound effects, misplaced sound effects, scratched out sound effects, music not playing where it's supposed to, major frame drops when getting achievements, it's just so so bad.
Before you start the game, you get the option to choose the voice overs. For the HD Collection, there are new actors for the characters. But since you get to use the original voices for Silent Hill 2, complaining about the new voices is pointless.
But Silent Hill 3 forces you to play with the new voices and oh ho ho ho I will get into it.
It's honestly disheartening to see this game reduced to such a state and has never been officially remedied.
But if you thought Silent Hill 2 was bad, good fucking God is it nothing compared to Silent Hill 3. Silent Hill 3 HD is without a doubt an absolute disaster by every definition of the word.
{Everything Wrong With Silent Hill 3 HD}
The first thing that you will absolutely notice is that there are a shitload of voice syncing problems in the cutscenes. Almost nothing is synced up properly. It is abysmal. And there are many instances where the subtitles do not match with the dialogue being spoken. They can also lag behind or skip forward. It is all so sloppily put together.
Also for some fucked up reason, there were changes done to the script, and now the cutscenes are fucked up even more than what they already were. There are lines of dialogue that were straight up changed merely for the fact that Tom Hullett wanted to change something to make it his own, which is straight up disrespectful to the people who fuckin' made that game.
But the funny thing is, they changed the dialogue, but they kept the subtitles the same. Which just shows how lazy these people were when it came to this port.
So about the voices, Silent Hill 3 does not give you the option to play with the old voices. So what do I think of the new voices? I do think they're pretty good, I like them.
Except for Heather and Claudia. They sound nothing like the characters they're supposed to represent. They sound way too old. Heather sounds like a middle-aged woman who is being heavily directed instead of a distressed 16 year old girl. It sounds fuckin' terrible.
And Claudia sounds 20-25 years older than what she actually is. It's just.. ugh, I fucking hate it.
There are also instances where textures don't load up properly, shadows are glitchy, there is a bad motion blur glitch going on, and the sound effects bug out as well. The SMG comes to mind. When you shoot it, it just makes the sound of static. I am not joking. And the fog can also glitch out as well. The game also crashes. A lot.
Silent Hill 2 HD is really bad, but it actually makes me sick that Silent Hill 3 HD was and still is in this bad of a state. I can't believe this was even put out in stores. I can only imagine the sheer disbelief of the people who actually bought this trainwreck.
{ Who is responsible? }
There are two major reasons why this collection is so botched.
When you boot up the game, you see a developer named Hijinx Studios in the intro. It turns out this studio were given the responsibility of porting these games. I've never heard of these guys before, but I think I know why after doing some research.
Wanna know what games these guys have made prior to Silent Hill HD Collection? Well we got...
- A series of Tony Hawk mobile games
- Two PS3 games called Frogger Returns and Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement
- A single Nintendo DS game called TouchMaster 3
- And THREE Karaoke Glee games for the Nintendo Wii
But you wanna know what these guys specialize in? Porting old video games to MOBILE platforms.
So now with a very important question: Why in the holy mother of shit was this studio given the task of bringing SILENT HILL 2 AND 3 to current generation consoles? See, this is one major issue, but here's the other problem:
It turns out that Konami fuckin' lost the original source code for their games years before the HD Collection was even a concept. But for some reason, they still had their BETA source codes. So they actually decided to take their incomplete Beta versions of each game and port those.
So it's no wonder why they're so fucking bad. What boggles my mind is the fact that you don't keep your original source codes safe somewhere for when your fans want you to bring them to modern platforms.
You could have also done what Square did with Final Fantasy VIII Remastered and just rebuild the game from the ground up if you lost the source code. But no, you had a developer studio whose only credibility is fucking mobile gaming take the broken Beta versions of each game, slap them onto a Blu-Ray disc, and then shove it out there for the world to see, with some unnecessary tweaks here and there.
Everything that could have possibly gone wrong with this collection has gone wrong.
If you thought for a moment that Konami can't be any more reckless and non-caring when it comes to the Silent Hill IP, this should be all you need. Metal Gear, Silent Hill, Castlevania, all of these franchises are in complete standstills now, and have been reduced to Panchinko machines. Konami are more worried about their god forsaken Pachinko machines than the good will of their most respected franchises.
Because that's all these games are to these fucking people now: money and cash grabs. And it's depressing.
This is the worst thing that Konami has ever done, yes I'd say even worse than Metal Gear Solid 5 and Metal Gear Survive, and at least all of the Metal Gear Solid games are still relatively easy to get your hands on these days, especially with the Metal Gear Legacy Collection, which is an awesome package. But I just can't say the same for Silent Hill. And that's just sad.
And yet they continue to be scummy and neglectful to this very day. Seriously, fuck Konami now and forever.
1/10
2011
It amazes me that a game like this even exists but honestly I could say the same about many games. But as notorious this game is, it was actually fascinating reading into the backstory of this game.
This game was cancelled before it even released. It was one of six games featured in Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors for the Sega CD.
Basically, they are two of the greatest entertainers of their time. They mix magic and comedy and perform it live, they're funny, they defy physics, they take jabs at bullshit, etc. They have been doing it for at least 40 years. The idea of a video game based off of them in the 90s was something that only they could have come up with.
The main reason why the game never released was because the company behind it filed for bankruptcy and shut down. But eventually it made its way onto the internet and has become a cult classic.
I also like the Full Motion Video sequences of Penn & Teller themselves.
One of my favorite Penn & Teller moments is where the two appeared on Hollywood Squares with motherfucking Gilbert Gottfried, the voice behind Iago from Disney's Aladdin, yeah no joke. And it was a really funny episode that featured a whopping 9 consecutive wrong answers.
It is a very funny watch. It's some of the dumbest shit I've ever seen in a game show.
https://youtu.be/iFMaPUtCi9o
But Desert Bus is a whole different story. This game is just asinine. But the worst offender is that everything in this game is deliberate. Penn & Teller made this game to take a jab at all the people who bitched about the controversy of violence in video games.
They decided "let's just make a game that is stupidly like reality and make doing the laborious busywork of real life into a video game." Now all we need is a video game where you can fucking do your taxes, but that might already exist.
The whole game is where you drive a bus. You drive, and drive, and drive, and drive..
Ocassionally you'll see a sign on the side of the road but that's pretty much it. There are no passengers on the bus to interact with, there are no other vehicles, there's no radio so you can listen to some music, and the road never turns. You can also push the B button to hear the sound of the bus door opens. That's.. something I guess.
Let's do some calculations. This bus is going from Tuscan, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada. And it doesn't go any faster than 45 MPH. Tuscan to Las Vegas is around 360 miles. 45 MPH for 360 miles equates to about 8 hours of driving.
This game is 8 hours long?? Jesus fucking Christ. Well maybe once this 8 hour journey is over maybe we can get some insane payoff for doing it.
.....
Wait, what's that? Nothing happens?
You mean we are stuck driving the bus infinitely with nothing happening throughout and with no reward afterwards?
Well actually something does happen after 8 hours of driving. You wanna know?
You get a point.
Yep. That's it. A singular, fucking point.
Supposedly Penn & Teller were going to have a contest where you sent them your high score, and whoever got the highest score would win a trip on an actual bus ride with the two masterminds themselves from Tuscan to Las Vegas, with a show there and whatnot. Which sounds awesome right? But that never happened sadly.
You can't pause the game by the way. The Start Button just blows the horn. And this is also intentional.
Also, if you stop moving the D-Pad, the bus will automatically veer off to the side of the road and get stuck in the sand. Then you have to wait for a tow truck to show up and tow the bus. All. The Way. Back.
So does that mean if you have been driving for 6 hours, you have to wait 6 hours for the game to start over? What the fuck.
Or you could just, you know, reset the game...
You just have to keep driving!! Jesus Christ, I wonder how many people have pissed themselves while playing this. You can't take bathroom breaks, you can't stop to grab food, you have to keep driving this damn bus. Imagine the amount of sensory deprivation from players sitting in front of the screen driving this shit for hours upon hours.
The fact that a game like this was cancelled and yet it made its way onto the internet and people have played it and even adapted it into an Atari 2600 game and even made a remake of it on Steam really speaks volumes of just how insufferable the experience is.
The people who played this fuckfest want you to suffer with them.
I can't imagine anyone playing this for more than 20 or 30 minutes. The farthest I've ever got was an hour, and that was for a livestream. And yet that hour felt like the longest hour of my entire life. You think you're playing the game for shits and giggles but then it turns into a horrific sensory deprivation induced nightmare. I see nothing but road and sand in my fucking dreams.
I mean you know it's bad when I got really bad car sickness after playing this game. I actually suffer from car sickness in real life. So imagine that. I get car sick just from playing this game.
This game is simply a health hazard, both physically and mentally.
Please send help.
1/10
This game was cancelled before it even released. It was one of six games featured in Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors for the Sega CD.
Basically, they are two of the greatest entertainers of their time. They mix magic and comedy and perform it live, they're funny, they defy physics, they take jabs at bullshit, etc. They have been doing it for at least 40 years. The idea of a video game based off of them in the 90s was something that only they could have come up with.
The main reason why the game never released was because the company behind it filed for bankruptcy and shut down. But eventually it made its way onto the internet and has become a cult classic.
I also like the Full Motion Video sequences of Penn & Teller themselves.
One of my favorite Penn & Teller moments is where the two appeared on Hollywood Squares with motherfucking Gilbert Gottfried, the voice behind Iago from Disney's Aladdin, yeah no joke. And it was a really funny episode that featured a whopping 9 consecutive wrong answers.
It is a very funny watch. It's some of the dumbest shit I've ever seen in a game show.
https://youtu.be/iFMaPUtCi9o
But Desert Bus is a whole different story. This game is just asinine. But the worst offender is that everything in this game is deliberate. Penn & Teller made this game to take a jab at all the people who bitched about the controversy of violence in video games.
They decided "let's just make a game that is stupidly like reality and make doing the laborious busywork of real life into a video game." Now all we need is a video game where you can fucking do your taxes, but that might already exist.
The whole game is where you drive a bus. You drive, and drive, and drive, and drive..
Ocassionally you'll see a sign on the side of the road but that's pretty much it. There are no passengers on the bus to interact with, there are no other vehicles, there's no radio so you can listen to some music, and the road never turns. You can also push the B button to hear the sound of the bus door opens. That's.. something I guess.
Let's do some calculations. This bus is going from Tuscan, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada. And it doesn't go any faster than 45 MPH. Tuscan to Las Vegas is around 360 miles. 45 MPH for 360 miles equates to about 8 hours of driving.
This game is 8 hours long?? Jesus fucking Christ. Well maybe once this 8 hour journey is over maybe we can get some insane payoff for doing it.
.....
Wait, what's that? Nothing happens?
You mean we are stuck driving the bus infinitely with nothing happening throughout and with no reward afterwards?
Well actually something does happen after 8 hours of driving. You wanna know?
You get a point.
Yep. That's it. A singular, fucking point.
Supposedly Penn & Teller were going to have a contest where you sent them your high score, and whoever got the highest score would win a trip on an actual bus ride with the two masterminds themselves from Tuscan to Las Vegas, with a show there and whatnot. Which sounds awesome right? But that never happened sadly.
You can't pause the game by the way. The Start Button just blows the horn. And this is also intentional.
Also, if you stop moving the D-Pad, the bus will automatically veer off to the side of the road and get stuck in the sand. Then you have to wait for a tow truck to show up and tow the bus. All. The Way. Back.
So does that mean if you have been driving for 6 hours, you have to wait 6 hours for the game to start over? What the fuck.
Or you could just, you know, reset the game...
You just have to keep driving!! Jesus Christ, I wonder how many people have pissed themselves while playing this. You can't take bathroom breaks, you can't stop to grab food, you have to keep driving this damn bus. Imagine the amount of sensory deprivation from players sitting in front of the screen driving this shit for hours upon hours.
The fact that a game like this was cancelled and yet it made its way onto the internet and people have played it and even adapted it into an Atari 2600 game and even made a remake of it on Steam really speaks volumes of just how insufferable the experience is.
The people who played this fuckfest want you to suffer with them.
I can't imagine anyone playing this for more than 20 or 30 minutes. The farthest I've ever got was an hour, and that was for a livestream. And yet that hour felt like the longest hour of my entire life. You think you're playing the game for shits and giggles but then it turns into a horrific sensory deprivation induced nightmare. I see nothing but road and sand in my fucking dreams.
I mean you know it's bad when I got really bad car sickness after playing this game. I actually suffer from car sickness in real life. So imagine that. I get car sick just from playing this game.
This game is simply a health hazard, both physically and mentally.
Please send help.
1/10
1986
Dark Castle is not a video game, and I repeat, not a video game. Dark Castle actually is a psychological bio-weapon created by an evil corporation to see how much mental anguish a person can take before they snap and transform into a suicidal crazy person.
The main character is one of the most laughable excuses of a protagonist I've ever seen in a video game. He moves around so sluggishly and awkwardly that you'd think he has some sort of mental
defficiency with a cactus shoved up his ass.
He can't even go down a single step without falling or getting dizzy, sometimes he'll even fall down stairs. It makes me believe he is running around with his goddamn shoelaces untied.
And sometimes when he has to make a jump, he'll just stop in mid-air and fall straight to his death. What?? Is the character just suicidal? Does he not want to be in this horrible game anymore? If so, I don't blame him. It's like that one line that Danny DeVito once said in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: "Suicide is badass!"
Sometimes you have to jump and grab ropes but he doesn't grab them and again, just commits suicide.
And he runs so slowly that it's actually faster to jump around the stage, and even then, that works against the player, because again, falling from even a few inches sends your character into a dizzying frenzy.
Pretty much every time you die is because the controls fight against you. The controls are some of the worst I've ever seen in a 2D platformer. Hell, to duck you have to hold up and press B.
I-I'm sorry?? Holding UP to DUCK? Christ.
Everything you try to do, you either die or get stun locked and it's impossible to play the game with any sort of precision. Your main weapon of defense are rocks, but they don't actually kill any of the enemies, instead they just stun them for a brief moment.
Trying to hit enemies with the rocks is a pain in the ass in itself: because you have to gradually turn your arm in a clockwise or counterclockwise fashion various degrees as if you were fuckin' using Mega Man's arm cannon. Just like the movement, aiming is slow, sluggish, and unresponsive. So by the time you get a proper aim, you're already dead, and if you do hit what you needed to hit, something is already behind you about to kill you anyway. This is especially impossible when trying to hit bats that fly around, just forget about it.
The layout design is also just abysmal. Many areas just have dead ends, a lot of them look the same, and sometimes you can even fall through trap doors that take to this one dungeon cell area, meaning you have to backtrack all the way from where you fell. Which means that it's all meant to waste time along with wasting even more time because you die repeatedly because of the impossible shitty controls, but oh man, I'll get to that.
The game is not only a time waster, but it is INSANELY annoying. The soundtrack only consists of ONE song, which is that one generic Dracula's Castle organ song that everyone is familiar with. It REALLY drones on your ears.
You can shut the music off but every time you die it gets turned back on again. And if you turn off the music while there is a note playing, it bugs out and then it sounds like the organist just slammed his face into the D key and lost conciousness.
Also for some fucked up reason there is a difficulty selection but that means literally nothing, because even on Easy Mode, the game is still impossible to play.
The enemy sound effects are so gut-wrenching to listen to. It never stops, and it's just a real pain to listen to, especially the ones that go
Nah nah nah nah nah
Nah nah nah nah nah
NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH
NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH
God, just shut up. It never stops, it genuinely drives me insane. Then again, it kinda makes sense, because it's like the game is trolling you.
So now for the biggest insult of this entire game:
So when you start the game there are a bunch of doors in front of you that you're supposed to go into to get items to defeat the Black Knight, the main bad guy of the game. But the truth is: You don't need any of these items. All you have to do to beat the game is to just go into the door the Black Knight is in, and when you reach him, you just pull a bunch of levers and that's it, you beat the game.
That's why there are speedruns of this game on YouTube in under 3 minutes, I'm dead serious.
Is this game for real?? So all of that masochism is completely unnecessary? You go through all of that trouble of playing through all the other stages only to realize that you can beat the game in just a few minutes?? Imagine being a kid in the 90s and you were completely unaware of this. Good God you have my condolences.
And this isn't just in the Genesis version, it's in the Mac version, the Commodore version, Atari version, it doesn't matter. And no matter what platform you are playing on, the controls are still broken, your character is still pathetic, and you can beat the game as soon as you start it.
It makes me wonder why this game was even made. Oh right, to cash in on the popularity of the resurgence of Dracula movies that came out in the late 80s and throughout the 1990s.
And if that wasn't enough, they released the game on the infamous Phillips CD-i, and oh ho ho boy, it's even WORSE than the Genesis version.
The art style is even more cartoonish, the sound effects are even more irritating, and the controls are somehow even worse, I am dead fuckin' serious. You cannot, and I mean you CANNOT control the character. It would be actually easier to control UFOs to make it easier for people to spot them.
It's incredibly difficult just to get past the first screen of the first level not just because of the horrendous controls, but you also get bombarded with bats that kill you in one hit. You also get stuck on stairs a lot, and you still have to manually aim your arm cannon to hit shit with rocks. And any little goddamn pixel you drop from, you fall over and get dizzy. This is meme-worthy.
The Genesis version is indeed horrific, but the CD-i version fucks you in the ass harder than most of 2020. The whole IP in general belongs in the deepest depths of enteral damnation and must never rise again.
1/10
The main character is one of the most laughable excuses of a protagonist I've ever seen in a video game. He moves around so sluggishly and awkwardly that you'd think he has some sort of mental
defficiency with a cactus shoved up his ass.
He can't even go down a single step without falling or getting dizzy, sometimes he'll even fall down stairs. It makes me believe he is running around with his goddamn shoelaces untied.
And sometimes when he has to make a jump, he'll just stop in mid-air and fall straight to his death. What?? Is the character just suicidal? Does he not want to be in this horrible game anymore? If so, I don't blame him. It's like that one line that Danny DeVito once said in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: "Suicide is badass!"
Sometimes you have to jump and grab ropes but he doesn't grab them and again, just commits suicide.
And he runs so slowly that it's actually faster to jump around the stage, and even then, that works against the player, because again, falling from even a few inches sends your character into a dizzying frenzy.
Pretty much every time you die is because the controls fight against you. The controls are some of the worst I've ever seen in a 2D platformer. Hell, to duck you have to hold up and press B.
I-I'm sorry?? Holding UP to DUCK? Christ.
Everything you try to do, you either die or get stun locked and it's impossible to play the game with any sort of precision. Your main weapon of defense are rocks, but they don't actually kill any of the enemies, instead they just stun them for a brief moment.
Trying to hit enemies with the rocks is a pain in the ass in itself: because you have to gradually turn your arm in a clockwise or counterclockwise fashion various degrees as if you were fuckin' using Mega Man's arm cannon. Just like the movement, aiming is slow, sluggish, and unresponsive. So by the time you get a proper aim, you're already dead, and if you do hit what you needed to hit, something is already behind you about to kill you anyway. This is especially impossible when trying to hit bats that fly around, just forget about it.
The layout design is also just abysmal. Many areas just have dead ends, a lot of them look the same, and sometimes you can even fall through trap doors that take to this one dungeon cell area, meaning you have to backtrack all the way from where you fell. Which means that it's all meant to waste time along with wasting even more time because you die repeatedly because of the impossible shitty controls, but oh man, I'll get to that.
The game is not only a time waster, but it is INSANELY annoying. The soundtrack only consists of ONE song, which is that one generic Dracula's Castle organ song that everyone is familiar with. It REALLY drones on your ears.
You can shut the music off but every time you die it gets turned back on again. And if you turn off the music while there is a note playing, it bugs out and then it sounds like the organist just slammed his face into the D key and lost conciousness.
Also for some fucked up reason there is a difficulty selection but that means literally nothing, because even on Easy Mode, the game is still impossible to play.
The enemy sound effects are so gut-wrenching to listen to. It never stops, and it's just a real pain to listen to, especially the ones that go
Nah nah nah nah nah
Nah nah nah nah nah
NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH
NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH
God, just shut up. It never stops, it genuinely drives me insane. Then again, it kinda makes sense, because it's like the game is trolling you.
So now for the biggest insult of this entire game:
So when you start the game there are a bunch of doors in front of you that you're supposed to go into to get items to defeat the Black Knight, the main bad guy of the game. But the truth is: You don't need any of these items. All you have to do to beat the game is to just go into the door the Black Knight is in, and when you reach him, you just pull a bunch of levers and that's it, you beat the game.
That's why there are speedruns of this game on YouTube in under 3 minutes, I'm dead serious.
Is this game for real?? So all of that masochism is completely unnecessary? You go through all of that trouble of playing through all the other stages only to realize that you can beat the game in just a few minutes?? Imagine being a kid in the 90s and you were completely unaware of this. Good God you have my condolences.
And this isn't just in the Genesis version, it's in the Mac version, the Commodore version, Atari version, it doesn't matter. And no matter what platform you are playing on, the controls are still broken, your character is still pathetic, and you can beat the game as soon as you start it.
It makes me wonder why this game was even made. Oh right, to cash in on the popularity of the resurgence of Dracula movies that came out in the late 80s and throughout the 1990s.
And if that wasn't enough, they released the game on the infamous Phillips CD-i, and oh ho ho boy, it's even WORSE than the Genesis version.
The art style is even more cartoonish, the sound effects are even more irritating, and the controls are somehow even worse, I am dead fuckin' serious. You cannot, and I mean you CANNOT control the character. It would be actually easier to control UFOs to make it easier for people to spot them.
It's incredibly difficult just to get past the first screen of the first level not just because of the horrendous controls, but you also get bombarded with bats that kill you in one hit. You also get stuck on stairs a lot, and you still have to manually aim your arm cannon to hit shit with rocks. And any little goddamn pixel you drop from, you fall over and get dizzy. This is meme-worthy.
The Genesis version is indeed horrific, but the CD-i version fucks you in the ass harder than most of 2020. The whole IP in general belongs in the deepest depths of enteral damnation and must never rise again.
1/10
2020
I genuinely do not understand what sort of appeal this game has. How in God's name can people play this every day? I seriously don't get it.
This is a game that suffers from schizophrenic game design and business decisions. It tries so hard trying to replicate and compete with CSGO and yet it fails spectacularly at understanding what made CSGO's mechanics work so well in the first place.
It feels like a game that just tries to cash in on the ever still popularity of CSGO while also double dipping by copying other games like Overwatch, Fortnite, and Rainbow Six Siege.
I don't even know where to start with this shit. I'll have to go category by category just so that you can fully understand how every single issue this game has all adds up to a messy fuck burger of a product.
And holy fuck this review turned out longer than I thought it would. But I salute you a hundred times over if you manage to get through it, cause goddamn, this game is much worse than I thought it was when you go in-depth.
Let's start with one of the most important aspects of this game, the gunplay. And already we're at a bad start, because they botched it to all fuck.
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The gunplay in this game is the definition of inconsistent. The main problem with the shooting is how it feels like you are shooting a buckshot shotgun no matter what weapon you are using.
How gun accuracy works is that as you move, your weapon gains more bullet spread. Walking gives you slight inaccuracy, jogging gives you the most inaccuracy.
Standing still makes your shots more accurate, and crouching gives you the most amount of accuracy. The less you move the more accurate your shots are.
The difference being that you can also ADS (Aim Down Sight) so that you can get some zoom in for those longer range targets.
It's the exact same as CSGO right? Well, no, it isn't. It's total shit.
Whether you are walking, standing still, or even crouching, the bullet spread is so much more severe than in CSGO.
There are so many goddamn instances where I could be shooting at an enemy standing even a few feet away from me, but the bullets spread so much that I can't get the kill, even if I shoot in short bursts or single tapping.
The bullet spread is so bad that it can feel like you're shooting at fish in a barrel. How is the spread so bad that even single tapping your enemy isn't effective half of the time?? The only exceptions where it isn't so bad is with the pistols and the shotguns.
Whether it's hip firing or aiming down sight, it feels like you have to rely on RNG to kill people in this game. Especially when the bullet spread can actually get you the most random headshots even if you're not aiming for the head.
Even crouching in Valorant does not give you as much accuracy as you may think it does like in CSGO. Your shots can still miss, and it's a fuckin' joke.
The one shot headshots in this game is some of the most random bullshit I've experienced in a shooter, and it's especially worse if you experience D-Sync.
Some of your bullets won't register on your enemy but they can just one shot kill you with no problem at all, and this is due to how shitty the servers are. It can also be why you can get shot before you even see your enemy around a corner.
The lag is also just atrocious. Sometimes the game would tell me that I have a ping of around 50 and yet I'm lagging like crazy. It makes the game virtually unbearable to play.
Here is another major issue with the aiming:
In CSGO, the amount your crosshair would bloom depended on the weapon type. The bloom is categorized from lowest to highest
Pistols
Shotguns
Submachine Guns
Rifles
However in Valorant, the submachine guns have relatively the same amount of bloom as the rifles. Meaning that jogging, hell, even walking with SMGs will still have a shitload of bullet spread.
This is stupid because SMGs are meant to be the run and gun type of weapon. So combine this with the slow movement speed that feels sluggish, like you're trying to run in an elementary school swimming pool full of pudding, and the SMGs just straight up suck, because weaker damage and yet higher spread than the SMGs in CSGO.
How did they fuck up SMGs so bad in this game? But the fucked up thing is, a very good portion of your match you'll have to use the SMGs, and I'll get into why later.
So because of random bullet spread, random one shot headshots, random D-Sync and random lag due to shit server issues, and SMGs being straight up anal sauce, this can all create a game where the skill comes from how lucky you are.
This is why it's nearly fucking impossible to get kill streaks going. This is why players get negative K/Ds in most matches. Even the Pro players struggle going positive while playing this game.
This game is brutally fucking difficult, but for all the wrong reasons.
Many times you will just be asking yourself
How the fuck did this guy kill me? or How did I not kill this guy?
Get used to it, because that is the whole game.
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Let's make a comparison. CSGO launched with 6 maps, and as of now the game has around 40 maps.
Overwatch launched with 12 maps, and now is crossing the 30 territory.
Keep in mind, these games came out years ago.
Valorant is a game that was released in 2020, and guess how many maps it launched with?
4...
Just, 4. And as of this review, they've only added TWO maps. Is this a joke? Six maps??
Hell, two of these maps the community absolutely fucking hates: Icebox and Bind.
This might be the lowest amount of maps a competitive shooter like this has had, well.. ever.
So because of the insanely low amount of maps, the game gets very repetitive. You can't even choose what map you want to play on to avoid playing on the shitty ones. So you'll just be getting the same 1 or 2 maps over and over and over.
Each map in this game is very gimmicky. They have something exclusive to them in an attempt to differentiate from each other, but if anything, it's minor, and just makes the game more annoying to play.
One map has rope rappels, another map has portals, another map has doors that open and close, which is pretty cool. And yes that was sarcasm.
Bind and Haven or example are total shit because those maps have three bomb sites.
How the fuck can you cover three different bomb sites with just five people? Who is the numbskull that thought this was a good idea?
These gimmicks are nothing more than just gimmicks, because they don't compensate for just how poorly designed these maps are.
The maps in this game have so many fucking angles and corners that the game can become a camper's wet dream. Camping is actually an insanely viable strategy because of the shitty gunplay and bad servers that I mentioned earlier, as well as the terrible map design.
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Oh ho ho ho ho my fucking god. Holy mother of shit. I honestly thought I wouldn't reach a point in time where I can safely say that a company has managed to make a game that is as greedy if not even more greedy than Star Wars Battlefront 2 in its early days.
This is one of the most egregious and predatory examples of monetization I have ever seen in a game. Is this what we get instead of loot boxes now? We're going from one scummy monetization scheme to another huh?
Battle Passes and overpriced paywalls. Seriously, why are the gun skins so fucking expensive in this game? It's flat out disgusting. And it's disgusting that there are people out there who buy this shit thinking that charging over $100 for cosmetics is totally okay.
Here is an example. As of this review there is a Spectrum Collection being sold right now. It comes with the Spectrum skin for the Classic Pistol, the Phantom, the Guardian, and the Bulldog, along with other stupid shit like sprays and charms.
It costs 10,700 Valorant Points. How much is that? Oh, you know...
$100...
And apparently the bundle is on discount. Oh, I'm so fucking sorry, Riot Games, let me give you a round of applause for your generosity, you really deserve it. Now instead of having to spend 170 fucking dollars I now only have to spend $100..
I'm going to have an aneurysm.
And that's not the worst part. The bundle comes with just the base skin. The base skin can be upgraded to have extra effects, upwards of 3 times. You need 10 Radianite Points for each upgrade. How do you get Radianite Points?
Oh, of fucking course, by either buying Battle Passes and grinding the fuck out of them, or you straight up buy it from the Store.
20 Radianite Points costs up to $20, which is the lowest amount you can get.
So even after you spend this RIDICULOUS amount of money on gun skins, you STILL need to spend even MORE money just to get the COMPLETE version of that skin.
The whole game is like this!!
And if you wanted to buy skins separately from a bundle, you still have to pay upwards of 2600 Valorant Points. $26 for a single weapon skin?
$53 for a fucking melee weapon skin??
You want proof? Well here are some screenshots I took.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/HpPiXcAv6YfbHASQ6
https://photos.app.goo.gl/1PSVq2735MEGzrMe8
https://photos.app.goo.gl/BeW4YDNzT2uZKyTm8
Seriously, this shit alone is reason enough to say that this game is a piece of shit. If you're one of those people who spent upwards of $200 buying skins for this game, you are the reason why corporations keep doing this shit, and get away with it.
You're the type of person that caused Grand Theft Auto V for the PS5 and Xbox Series X to exist, by making Rockstar and Take Two Interactive $1 billion alone from buying Shark Cards. That is the game that you deserve.
I'm sorry but I'm taking a stand against prices like this. This is just grotesque.
And don't give me that same copy and pasted retarded as fuck statement:
"But it's a free to play game."
That is seriously a meme at this point. The game being free to play does not justify having $200+ paywalls when the game doesn't even have loot boxes. This is the kind of shit that I expect from mobile games.
Who wants to play a game only to be greeted by a paywall that is more expensive than three newly released $60 AAA games?
There is nothing that kills my motivation more and makes me want to not play a game than opening up said game only to be greeted by giant price tags being shoved right in my face.
Stop letting this horrible shit get into our core gaming Industry. I don't want another EA or Activision/Blizzard, and you shouldn't either.
I never thought I would say it but Fortnite actually did it right when it came to cosmetics. You buy a skin, which is no more expensive than 2000 V-Bucks which equals $20, but not only is it not too expensive, but there are many ways to easily earn V-Bucks so that you don't have to buy them at all.
Not to mention, if you wanted to unlock additional effects and or variations of that skin, you just had to play the game, and that's it. So what is Riot Games' excuse?
I hate Fortnite, but I have to give credit where credit is due and give the W to it. Rogue Company has much more reasonable prices as well, not to mention the skins look really fucking good in that game so yes I'm giving a W to that game as well.
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The game has a class system, each character has a different set of abilities that can change the tide of battle, along with an Ultimate ability. You've got your Fraggers, your Supports, your Defenders, etc.
This is supposed to be the main game changer opposed to CSGO. A CSGO type game but with unique characters with abilities like Overwatch.
The best of both worlds, but itโs more like double dipping your cock into a bowl of ghost pepper salsa.
There is a major problem right off the bat when you have hero shooter ability mechanics in a competitive shooter like this. No matter what, whether you nerf a character or buff a character, there will always be another character that is better than that specific person.
This game will always have balancing problems. And because of this, it creates a trend where people will mostly play meta characters.
80-90% of my matches always have me face an enemy team that has either a Sage, a Jett, a Viper, a Raze, a Kay/0, or a Reyna.
Maybe Omen or Phoenix.
And sometimes, it's a combination of all of these characters. Because these are all the best characters to play. They are the most powerful. And yet there are like, 7 other characters.
A team consisting of a Sage or a Skye, a Jett or a Viper, a Raze or a Kay/0, along with a Phoenix or an Omen is literally the most versatile team comp. It's pretty much what many teams like to run even in the Pro scene.
Like, why would you play Cypher, Breach, Astra, Sova, Brimstone, or Yoru, when you could play Sage, Raze, Viper, Phoenix, Kay/0, or Jett?
Hell, Jett alone can break the whole game because of her insanely powerful utility, being able to throw smokes, soar into the air, and dash.
And her ultimate allows her to shoot kunais and quickly dispatch enemies if you know how to aim them. And each time you kill someone they refill.
You see how stupidly overpowered Jett is?
See, this is the problem. Most players go with the latter option. They just play whatever is the meta. And while I am on the topic of abilities, I want to get into the problem with the Buy Phase.
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For some fucked up reason the developers decided to increase the prices in the Buy Phase. Guns and Abilities during the Buy Phase have have either gone up in price or went down in price but these are all minor tweaks if anything. It's still difficult trying to get money.
This just makes it even harder to purchase what you need. I reach many instances where I get really frustrated with not being able to buy what I need.
If the SMGs were actually viable then it wouldn't be such an issue, but no, they're shit, and yet you are forced to use them for a large portion of the match because you need to save money for the rifles and abilities.
The rifles are expensive as shit. It's even worse when you also have to buy armor before each round starts which already takes away at least a quarter of your earnings. So you either have to buy pretty much nothing or you're always gonna be either broke or near broke.
The developers did this for balancing, to reduce the amount of ability spam. To make the game more centered around gun skill rather than utility game.
Maybe if the gunplay actually fucking worked then I could understand this. But it doesn't. So this change just comes off as vapid and tone deaf. You just made the game even more irritating to play than it already is.
And speaking of the game being irritating to play, I need to address a gigantic issue that I just don't see enough people complaining about. It is still one of the most stupefying game mechanics that results in a problem I tend to roast Rainbow Six Siege for.
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I seriously can't stress enough how much of a plague game penalties are. It is the biggest example of how a game becomes less like a game and more of a Chinese sweatshop.
Basically, if you get removed from the match from being AFK or if you leave a match early, you get a penalty, in which you have to wait on a timer to reach 0 before you can play again.
Keep in mind, if you're playing with friends and at least one person has an AFK penalty timer well guess what? None of you can fucking play. You either kick that person out of your party or you can't play.
What? Why? Who fucking came up with this? This is fucking stupid, I wanna play with all of my friends! Why should people have to wait on me if I get a penalty? I already commonly go AFK as is.
See, if it was a Ranked mode like in CSGO and Siege, that is totally fine. Throwing a game and going AFK not just affects you but your team as well. If you go AFK a lot then you shouldn't be playing Ranked.
But, some dumbfuck(s) at Riot Games and Hi-Rez (the guys who made Rogue Company) decided that it was a good idea to give these timer penalties to players who get booted out of Casual matches.
Well then that just defeats the fucking purpose of Casual now does it? Why the fuck do you have both Casual and Ranked modes but if you get booted from a Casual match you still get penalized for it?
These timers can go up to a fucking hour, even two hours. Two fucking hours? Are you out of your fucking minds??
Also, if you do get penalized you can't play ANY mode for that duration of time. Not just the standard plant and defuse mode, but even modes like Deathmatch, Fracture, and Spike Rush.
So you know what that means? If you get penalized, you can't play the game. At all. So you know what you gotta do for the next hour? Either fuck around in the shooting range, do private matches (if you have anyone to play with), or you fight against bots.
Or you could just..you know..play a better fucking game instead.
Seriously, what was the thought process here?? Punishing players for going AFK and leaving Casual matches mid-session?
Why not just give players the ability to join in the middle of a match? If you have a teammate that leaves the game, why not have that person replaced with someone else?
Rainbow Six Siege does this and CSGO does this. In CSGO, if you're playing Casual or Deathmatch or Arms Race and you're having a terrible match and you're just frustrated and you don't wanna be there anymore, you should not be punished for wanting to leave.
Not to mention, going AFK should not be as much of a sin as the developers seem to think that it is. Do you have any idea how long matches last in Valorant? Upwards of 25 minutes, sometimes even 35.
You have to win 13 rounds in Valorant's Casual mode, as opposed to CSGO's Casual where you only need to win 8.
Think about how many rounds you have to play before you win. It's a minimum of 13.
Matches can fucking go on forever in this game, and yet you are expected to not have to go AFK at all. Nothing else is more important. You are either playing the game 100% or fuck you, don't play at all.
You know, I'm not sure if the developers were aware of the fact that people like me have real lives. Shit that we have to do. And yet we get punished for having to go AFK.
Again, I get Ranked, but why Casuals? And why prevent players from being able to play the game at all because of something as common as "Oh shit, hang on, I gotta do something, I'll brb."
Why not just have a vote to remove player system like in CSGO? And then have that player replaced with someone else?
Seriously, this is Marvelโs Avengers (the 2020 game) levels of fucking stupidity.
Same shit with Rogue Company. The game has both Casual and Ranked modes but going AFK in Casual modes can result in getting temporarily banned from matchmaking for at least 30 minutes, instead of just having a system where players can join matches already in progress.
Because of this AFK and throw mentality but with the only option being to surrender to the enemy team and force the match to end, it reaches a point where it's less about you and more about the game. You become the fucking game.
It's non-stop sweat all the time. And this is the same shit that I get on Siege's ass for.
[ ๐๐'๐ ๐๐๐ ๐พ๐ผ๐๐๐ผ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ]
There's never a moment in this game where you can get a chance to breathe, maybe experiment with the different characters and learn the maps.
There's no such thing as fun in Valorant. You either sweat, or you get fucked in the ass repeatedly by the enemy and get yelled at by toxic man babies on your team.
CSGO has a pretty steep learning curve. At first I didn't like the game, but as I kept playing it and I was getting better and better, I started to fully appreciate the game for what it was because of the fact that you can make the game as sweaty as you want it to be.
CSGO can be a pretty sweaty game, and yeah I can get frustrated at it sometimes, but if I get tired of one mode or lobby I can just go into another one with no punishment unless it's Competitive. It also does have that casual side to it as well. Hence there's modes like Deathmatch and Arms Race, to get you ready for Casual, and then that gets you ready for Competitive.
It's a long staircase that takes time to run up, but as you get better, you start to feel like you're on top, that you are reaching that goal.
But in Valorant, you never feel like that. Yes there are good and bad players obviously.
But if you're someone like me, someone who doesn't snort G-Fuel up your nose and inject Adderall into your throbbing erection, you never feel like you are getting better at the game, because of how broken the mechanics are. I've been playing FPS games for a good 15 years now, and Valorant makes me feel like I'm total shit.
Hence why the game is as toxic as it is. Seriously, this might be the most toxic game I've played since DayZ and Rust. And that is because of how badly designed the game is. The game fails at being a CSGO type game and it fails at being an Overwatch type game, and because of this, there is no such thing as playing the game to just have fun.
And now for the final big elephant in the room. And you probably already know about this even without playing the game. I'm talking about the infamous anti-cheat the game forces you to install.
[ ๐๐ผ๐๐๐๐ผ๐๐ฟ ๐ผ๐๐๐-๐พ๐๐๐ผ๐ ]
What I'm going to be explaining is going to sound pretty nerdy, so I apologize in advance. I'm not a software engineer, but this is based on information I read online.
So before you are even allowed to start the game you have to install the anti-cheat known as Vanguard. Basically, it requires access to Ring 0.
Basically what that means is that your operating system has different "layers", Ring 3, Ring 2, Ring 1, and then Ring 0, which is the kernel center of your computer's security.
Vanguard requires access to Ring 0, basically giving it the most amount of access to your PC. This is why Valorant requires you to restart your PC in order to finish installing it, because that's how you give software access to Ring 0.
Ring 0 is not what you should be allowing a lot of programs access to, as that is where you are the most vulnerable.
The anti-cheat runs at all times while your PC is on. It only scans your PC while you're playing Valorant.
A lot of people like to call these "root kits" which are basically backdoors for hackers to break into your PC.
How Vanguard works is that it uses an AI to scan your computer for cheating software, and would automatically ban you as soon as you try to play the game with said cheats.
Which sounds good right? Well, it's shitty for two reasons.
First of all, it can lead to players getting banned for absolutely no reason at all even though they didn't have cheats installed, because the software isn't perfect.
And second, it can be dangerous.
Vanguard itself is not dangerous, but it is potentially dangerous. And that alone was enough for me to uninstall the game after I read about this shit, because I was not going to risk having my $800+ PC rig compromised from playing this shit game.
Because there could be a situation where you are playing Valorant and a hacker decides to use the backdoor to get into your kernel, cause mayhem on your computer, and possibly steal valuable information from you.
It's like when Grand Theft Auto V first came out on PC and there was a massive security breach on the Rockstar Social Club.
Thousands upon thousands of people had their information leaked out to hackers.
Not only did they have access to people's social media accounts, bank accounts, and other critical information, but these people got locked out of their accounts meaning that they could not play the game that they just spent $60+ on, because you have to be logged into the Rockstar Social Club's servers in order to play GTA5, even for the single player, which is fucking horseshit.
Rockstar's Social Club Accounts May Be Compromised (2015)
https://www.overclock3d.net/news/software/rockstar_social_club_accounts_may_be_compromised/1
Not to mention playing GTA Online gives you the risk of hackers grabbing your IP address and whatnot simply by just being in the same lobby as you, because that is just how awful Rockstar's security and anti-cheat are.
There is an awesome video that perfectly goes in-depth about just how bad all of this is. I will leave a link if you are interested.
Gypsy - Rockstar's Dirty Little Secret
https://youtu.be/C_fdhCXlPI0
But I'm only bringing up GTA5 because well, Valorant has the same problem. It also really doesn't help that Riot Games is owned by Tencent which is one of the largest corporations in all of China.
And unless you have been living under a rock, you'll be aware that Americans are really not the biggest fans of the Chinese market.
Riot Games have claimed that they are not planning to do anything malicious with Vanguard, and yet the idea of having someone breaking into your computer just by playing the game, it's fucking horrifying. I've seen it happen.
Big companies get hacked all the time. Remember when Sony and the PlayStation Network got hacked in 2011? I'm sure a lot of people do. What if the same were to happen to Riot Games? But it's much worse because this puts your whole PC at risk.
So again, the anti-cheat itself is not dangerous per say, but it is prone to be exploited. So even if you got past literally everything I have gone through in this review, then I would hope that you are feeling at least a bit weary about this shit right here.
[ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ก ๐๐๐ค๐ช๐๐๐ฉ๐จ ]
Okay so after all of this fuckin' nonsense you get the idea of just how terrible this game is. In a nutshell, the game suffers from all of these things:
The gunplay is heavily reliant on RNG with ridiculous bullet spread, D-Sync and laggy servers, and random chances of getting headshots or headshotted
There are an insanely low amount of gimmicky maps with a shitload of angles and corners that results in a camper's paradise
The game is chock full of revolting, anti-consumer, and ridiculously overpriced monetization that has the fucking audacity to ask for even more money from you even after it already asks you to spend a fuck ton as is (upwards of $200+)
The game suffers from the infinite problem of balance because players will always play whatever the meta heroes are because it is the most viable option to do well
The developers inflate the prices of some of the guns and abilities in-game in an attempt to reduce ability spam but then stupidly forget that the gunplay is total shit
You can get AFK banned even from playing Casual modes, preventing you from being able to even play the game for very long periods of time which defeat the purpose of a Casual game mode, especially due to ridiculously long match times (25-40 minutes long)
The game isn't casual enough in which there is no such thing as just playing the game to have fun, it's non-stop sweat and toxicity all the fucking time
And to top it all off, the game forces you to download an anti-cheat that requires access to the Ring 0 kernel in your PC's security, which can serve as a potential risk for hackers to use the anti-cheat to create a backdoor to break into your computer and either damage it or steal your personal information.
You can't delete Vanguard by the way. If you delete it then you can't play Valorant, but you know what? I could give a fuck less. Because this game deserves to be thrown in the trash heap where it belongs.
Just go play CSGO for god sake. It is an infinitely better game. Go play Rainbow Six Siege, go play Verdun or Rising Storm 2 Vietnam or Squad or Enlisted or Insurgency Sandstorm, just, fuck this game.
Hell, even Standoff 2 does all of this much better than Valorant, and that's a fuckin' mobile game.
I hate this game, and I hate this company.
Funny enough, this game was actually developed by people who played CSGO professionally. And after playing this absolute shitshow of a game, it makes me grateful that I'm not a "pro" myself. Because everything in this game just comes off as gross and embarrassing.
And it doesn't take a game developer or a player in the eSports scene to expose the god awful flaws in your game.
Playing this game only just makes me appreciate other games that did all of this shit way better.
2/10
This is a game that suffers from schizophrenic game design and business decisions. It tries so hard trying to replicate and compete with CSGO and yet it fails spectacularly at understanding what made CSGO's mechanics work so well in the first place.
It feels like a game that just tries to cash in on the ever still popularity of CSGO while also double dipping by copying other games like Overwatch, Fortnite, and Rainbow Six Siege.
I don't even know where to start with this shit. I'll have to go category by category just so that you can fully understand how every single issue this game has all adds up to a messy fuck burger of a product.
And holy fuck this review turned out longer than I thought it would. But I salute you a hundred times over if you manage to get through it, cause goddamn, this game is much worse than I thought it was when you go in-depth.
Let's start with one of the most important aspects of this game, the gunplay. And already we're at a bad start, because they botched it to all fuck.
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ผ๐ ]
The gunplay in this game is the definition of inconsistent. The main problem with the shooting is how it feels like you are shooting a buckshot shotgun no matter what weapon you are using.
How gun accuracy works is that as you move, your weapon gains more bullet spread. Walking gives you slight inaccuracy, jogging gives you the most inaccuracy.
Standing still makes your shots more accurate, and crouching gives you the most amount of accuracy. The less you move the more accurate your shots are.
The difference being that you can also ADS (Aim Down Sight) so that you can get some zoom in for those longer range targets.
It's the exact same as CSGO right? Well, no, it isn't. It's total shit.
Whether you are walking, standing still, or even crouching, the bullet spread is so much more severe than in CSGO.
There are so many goddamn instances where I could be shooting at an enemy standing even a few feet away from me, but the bullets spread so much that I can't get the kill, even if I shoot in short bursts or single tapping.
The bullet spread is so bad that it can feel like you're shooting at fish in a barrel. How is the spread so bad that even single tapping your enemy isn't effective half of the time?? The only exceptions where it isn't so bad is with the pistols and the shotguns.
Whether it's hip firing or aiming down sight, it feels like you have to rely on RNG to kill people in this game. Especially when the bullet spread can actually get you the most random headshots even if you're not aiming for the head.
Even crouching in Valorant does not give you as much accuracy as you may think it does like in CSGO. Your shots can still miss, and it's a fuckin' joke.
The one shot headshots in this game is some of the most random bullshit I've experienced in a shooter, and it's especially worse if you experience D-Sync.
Some of your bullets won't register on your enemy but they can just one shot kill you with no problem at all, and this is due to how shitty the servers are. It can also be why you can get shot before you even see your enemy around a corner.
The lag is also just atrocious. Sometimes the game would tell me that I have a ping of around 50 and yet I'm lagging like crazy. It makes the game virtually unbearable to play.
Here is another major issue with the aiming:
In CSGO, the amount your crosshair would bloom depended on the weapon type. The bloom is categorized from lowest to highest
Pistols
Shotguns
Submachine Guns
Rifles
However in Valorant, the submachine guns have relatively the same amount of bloom as the rifles. Meaning that jogging, hell, even walking with SMGs will still have a shitload of bullet spread.
This is stupid because SMGs are meant to be the run and gun type of weapon. So combine this with the slow movement speed that feels sluggish, like you're trying to run in an elementary school swimming pool full of pudding, and the SMGs just straight up suck, because weaker damage and yet higher spread than the SMGs in CSGO.
How did they fuck up SMGs so bad in this game? But the fucked up thing is, a very good portion of your match you'll have to use the SMGs, and I'll get into why later.
So because of random bullet spread, random one shot headshots, random D-Sync and random lag due to shit server issues, and SMGs being straight up anal sauce, this can all create a game where the skill comes from how lucky you are.
This is why it's nearly fucking impossible to get kill streaks going. This is why players get negative K/Ds in most matches. Even the Pro players struggle going positive while playing this game.
This game is brutally fucking difficult, but for all the wrong reasons.
Many times you will just be asking yourself
How the fuck did this guy kill me? or How did I not kill this guy?
Get used to it, because that is the whole game.
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ผ๐๐, ๐ผ๐๐ฟ ๐๐ผ๐พ๐ ๐๐ ]
Let's make a comparison. CSGO launched with 6 maps, and as of now the game has around 40 maps.
Overwatch launched with 12 maps, and now is crossing the 30 territory.
Keep in mind, these games came out years ago.
Valorant is a game that was released in 2020, and guess how many maps it launched with?
4...
Just, 4. And as of this review, they've only added TWO maps. Is this a joke? Six maps??
Hell, two of these maps the community absolutely fucking hates: Icebox and Bind.
This might be the lowest amount of maps a competitive shooter like this has had, well.. ever.
So because of the insanely low amount of maps, the game gets very repetitive. You can't even choose what map you want to play on to avoid playing on the shitty ones. So you'll just be getting the same 1 or 2 maps over and over and over.
Each map in this game is very gimmicky. They have something exclusive to them in an attempt to differentiate from each other, but if anything, it's minor, and just makes the game more annoying to play.
One map has rope rappels, another map has portals, another map has doors that open and close, which is pretty cool. And yes that was sarcasm.
Bind and Haven or example are total shit because those maps have three bomb sites.
How the fuck can you cover three different bomb sites with just five people? Who is the numbskull that thought this was a good idea?
These gimmicks are nothing more than just gimmicks, because they don't compensate for just how poorly designed these maps are.
The maps in this game have so many fucking angles and corners that the game can become a camper's wet dream. Camping is actually an insanely viable strategy because of the shitty gunplay and bad servers that I mentioned earlier, as well as the terrible map design.
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐พ๐๐๐๐๐ผ๐๐๐ผ๐พ๐๐๐๐๐ ]
Oh ho ho ho ho my fucking god. Holy mother of shit. I honestly thought I wouldn't reach a point in time where I can safely say that a company has managed to make a game that is as greedy if not even more greedy than Star Wars Battlefront 2 in its early days.
This is one of the most egregious and predatory examples of monetization I have ever seen in a game. Is this what we get instead of loot boxes now? We're going from one scummy monetization scheme to another huh?
Battle Passes and overpriced paywalls. Seriously, why are the gun skins so fucking expensive in this game? It's flat out disgusting. And it's disgusting that there are people out there who buy this shit thinking that charging over $100 for cosmetics is totally okay.
Here is an example. As of this review there is a Spectrum Collection being sold right now. It comes with the Spectrum skin for the Classic Pistol, the Phantom, the Guardian, and the Bulldog, along with other stupid shit like sprays and charms.
It costs 10,700 Valorant Points. How much is that? Oh, you know...
$100...
And apparently the bundle is on discount. Oh, I'm so fucking sorry, Riot Games, let me give you a round of applause for your generosity, you really deserve it. Now instead of having to spend 170 fucking dollars I now only have to spend $100..
I'm going to have an aneurysm.
And that's not the worst part. The bundle comes with just the base skin. The base skin can be upgraded to have extra effects, upwards of 3 times. You need 10 Radianite Points for each upgrade. How do you get Radianite Points?
Oh, of fucking course, by either buying Battle Passes and grinding the fuck out of them, or you straight up buy it from the Store.
20 Radianite Points costs up to $20, which is the lowest amount you can get.
So even after you spend this RIDICULOUS amount of money on gun skins, you STILL need to spend even MORE money just to get the COMPLETE version of that skin.
The whole game is like this!!
And if you wanted to buy skins separately from a bundle, you still have to pay upwards of 2600 Valorant Points. $26 for a single weapon skin?
$53 for a fucking melee weapon skin??
You want proof? Well here are some screenshots I took.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/HpPiXcAv6YfbHASQ6
https://photos.app.goo.gl/1PSVq2735MEGzrMe8
https://photos.app.goo.gl/BeW4YDNzT2uZKyTm8
Seriously, this shit alone is reason enough to say that this game is a piece of shit. If you're one of those people who spent upwards of $200 buying skins for this game, you are the reason why corporations keep doing this shit, and get away with it.
You're the type of person that caused Grand Theft Auto V for the PS5 and Xbox Series X to exist, by making Rockstar and Take Two Interactive $1 billion alone from buying Shark Cards. That is the game that you deserve.
I'm sorry but I'm taking a stand against prices like this. This is just grotesque.
And don't give me that same copy and pasted retarded as fuck statement:
"But it's a free to play game."
That is seriously a meme at this point. The game being free to play does not justify having $200+ paywalls when the game doesn't even have loot boxes. This is the kind of shit that I expect from mobile games.
Who wants to play a game only to be greeted by a paywall that is more expensive than three newly released $60 AAA games?
There is nothing that kills my motivation more and makes me want to not play a game than opening up said game only to be greeted by giant price tags being shoved right in my face.
Stop letting this horrible shit get into our core gaming Industry. I don't want another EA or Activision/Blizzard, and you shouldn't either.
I never thought I would say it but Fortnite actually did it right when it came to cosmetics. You buy a skin, which is no more expensive than 2000 V-Bucks which equals $20, but not only is it not too expensive, but there are many ways to easily earn V-Bucks so that you don't have to buy them at all.
Not to mention, if you wanted to unlock additional effects and or variations of that skin, you just had to play the game, and that's it. So what is Riot Games' excuse?
I hate Fortnite, but I have to give credit where credit is due and give the W to it. Rogue Company has much more reasonable prices as well, not to mention the skins look really fucking good in that game so yes I'm giving a W to that game as well.
[ ๐๐๐ ๐พ๐๐ผ๐๐ผ๐พ๐๐๐๐ ]
The game has a class system, each character has a different set of abilities that can change the tide of battle, along with an Ultimate ability. You've got your Fraggers, your Supports, your Defenders, etc.
This is supposed to be the main game changer opposed to CSGO. A CSGO type game but with unique characters with abilities like Overwatch.
The best of both worlds, but itโs more like double dipping your cock into a bowl of ghost pepper salsa.
There is a major problem right off the bat when you have hero shooter ability mechanics in a competitive shooter like this. No matter what, whether you nerf a character or buff a character, there will always be another character that is better than that specific person.
This game will always have balancing problems. And because of this, it creates a trend where people will mostly play meta characters.
80-90% of my matches always have me face an enemy team that has either a Sage, a Jett, a Viper, a Raze, a Kay/0, or a Reyna.
Maybe Omen or Phoenix.
And sometimes, it's a combination of all of these characters. Because these are all the best characters to play. They are the most powerful. And yet there are like, 7 other characters.
A team consisting of a Sage or a Skye, a Jett or a Viper, a Raze or a Kay/0, along with a Phoenix or an Omen is literally the most versatile team comp. It's pretty much what many teams like to run even in the Pro scene.
Like, why would you play Cypher, Breach, Astra, Sova, Brimstone, or Yoru, when you could play Sage, Raze, Viper, Phoenix, Kay/0, or Jett?
Hell, Jett alone can break the whole game because of her insanely powerful utility, being able to throw smokes, soar into the air, and dash.
And her ultimate allows her to shoot kunais and quickly dispatch enemies if you know how to aim them. And each time you kill someone they refill.
You see how stupidly overpowered Jett is?
See, this is the problem. Most players go with the latter option. They just play whatever is the meta. And while I am on the topic of abilities, I want to get into the problem with the Buy Phase.
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ผ๐๐๐๐ ]
For some fucked up reason the developers decided to increase the prices in the Buy Phase. Guns and Abilities during the Buy Phase have have either gone up in price or went down in price but these are all minor tweaks if anything. It's still difficult trying to get money.
This just makes it even harder to purchase what you need. I reach many instances where I get really frustrated with not being able to buy what I need.
If the SMGs were actually viable then it wouldn't be such an issue, but no, they're shit, and yet you are forced to use them for a large portion of the match because you need to save money for the rifles and abilities.
The rifles are expensive as shit. It's even worse when you also have to buy armor before each round starts which already takes away at least a quarter of your earnings. So you either have to buy pretty much nothing or you're always gonna be either broke or near broke.
The developers did this for balancing, to reduce the amount of ability spam. To make the game more centered around gun skill rather than utility game.
Maybe if the gunplay actually fucking worked then I could understand this. But it doesn't. So this change just comes off as vapid and tone deaf. You just made the game even more irritating to play than it already is.
And speaking of the game being irritating to play, I need to address a gigantic issue that I just don't see enough people complaining about. It is still one of the most stupefying game mechanics that results in a problem I tend to roast Rainbow Six Siege for.
[ ๐ผ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ผ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐พ๐ผ๐๐๐ผ๐ ]
I seriously can't stress enough how much of a plague game penalties are. It is the biggest example of how a game becomes less like a game and more of a Chinese sweatshop.
Basically, if you get removed from the match from being AFK or if you leave a match early, you get a penalty, in which you have to wait on a timer to reach 0 before you can play again.
Keep in mind, if you're playing with friends and at least one person has an AFK penalty timer well guess what? None of you can fucking play. You either kick that person out of your party or you can't play.
What? Why? Who fucking came up with this? This is fucking stupid, I wanna play with all of my friends! Why should people have to wait on me if I get a penalty? I already commonly go AFK as is.
See, if it was a Ranked mode like in CSGO and Siege, that is totally fine. Throwing a game and going AFK not just affects you but your team as well. If you go AFK a lot then you shouldn't be playing Ranked.
But, some dumbfuck(s) at Riot Games and Hi-Rez (the guys who made Rogue Company) decided that it was a good idea to give these timer penalties to players who get booted out of Casual matches.
Well then that just defeats the fucking purpose of Casual now does it? Why the fuck do you have both Casual and Ranked modes but if you get booted from a Casual match you still get penalized for it?
These timers can go up to a fucking hour, even two hours. Two fucking hours? Are you out of your fucking minds??
Also, if you do get penalized you can't play ANY mode for that duration of time. Not just the standard plant and defuse mode, but even modes like Deathmatch, Fracture, and Spike Rush.
So you know what that means? If you get penalized, you can't play the game. At all. So you know what you gotta do for the next hour? Either fuck around in the shooting range, do private matches (if you have anyone to play with), or you fight against bots.
Or you could just..you know..play a better fucking game instead.
Seriously, what was the thought process here?? Punishing players for going AFK and leaving Casual matches mid-session?
Why not just give players the ability to join in the middle of a match? If you have a teammate that leaves the game, why not have that person replaced with someone else?
Rainbow Six Siege does this and CSGO does this. In CSGO, if you're playing Casual or Deathmatch or Arms Race and you're having a terrible match and you're just frustrated and you don't wanna be there anymore, you should not be punished for wanting to leave.
Not to mention, going AFK should not be as much of a sin as the developers seem to think that it is. Do you have any idea how long matches last in Valorant? Upwards of 25 minutes, sometimes even 35.
You have to win 13 rounds in Valorant's Casual mode, as opposed to CSGO's Casual where you only need to win 8.
Think about how many rounds you have to play before you win. It's a minimum of 13.
Matches can fucking go on forever in this game, and yet you are expected to not have to go AFK at all. Nothing else is more important. You are either playing the game 100% or fuck you, don't play at all.
You know, I'm not sure if the developers were aware of the fact that people like me have real lives. Shit that we have to do. And yet we get punished for having to go AFK.
Again, I get Ranked, but why Casuals? And why prevent players from being able to play the game at all because of something as common as "Oh shit, hang on, I gotta do something, I'll brb."
Why not just have a vote to remove player system like in CSGO? And then have that player replaced with someone else?
Seriously, this is Marvelโs Avengers (the 2020 game) levels of fucking stupidity.
Same shit with Rogue Company. The game has both Casual and Ranked modes but going AFK in Casual modes can result in getting temporarily banned from matchmaking for at least 30 minutes, instead of just having a system where players can join matches already in progress.
Because of this AFK and throw mentality but with the only option being to surrender to the enemy team and force the match to end, it reaches a point where it's less about you and more about the game. You become the fucking game.
It's non-stop sweat all the time. And this is the same shit that I get on Siege's ass for.
[ ๐๐'๐ ๐๐๐ ๐พ๐ผ๐๐๐ผ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ]
There's never a moment in this game where you can get a chance to breathe, maybe experiment with the different characters and learn the maps.
There's no such thing as fun in Valorant. You either sweat, or you get fucked in the ass repeatedly by the enemy and get yelled at by toxic man babies on your team.
CSGO has a pretty steep learning curve. At first I didn't like the game, but as I kept playing it and I was getting better and better, I started to fully appreciate the game for what it was because of the fact that you can make the game as sweaty as you want it to be.
CSGO can be a pretty sweaty game, and yeah I can get frustrated at it sometimes, but if I get tired of one mode or lobby I can just go into another one with no punishment unless it's Competitive. It also does have that casual side to it as well. Hence there's modes like Deathmatch and Arms Race, to get you ready for Casual, and then that gets you ready for Competitive.
It's a long staircase that takes time to run up, but as you get better, you start to feel like you're on top, that you are reaching that goal.
But in Valorant, you never feel like that. Yes there are good and bad players obviously.
But if you're someone like me, someone who doesn't snort G-Fuel up your nose and inject Adderall into your throbbing erection, you never feel like you are getting better at the game, because of how broken the mechanics are. I've been playing FPS games for a good 15 years now, and Valorant makes me feel like I'm total shit.
Hence why the game is as toxic as it is. Seriously, this might be the most toxic game I've played since DayZ and Rust. And that is because of how badly designed the game is. The game fails at being a CSGO type game and it fails at being an Overwatch type game, and because of this, there is no such thing as playing the game to just have fun.
And now for the final big elephant in the room. And you probably already know about this even without playing the game. I'm talking about the infamous anti-cheat the game forces you to install.
[ ๐๐ผ๐๐๐๐ผ๐๐ฟ ๐ผ๐๐๐-๐พ๐๐๐ผ๐ ]
What I'm going to be explaining is going to sound pretty nerdy, so I apologize in advance. I'm not a software engineer, but this is based on information I read online.
So before you are even allowed to start the game you have to install the anti-cheat known as Vanguard. Basically, it requires access to Ring 0.
Basically what that means is that your operating system has different "layers", Ring 3, Ring 2, Ring 1, and then Ring 0, which is the kernel center of your computer's security.
Vanguard requires access to Ring 0, basically giving it the most amount of access to your PC. This is why Valorant requires you to restart your PC in order to finish installing it, because that's how you give software access to Ring 0.
Ring 0 is not what you should be allowing a lot of programs access to, as that is where you are the most vulnerable.
The anti-cheat runs at all times while your PC is on. It only scans your PC while you're playing Valorant.
A lot of people like to call these "root kits" which are basically backdoors for hackers to break into your PC.
How Vanguard works is that it uses an AI to scan your computer for cheating software, and would automatically ban you as soon as you try to play the game with said cheats.
Which sounds good right? Well, it's shitty for two reasons.
First of all, it can lead to players getting banned for absolutely no reason at all even though they didn't have cheats installed, because the software isn't perfect.
And second, it can be dangerous.
Vanguard itself is not dangerous, but it is potentially dangerous. And that alone was enough for me to uninstall the game after I read about this shit, because I was not going to risk having my $800+ PC rig compromised from playing this shit game.
Because there could be a situation where you are playing Valorant and a hacker decides to use the backdoor to get into your kernel, cause mayhem on your computer, and possibly steal valuable information from you.
It's like when Grand Theft Auto V first came out on PC and there was a massive security breach on the Rockstar Social Club.
Thousands upon thousands of people had their information leaked out to hackers.
Not only did they have access to people's social media accounts, bank accounts, and other critical information, but these people got locked out of their accounts meaning that they could not play the game that they just spent $60+ on, because you have to be logged into the Rockstar Social Club's servers in order to play GTA5, even for the single player, which is fucking horseshit.
Rockstar's Social Club Accounts May Be Compromised (2015)
https://www.overclock3d.net/news/software/rockstar_social_club_accounts_may_be_compromised/1
Not to mention playing GTA Online gives you the risk of hackers grabbing your IP address and whatnot simply by just being in the same lobby as you, because that is just how awful Rockstar's security and anti-cheat are.
There is an awesome video that perfectly goes in-depth about just how bad all of this is. I will leave a link if you are interested.
Gypsy - Rockstar's Dirty Little Secret
https://youtu.be/C_fdhCXlPI0
But I'm only bringing up GTA5 because well, Valorant has the same problem. It also really doesn't help that Riot Games is owned by Tencent which is one of the largest corporations in all of China.
And unless you have been living under a rock, you'll be aware that Americans are really not the biggest fans of the Chinese market.
Riot Games have claimed that they are not planning to do anything malicious with Vanguard, and yet the idea of having someone breaking into your computer just by playing the game, it's fucking horrifying. I've seen it happen.
Big companies get hacked all the time. Remember when Sony and the PlayStation Network got hacked in 2011? I'm sure a lot of people do. What if the same were to happen to Riot Games? But it's much worse because this puts your whole PC at risk.
So again, the anti-cheat itself is not dangerous per say, but it is prone to be exploited. So even if you got past literally everything I have gone through in this review, then I would hope that you are feeling at least a bit weary about this shit right here.
[ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ก ๐๐๐ค๐ช๐๐๐ฉ๐จ ]
Okay so after all of this fuckin' nonsense you get the idea of just how terrible this game is. In a nutshell, the game suffers from all of these things:
The gunplay is heavily reliant on RNG with ridiculous bullet spread, D-Sync and laggy servers, and random chances of getting headshots or headshotted
There are an insanely low amount of gimmicky maps with a shitload of angles and corners that results in a camper's paradise
The game is chock full of revolting, anti-consumer, and ridiculously overpriced monetization that has the fucking audacity to ask for even more money from you even after it already asks you to spend a fuck ton as is (upwards of $200+)
The game suffers from the infinite problem of balance because players will always play whatever the meta heroes are because it is the most viable option to do well
The developers inflate the prices of some of the guns and abilities in-game in an attempt to reduce ability spam but then stupidly forget that the gunplay is total shit
You can get AFK banned even from playing Casual modes, preventing you from being able to even play the game for very long periods of time which defeat the purpose of a Casual game mode, especially due to ridiculously long match times (25-40 minutes long)
The game isn't casual enough in which there is no such thing as just playing the game to have fun, it's non-stop sweat and toxicity all the fucking time
And to top it all off, the game forces you to download an anti-cheat that requires access to the Ring 0 kernel in your PC's security, which can serve as a potential risk for hackers to use the anti-cheat to create a backdoor to break into your computer and either damage it or steal your personal information.
You can't delete Vanguard by the way. If you delete it then you can't play Valorant, but you know what? I could give a fuck less. Because this game deserves to be thrown in the trash heap where it belongs.
Just go play CSGO for god sake. It is an infinitely better game. Go play Rainbow Six Siege, go play Verdun or Rising Storm 2 Vietnam or Squad or Enlisted or Insurgency Sandstorm, just, fuck this game.
Hell, even Standoff 2 does all of this much better than Valorant, and that's a fuckin' mobile game.
I hate this game, and I hate this company.
Funny enough, this game was actually developed by people who played CSGO professionally. And after playing this absolute shitshow of a game, it makes me grateful that I'm not a "pro" myself. Because everything in this game just comes off as gross and embarrassing.
And it doesn't take a game developer or a player in the eSports scene to expose the god awful flaws in your game.
Playing this game only just makes me appreciate other games that did all of this shit way better.
2/10
2001
2021, which is 20 entire years since this game has come out. Are you feeling old yet? Cause I sure do. I was only 5 years old when this game came out so I ended up missing out on it since I was much too young to play games like this at the time.
Silent Hill 3 is approaching that ripe ol' age as well. I plan on writing a review for that game too since I did get a physical PS2 copy as a Christmas gift a couple years ago. After beating it a couple times and finding every secret and all the content the game has to offer, I consider it one of the greatest survival horror games I have ever played.
I played Silent Hill 1 many years ago and I enjoyed that game a lot as well.
In 2011, Konami announced to the public's excitement that Silent Hill 2 and 3 would be returning in an HD Collection for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
However the first red flag was how the collection was missing Silent Hill 1 and 4 entirely, due to the fact that Tom Hullett, the guy in charge of the franchise at the time, said Silent Hill 1 wasn't included in the collection because it's a PS1 game, and that porting PS1 games to current generation hardware was "difficult."
But then he would go on and say that Silent Hill 4 wasn't included because of "how polarizing it was to the fanbase."
Right off the bat something was wrong here. Then screenshots were leaked of Silent Hill 2 HD on Twitter, around one month before the collection came out, in which Masahiro Ito, the level and monster designer of the first three Silent Hill games, responded in complete shock.
The game looked like total shit compared to the original. Then the game came out, and it all went downhill from there.
Silent Hill HD Collection is one of the most broken and disappointing releases in gaming history that not only completely disrespects both the legacy of Silent Hill 2 and 3, but also the people who worked their collective asses off creating them to make them the absolute best they can be.
I actually made an in-depth review about both Silent Hill 2 and 3 HD if you are interested. I will post a link. I go in-depth about all of the bugs, glitches, graphical errors, the awful tweaks done to the voice acting and script in Silent Hill 3, and then I go into how this collection came to be and who is responsible. It's actually become my most Hearted review on this site.
https://www.backloggd.com/u/Katiopeia/review/106209/
The reason why I am bringing all of this up is because we are in the year 2021, and the HD Collection is still the most accessible way to get your hands on Silent Hill 2 and 3, but to this day, the HD versions are buggy, broken, and unoptimized.
To this day Konami has completely abandoned the IP for many years in favor of their Silent Hill, Metal Gear, and Castlevania Pachinko machines, which are basically their Japanese slot machines. They're basically the fuckin' EA of Japan. Greed is more important than the well-being of your most beloved franchises it seems.
Many people call Silent Hill 2 the best game in the franchise, and I was desperate as shit to play it. At the time of making that HD Collection review it was literally impossible for me to get the game because I didn't have a PC, and if I wanted an original PS2 copy, I'd have to trade an arm and a leg for one.
I refused to play the HD Collection. I saw the screenshots, I read articles online, and I watched reviews and gameplay footage on YouTube but without spoiling myself from story details. I did not want my first experience to be through the HD Collection.
But, I eventually did save up money and I just decided to buy my own gaming PC this generation for reasons such as exclusives and emulation.
So after this inflated intro, after finally playing through Silent Hill 2 for the first time, when I watched those credits roll, I felt very emotional, the likes of which I hadn't felt in a long time from playing games.
I sat there at my desk in total silence, in complete amazement. I felt terrible inside that I missed out on a game like this all those years ago, and at the same time I felt a serious anger because of the fact that there are people out there who first experienced these games through the HD Collection, and to this day, Konami has never fixed this gap because of their greedy anti-consumer business practices that still persist to this very day.
I imagine the people who played HD Collection for the first time wondered what in the hell all the fuss was about all those years ago and just thought of people like me as like a bunch of idiots, and this is something that Masahiro Ito expressed on Twitter to his disappointment.
So with that being said, I will do the standard critique of the story, gameplay, presentation, etc. I won't spoil anything major if you haven't played it yet. Though I would like to talk about how insane the narrative structure to this game is.
[ ๐๐๐๐๐ (๐๐๐ฃ๐ค๐ง ๐๐ฅ๐ค๐๐ก๐๐ง๐จ) ]
Instead of Harry Mason from the first game, the protagonist of this game is James Sunderland, who arrives in Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his missing wife Mary that she is alive, waiting for him at their "special place."
Three years before this she passed away from a fatal disease, so James wonders how in the hell she could still be alive. He knows the journey is insane but goes through with it anyway, seeking answers.
At a first glance he doesn't really stand out as a very charismatic character, in fact he is very stilted, especially when compared to other video game protagonists at the time.
However, from the way that he awkwardly conversates with others, his mannerisms, his disregard for his own personal safety, even the way that he's dressed, are all signs of a damaged man that has lost pretty much everything he cared about, a person who never really came to terms with his grief and hasn't moved on.
But deep down there is a glimmer of hope, that Mary is still alive, and that alone is enough to keep James pushing on. So I as a player not only relate to James' inner struggle, but I get invested because I not only want to see the truth as well, but I want to see James succeed.
Because James is actually quite a likeable character. He is not your typical one note passive aggressive douchebag like you see with other video game characters, but his mental state does come into question.
Because at first it's difficult to tell whether or not everything that James is seeing is real; the horrifying monsters, the empty fog covered town, the characters that he meets who are just as confused and lost as he is, and memos found in the world containing very questionable descriptions.
The reason that I say this is because at one point in the game James meets a little girl named Laura, and she doesn't seem to physically see any of the monsters that he does.
And at another point he meets Maria who strikingly has the same face as Mary. The difference being that Maria has a different style of clothing, and her personality is not the same. Despite this, James actually sees his wife inside of Maria.
It's even made more apparent due to the fact that Maria shows indications that she knows more about James and Mary's relationship than what she should, and this makes her a very intriguing character.
And this brings James into question as to how sane he really is.
Which made me come to the conclusion that Silent Hill is the physical embodiment of a person's mental state. What the characters see in Silent Hill is representative of what they feel in their minds.
It's similar to the first game with Alessa, in which the Silent Hill that Mason travels through is the culmination of the everyday pain and trauma of a poor girl who has been used by an evil cult to create a god to take over the world.
Silent Hill 2 expands upon this, and I believe it's absolutely fuckin' brilliant.
Every character in this game is reflective of James in one way or another, but each of them have their own inner demons, thus they all see their own fucked up versions of Silent Hill. All of them are on their own journeys through Silent Hill. And this is what makes the characters more memorable and relatable.
This is exacerbated by the voice acting. It is very schlocky, hell it's a bit terrible in some areas. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of awkward line deliveries. This game's voice acting just reeks of a game that came out in the early 2000s or 1990s.
But, the voice acting is intentional, and that's the key word right there. Everyone speaks in a lost, terrified, or even confused manner, but that's the point.
Everyone in this game is either sad, lost, or broken in their own ways. Everyone has a depressing backstory behind them, they're just complete strangers to each other, and most of them don't even know why they're here in Silent Hill to begin with, unlike James.
This is what makes James stand out above the rest. He knows why he is in Silent Hill, it's just the question of why he sees what he does. He keeps the details about his relationship to himself. But he keeps going forward even though he knows that he could end his life.
And he does still have humanity inside of him, because you can see that he wants to help all of these hurt people.
So with all of this being said, it brings into question what the true nature of Silent Hill really is. And this is an ingenious philosophical concept from a narrative standpoint, because it makes the town itself feel like an actual character, exacerbated by the horrific atmosphere, like it has a self aware twisted consciousness, like it's alive.
And that's a scary thing to think about. Because like I said earlier, and this is what my beliefs are, is that whatever trauma or mental strain the characters have felt is what they see in Silent Hill.
When you think about it, when you take a step back and think about the when, the why, and the how, it becomes so much more grandiose than just a story about stopping an evil cult from summoning a world destroying god, or a story about finding your missing wife.
These are simple setups. But they go much farther than that, and that's what I love about these games. You play through this game and you ask yourself at least once "What in the hell is going on?"
And that's the magic question that pretty much describes this whole franchise. The intrigue, the mystery, the character development, the tragic backstories of these characters, it all comes together like that perfectly written novel by someone like Stephen King, John Saul, or Dean Koontz.
This is a story that was designed to be questioned, to be discussed, to provoke the player's mindset. It's a game meant to challenge you, and I haven't even talked about the gameplay yet. This is how you make a game's narrative interesting, stand out, and make it the center of discussion for a long time.
Because everything that I have stated so far are just my own personal opinions. This narrative is subjective among the players. You may have a completely different opinion from me about the characters and the town and the sequence of events.
You could write a book dissecting the human nature behind this game's themes, but there will always be someone who will say "yes, but what about this, this, and this?"
But that's why I like this story so much. This is why it's still talked about to this very day. It is masterfully put together.
I started off questioning the world, but as I played and I unraveled these mysteries, by the end, it was insanely satisfying, and it made me want even more context.
And the multiple endings only just add the cherry on the top of the sundae.
The story alone makes this game one of the best games ever made. This storytelling is what sets these games apart from the competition, Silent Hill 2 just stands above the rest, it just blows the Resident Evil games out of the water in that aspect.
[ ๐๐ผ๐๐๐๐๐ผ๐ ]
The gameplay on the other hand, while the game plays fine, the mechanics do work for what they are, they are very clunky, but that is to be expected from a 2001 survival horror game.
This is a third person survival shooter with fixed camera angles, although the camera does move around with the player like in Code Veronica. The game has tank controls, however you are able to turn the camera around to face James' back by just holding down the L2 button, if you want to see what's in front of you.
Also with the push of either L1 or R1, you can strafe left and right. I don't really use this because it can be awkward using this because of the tank controls and claustrophobic areas. You can't strafe shoot in this game either.
But, pushing L1 and R1 at the same time makes you do an instant 180 degree turn like in Resident Evil. Now this was very useful. I'm very glad this mechanic is also in these games.
It works perfectly for a game like this. Pushing up makes you go forward no matter which direction you are facing. Pushing down makes you go backwards, pushing left or right makes you rotate left or right. Which means that every time the camera angle changes, you don't have to reorient your movement on the control pad or thumbstick.
There are games that have this issue where the camera changes perspective but there are no tank controls, meaning now you are pushing the direction the opposite way, and it can get disorienting. You have to reconfigure your movement with each camera change. But you don't have to worry about that in any of the old Resident Evil or Silent Hill games.
Since this is a Survival Horror game, the goal is about making it out alive rather than fighting everything head on, because ammo and healing items are limited. Once you run out of resources, you're screwed. This is where the survival part comes in.
This means that every enemy encounter means that your brain has to make quick decision making. Do you waste ammo and shoot the enemy down so that you don't have to worry about them anymore? Or do you risk taking damage and running past them so you can save your ammo? But if you take too much damage you need to use healing items which are also limited.
This is a central theme in Resident Evil. However unlike in RE, Silent Hill has a much bigger emphasis on melee combat. Melee is actually a viable strategy in this game if you want to save ammo. But you should be careful since using melee is more risky than using guns. Or you could just do what I do and just run past enemies.
Avoiding enemies actually isn't that difficult in this game though don't get too comfortable cause there will be times where you have to fight to avoid taking damage, especially in the hospital with those goddamn nurses.
Speaking of enemies, man, the enemy variety in this game is goddamn astounding. They not only look terrifying but the sounds that they make actually gave me some shivers.
The acid spitting enemies are the basic enemy type but that acid does hurt. Most of the time I run past them to save ammo
I hate those goddamn cockroaches since the sounds they make just make me seriously uncomfortable
The nurses can be threatening since some of them can wield guns, fucking guns
But the best enemy in the game is the Pyramid Head. He is basically the Nemesis of Silent Hill 2 though he doesn't appear as often. Still, he stalks and attacks you throughout the whole game in some parts. He wields a gigantic axe and it doesn't have a face besides his head being a weird pyramid shape.
This guy is fucking amazing. He not only looks threatening, but the fact that he is prevalent throughout the whole game just shows how much of a great force it is.
There are a handful of different melee weapons. You first start off with a wooden plank, then you can obtain a steel pipe, a great knife, and when you beat the game you can obtain a chainsaw and a can of infinite aerosol spray in a second playthrough.
Basically, the more damage the weapon does, the more awkward it is to use. It takes James a while to swing melee weapons, you have to wait for a slight wind up animation before he swings, but it's even worse than using heavier weaponry.
The damage for the melee weapons is categorized from weakest to strongest
Wooden Plank > Steel Pipe > Great Knife > Chainsaw
So about the weapons, you only get three of them: a pistol, a shotgun, and a hunting rifle.
They all feel great to use. The sound design of the weapons is just deliciously good. The pistol is good for weaker enemies and the shotgun as you would expect is a powerhouse at close range.
The hunting rifle also has high damage and can be used at longer ranges.
Also, I find the aerosol spray to be pointless because while it can immobilize enemies for a brief amount of time, it can damage James if you use it too much.
When you use the shotgun or the rifle, you have to wait for the animation of James pulling the loading mechanism before you can move around again. This creates a gameplay strategy where you have to time your shots and get into a good position so that you don't risk yourself taking damage while you're in the middle of loading your gun.
Because unlike in other games where you seem to play as a super soldier who is deadeye accurate and reloads a gun like if they had a Call of Duty Sleight of Hand perk, Silent Hill games aren't like that.
James is not a soldier, not a police officer, or even a gun nut. James is just a regular civilian who has never had any combat experience. He has never been in a situation where he has to use a firearm or a goddamn chainsaw to defend himself.
Yes, James can miss shots, he moves around sluggishly while using a firearm, he takes a while to reload a gun. But this is all intentional.
The movement and combat mechanics are awkward and clunky.. because it's supposed to be.
That just fits James' character more.
Not to mention, James is a bit frail. It can be easy to lose a good chunk of your health in a short time if you're not careful.
For example, those basic enemies that spit acid at you, I think it only takes 2 or 3 hits from that to go from Green to Red health.
Also, the flashlight is a central mechanic since the majority of the game is set in the dark.
Although there's pretty insane attention to detail where if you have the flashlight off, James will miss even more shots, however it will be harder for enemies to see you.
I don't see why you would play with the flashlight off other than for a challenge run, but I love that this detail is in the game.
Some of the areas that you will be exploring are tight hallways in which avoiding enemy attacks can be tricky. I like to read enemy patterns and I just run as much as I can. I only fight and use up ammo if I really, really have to.
In Silent Hill 1, 2, and 3, you get infinite inventory space. You are able to pick up as many healing items, bullets, and other key items as much as you want. You may think this may break the challenge of a survival horror game, but it doesn't because there is a perfect balance of item drops, so that it doesn't feel like you can just carry 1000 rounds of ammo and 50 healing items.
This also reduces the amount of backtracking you would have to do if you had limited inventory space, so this keeps the pace of the game going.
Although there is a setting in the options menu where you can multiply the amount of ammo you can obtain, why would you do that other than for power trips?
Yeah, power trips can be fun, but I like to actually be challenged when I play a survival horror game. I mean, it's in the name, survival.
When you don't have that setting on, ammo is rare. Healing items are a bit more plentiful, but since James can take a lot of damage even on Normal difficulty, you still have to use your items wisely and conserve what you can.
So now about the difficulty, there are actually two different types of difficulty: combat and puzzle difficulty.
Puzzle difficulty is one of the greatest things to ever have graced gaming. See, I like puzzles in some games, although there can be times where a specific puzzle can be such a ball breaker that I get forced to look up guides on the internet.
And I try to look up guides as least as I can. I can't stand difficult puzzles. It's actually why I have had a hard time getting into the old Tomb Raider games, the Uncharted games, Resident Evil 1, and even Silent Hill 1. The puzzles in SH1 are legendarily difficult, requiring you to know fuckin' Shakespeare and all that nonsense in order to solve them.
And that game didn't have puzzle difficulty. Silent Hill 2 introduces this. You can select Easy, Normal, or Hard puzzles, so you can make them as easy or as hard as you want, either because you hate difficult puzzles like I do, or you're a glutton for masochism.
This is an ingenious system. More games need to have this.
In fact the customization in general is just excellent. You can choose both combat and puzzle difficulty, you can tweak how much ammo you obtain, and with the flashlight mechanic, you can basically make the game as easy or as hard as you want.
If you play any of the later editions of Silent Hill 2 you can play the Maria side story. But it's recommended that you beat James' story first as the Maria scenario contains spoilers.
Maria's story is shorter than James' however it gives more context and backstory into her character and the events that follow James' journey, which means that like I said earlier, she is an important character, with depth and weight to her personality. The fact that she gets her own scenario just shows how much the developers wanted to flesh out this character.
Maria's arsenal only consists of a powerful snub nose revolver and a butcher knife. Also, she doesn't ever get a flashlight. You would think this would be a pain in the ass because of the game being 80-90% dark, but the game does a good job at making everything bright enough that you can actually see where you're going.
Although fighting enemies without a flashlight can either make the encounter more intense or more of a pain to deal with depending on how you look at it.
[ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ผ๐๐๐๐ ]
This game reeks of an early 2000s game. Graphics wise, it has aged alright. The character models look good for 2001, though the lip syncing leaves much to be desired. And the voice acting as I mentioned earlier, it can range from pretty good to just plain terrible, but like I said, I think that was the point.
The FMV cutscenes however look really damn good, beautiful if I may say. All of the locations are just horrifying.
If I was to give a video game award for best horror atmosphere it would be these games. All the story elements that I talked about earlier really elevate the dread in these locations. Exploring some of these areas can be soul crushing because of the amazing sound design, horrific enemy design, and the darkness.
But the best part about this presentation has to be the soundtrack. Holy mother of shit, this game has one of the greatest soundtracks I have ever heard in a video game. The music evelates both the narrative and the gameplay so goddamn much.
The intro music, the cutscenes, the road to Silent Hill music, the Angela theme, the Maria theme, the bowling alley music, the hospital music, Silent Hill itself, the ending music, I love ALL of the tracks in this game.
This is Final Fantasy VI levels of goddamn brilliant in terms of music. This is one of the only times where I want to buy the official soundtrack for a game and put it up on a shelf as a collector's item, it's that good.
Akira Yamaoka, you're a damn genius composing this OST. The graphics, the voice acting, and the character models may have aged like milk stains, but this soundtrack never did.
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ผ๐? ]
Like I have said a handful of times throughout this review, avoid the HD Collection like the Black Death, that is the absolute worst way to play the game.
The only way you can play this game is to either spend $65-150 on a physical PS2 copy, emulate it on PC with a PS2 emulator, or download the PC version online.
You can safely download the PC version from this link if you're interested.
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/silent-hill-2-restless-dreams-bgd
However, the PC port of Silent Hill 2 is really buggy and unoptimized similarly to the HD Collection. Some examples would be a stretched out aspect ratio, weak fog effects, crashing issues, the FMV cutscenes being broken, the music getting stuck in a quarter second loop, and the key bindings are BEYOND appalling.
And that is where the Enhanced Edition mod comes in. Over the past 3 years or so a team of coders have created fan mods for Silent Hill 2 that both fixes and enhances the game in order to make it the definitive way to play the game. And to this day it's still being updated.
Enhances such as HD textures and backgrounds, a maximum resolution of 1440p, a fixed frame rate, modern PC key binding support, Xbox controller support, etc. These people are basically doing what Konami don't.
If you want to install this mod then here is a link.
http://www.enhanced.townofsilenthill.com/SH2/install.htm
Installing the mod is simple enough. You just download and unzip each file and then drag them into your Silent Hill 2 main folder, replacing any files in the process. Each file is displayed in order so you can keep track.
But if need be, you can check out this comprehensive guide I found on YouTube. It gets straight to the point and doesn't waste time, it even highlights just how bad the original PC port of Silent Hill 2 is.
https://youtu.be/PF1D6_shKIQ
[ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ก ๐๐๐ค๐ช๐๐๐ฉ๐จ ]
Playing this game felt like an epiphany, that gaming is just nothing like what it was back then, and it made me miss this generation of gaming. But, with the rise of indie developers, there have been games being released that attempt to replicate these old games.
Some of them good, some of them bad, but you know it's bad when the community has to step up and create something because AAA developer studios like Konami are unwilling to either because they know they're gonna fuck it up or they just don't care.
To this day the HD Collection still haunts the company, I still consider it the worst thing they have ever done, which is further elevated once you actually play these games and you realize why so many people fell in love with them back then.
Because this game should be experienced at least a couple times. This game is a masterpiece, it was far ahead of its time. If I enjoyed Silent Hill 3 so much I wasn't expecting any less from this game, but damn, this game blows Silent Hill 3 out of the water in some aspects.
Maybe, just maybe, we will get a Steam version of Silent Hill 2 and 3, since Silent Hill 4 was added to GOG. Or maybe just a better console port of these games.
But to be honest, I am not holding my breath, because I am not convinced in the slightest that Konami is capable of doing that. Think about when the HD Collection came out. It's been 10 years now and the HD Collection is still being paraded around on digital stores like a corpse, just begging to be buried in peace in a proper coffin, and then reincarnated as a newfounded being.
It's even worse when you consider that now we have emulation and fan mods for both Silent Hill 2 and 3 like Enhanced Edition, made by people who put in the legwork that Konami have neglected for so many years now, and for free might I add.
I give this game 10 Pyramid Heads out of 10.
Silent Hill 3 is approaching that ripe ol' age as well. I plan on writing a review for that game too since I did get a physical PS2 copy as a Christmas gift a couple years ago. After beating it a couple times and finding every secret and all the content the game has to offer, I consider it one of the greatest survival horror games I have ever played.
I played Silent Hill 1 many years ago and I enjoyed that game a lot as well.
In 2011, Konami announced to the public's excitement that Silent Hill 2 and 3 would be returning in an HD Collection for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
However the first red flag was how the collection was missing Silent Hill 1 and 4 entirely, due to the fact that Tom Hullett, the guy in charge of the franchise at the time, said Silent Hill 1 wasn't included in the collection because it's a PS1 game, and that porting PS1 games to current generation hardware was "difficult."
But then he would go on and say that Silent Hill 4 wasn't included because of "how polarizing it was to the fanbase."
Right off the bat something was wrong here. Then screenshots were leaked of Silent Hill 2 HD on Twitter, around one month before the collection came out, in which Masahiro Ito, the level and monster designer of the first three Silent Hill games, responded in complete shock.
The game looked like total shit compared to the original. Then the game came out, and it all went downhill from there.
Silent Hill HD Collection is one of the most broken and disappointing releases in gaming history that not only completely disrespects both the legacy of Silent Hill 2 and 3, but also the people who worked their collective asses off creating them to make them the absolute best they can be.
I actually made an in-depth review about both Silent Hill 2 and 3 HD if you are interested. I will post a link. I go in-depth about all of the bugs, glitches, graphical errors, the awful tweaks done to the voice acting and script in Silent Hill 3, and then I go into how this collection came to be and who is responsible. It's actually become my most Hearted review on this site.
https://www.backloggd.com/u/Katiopeia/review/106209/
The reason why I am bringing all of this up is because we are in the year 2021, and the HD Collection is still the most accessible way to get your hands on Silent Hill 2 and 3, but to this day, the HD versions are buggy, broken, and unoptimized.
To this day Konami has completely abandoned the IP for many years in favor of their Silent Hill, Metal Gear, and Castlevania Pachinko machines, which are basically their Japanese slot machines. They're basically the fuckin' EA of Japan. Greed is more important than the well-being of your most beloved franchises it seems.
Many people call Silent Hill 2 the best game in the franchise, and I was desperate as shit to play it. At the time of making that HD Collection review it was literally impossible for me to get the game because I didn't have a PC, and if I wanted an original PS2 copy, I'd have to trade an arm and a leg for one.
I refused to play the HD Collection. I saw the screenshots, I read articles online, and I watched reviews and gameplay footage on YouTube but without spoiling myself from story details. I did not want my first experience to be through the HD Collection.
But, I eventually did save up money and I just decided to buy my own gaming PC this generation for reasons such as exclusives and emulation.
So after this inflated intro, after finally playing through Silent Hill 2 for the first time, when I watched those credits roll, I felt very emotional, the likes of which I hadn't felt in a long time from playing games.
I sat there at my desk in total silence, in complete amazement. I felt terrible inside that I missed out on a game like this all those years ago, and at the same time I felt a serious anger because of the fact that there are people out there who first experienced these games through the HD Collection, and to this day, Konami has never fixed this gap because of their greedy anti-consumer business practices that still persist to this very day.
I imagine the people who played HD Collection for the first time wondered what in the hell all the fuss was about all those years ago and just thought of people like me as like a bunch of idiots, and this is something that Masahiro Ito expressed on Twitter to his disappointment.
So with that being said, I will do the standard critique of the story, gameplay, presentation, etc. I won't spoil anything major if you haven't played it yet. Though I would like to talk about how insane the narrative structure to this game is.
[ ๐๐๐๐๐ (๐๐๐ฃ๐ค๐ง ๐๐ฅ๐ค๐๐ก๐๐ง๐จ) ]
Instead of Harry Mason from the first game, the protagonist of this game is James Sunderland, who arrives in Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his missing wife Mary that she is alive, waiting for him at their "special place."
Three years before this she passed away from a fatal disease, so James wonders how in the hell she could still be alive. He knows the journey is insane but goes through with it anyway, seeking answers.
At a first glance he doesn't really stand out as a very charismatic character, in fact he is very stilted, especially when compared to other video game protagonists at the time.
However, from the way that he awkwardly conversates with others, his mannerisms, his disregard for his own personal safety, even the way that he's dressed, are all signs of a damaged man that has lost pretty much everything he cared about, a person who never really came to terms with his grief and hasn't moved on.
But deep down there is a glimmer of hope, that Mary is still alive, and that alone is enough to keep James pushing on. So I as a player not only relate to James' inner struggle, but I get invested because I not only want to see the truth as well, but I want to see James succeed.
Because James is actually quite a likeable character. He is not your typical one note passive aggressive douchebag like you see with other video game characters, but his mental state does come into question.
Because at first it's difficult to tell whether or not everything that James is seeing is real; the horrifying monsters, the empty fog covered town, the characters that he meets who are just as confused and lost as he is, and memos found in the world containing very questionable descriptions.
The reason that I say this is because at one point in the game James meets a little girl named Laura, and she doesn't seem to physically see any of the monsters that he does.
And at another point he meets Maria who strikingly has the same face as Mary. The difference being that Maria has a different style of clothing, and her personality is not the same. Despite this, James actually sees his wife inside of Maria.
It's even made more apparent due to the fact that Maria shows indications that she knows more about James and Mary's relationship than what she should, and this makes her a very intriguing character.
And this brings James into question as to how sane he really is.
Which made me come to the conclusion that Silent Hill is the physical embodiment of a person's mental state. What the characters see in Silent Hill is representative of what they feel in their minds.
It's similar to the first game with Alessa, in which the Silent Hill that Mason travels through is the culmination of the everyday pain and trauma of a poor girl who has been used by an evil cult to create a god to take over the world.
Silent Hill 2 expands upon this, and I believe it's absolutely fuckin' brilliant.
Every character in this game is reflective of James in one way or another, but each of them have their own inner demons, thus they all see their own fucked up versions of Silent Hill. All of them are on their own journeys through Silent Hill. And this is what makes the characters more memorable and relatable.
This is exacerbated by the voice acting. It is very schlocky, hell it's a bit terrible in some areas. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of awkward line deliveries. This game's voice acting just reeks of a game that came out in the early 2000s or 1990s.
But, the voice acting is intentional, and that's the key word right there. Everyone speaks in a lost, terrified, or even confused manner, but that's the point.
Everyone in this game is either sad, lost, or broken in their own ways. Everyone has a depressing backstory behind them, they're just complete strangers to each other, and most of them don't even know why they're here in Silent Hill to begin with, unlike James.
This is what makes James stand out above the rest. He knows why he is in Silent Hill, it's just the question of why he sees what he does. He keeps the details about his relationship to himself. But he keeps going forward even though he knows that he could end his life.
And he does still have humanity inside of him, because you can see that he wants to help all of these hurt people.
So with all of this being said, it brings into question what the true nature of Silent Hill really is. And this is an ingenious philosophical concept from a narrative standpoint, because it makes the town itself feel like an actual character, exacerbated by the horrific atmosphere, like it has a self aware twisted consciousness, like it's alive.
And that's a scary thing to think about. Because like I said earlier, and this is what my beliefs are, is that whatever trauma or mental strain the characters have felt is what they see in Silent Hill.
When you think about it, when you take a step back and think about the when, the why, and the how, it becomes so much more grandiose than just a story about stopping an evil cult from summoning a world destroying god, or a story about finding your missing wife.
These are simple setups. But they go much farther than that, and that's what I love about these games. You play through this game and you ask yourself at least once "What in the hell is going on?"
And that's the magic question that pretty much describes this whole franchise. The intrigue, the mystery, the character development, the tragic backstories of these characters, it all comes together like that perfectly written novel by someone like Stephen King, John Saul, or Dean Koontz.
This is a story that was designed to be questioned, to be discussed, to provoke the player's mindset. It's a game meant to challenge you, and I haven't even talked about the gameplay yet. This is how you make a game's narrative interesting, stand out, and make it the center of discussion for a long time.
Because everything that I have stated so far are just my own personal opinions. This narrative is subjective among the players. You may have a completely different opinion from me about the characters and the town and the sequence of events.
You could write a book dissecting the human nature behind this game's themes, but there will always be someone who will say "yes, but what about this, this, and this?"
But that's why I like this story so much. This is why it's still talked about to this very day. It is masterfully put together.
I started off questioning the world, but as I played and I unraveled these mysteries, by the end, it was insanely satisfying, and it made me want even more context.
And the multiple endings only just add the cherry on the top of the sundae.
The story alone makes this game one of the best games ever made. This storytelling is what sets these games apart from the competition, Silent Hill 2 just stands above the rest, it just blows the Resident Evil games out of the water in that aspect.
[ ๐๐ผ๐๐๐๐๐ผ๐ ]
The gameplay on the other hand, while the game plays fine, the mechanics do work for what they are, they are very clunky, but that is to be expected from a 2001 survival horror game.
This is a third person survival shooter with fixed camera angles, although the camera does move around with the player like in Code Veronica. The game has tank controls, however you are able to turn the camera around to face James' back by just holding down the L2 button, if you want to see what's in front of you.
Also with the push of either L1 or R1, you can strafe left and right. I don't really use this because it can be awkward using this because of the tank controls and claustrophobic areas. You can't strafe shoot in this game either.
But, pushing L1 and R1 at the same time makes you do an instant 180 degree turn like in Resident Evil. Now this was very useful. I'm very glad this mechanic is also in these games.
It works perfectly for a game like this. Pushing up makes you go forward no matter which direction you are facing. Pushing down makes you go backwards, pushing left or right makes you rotate left or right. Which means that every time the camera angle changes, you don't have to reorient your movement on the control pad or thumbstick.
There are games that have this issue where the camera changes perspective but there are no tank controls, meaning now you are pushing the direction the opposite way, and it can get disorienting. You have to reconfigure your movement with each camera change. But you don't have to worry about that in any of the old Resident Evil or Silent Hill games.
Since this is a Survival Horror game, the goal is about making it out alive rather than fighting everything head on, because ammo and healing items are limited. Once you run out of resources, you're screwed. This is where the survival part comes in.
This means that every enemy encounter means that your brain has to make quick decision making. Do you waste ammo and shoot the enemy down so that you don't have to worry about them anymore? Or do you risk taking damage and running past them so you can save your ammo? But if you take too much damage you need to use healing items which are also limited.
This is a central theme in Resident Evil. However unlike in RE, Silent Hill has a much bigger emphasis on melee combat. Melee is actually a viable strategy in this game if you want to save ammo. But you should be careful since using melee is more risky than using guns. Or you could just do what I do and just run past enemies.
Avoiding enemies actually isn't that difficult in this game though don't get too comfortable cause there will be times where you have to fight to avoid taking damage, especially in the hospital with those goddamn nurses.
Speaking of enemies, man, the enemy variety in this game is goddamn astounding. They not only look terrifying but the sounds that they make actually gave me some shivers.
The acid spitting enemies are the basic enemy type but that acid does hurt. Most of the time I run past them to save ammo
I hate those goddamn cockroaches since the sounds they make just make me seriously uncomfortable
The nurses can be threatening since some of them can wield guns, fucking guns
But the best enemy in the game is the Pyramid Head. He is basically the Nemesis of Silent Hill 2 though he doesn't appear as often. Still, he stalks and attacks you throughout the whole game in some parts. He wields a gigantic axe and it doesn't have a face besides his head being a weird pyramid shape.
This guy is fucking amazing. He not only looks threatening, but the fact that he is prevalent throughout the whole game just shows how much of a great force it is.
There are a handful of different melee weapons. You first start off with a wooden plank, then you can obtain a steel pipe, a great knife, and when you beat the game you can obtain a chainsaw and a can of infinite aerosol spray in a second playthrough.
Basically, the more damage the weapon does, the more awkward it is to use. It takes James a while to swing melee weapons, you have to wait for a slight wind up animation before he swings, but it's even worse than using heavier weaponry.
The damage for the melee weapons is categorized from weakest to strongest
Wooden Plank > Steel Pipe > Great Knife > Chainsaw
So about the weapons, you only get three of them: a pistol, a shotgun, and a hunting rifle.
They all feel great to use. The sound design of the weapons is just deliciously good. The pistol is good for weaker enemies and the shotgun as you would expect is a powerhouse at close range.
The hunting rifle also has high damage and can be used at longer ranges.
Also, I find the aerosol spray to be pointless because while it can immobilize enemies for a brief amount of time, it can damage James if you use it too much.
When you use the shotgun or the rifle, you have to wait for the animation of James pulling the loading mechanism before you can move around again. This creates a gameplay strategy where you have to time your shots and get into a good position so that you don't risk yourself taking damage while you're in the middle of loading your gun.
Because unlike in other games where you seem to play as a super soldier who is deadeye accurate and reloads a gun like if they had a Call of Duty Sleight of Hand perk, Silent Hill games aren't like that.
James is not a soldier, not a police officer, or even a gun nut. James is just a regular civilian who has never had any combat experience. He has never been in a situation where he has to use a firearm or a goddamn chainsaw to defend himself.
Yes, James can miss shots, he moves around sluggishly while using a firearm, he takes a while to reload a gun. But this is all intentional.
The movement and combat mechanics are awkward and clunky.. because it's supposed to be.
That just fits James' character more.
Not to mention, James is a bit frail. It can be easy to lose a good chunk of your health in a short time if you're not careful.
For example, those basic enemies that spit acid at you, I think it only takes 2 or 3 hits from that to go from Green to Red health.
Also, the flashlight is a central mechanic since the majority of the game is set in the dark.
Although there's pretty insane attention to detail where if you have the flashlight off, James will miss even more shots, however it will be harder for enemies to see you.
I don't see why you would play with the flashlight off other than for a challenge run, but I love that this detail is in the game.
Some of the areas that you will be exploring are tight hallways in which avoiding enemy attacks can be tricky. I like to read enemy patterns and I just run as much as I can. I only fight and use up ammo if I really, really have to.
In Silent Hill 1, 2, and 3, you get infinite inventory space. You are able to pick up as many healing items, bullets, and other key items as much as you want. You may think this may break the challenge of a survival horror game, but it doesn't because there is a perfect balance of item drops, so that it doesn't feel like you can just carry 1000 rounds of ammo and 50 healing items.
This also reduces the amount of backtracking you would have to do if you had limited inventory space, so this keeps the pace of the game going.
Although there is a setting in the options menu where you can multiply the amount of ammo you can obtain, why would you do that other than for power trips?
Yeah, power trips can be fun, but I like to actually be challenged when I play a survival horror game. I mean, it's in the name, survival.
When you don't have that setting on, ammo is rare. Healing items are a bit more plentiful, but since James can take a lot of damage even on Normal difficulty, you still have to use your items wisely and conserve what you can.
So now about the difficulty, there are actually two different types of difficulty: combat and puzzle difficulty.
Puzzle difficulty is one of the greatest things to ever have graced gaming. See, I like puzzles in some games, although there can be times where a specific puzzle can be such a ball breaker that I get forced to look up guides on the internet.
And I try to look up guides as least as I can. I can't stand difficult puzzles. It's actually why I have had a hard time getting into the old Tomb Raider games, the Uncharted games, Resident Evil 1, and even Silent Hill 1. The puzzles in SH1 are legendarily difficult, requiring you to know fuckin' Shakespeare and all that nonsense in order to solve them.
And that game didn't have puzzle difficulty. Silent Hill 2 introduces this. You can select Easy, Normal, or Hard puzzles, so you can make them as easy or as hard as you want, either because you hate difficult puzzles like I do, or you're a glutton for masochism.
This is an ingenious system. More games need to have this.
In fact the customization in general is just excellent. You can choose both combat and puzzle difficulty, you can tweak how much ammo you obtain, and with the flashlight mechanic, you can basically make the game as easy or as hard as you want.
If you play any of the later editions of Silent Hill 2 you can play the Maria side story. But it's recommended that you beat James' story first as the Maria scenario contains spoilers.
Maria's story is shorter than James' however it gives more context and backstory into her character and the events that follow James' journey, which means that like I said earlier, she is an important character, with depth and weight to her personality. The fact that she gets her own scenario just shows how much the developers wanted to flesh out this character.
Maria's arsenal only consists of a powerful snub nose revolver and a butcher knife. Also, she doesn't ever get a flashlight. You would think this would be a pain in the ass because of the game being 80-90% dark, but the game does a good job at making everything bright enough that you can actually see where you're going.
Although fighting enemies without a flashlight can either make the encounter more intense or more of a pain to deal with depending on how you look at it.
[ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ผ๐๐๐๐ ]
This game reeks of an early 2000s game. Graphics wise, it has aged alright. The character models look good for 2001, though the lip syncing leaves much to be desired. And the voice acting as I mentioned earlier, it can range from pretty good to just plain terrible, but like I said, I think that was the point.
The FMV cutscenes however look really damn good, beautiful if I may say. All of the locations are just horrifying.
If I was to give a video game award for best horror atmosphere it would be these games. All the story elements that I talked about earlier really elevate the dread in these locations. Exploring some of these areas can be soul crushing because of the amazing sound design, horrific enemy design, and the darkness.
But the best part about this presentation has to be the soundtrack. Holy mother of shit, this game has one of the greatest soundtracks I have ever heard in a video game. The music evelates both the narrative and the gameplay so goddamn much.
The intro music, the cutscenes, the road to Silent Hill music, the Angela theme, the Maria theme, the bowling alley music, the hospital music, Silent Hill itself, the ending music, I love ALL of the tracks in this game.
This is Final Fantasy VI levels of goddamn brilliant in terms of music. This is one of the only times where I want to buy the official soundtrack for a game and put it up on a shelf as a collector's item, it's that good.
Akira Yamaoka, you're a damn genius composing this OST. The graphics, the voice acting, and the character models may have aged like milk stains, but this soundtrack never did.
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ผ๐? ]
Like I have said a handful of times throughout this review, avoid the HD Collection like the Black Death, that is the absolute worst way to play the game.
The only way you can play this game is to either spend $65-150 on a physical PS2 copy, emulate it on PC with a PS2 emulator, or download the PC version online.
You can safely download the PC version from this link if you're interested.
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/silent-hill-2-restless-dreams-bgd
However, the PC port of Silent Hill 2 is really buggy and unoptimized similarly to the HD Collection. Some examples would be a stretched out aspect ratio, weak fog effects, crashing issues, the FMV cutscenes being broken, the music getting stuck in a quarter second loop, and the key bindings are BEYOND appalling.
And that is where the Enhanced Edition mod comes in. Over the past 3 years or so a team of coders have created fan mods for Silent Hill 2 that both fixes and enhances the game in order to make it the definitive way to play the game. And to this day it's still being updated.
Enhances such as HD textures and backgrounds, a maximum resolution of 1440p, a fixed frame rate, modern PC key binding support, Xbox controller support, etc. These people are basically doing what Konami don't.
If you want to install this mod then here is a link.
http://www.enhanced.townofsilenthill.com/SH2/install.htm
Installing the mod is simple enough. You just download and unzip each file and then drag them into your Silent Hill 2 main folder, replacing any files in the process. Each file is displayed in order so you can keep track.
But if need be, you can check out this comprehensive guide I found on YouTube. It gets straight to the point and doesn't waste time, it even highlights just how bad the original PC port of Silent Hill 2 is.
https://youtu.be/PF1D6_shKIQ
[ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ก ๐๐๐ค๐ช๐๐๐ฉ๐จ ]
Playing this game felt like an epiphany, that gaming is just nothing like what it was back then, and it made me miss this generation of gaming. But, with the rise of indie developers, there have been games being released that attempt to replicate these old games.
Some of them good, some of them bad, but you know it's bad when the community has to step up and create something because AAA developer studios like Konami are unwilling to either because they know they're gonna fuck it up or they just don't care.
To this day the HD Collection still haunts the company, I still consider it the worst thing they have ever done, which is further elevated once you actually play these games and you realize why so many people fell in love with them back then.
Because this game should be experienced at least a couple times. This game is a masterpiece, it was far ahead of its time. If I enjoyed Silent Hill 3 so much I wasn't expecting any less from this game, but damn, this game blows Silent Hill 3 out of the water in some aspects.
Maybe, just maybe, we will get a Steam version of Silent Hill 2 and 3, since Silent Hill 4 was added to GOG. Or maybe just a better console port of these games.
But to be honest, I am not holding my breath, because I am not convinced in the slightest that Konami is capable of doing that. Think about when the HD Collection came out. It's been 10 years now and the HD Collection is still being paraded around on digital stores like a corpse, just begging to be buried in peace in a proper coffin, and then reincarnated as a newfounded being.
It's even worse when you consider that now we have emulation and fan mods for both Silent Hill 2 and 3 like Enhanced Edition, made by people who put in the legwork that Konami have neglected for so many years now, and for free might I add.
I give this game 10 Pyramid Heads out of 10.
I have some insanely conflicting feelings about this game. There are some amazing aspects to this game but at the same time has issues that are so prevalent that it's preventing me from fully enjoying it. I both love and fucking can't stand this game at times. The more I played it the more it burned me out.
I only just started playing this game like a week ago, and as a first timer, this game was fuckin' painful to get though and I'll explain why.
But just to be fair, I'll start with the great things about this game.
{ The Very Noticably Good }
The soundtrack is fuckin' orgasmic for the ears. This game has some of the best music I've ever heard in a Super Nintendo game. I could listen to this music for hours. The SNES is an absolute powerhouse in terms of sound. There is something about this era of video game music that is just timeless.
There isn't a single track I dislike in this game. I also love how almost every stage has a different track. And there is also a different song that plays whenever you die, depending on the stage you're playing on. There is so much variety. Once I got to Krazy Kremland I started humming the music as I was playing, it was so goddamn addictive. The music makes up half of these older games.
This is also one of the best looking games on the system. I find it hard to believe that they even managed to make a game look this fantastic on a 4-6 MB cartridge.
This game is so good graphically that it could pass as a mid era PS1 game. All of the character sprites remind me of the old Mortal Kombat games where all of the sprites are just digitized actors. The animations are excellent and the backdrops look absolutely amazing, and so rich in detail. This is one of those games that should be in an art museum, it's that beautiful.
The controls also work fine. They do the job and are quite responsive. Moving around and platforming is very swift and I feel like I'm in control at all times. There doesn't feel like there is a moment where I get screwed over because of the controls, no, there are other reasons why.
{ The Very Noticably Bad }
The biggest reason why it's so difficult for me to fully enjoy this game is two words:
SCREEN. CRUNCH.
The camera is so zoomed in that it's insanely difficult to know what is coming up ahead, so many times I end up running right into enemies like a complete dumbass. This game is just not meant to be rushed through. And yet there are many, many moments through the game where you HAVE to rush and go fast. The only way to know what is coming up ahead is if you have played the stage over, and over, and over again, dying repeatedly in the process.
The mine cart levels are just painful. Because many jumps require pixel perfect accuracy and you only have a fraction of a second to react. Dying in these levels are just very easy. Trial and error and resetting your save file is the only way to get good at these levels.
Because if you run out of lives, it's not like other games where you just restart the level from the beginning, no, you have to reload your save file and just hope to God that you don't run out of lives on your pilgrimage to the next save area.
I like difficult games. Hell, I've pretty much mastered the first 7 Mega Man games, and those games are known for being hard. But the devs of this game went way too far with this. The difficulty in this game is legendary.
The first two Worlds aren't that bad, but once you get to Krazy Kremland, the difficulty spikes up so hard that it feels like a completely different development team designed these levels.
Enemies and obstacles that you can't see coming until it's too late, only one checkpoint per level and it's at the halfway mark, unkillable enemies spammed repeatedly throughout the level like those goddamn hornets, having to know how to jump higher off of enemies, and other things like having to know all the controls for each of the Animal Buddies.
If you're playing this game for the first time, like, emulating it like I did, I hope you looked up the instruction manual and looked at all the controls in this game. Because this is one of those games where you're not told any of the controls. You just gotta figure out everything yourself and know all the mechanics of each of the Animal Buddies.
Like pushing A and Up or Down to fly higher or lower much faster with Squawks, and, holding A before you land on an enemy to go three times higher as Rattly the Rattlesnake, and, pushing A and then pushing A again to make platforms with Squitter the Spider, and that you can push Down and A to make platforms below you, and that you can jump and push L + R to make an instant platform higher above.
These are things that you have to know in order to make getting through each stage so much easier. There are obstacles in the later stages where you need to have this prior knowledge to get past them.
The enemy placements in a lot of these levels are just atrocious. Some stages just relentlessly spam enemies at you and I feel like many of my deaths are just out of my control because of again, the scrunched up camera and not knowing that I need to know specific controls to get through certain obstacles.
And getting a Game Over can just be the absolute worst feeling ever because you gotta do all of that progress all over again, bosses and all.
And speaking of bosses, Jesus fucking Christ, the bosses in this game are just brutal. Again, the first couple bosses are not hard. But once you get to Krazy Kremland, the bosses are so unforgiving that it's straight up sadistic.
The Hornet King boss was the absolute worst. I can't tell you how many times I died on that guy because he flies around the stage and you have to shoot him with Squawk's eggs, but there are two major problems.
1: You can only damage the boss by hitting the stinger, yes, the fucking STINGER
And 2: The eggs travel at an arc, making hitting the damn thing even harder than it needs to be
Not to mention you have to hit him EIGHT times and each time you hit him he flies faster and faster. And you only get two hits to do this, you don't get any more DK barrels.
This boss drove me fucking mad. I must have died at least 30 times on this fight. It got to the point that I had to force myself to use Save States, because I was not putting up with another 20+ minutes of progress just to get back to where I got a Game Over.
Then there is the boss fight where you fight the ghost of the Pirate Vulture from the first World.
It's simple enough but what makes it so brutal is the fact you have to climb up ropes while dodging falling eggs, and you only get like, a fraction of a second to react and get out of the way. Again, I've died around 20 times on this shit alone. And again, you only get two hits. No DK barrels throughout.
The most successful way was to just go as fast as I could and hope to God I don't get hit, and just abuse the invincibility frames whenever I had the chance. Either way, I ended up using Save States.
In fact this game pretty much forced me to use them whenever I felt like I needed to. And that sucks. I shouldn't have to do that shit.
A game shouldn't have to force the player to use cheat codes or Save States in order to make progress, but without Save States, I doubt that I could have even finished this game. This game was so brutal that I can't tell if that's by design or lack thereof.
The camera really does plague a large portion of the stages and bosses in this game.
I find it hard to believe that this game was marketed towards children in the 90s and it is this difficult. Imagine being a kid in the 90s and you jumped into this game or the first Donkey Kong Country game completely blind and you didn't have Save States.
I know that you can get a handful of extra lives from the game show stages but even then, it's not enough.
You would think that after the first Donkey Kong Country game that there would have been some more regard towards children, hell even as an adult these games are insane. This is definitely one of the toughest platformers I've played in a very long time. And I've played Rayman 1, Mega Man 9, Mega Man X3, Mega Man X6, Super Meat Boy, Celeste, Cuphead, etc.
But at least with those games, if you die you just start from a checkpoint and they're frequent enough to be acceptable, and if you get a Game Over you just start the stage over. Well, except Rayman 1. I never finished that game either.
And then there are the Lost Levels. They're the hardest levels in the game, obviously, but they just put front and center all of the issues that I have with this game. There is so much precision involved that it feels like I get lucky if I even manage to beat them.
{ Final Thoughts }
This game is better than the first DKC game there is no doubt about that. That game is even more difficult than DKC2, so I can only imagine the insane amount of rage that game must have caused back then.
But even then, rarely have I played a game like this that has made me just want to drop the controller and call it a day. I play games to have a fun, not to have an excuse to break a fuckin' monitor. I understand if you like or even love this game, all the power to you.
But for a first timers, I don't see how you can enjoy this game that much without the use of Save States or an Extra Life code. Maybe it would have grown on me the more I played it, but after beating the game, I haven't really looked back at it, and that is not really a good sign.
The music is orgasmic, the graphics are stunning for a SNES game, the sound effects are great, and the controls work good for what they are.
But the awful camera, the bad enemy placements, the lack of checkpoints, bosses being hit sponges meanwhile you only have two hits yourself to get it done in one go, and having to restart from your last save upon getting a Game Over can make the game just infuriating to play without the use of Save States.
The difficulty spiking once you get to Krazy Kremland is so severe that I imagine kids back then had to just drop the game because they couldn't finish it.
Overall I just feel very mixed about this game.
6/10
I only just started playing this game like a week ago, and as a first timer, this game was fuckin' painful to get though and I'll explain why.
But just to be fair, I'll start with the great things about this game.
{ The Very Noticably Good }
The soundtrack is fuckin' orgasmic for the ears. This game has some of the best music I've ever heard in a Super Nintendo game. I could listen to this music for hours. The SNES is an absolute powerhouse in terms of sound. There is something about this era of video game music that is just timeless.
There isn't a single track I dislike in this game. I also love how almost every stage has a different track. And there is also a different song that plays whenever you die, depending on the stage you're playing on. There is so much variety. Once I got to Krazy Kremland I started humming the music as I was playing, it was so goddamn addictive. The music makes up half of these older games.
This is also one of the best looking games on the system. I find it hard to believe that they even managed to make a game look this fantastic on a 4-6 MB cartridge.
This game is so good graphically that it could pass as a mid era PS1 game. All of the character sprites remind me of the old Mortal Kombat games where all of the sprites are just digitized actors. The animations are excellent and the backdrops look absolutely amazing, and so rich in detail. This is one of those games that should be in an art museum, it's that beautiful.
The controls also work fine. They do the job and are quite responsive. Moving around and platforming is very swift and I feel like I'm in control at all times. There doesn't feel like there is a moment where I get screwed over because of the controls, no, there are other reasons why.
{ The Very Noticably Bad }
The biggest reason why it's so difficult for me to fully enjoy this game is two words:
SCREEN. CRUNCH.
The camera is so zoomed in that it's insanely difficult to know what is coming up ahead, so many times I end up running right into enemies like a complete dumbass. This game is just not meant to be rushed through. And yet there are many, many moments through the game where you HAVE to rush and go fast. The only way to know what is coming up ahead is if you have played the stage over, and over, and over again, dying repeatedly in the process.
The mine cart levels are just painful. Because many jumps require pixel perfect accuracy and you only have a fraction of a second to react. Dying in these levels are just very easy. Trial and error and resetting your save file is the only way to get good at these levels.
Because if you run out of lives, it's not like other games where you just restart the level from the beginning, no, you have to reload your save file and just hope to God that you don't run out of lives on your pilgrimage to the next save area.
I like difficult games. Hell, I've pretty much mastered the first 7 Mega Man games, and those games are known for being hard. But the devs of this game went way too far with this. The difficulty in this game is legendary.
The first two Worlds aren't that bad, but once you get to Krazy Kremland, the difficulty spikes up so hard that it feels like a completely different development team designed these levels.
Enemies and obstacles that you can't see coming until it's too late, only one checkpoint per level and it's at the halfway mark, unkillable enemies spammed repeatedly throughout the level like those goddamn hornets, having to know how to jump higher off of enemies, and other things like having to know all the controls for each of the Animal Buddies.
If you're playing this game for the first time, like, emulating it like I did, I hope you looked up the instruction manual and looked at all the controls in this game. Because this is one of those games where you're not told any of the controls. You just gotta figure out everything yourself and know all the mechanics of each of the Animal Buddies.
Like pushing A and Up or Down to fly higher or lower much faster with Squawks, and, holding A before you land on an enemy to go three times higher as Rattly the Rattlesnake, and, pushing A and then pushing A again to make platforms with Squitter the Spider, and that you can push Down and A to make platforms below you, and that you can jump and push L + R to make an instant platform higher above.
These are things that you have to know in order to make getting through each stage so much easier. There are obstacles in the later stages where you need to have this prior knowledge to get past them.
The enemy placements in a lot of these levels are just atrocious. Some stages just relentlessly spam enemies at you and I feel like many of my deaths are just out of my control because of again, the scrunched up camera and not knowing that I need to know specific controls to get through certain obstacles.
And getting a Game Over can just be the absolute worst feeling ever because you gotta do all of that progress all over again, bosses and all.
And speaking of bosses, Jesus fucking Christ, the bosses in this game are just brutal. Again, the first couple bosses are not hard. But once you get to Krazy Kremland, the bosses are so unforgiving that it's straight up sadistic.
The Hornet King boss was the absolute worst. I can't tell you how many times I died on that guy because he flies around the stage and you have to shoot him with Squawk's eggs, but there are two major problems.
1: You can only damage the boss by hitting the stinger, yes, the fucking STINGER
And 2: The eggs travel at an arc, making hitting the damn thing even harder than it needs to be
Not to mention you have to hit him EIGHT times and each time you hit him he flies faster and faster. And you only get two hits to do this, you don't get any more DK barrels.
This boss drove me fucking mad. I must have died at least 30 times on this fight. It got to the point that I had to force myself to use Save States, because I was not putting up with another 20+ minutes of progress just to get back to where I got a Game Over.
Then there is the boss fight where you fight the ghost of the Pirate Vulture from the first World.
It's simple enough but what makes it so brutal is the fact you have to climb up ropes while dodging falling eggs, and you only get like, a fraction of a second to react and get out of the way. Again, I've died around 20 times on this shit alone. And again, you only get two hits. No DK barrels throughout.
The most successful way was to just go as fast as I could and hope to God I don't get hit, and just abuse the invincibility frames whenever I had the chance. Either way, I ended up using Save States.
In fact this game pretty much forced me to use them whenever I felt like I needed to. And that sucks. I shouldn't have to do that shit.
A game shouldn't have to force the player to use cheat codes or Save States in order to make progress, but without Save States, I doubt that I could have even finished this game. This game was so brutal that I can't tell if that's by design or lack thereof.
The camera really does plague a large portion of the stages and bosses in this game.
I find it hard to believe that this game was marketed towards children in the 90s and it is this difficult. Imagine being a kid in the 90s and you jumped into this game or the first Donkey Kong Country game completely blind and you didn't have Save States.
I know that you can get a handful of extra lives from the game show stages but even then, it's not enough.
You would think that after the first Donkey Kong Country game that there would have been some more regard towards children, hell even as an adult these games are insane. This is definitely one of the toughest platformers I've played in a very long time. And I've played Rayman 1, Mega Man 9, Mega Man X3, Mega Man X6, Super Meat Boy, Celeste, Cuphead, etc.
But at least with those games, if you die you just start from a checkpoint and they're frequent enough to be acceptable, and if you get a Game Over you just start the stage over. Well, except Rayman 1. I never finished that game either.
And then there are the Lost Levels. They're the hardest levels in the game, obviously, but they just put front and center all of the issues that I have with this game. There is so much precision involved that it feels like I get lucky if I even manage to beat them.
{ Final Thoughts }
This game is better than the first DKC game there is no doubt about that. That game is even more difficult than DKC2, so I can only imagine the insane amount of rage that game must have caused back then.
But even then, rarely have I played a game like this that has made me just want to drop the controller and call it a day. I play games to have a fun, not to have an excuse to break a fuckin' monitor. I understand if you like or even love this game, all the power to you.
But for a first timers, I don't see how you can enjoy this game that much without the use of Save States or an Extra Life code. Maybe it would have grown on me the more I played it, but after beating the game, I haven't really looked back at it, and that is not really a good sign.
The music is orgasmic, the graphics are stunning for a SNES game, the sound effects are great, and the controls work good for what they are.
But the awful camera, the bad enemy placements, the lack of checkpoints, bosses being hit sponges meanwhile you only have two hits yourself to get it done in one go, and having to restart from your last save upon getting a Game Over can make the game just infuriating to play without the use of Save States.
The difficulty spiking once you get to Krazy Kremland is so severe that I imagine kids back then had to just drop the game because they couldn't finish it.
Overall I just feel very mixed about this game.
6/10
This review contains spoilers
[Spoiler Warning oh who gives a shit]
You know, when I write reviews for bad games, I like to make funny jokes just to spice it up instead of just being totally bleak the whole way through. But, I can't do that here. I'm just so angry that words cannot possibly describe the mental anguish, grief, and sheer dumbfounding disbelief that a game like this has costed me.
Just a bit of context, I am a huge fan of the original Last of Us. Huge is an understatement. It is my favorite video game of all time next to games like Final Fantasy VI and Metal Gear Solid 3, it's #1 on my top 5 favorite games of all time. The impact that the game has left on me when I was a teenager and how it taught me many important life lessons and carried me through some of the most depressing times of my life during my high school days, it cannot be underestimated.
I am now 24 years old and I still believe that The Last of Us 1 is truly lightning in a bottle, a game that cannot be replicated the same way Naughty Dog did all those years ago. I love the game so much that I got the platinum trophy for the game not once, but twice, and have spent a minimum of 500 hours on the Factions Multiplayer. That's how much I couldn't get enough of it. I've played all of Naughty Dog's games since the original Crash Bandicoot on the PS1, they've been my all-time favorite video game company, and to think that a single game could have made them fall from grace this much, it's truly heartbreaking and it has majorly affected me as a gamer. I don't get hyped for games anymore because of this. That and Cyberpunk 2077.
Which is why it is so painful to write a review for the sequel. When it was revealed in 2016 I was literally crying. I was more hyped for that game than any other. I bought my PS4 for the remaster of The Last of Us 1 and was damn ready for Part II. It's not a perfect game but it is MY perfect game, so I was expecting the sequel to not be able to surpass it. I mean, the first game was so masterfully crafted, how could the sequel surpass it anyway? Even then, I was at least expecting it to be a fantastic fuckin' game and not what we ended up getting.
How did we end up going from The Last of Us 1 which got 9/10s and 10/10s across the board across every gaming site from fans to The Last of Us 2 which had a User Score of 3.3 at launch on Metacritic? COUGH I mean Betacritic since they disabled the ability to write negative reviews which raised the aggregate User Score to a 5.7 because they have certain "priorities" to uphold.
This shit truly blows my mind and is something that I will never forget. This whole fiasco is such a shitshow that it's giving me flashbacks of god awful games and movies like Fallout 76, Star Wars The Last Jedi, Game of Thrones Season 8, Ride to Hell Retribution, the final season of Breaking Bad, Captain Marvel, Batwoman, Silent Hill HD Collection, Metal Gear Survive, and Battlefield 5.
The majority of these games, movies, and TV shows have absolutely BUTCHERED their respective IPs and franchises, and The Last of Us has also fallen victim to this ongoing trend. It's like the beginning of the end of entertainment as we know it.
The Last of Us Part 2 is one of the most, if not, the most miserable, anti-consumer, self-indulgent, incoherent, preachy, cowardly, soulless, manipulative, misleading, and downright offensive games I have ever played and witnessed in my entire life. I can't believe this game was even made, and most others believe the same way since they don't even acknowledge that this game is canon to the franchise.
This game has created such a disconnect between the gamers, game journalists, and the developers themselves that it has created one of the greatest onslaught of memes, hate videos, and the biggest drop in sales for a game one week after launch I have ever witnessed, and it is both brutal and hilarious. Naughty Dog and Directors Neil Drukkman and Haley Gross should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for taking everything that people loved for the past seven years and completely obliterating it.
And this is why people are stepping away from these woke SJW trash companies like IGN, Gamespot, Polygon, Kotaku, etc. and they're moving onto YouTube personalities instead for reliable information and reviews, because a good chunk of em' don't follow a bias and will tell you what you should be knowing, and don't praise a game because it has woke inclusion in it for the sake of pandering.
I don't consider the average YouTuber to be professional by any means, at least in the way that you might be thinking, but for god sake, these game journalists are not even real gamers, they're fuckin' activists. In reality, they hate video games and the people that play and support them. They're not about covering games, they only care for the diversity and inclusion box ticking. That and free early access review copies along with advertising revenue.
The review process and embargo for gaming access is absolutely broken, and there should be changes. All the way until launch you were not allowed to talk about anything involving Joel, Abby, the ending, etc.
Which is like half of the entire game.
This might be the longest review for a game I will ever write, even longer than my Cyberpunk 2077 review, but if you're reading all of this, I thank you.
[STORY]
Joel, our most beloved character dies only 2 hours into the game. And this game is 25-30 hours long. Let's do a calculation really quick.
2 out of 25 as a percentage is 8..
2 out of 30 as a percentage is 6.66...
Are you telling me that out of this 25-30 hour game, Joel is alive 6-8% of the entire game, not including the flashback sequences? Are you fucking kidding me???
Why is the character that we bonded so much with in the first game dies only two hours into Part 2, and he is only playable for FIVE MINUTES in the introduction on horseback?? How can you even call this a Last of Us game without Joel and Ellie? The whole point of the first game is about them, as well as the surrounding characters that support them throughout their journey. But if you don't have Joel and Ellie together like you did before, the game will just lose its purpose, weight, and most of all, investment.
The moment you killed off Joel so abruptly, you created a huge disconnect with the player, and as a result, the game just becomes boring, and it lacks the depth and soul that the first game had.
See, Joel dying as a concept is not a bad idea. In fact, I actually did think before the game came out that he was going to die. But the way they handled it was just so rushed, so forced, so nonsensical, and it had no agency to it. It just comes out of the blue and we just have to deal with it.
Joel's established character from the first game, hell even Tommy's character was dumbed down severely for the sake of being put into a position to be easily ambushed in order to push the plot forward, because there is no way that a scenario like this would happen in the previous game. And there is a reason for this. Joel is less like a character in this game and more like a plot device to drive Ellie's story arc.
The Last of Us 2 became about identity politics instead of moral dilemmas. This game is a werewolf crossed with a Social Justice Warrior. People in the game were arbitrarily good or bad depending on their gender, their sexual orientation, or their views on the world.
The bigot sandwich scene comes to mind. It's only 10 minutes into the game and it was one of the dumbest scenes I've seen in a very long time.
Ellie gets into a dispute with this guy named Seth because of the fact that she is in love with Dina and the two of them have a dance and make out, and Seth calls Ellie a dyke, which is a derogatory term for lesbian.
But it was only because he was drunk and he had no control over what he said, so the next day he tries to make it up to Ellie by making her some sandwiches to take with her on her scouting mission, but instead of accepting his peace offering, she calls him a bigot and just gives the food to Jessie.
Uh, what the fuck?? Okay, first of all, who the fuck says the word "bigot" 25 years into an apocalypse? And furthermore, how did Ellie not know what an ice cream truck was in the first Last of Us game, but in this game she knows what the word bigot means?
In the first game Ellie didn't even know how to whistle for god sake. Now I'm supposed to to believe that she is knowledgeable on bigotry?? Who the fuck would even teach her that?
I guess it would seem that cancel culture is alive and well in a world like this.
Not to mention, this is the APOCOLYPSE. Food and resources are scarce as fuck in times like these. You wouldn't normally just reject something like food when food like that is very fucking hard to come by. Ellie was forced to eat human flesh in the first game, but I guess now politics are more important.
I don't care if he called you the D word, just take the goddamn sandwiches!
My god. And I'm only just getting started.
Naughty Dog retconed the living shit out the first game just so they could cuck Joel and Ellie and antagonize them.
The marketing of this game flat out lied to you. Naughty Dog actually pulled a Cyberpunk and faked all of their trailers. They pulled a bait and switch and actually swapped out character models in the trailers to make it look like we were going to get another Joel and Ellie journey, so that they could sell more copies when the game came out.
This is some of the most evil shit I have ever seen a company do. They fooled everyone with this deceptive advertising, which makes me wonder why CD Projekt Red are getting such an incredible amount of shit from both gamers and their shareholders, with lawsuits, stock plummets, and their company getting straight up hacked and having their games being held up for ransom, but Sony and Naughty Dog gets to walk away unscathed. Seriously, not even EA or Activision have pulled a troll move on this caliber.
Naughty Dog hid important story details and faked their trailers because they knew that what they did to Joel and Ellie in this game was fucking despicable. They kill off Joel a couple hours into the game, they tell us that everything he did in the first game was objectively wrong despite how players felt about it, they treat him like shit in the flashback sequences, they demoralize him throughout the whole game, they did him dirty. Big time.
Ellie isn't any better. She is nothing like she was in the first game. In the first game she was funny, witty, sarcastic, caring, and just an overall loveable person, and also showed signs of weakness despite being a very tough girl. She had as much character as Joel did. I loved Ellie the same way that I loved Joel, that's why the first game worked so well.
But then in the second game, Ellie is entitled, ungrateful, edgy, tryhard, whiny, sadistic, idiotic, and just straight up evil. What in the living fuck did you guys do to Ellie in this game?? I get that this game is supposed to be darker with Joel dying and whatnot, but Ellie is just so unrelatable in this game, and the shit that she does in this game lacks all sense of rhyme or reason, most of which has nothing to do with Joel's death.
Ellie is mad at Joel for lying about the Fireflies so that he could save her, but what Ellie neglects is the fact that not only is it actually fucking impossible to create a vaccine for a fungal infection, and also, what makes Ellie think that the Fireflies aren't just a group of terrorists that were willing to kill a 14 year old for the sake of having the POTENTIAL to get a cure? Joel knows this. And that's why he saved her, not just because he has grown attached to her like he did with Sarah.
But regardless, Ellie acts like a shitty ungrateful asshole to Joel until the day that he actually dies, which is just so fucking unpleasant and you can't help but feel awful for Joel. Joel saves her life numerous times only to be told by Ellie that she doesn't need his help anymore. How utterly disgusting.. What did you guys do to Ellie??
Going back to Joel and Ellie being together, you can't have a Last of Us game with just Joel, and you can't have a Last of Us game with just Ellie. You need to have both. But then Neil Drukkman and Anita Sarkeesian come along with the sequel and are all like "Hey, we want Joel to not have any of the qualities that he had in the first game. We want his reputation burned to the ground and his credibility destroyed within the two hours of the game, and throughout the rest of the game we will continue to demonize both him and Ellie while making a trans friendly character named Abby into the new protagonist and make her look like the good person in comparison."
"Oh, and this Abby person is gonna kill Joel by the way. He saves her life a few times from infected, and she is going to return the favor by blowing off his knee cap with a shotgun, torture him, and then smash his skull in with a golf club, because Joel killed her father at the end of the first game when he saved Ellie from being sacrificed so humanity could MAYBE get a cure."
A cure for a fungal infection..that never existed before the apocalypse..and never will exist...and won't fix how fucked up the world has become with bandits and faction groups at war with each other....
Oh, and Abby's father was just a random NPC in the first game...and he was black...now he is white...
Oh my god my brain. Who thought that this was a good idea? Was no one man enough to step up and say "Neil, what the fuck are you doing? Do you realize that this makes absolutely no sense what so ever and is insanely cliche?"
Oh right, of course no one would speak up, out of fear of losing their job and being shit talked by other developers and higher ups.
This is just absolutely awful, and I feel awful just for witnessing it. They made all the characters in this game unlikable, they demonize Joel and Ellie, the two of them get emasculated and replaced as the protagonists with a sexually conforming or non conforming steroid abusing Hulk Smash bodybuilder/golfer in a fucking ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, every character is killed off as soon as they are introduced, and they try to humanize Abby but they start this off by having her kill your favorite fucking character.
That is just as effective as introducing yourself to your new stepson by sending the little fella a selfie of yourself fucking his mom in the ass while flexing your muscles.
By that point, you despise Abby and everything she stands for, and you just don't care about what happens to her. You just want to see her suffer a slow and painful death.
Why do you think there are numerous and numerous amounts of YouTube compliation videos of players purposefully dying as Abby? Because everyone fucking hates Abby. They don't want to fucking play as her. They want to see her die for killing Joel even before Ellie gets that chance on her revenge quest. We wanted a game with Joel and Ellie. How hard is that to understand?
Also, how in the fuck does Abby keep a swole body like that in a world where a good day is finding some out of date canned bacon in a cupboard?
Abby has been living a good life. She literally lives in a fucking football stadium with other trained soldiers with good food, a library with tons of books, and a gym. A fucking gym. With weight training equipment and whatnot. And then you go outside and there are people cooking burgers on grills and there is a shooting range. There are people lining up in a cafeteria to get BURRITOS. How the fuck?!
Where in the holy mother of shit did these guys get all of this ammo, food, guns, a working firing range, and WEIGHT TRAINING EQUIPMENT 25 years into the fucking apocalypse? It makes no sense!!
In the first Last of Us game, it was a major pain in the ass just to get your hands on a working car battery and gasoline.
This basically makes it even more impossible to feel sorry for Abby, because she is living an incredibly privileged life with good food, high quality living space, and friends who look out for her.
The game is set up so that Abby looks like the good guy in all of this while making Joel and Ellie, the people that we are supposed to root for, into the villains. What kind of madness is this? This is so fucked up and bullshit on so many levels. And the game takes away any sort of player agency so that Abby is the only one who gets a happy ending, while everyone else is either dead, gone, miserable, etc.
You even play as Abby as you beat the shit out of Ellie in a boss fight because Ellie killed her comrades. Why?? Why are we playing as Abby in this fight? So now more than ever, you as the player wants Ellie to defeat Abby, but you can't. Because if you let Ellie kill Abby, the game will just restart the checkpoint. Because then the game would be over and we can all move on with our lives.
Having to play as this freak of nature and then having to beat the shit out of a beloved character and her pregnant girlfriend, who had nothing to do with anything, is just so sickening and distasteful that I can't help but feel nauseous.
And this the second time Abby spares Ellie. The first time was where she forced Ellie to watch her beat her surrogate father to death, and now she spares her again after Lev tells her not to kill Dina.
These characters have so much fucking plot armor that I can't help but laugh at it. These are less like characters and more like objects to push the plot forward.
Only reason why Abby spares them is because Lev tells her to stop.
Ellie goes on a quest to avenge Joel and has put the lives of so many of her comrades on the line and has been through so much suffering and yet at the very moment that she has the chance to kill Abby, she doesn't go through with it. She even lost her fingers so she can't play her guitar anymore which was the very last thing that had her connect to Joel. If someone killed my father or father figure and bit my fingers off in an attempt to kill me then damn fucking well I would kill the bitch, but no, Ellie has a random flashback of Joel while she is drowning Abby and decides "Just fucking go."
This is just a broken narrative on so many factors and it blows my mind that this is the same company that gave us Uncharted 2 and The Last of Us 1. It is hands down the biggest fuck you of an ending I've seen in any game, movie, or TV show.
Abby has killed Joel, killed hundreds of other people, threatened to slit Dina's throat to spite Ellie, and took pleasure in it, took an 8 month pregnant lady on a fucking scavenging mission with her and was totally okay with it, crippled Tommy by shooting him in the leg and then in the eye, she killed Jessie, who was traveling with Ellie and Dina (then again, all Jessie was used in this game was just to be a sperm donor for Dina to push the plot forward, but even though he was bland, he was one of the better characters of this game), and then bit off Ellie's fingers and now she can't play the guitar anymore, and to top it all off, she has sex with Owen, at the same time he's cheating on Mel, while getting off to torturing Joel more, in what can only be described as the most disgusting uncensored hate fuck scene I've ever witnessed in a video game.
Joel died for this by the way
Abby is an absolutely despicable, irredeemable piece of shit. Even Mel, the pregnant lady, said it herself. And yet we are supposed to side with her? And we are supposed to believe that Ellie is totally okay with letting her go? Are you guys out of your fucking minds?? Seriously, I-I...
Wow, I can't even put into words how shocking this is. This is just.. Wow. I thought the Star Wars sequel trilogy was bad. The Last of Us 2 might actually gave me more respect towards that.
Abby is nothing but a projection for Drukkman's distaste for Joel.
Hell, look at the box art for the game's Special Edition. Joel isn't on the fuckin' cover. But do you know who is?
Yep. Abby.
So what was the moral of the story?
REVENGE IS BAD OOOOH
SENSELESS KILLING IS BAAAAD
APPRECIATE THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS EVEN THOUGH WE TOOK ALL CONTROL AWAY FROM YOU HOW DO YOU FEEL?!
Ellie carves a murderous, bloody path across the land, like in that game Hatred, where the main protagonist just senselessly slaughters innocent people on sight because life is shit and nilhisitic according to him. But the ONE person that Ellie doesn't kill is the one who started this whole ordeal in the first place, which just made the whole journey a giant fucking waste of time.
Slaughtering hundreds of random people across the game as Ellie is made as if what you are doing is bad and wrong, but the moment that Ellie is seconds away from drowning Abby, after everything that she has done, is the moment where Ellie has an epiphany where REVENGE IS BAD.
It dives into the topic of the cycle of violence, but it fucking shows us and lets us cause that violence. Oh yeah, violence ends the cycle of violence, isn't that right guys?
The game forces you repeatedly into situations where you MUST kill the enemies to advance the plot, including dogs. This game promotes dog killing and killing pregnant women (Ellie kills Mel). However you want to kill the dogs, you can do it. You can stab them in the neck, set them on fire, and even blow their legs off. I'm not kidding. It is absolutely vile.
At least the dogs in Wolfenstein were Nazi trained to eat human flesh, and the dogs in the old Modern Warfare games were trained by the opposing military threat and you have to choice but to defend yourself.
But these dogs aren't Nazi trained or military trained.
These are just regular guard dogs being protective of their owners. This is fucking demented, and perhaps I am saying this because I own pets myself.
But this is all meant to make Ellie look like an even bigger maniacal shithead just to make Abby look better. There is literally a scene where Ellie kills Abby's guard dog in an act of self defense, but then after that it goes into a flashback where Abby is seen playing with the dogs.
And they do this not once, but two times.
See, see? Ellie kills dogs but Abby saves them and plays with them. Her father saved a zebra and therefore you should like him.
Do you like Abby yet?
Do you?
DO YOU?!
And going back to the whole Mel scene, Ellie stabs her in the throat, and that was the moment that the coat opens up and Ellie sees the baby that she just killed.
"Oh no!! Ellie just killed a pregnant woman? What are the ramifications of that?!"
Uh, none??
None.
It's never mentioned again.
Wait, what's that? It's never mentioned again. Just like with the deaths of Manny, Nora, Yara, Owen, Jessie, none of their deaths are mentioned after they die. Soooo.. what was the point?
This is just childish levels of manipulation and stupidity.
You know this whole Abby shit is bad when they hid Abby in all the trailers pre-release but then also releases an Abby Trailer 6 months after the game comes out, which just shows the level of sheer incompetence that is going on at Naughty Dog right now.
Christ, I didn't even get into the other characters. You have other characters in Abby's group. You have Manny who at the start is vicious, he spits on our father figure's dead body and just goes around shouting PENEDJO every five fucking minutes but then later on he is all like "Ayyyyy I am Manny, I get all the pussy, I fuck her, and a her, and a her, and I got a sex dungeon in the city where I do my fucking!"
Oh? Manny is meant to be likeable?
And then Owen does remain relatively consistent throughout, that is until he gets Mel pregnant but then cheats on her with Abby...
Oh good God...
And Mel is the bestest ever surgeon and the bestest ever archer, and then Yara comes along, and Lev comes along, and Lev is a transexual who wants his mother to accept him in a world where people are getting eaten by fucking PLANT MONSTERS, and being raped, murdered, and looted by bandits, random strangers, and faction groups.
This is a world where you're trying to get a roof over your head, where you're trying to find a meal, where you're trying to get clothes, where you're trying to gear yourself up to survive against hordes of infected, but no, we gotta worry about gender and being accepted. In the zombie apocalypse. Sweet fucking Jesus.
Yara's arm becomes septic and it needs to be operated on so then Abby goes off to find the tools needed and she has to look after Lev, Joel and Ellie style, which in game takes around 2 and a half hours. But then that was all a waste of time because she ends up dying trying to protect Lev against a WLF attack, cause well, the WLF are at war with the Scars.
And before that happens, Lev goes back to the village of Haven where his mother is, because he wants his mom to accept him as a boy instead of a girl, but his mother hates the idea of that, so she tries to kill fuckin' him, so then Lev ends up killing his own mother.
Just... What the fuck, dude.
And all the while this is happening, there is a goddamn faction war going on in the background where the WLF and the Scars are slaughtering each other.
The WLF is the organization that Abby works for. Because Lev is a Scar, Abby vows by her life to protect him, and because of this, the WLF labels Abby as a traitor, so they try to kill her. So you and Lev are literally going around killing hundreds of your own people.
Then you reach the village of the Scars, then you're shooting at people on a horse and everything and everyone is burning around you, and then you're fighting this HUGE guy with a sledgehammer and it's just like....
Jesus Christ my braaaaainnn!
You guys are juggling so many balls at once that you forgot what you were supposed to be doing. This game is so fucking bloated. It needed to be trimmed down by at least 8-10 hours. Because most of the time it is going nowhere trying to build all of these characters to try to make them likeable and it's just so messy.
You're just going here to here, here to here, here to here, and you don't feel as if there is a reason for doing any of it.
And the infected have become completely trivialized in this game. The infected are everything that drives the plot of the first game, but here, they barely mean anything.
And Ellie's immunity to the infection doesn't mean anything anymore either. There is a moment in the game where Ellie and her girlfriend Dina are running from a horde of Infected and Ellie's gas mask breaks, because she is trying to hide her immunity. Dina is horrified by the fact that Ellie is breathing in spores. When they get to the theater, Ellie reveals to Dina that she was bitten many years ago but she never turned, because she is immune.
It's supposed to be a moment of revelation, and what does Dina do? She decides to COUNTERACT Ellie by saying "Oh! I think I'm pregnant!!"
And it's such a comical CW moment. Nothing ever gets to sit and rest. It feels like Ellie and Dina are less like lovers and more like two middle aged men trying to one up each other.
Dina doesn't even get that much development throughout. Her motivations are never clear as to why she wants to go with Ellie. All the game tells you is that the two of them started dating the day that Joel dies and all of a sudden we are expected to be attached to the two of them, without any sort of prior development.
And while Joel was having his head smashed in by Abby, Ellie and Dina neglect their patrol by smoking weed, talking about a kiss the two had the day before, and then proceed to have off screen sex with each other.
In the beginning of the game, Abby and her crew are absolutely vicious and unforgiving, but then later on, none of them reflect on what they did, especially Abby. She doesn't reflect on anything or regret anything that she did. In fact, they turn all of these characters into completely different people just to try to get the player to sympathize and relate to them, and it is just so basic, manipulative, and flat out childish.
It's almost like this game was made by a nihilist serial killer hiding underneath its wretched skin ready to murder everything that you loved about your childhood.
We have waited 7 years for a continuation to The Last of Us 1, and when we finally get it, they shit all over Joel and Ellie, they make you focus on entirely different characters that you just can't relate or connect to, and yet you spend more time with them than with the characters that you have been waiting all these years to play as, and by the end of the game everyone is either dead or broken.
And all of the new characters that you do actually like in this game are again, dead, gone, or broken.
Remember that scene in Last of Us 1 just before Joel and Ellie get to the Firefly Hospital, Ellie tells Joel that everything that they had been through cannot be for nothing? Well sorry to say kiddo, but everything you went through was all for nothing in the end. You lost your father figure, you lost your girlfriend and her child, you lost your friend Jessie, your Uncle in law Tommy lost his wife and disappeared as a crippled man, and you lost your fingers so you can't play guitar anymore.
This really is the most miserable end to a game in history. Then again, the whole game is miserable. Nothing gets to sit in. There is no light hearted moments to speak of in this game. The first game had some funny and light hearted moments in it to break up the sorrow moments. But in The Last of Us 2, the whole game is just compounded misery porn.
There is so much darkness, so much hatred and sorrow, that it just becomes extremely tiring after a while. I became desensitized and immune to it eventually. And it gets to a point of parody, because it's nothing but people dying and suffering. It's death, death, death, death, death, death, death, and more goddamn death.
And this constant death makes it extremely difficult to get attached to anyone, so when someone does die, I couldn't give a shit. Because almost every fucking person in this game gets killed off. Joel, Jessie, Owen, Manny, Mel, Nora, Yara, etc.
The game fantasizes and promotes really god awful shit like dog killing and sending out pregnant women to the frontlines of combat with a fucking UNBORN CHILD. What?!
So it wants to be against the cycle of violence and how revenge is bad, but it glorifies the very thing that it's fighting against, it's very hypocritical.
"But, but, but, but, Kat, that's the whole point of the game. Look at the reaction it's getting from you. That's why Neil Drukkman did it. He did it to SuBveRt OuR ExPectAtIons."
tongue spitting noises
By subverting our expectations you mean by giving us something that none of us have asked for. By appealing to everyone but your loyal customers, the people who are fucking woke activists, people who don't actually buy, play, and support your products in the first place. Neil Drukkman set out to make a game that HE wanted to make that HE wanted it to be made just to pander. The moment you decided to go against your fans and kiss Anita Sarkeesian's feet was the moment you fucked up, Neil. Because now most people have completely lost interest in not just this game, but also the future of your company.
This game is the equivalent of someone having daddy issues seeking therapeutic relief by channeling all of his hatred into a video game narrative and then shitting all over people who are either white, male, straight, or a combination of all three.
You have divided your customer base like what Disney and Lucasfilm is doing with Star Wars. And look at how that is turning out for the franchise.
All I can say is lmfao and good luck in the future, because you're gonna really need it.
This game is the textbook example of how NOT to make a sequel to a beloved game. You guys really should take a look at the book called "Customer Service for Dummies." and then come back to us when you guys have an idea on how to make good video games again.
[GAMEPLAY]
There isn't much to talk about here. Outdated would be the best word to describe it. Aside from a few rope puzzles and safe code cracking sequences, this game barely does anything to evolve the gameplay from the first game. The shooting is still as clunky as the first game, and there is now a jump button, and a dodge button unlike in the first game, oh yeeaah.
It also rehashes the same melee mechanics from the first game. You just mash square mindlessly except this time you push L1 to dodge which somehow makes combat flow even slower, because there are times where you HAVE to push dodge or else your enemy will just keep endlessly attacking you.
According from what I have read online, the jump button was invented in 1978. So excuse me for not shitting my bed with excitement with this new addition to the franchise, a game mechanic that is literally as old as a fucking Back to the Future Delorian car.
Also you barely ever use the jump button so that's nice as well.
The game also has the exact same crafting mechanics from the first game, almost every item requires the same ingredients to make just like in the first game, except now you can craft things like explosive arrows and oil can suppressors.
You can also go prone and hide in tall grass.
Um, can I just address something?
Metal Gear Solid 2 from 2001 did all of this before. Suppressors, proning, CQC combat, it even had dive rolling, all of this was done before, so what exactly did The Last of Us 2 bring to the table in terms of innovating the gameplay again?
It feels like this game is stuck in the last generation, because it just rehashes the gameplay mechanics from the first game. It's The Last of Us 1, but worse. A lot worse. That's the best I can describe it.
There are many other games that do stealth better than this, there are hundreds of games that do shooting better than this, and there are thousands of games that have a better story than this.
Abby is so "badass and cool" that she gets all of the best weapons and upgrades in the game.
Because unlike Ellie, Abby gets a flamethrower, a hunting pistol that is capable of one shotting enemies, a double barrel shotgun with incendiary rounds, a crossbow, and a semi-auto assault rifle.
I swear to God this game was designed to be Abby and Lev's game instead of Joel and Ellie's.
Funny enough, watching Abby run around aimlessly punching the ever living shit out of people with her massive WWE arms is one of the best parts about this game. There's just something so utterly stupid about it, it's hilarious. Like watching a female version of Hulk Hogan going ape shit on zombies and other people.
Watching her sprinting and pinning someone on a wall while screaming "FUCK YOU BRO" and then punching them to death is all I think about in my head.
The stealth mechanics are still exactly the same as well. You can stab people repeatedly in the neck as you please and delight in the blood gurgling sounds as your enemy fears for his/her shambling of their mortal coil.
And when you're running around being a murderous psychopath, you are running around listening to pointless exposition as you are picking up crap all over the place.
Pick up shit there, pick up shit there, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick. It's literally a picking up crap simulator.
The first game had this too but at least the characters and the writing actually broke up the repetition of jogging around and looting for materials, it felt real and grounded.
Since you fight dogs now, you can actually see them in your Listen Mode. You can also see them tracking your scent. I'm sorry but I'm pretty sure that you can't be stinky enough to be able to literally SEE your own stench..using..your ears..
Uhhhh, what??
Am I fuckin' crazy or does this make no sense at all?
And holy mother of shit, the violence in this game is just horrifying. It is unnecessarily gory, and I've played every DOOM game. The first Last of Us game had violent stuff in it as well but it was kept at a moderate level. I like violent video games, but they went above and beyond to make the violence in Last of Us 2 as sadistic and uncomfortable as humanly possible. It really doesn't help that you seem to fight a lot more human enemies than infected which just makes it all more unpleasant.
And in the first game, Joel only had to commit violent deeds because he did it to protect Ellie. But Ellie in The Last of Us 2 just goes on a murderous rampage, and some of the shit that she does in this game is so, so much worse than the shit that Joel did.
Enemies scream and shout out each other's names when killed in a pathetic attempt to generate empathy, which is yet another stupid gimmick just to make the player feel bad.
This is a game where you are forced to be a bloodthirsty murderous cunt, takes away any sort of player agency, all with Ellie saying stupid insults and comments, and all the while, the game is trying to have some sort of bulked narrative that tries to teach you about the consequences of your actions.
This is a game where it is essentially a murder simulator, but then stupidly thought that the player would feel bad about the choices that they DID NOT make. It's embarrassing.
I will say one thing and say that they did do a great job with all the accessibility settings. They went all out to make The Last of Us 2 the most accessible game ever. There are like 60 different options to choose from . You can basically play the game however you want. The game has gotten much deserved praise from disabled people.
But, does that mean anything in the end? Because even though the game is the most accessible game out there right now, and even if the gameplay was more polished and had more mechanics to truly evolve it, and even if the game is the most beautiful looking game I've ever seen, why the hell would you want to play it anyway? The game is miserable from beginning to end. No matter how good the gameplay is, the story is still shit, and the game hates you for playing it.
This is basically the equivalent of giving your money to a friend to go bring back some breakfast for the two of you from iHop, but then when he comes home he spits in your food, because you two have certain.. disagreements with each other.
We don't play The Last of Us because we can punch people, craft molotov cocktails to throw at dogs, stab people in the throat, move objects around to solve trivial puzzles, and blow people's legs off with a shotgun. We play The Last of Us for the story. And if the story is bad, the game is bad. That's just by the by.
[FINAL THOUGHTS]
I may have slagged the shit out of this game, but there are good things about it as I have mentioned before. Beautiful graphics and animations, the weapon upgrading is both eye and ear candy, the guns feel good to use despite the clunky aiming, and the soundtrack, while isn't as good as the first games', it's still really damn good. And the praise it got for the insane amount of accessibility options from disabled gamers is heartfelt.
But all of the good of this game is completely overshadowed by everything that is wrong with it. It's a very pretty game, but that's all I can say about it. Playing through it is just fuckin' insufferable.
I've never played a game that is so aggressively against the player in everything it stands for. It is quite literally an anti-video game.
As if it wasn't enough that this game is as truly horrific as it was, it's even worse when you consider just how awfully the developers were treated at Naughty Dog just to churn this shit out. This is just another reason on top of everything else that is simply why I just can't support this game. Neil Drukkman crunched the living shit out his development team to the point that employees had to be hospitalized, I wish I was joking.
Throughout the course of development between Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us 2, there has been around a 70% employee turnover, for multiple reasons. They were given unpaid overtime, the work conditions were toxic as hell, and they hated the direction Neil Drukkman took the story in. This is the largest amount of employee turnover I have ever seen for a game studio.
These guys had to start hiring people in the film and television industry for assistance because they simply were losing too many people who worked on previous games. It is a total fucking disaster.
Not to mention Neil Drukkman attacked the fans on social media, not only calling us bigots, homophobic, sexist, etc. for hating the direction he took the story in, but also actively tried to take down YouTube channels and ruin their livelihoods who dared to talk about the god awful decisions he made with the characters and the direction of the story in contrast to the first game, and how it just rectons everything for the sake of promoting his ABBY SMASH character.
If you dared to question Neil, you would get labeled as a phobic or something, when it has nothing to do with that. I don't care what your gender or sexual orientation is. I am a Pansexual femboy, and my last ex girlfriend was trans.
I'm just mad that you took everything I loved about the Last of Us 1 and had none of it carry over into Part 2. I have seen Sonic the Hedgehog fan fiction that is written way better than this. I've seen better writing choices in modern Pokemon movies.
Neil Drukkman sacrifices the artistic integrity of the first game and what everyone loved about it for the sake of pushing stereotypes of intersectional groups, yet he is so surprised when none of us liked that. It's fucking cheap, lazy, and disrespectful to the people who worked really hard on that game.
I know that Haley Gross is the Co-Director, but it's very clear who had all of the power in this shitty theater play.
All of this destruction for the sake of pandering to Anita Sarkeesian and people like her, like the LGBT community and the Social Justice Warrior community. But even the LGBT and some SJWs themselves fucking hate the game. So they even failed to appeal to the very people that they were trying to pander to. That's just humiliating.
All over Twitter are hundreds of pictures of unsold copies of the game from all over the world, just sitting and rotting on store shelves. There's fucking thousands of them!!
I've seen streamers taking the discs out and cutting the damn things up live on stream. I've seen how Neil Drukkman provoked the people who hated The Last of Us 2 by telling us that he was having his fanboy army spam voting for the game to win Game of the Year, and what happened? People like myself responded and got Ghost of Tsushima to win.
Drukkman is such a spiteful, hateful little man is he not? The fact that he is so smug all the time really speaks volumes of his character.
A lot of these Last of Us 2 copies were returned, because people don't want them. It got to the point where stores that sold games were rejecting any more returns because there were just too many copies, they couldn't handle any more.
You wanna know what this reminds of? E.T. the Extra Terrestrial on the Atari 2600. Yeah, it's that fucking bad. Maybe it won't be long until someone tries to bury all of the copies in a landfill, if they can't be given away for free. Even then, you would have to pay me to play this shit again.
I know that the game did make record sales in its opening week, and I think it was the #6 best selling game of 2020 period, but here is something you have to consider. The fact that the game dropped in sales at least 80% globally in week two, and considering the massive amount of returns of the game has, where do you think it is right now, if these sites actually updated the numbers after all the returns? In 6 months time, or even a year, where is it gonna be? I'm pretty sure around half of the copies that were sold were given back to stores, that's just speculation after seeing photos of resales on Twitter for 2+ hours.
The game will only sell a small fraction of what The Last of Us 1 did, so when you think about that, that's terrible for a sequel to a beloved game, especially when you compare it to other high quality Sony exclusive games like, I don't know..
God of War?
Horizon Zero Dawn?
Days Gone?
Marvel's Spider-Man?
Who knows, Sony and Naughty Dog might have lost money on this game. The best comparison I could make are the Justice League and Birds of Prey movies.
You guys at Naughty Dog preach about women while at the same time, you are the type who cancel other people who have their own opinions and thoughts. COUGH GINA CARANO
But this is where we are at in 21st century entertainment. Where companies are selfish people by nature. If a game isn't stuffed to the brim with greedy anti-consumer microtransactions, it's stuffed to the brim with anti-consumer ultra progressive and hateful woke identity politics and vicious hypocritical rhetoric.
Because that's what they want to give us apparently.
It's almost as if there is no such thing as escapism in our video games anymore. Everything now has to be political and preachy or else we are bigots who need to be "educated"... Wha??
I have nothing against women and feminism, but if you are one of those radical extremists that tells me that I should be dead or my livelihood should burn to the ground because I am an independent person with my own thoughts and opinions and they don't fall under your agenda, then I will just say that you are no better than the spread of Communism propaganda during the late 20th century.
[FINAL MESSAGE TO NEIL DRUKKMAN]
This is a game that wants to make you miserable and at a price. Neil Drukkman went on record by saying that The Last of Us 2 is about hatred. Well congratulations, Neil, because almost everyone hates this game, and almost everyone hates you.
I don't hate you solely because of the fact that you are a leftist, Neil. I hate you because you botched this highly anticipated game with your dreadful writing, and then you tried to blame it on the supposed sexism and homophobia of the "alt-Right", which is just so outrageous.
You shoved politics down our throats, so now people like myself are forced to talk about it even though I frankly hate doing so.
And it's terrible, because politics are never an easy thing to talk about without getting someone triggered, hence why I get so pissed when I see this shit in my games.
I really hate talking about politics, but this game forces it upon me, so it's literally designed to be a trap.
I'm just a guy who bitches about games from the comfort of my basement. But if Naughty Dog wants to talk about the gator underneath the bed, I gotta fuckin' talk about the gator underneath the bed. And I knew before I even wrote this review that I was going to get some shit for it. But that is the risk that I have to take in order to get my opinions out there.
Neil even went as far as to pull off a Kurt Cobain by saying "If you don't like it then don't buy it."
Yeah, because that worked so well when EA did it when people were complaining about Battlefield 5.
This game really has brought out the worst in people. It's a game that is a culmination of all of 2020's hatred and malice. Is this what video games are trying to be now? Less like fun games and more like 50 shades of gray progressive vessels to preach to the audience?
You lied to people using dishonest promotional material just to sell more copies at launch.
You tried to cowardly screw over the YouTube community with false DMCA takedown claims and nearly ruined years of work into their channels because they had the audacity to call you out on your shitty writing choices, even innocent people who just reported on the fact that the game's spoilers were leaked months before release. Livestreams were shut down mid-session just for simply discussing this whole shitshow going down.
Hell, even memes on Twitter were taken down. MEMES!
What the fuck was the point of that? The only thing that did was expose you for abusing copyright.
(Can I just mention that all of this is illegal because it violates Fair Use policy?)
You completely changed the personalities of beloved characters from the first game for the sake of creating artificial conflict.
You killed off Joel in the most traumatizing and disrespectful way you could have done it.
You took everything about Ellie that we loved in the first game and utterly butchered her while also taking away everything that she fought for.
You forced us to play as a character we didn't want to for 10+ hours straight who murdered Joel in a lazy half-assed attempt to get us to sympathize with her.
You made us kill and brutalize dogs in the most inhumane ways possible after you said we wouldn't have to.
You lied to everyone by saying that Ellie was the only playable character in the game.
You made the zombies in this zombie apocalypse game irrelevant.
You made us watch an utterly gross explicit uncensored Abby sex scene despite of Sony's hypocritical stance on censorship policies.
You shoved representation and bulking women down our throats to get extra doggie treats from Anita Sarkeesian.
And I know I have mentioned Anita a lot but that's only cause she was involved in the development of this game. It turns out that Anita served as a lot of inspiration for Neil's abortion of a story.
You gave Abby, the clear villain, the only good ending out of everyone else in this game.
7 years of development and this was the best that you could come up with? Seriously, you are a disgrace to video game development and the gaming community at large. Your presence is a plague in an industry that millions upon millions of people have expressed so much passion for. You went as far as to put your employees' health in jeopardy as long as it meant that you could shove the game out the door as quick as possible. You have no respect for the art form that you are supposed to represent.
Joel and Ellie, and your fans of the first Last of Us game, deserved so much better than what you have done to them. All I can say is fuck you, dude, you manipulative piece of shit.
And yet games journalism and media is just eating it the fuck up while also siding with the corporation. It's a very fucked up situation.
Well, guess I'll just go back to Days Gone and Ghost of Tsushima, at least those guys actually care about their fans.
And I doubt that the TV show and the Multiplayer to The Last of Us 2 will fully ever come to fruition and reach their full potential, considering how badly received the single player is being received. It will literally be a Game of Thrones situation where everyone will have lost interest and will just move onto other things instead.
I mean you know it's bad when only around a week and a half after the game came out, I went on Twitter and saw pictures of the game being sold for only $40 by major retailers such as WalMart, Target, Best Buy, etc.
There are very few other AAA games that has been put into a position like this. And the developers at Naughty Dog have no one to blame but themselves.
3/10
Edit: And the comments to this are already fucking priceless.
"DUDE so are you saying FFVIIR, Nioh 2, and Days Gone were also desperate? That they had to go on $20 sales because they were losing
Money? Or do you think it was just because EVERY PS4 GAME WENT ON SALE FOR BLACK FRIDAY LOL"
Yeah no fucking shit, Sherlock. But all of those games that I mentioned in my response are games that have come out long before The Last of Us 2 did. The Last of Us 2 is less than a year old and even right now, I could dead ass go to my local Gamestop a couple miles from my home, and grab a mint condition copy of the game for $18-25, when other games like FFVIIR, Sekiro, Kingdom Hearts 3 with the ReMind DLC, Metro Exodus, and Remnant from the Ashes are still going for $30-45. And these games have not went on sale Digitally as many times as The Last of Us 2 did.
It won't be long until I probably start seeing the game inside of bargain bins at my local Family Dollar.
You wanna know why these other games go on sale? Lemme tell you sweetheart. It's not because these developers are desperate to sell more copies, they're just making it easier for people to afford them, especially considering how tough times have gotten this past year. Money has become harder to come by, more people are stuck in their houses everyday with nothing better to do. What is your excuse?
Ghost of Tsushima went on sale Digitally only a couple months after release but that's only cause physical copies were selling like hotcakes. So much so that it's pretty much impossible to find any. Stores were completely empty of them. And since the free Multiplayer update was coming which brought the hype train right back up again, people wanted the game more than ever.
That's called releasing a quality product and being committed to it to keeping your fans happy. You keep good relations with your consumers, they will keep coming back and investing in your product(s). That's how business works.
Or at least, that's how it should work.. But this AAA gaming industry never really learn anything do they?
You know, when I write reviews for bad games, I like to make funny jokes just to spice it up instead of just being totally bleak the whole way through. But, I can't do that here. I'm just so angry that words cannot possibly describe the mental anguish, grief, and sheer dumbfounding disbelief that a game like this has costed me.
Just a bit of context, I am a huge fan of the original Last of Us. Huge is an understatement. It is my favorite video game of all time next to games like Final Fantasy VI and Metal Gear Solid 3, it's #1 on my top 5 favorite games of all time. The impact that the game has left on me when I was a teenager and how it taught me many important life lessons and carried me through some of the most depressing times of my life during my high school days, it cannot be underestimated.
I am now 24 years old and I still believe that The Last of Us 1 is truly lightning in a bottle, a game that cannot be replicated the same way Naughty Dog did all those years ago. I love the game so much that I got the platinum trophy for the game not once, but twice, and have spent a minimum of 500 hours on the Factions Multiplayer. That's how much I couldn't get enough of it. I've played all of Naughty Dog's games since the original Crash Bandicoot on the PS1, they've been my all-time favorite video game company, and to think that a single game could have made them fall from grace this much, it's truly heartbreaking and it has majorly affected me as a gamer. I don't get hyped for games anymore because of this. That and Cyberpunk 2077.
Which is why it is so painful to write a review for the sequel. When it was revealed in 2016 I was literally crying. I was more hyped for that game than any other. I bought my PS4 for the remaster of The Last of Us 1 and was damn ready for Part II. It's not a perfect game but it is MY perfect game, so I was expecting the sequel to not be able to surpass it. I mean, the first game was so masterfully crafted, how could the sequel surpass it anyway? Even then, I was at least expecting it to be a fantastic fuckin' game and not what we ended up getting.
How did we end up going from The Last of Us 1 which got 9/10s and 10/10s across the board across every gaming site from fans to The Last of Us 2 which had a User Score of 3.3 at launch on Metacritic? COUGH I mean Betacritic since they disabled the ability to write negative reviews which raised the aggregate User Score to a 5.7 because they have certain "priorities" to uphold.
This shit truly blows my mind and is something that I will never forget. This whole fiasco is such a shitshow that it's giving me flashbacks of god awful games and movies like Fallout 76, Star Wars The Last Jedi, Game of Thrones Season 8, Ride to Hell Retribution, the final season of Breaking Bad, Captain Marvel, Batwoman, Silent Hill HD Collection, Metal Gear Survive, and Battlefield 5.
The majority of these games, movies, and TV shows have absolutely BUTCHERED their respective IPs and franchises, and The Last of Us has also fallen victim to this ongoing trend. It's like the beginning of the end of entertainment as we know it.
The Last of Us Part 2 is one of the most, if not, the most miserable, anti-consumer, self-indulgent, incoherent, preachy, cowardly, soulless, manipulative, misleading, and downright offensive games I have ever played and witnessed in my entire life. I can't believe this game was even made, and most others believe the same way since they don't even acknowledge that this game is canon to the franchise.
This game has created such a disconnect between the gamers, game journalists, and the developers themselves that it has created one of the greatest onslaught of memes, hate videos, and the biggest drop in sales for a game one week after launch I have ever witnessed, and it is both brutal and hilarious. Naughty Dog and Directors Neil Drukkman and Haley Gross should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for taking everything that people loved for the past seven years and completely obliterating it.
And this is why people are stepping away from these woke SJW trash companies like IGN, Gamespot, Polygon, Kotaku, etc. and they're moving onto YouTube personalities instead for reliable information and reviews, because a good chunk of em' don't follow a bias and will tell you what you should be knowing, and don't praise a game because it has woke inclusion in it for the sake of pandering.
I don't consider the average YouTuber to be professional by any means, at least in the way that you might be thinking, but for god sake, these game journalists are not even real gamers, they're fuckin' activists. In reality, they hate video games and the people that play and support them. They're not about covering games, they only care for the diversity and inclusion box ticking. That and free early access review copies along with advertising revenue.
The review process and embargo for gaming access is absolutely broken, and there should be changes. All the way until launch you were not allowed to talk about anything involving Joel, Abby, the ending, etc.
Which is like half of the entire game.
This might be the longest review for a game I will ever write, even longer than my Cyberpunk 2077 review, but if you're reading all of this, I thank you.
[STORY]
Joel, our most beloved character dies only 2 hours into the game. And this game is 25-30 hours long. Let's do a calculation really quick.
2 out of 25 as a percentage is 8..
2 out of 30 as a percentage is 6.66...
Are you telling me that out of this 25-30 hour game, Joel is alive 6-8% of the entire game, not including the flashback sequences? Are you fucking kidding me???
Why is the character that we bonded so much with in the first game dies only two hours into Part 2, and he is only playable for FIVE MINUTES in the introduction on horseback?? How can you even call this a Last of Us game without Joel and Ellie? The whole point of the first game is about them, as well as the surrounding characters that support them throughout their journey. But if you don't have Joel and Ellie together like you did before, the game will just lose its purpose, weight, and most of all, investment.
The moment you killed off Joel so abruptly, you created a huge disconnect with the player, and as a result, the game just becomes boring, and it lacks the depth and soul that the first game had.
See, Joel dying as a concept is not a bad idea. In fact, I actually did think before the game came out that he was going to die. But the way they handled it was just so rushed, so forced, so nonsensical, and it had no agency to it. It just comes out of the blue and we just have to deal with it.
Joel's established character from the first game, hell even Tommy's character was dumbed down severely for the sake of being put into a position to be easily ambushed in order to push the plot forward, because there is no way that a scenario like this would happen in the previous game. And there is a reason for this. Joel is less like a character in this game and more like a plot device to drive Ellie's story arc.
The Last of Us 2 became about identity politics instead of moral dilemmas. This game is a werewolf crossed with a Social Justice Warrior. People in the game were arbitrarily good or bad depending on their gender, their sexual orientation, or their views on the world.
The bigot sandwich scene comes to mind. It's only 10 minutes into the game and it was one of the dumbest scenes I've seen in a very long time.
Ellie gets into a dispute with this guy named Seth because of the fact that she is in love with Dina and the two of them have a dance and make out, and Seth calls Ellie a dyke, which is a derogatory term for lesbian.
But it was only because he was drunk and he had no control over what he said, so the next day he tries to make it up to Ellie by making her some sandwiches to take with her on her scouting mission, but instead of accepting his peace offering, she calls him a bigot and just gives the food to Jessie.
Uh, what the fuck?? Okay, first of all, who the fuck says the word "bigot" 25 years into an apocalypse? And furthermore, how did Ellie not know what an ice cream truck was in the first Last of Us game, but in this game she knows what the word bigot means?
In the first game Ellie didn't even know how to whistle for god sake. Now I'm supposed to to believe that she is knowledgeable on bigotry?? Who the fuck would even teach her that?
I guess it would seem that cancel culture is alive and well in a world like this.
Not to mention, this is the APOCOLYPSE. Food and resources are scarce as fuck in times like these. You wouldn't normally just reject something like food when food like that is very fucking hard to come by. Ellie was forced to eat human flesh in the first game, but I guess now politics are more important.
I don't care if he called you the D word, just take the goddamn sandwiches!
My god. And I'm only just getting started.
Naughty Dog retconed the living shit out the first game just so they could cuck Joel and Ellie and antagonize them.
The marketing of this game flat out lied to you. Naughty Dog actually pulled a Cyberpunk and faked all of their trailers. They pulled a bait and switch and actually swapped out character models in the trailers to make it look like we were going to get another Joel and Ellie journey, so that they could sell more copies when the game came out.
This is some of the most evil shit I have ever seen a company do. They fooled everyone with this deceptive advertising, which makes me wonder why CD Projekt Red are getting such an incredible amount of shit from both gamers and their shareholders, with lawsuits, stock plummets, and their company getting straight up hacked and having their games being held up for ransom, but Sony and Naughty Dog gets to walk away unscathed. Seriously, not even EA or Activision have pulled a troll move on this caliber.
Naughty Dog hid important story details and faked their trailers because they knew that what they did to Joel and Ellie in this game was fucking despicable. They kill off Joel a couple hours into the game, they tell us that everything he did in the first game was objectively wrong despite how players felt about it, they treat him like shit in the flashback sequences, they demoralize him throughout the whole game, they did him dirty. Big time.
Ellie isn't any better. She is nothing like she was in the first game. In the first game she was funny, witty, sarcastic, caring, and just an overall loveable person, and also showed signs of weakness despite being a very tough girl. She had as much character as Joel did. I loved Ellie the same way that I loved Joel, that's why the first game worked so well.
But then in the second game, Ellie is entitled, ungrateful, edgy, tryhard, whiny, sadistic, idiotic, and just straight up evil. What in the living fuck did you guys do to Ellie in this game?? I get that this game is supposed to be darker with Joel dying and whatnot, but Ellie is just so unrelatable in this game, and the shit that she does in this game lacks all sense of rhyme or reason, most of which has nothing to do with Joel's death.
Ellie is mad at Joel for lying about the Fireflies so that he could save her, but what Ellie neglects is the fact that not only is it actually fucking impossible to create a vaccine for a fungal infection, and also, what makes Ellie think that the Fireflies aren't just a group of terrorists that were willing to kill a 14 year old for the sake of having the POTENTIAL to get a cure? Joel knows this. And that's why he saved her, not just because he has grown attached to her like he did with Sarah.
But regardless, Ellie acts like a shitty ungrateful asshole to Joel until the day that he actually dies, which is just so fucking unpleasant and you can't help but feel awful for Joel. Joel saves her life numerous times only to be told by Ellie that she doesn't need his help anymore. How utterly disgusting.. What did you guys do to Ellie??
Going back to Joel and Ellie being together, you can't have a Last of Us game with just Joel, and you can't have a Last of Us game with just Ellie. You need to have both. But then Neil Drukkman and Anita Sarkeesian come along with the sequel and are all like "Hey, we want Joel to not have any of the qualities that he had in the first game. We want his reputation burned to the ground and his credibility destroyed within the two hours of the game, and throughout the rest of the game we will continue to demonize both him and Ellie while making a trans friendly character named Abby into the new protagonist and make her look like the good person in comparison."
"Oh, and this Abby person is gonna kill Joel by the way. He saves her life a few times from infected, and she is going to return the favor by blowing off his knee cap with a shotgun, torture him, and then smash his skull in with a golf club, because Joel killed her father at the end of the first game when he saved Ellie from being sacrificed so humanity could MAYBE get a cure."
A cure for a fungal infection..that never existed before the apocalypse..and never will exist...and won't fix how fucked up the world has become with bandits and faction groups at war with each other....
Oh, and Abby's father was just a random NPC in the first game...and he was black...now he is white...
Oh my god my brain. Who thought that this was a good idea? Was no one man enough to step up and say "Neil, what the fuck are you doing? Do you realize that this makes absolutely no sense what so ever and is insanely cliche?"
Oh right, of course no one would speak up, out of fear of losing their job and being shit talked by other developers and higher ups.
This is just absolutely awful, and I feel awful just for witnessing it. They made all the characters in this game unlikable, they demonize Joel and Ellie, the two of them get emasculated and replaced as the protagonists with a sexually conforming or non conforming steroid abusing Hulk Smash bodybuilder/golfer in a fucking ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, every character is killed off as soon as they are introduced, and they try to humanize Abby but they start this off by having her kill your favorite fucking character.
That is just as effective as introducing yourself to your new stepson by sending the little fella a selfie of yourself fucking his mom in the ass while flexing your muscles.
By that point, you despise Abby and everything she stands for, and you just don't care about what happens to her. You just want to see her suffer a slow and painful death.
Why do you think there are numerous and numerous amounts of YouTube compliation videos of players purposefully dying as Abby? Because everyone fucking hates Abby. They don't want to fucking play as her. They want to see her die for killing Joel even before Ellie gets that chance on her revenge quest. We wanted a game with Joel and Ellie. How hard is that to understand?
Also, how in the fuck does Abby keep a swole body like that in a world where a good day is finding some out of date canned bacon in a cupboard?
Abby has been living a good life. She literally lives in a fucking football stadium with other trained soldiers with good food, a library with tons of books, and a gym. A fucking gym. With weight training equipment and whatnot. And then you go outside and there are people cooking burgers on grills and there is a shooting range. There are people lining up in a cafeteria to get BURRITOS. How the fuck?!
Where in the holy mother of shit did these guys get all of this ammo, food, guns, a working firing range, and WEIGHT TRAINING EQUIPMENT 25 years into the fucking apocalypse? It makes no sense!!
In the first Last of Us game, it was a major pain in the ass just to get your hands on a working car battery and gasoline.
This basically makes it even more impossible to feel sorry for Abby, because she is living an incredibly privileged life with good food, high quality living space, and friends who look out for her.
The game is set up so that Abby looks like the good guy in all of this while making Joel and Ellie, the people that we are supposed to root for, into the villains. What kind of madness is this? This is so fucked up and bullshit on so many levels. And the game takes away any sort of player agency so that Abby is the only one who gets a happy ending, while everyone else is either dead, gone, miserable, etc.
You even play as Abby as you beat the shit out of Ellie in a boss fight because Ellie killed her comrades. Why?? Why are we playing as Abby in this fight? So now more than ever, you as the player wants Ellie to defeat Abby, but you can't. Because if you let Ellie kill Abby, the game will just restart the checkpoint. Because then the game would be over and we can all move on with our lives.
Having to play as this freak of nature and then having to beat the shit out of a beloved character and her pregnant girlfriend, who had nothing to do with anything, is just so sickening and distasteful that I can't help but feel nauseous.
And this the second time Abby spares Ellie. The first time was where she forced Ellie to watch her beat her surrogate father to death, and now she spares her again after Lev tells her not to kill Dina.
These characters have so much fucking plot armor that I can't help but laugh at it. These are less like characters and more like objects to push the plot forward.
Only reason why Abby spares them is because Lev tells her to stop.
Ellie goes on a quest to avenge Joel and has put the lives of so many of her comrades on the line and has been through so much suffering and yet at the very moment that she has the chance to kill Abby, she doesn't go through with it. She even lost her fingers so she can't play her guitar anymore which was the very last thing that had her connect to Joel. If someone killed my father or father figure and bit my fingers off in an attempt to kill me then damn fucking well I would kill the bitch, but no, Ellie has a random flashback of Joel while she is drowning Abby and decides "Just fucking go."
This is just a broken narrative on so many factors and it blows my mind that this is the same company that gave us Uncharted 2 and The Last of Us 1. It is hands down the biggest fuck you of an ending I've seen in any game, movie, or TV show.
Abby has killed Joel, killed hundreds of other people, threatened to slit Dina's throat to spite Ellie, and took pleasure in it, took an 8 month pregnant lady on a fucking scavenging mission with her and was totally okay with it, crippled Tommy by shooting him in the leg and then in the eye, she killed Jessie, who was traveling with Ellie and Dina (then again, all Jessie was used in this game was just to be a sperm donor for Dina to push the plot forward, but even though he was bland, he was one of the better characters of this game), and then bit off Ellie's fingers and now she can't play the guitar anymore, and to top it all off, she has sex with Owen, at the same time he's cheating on Mel, while getting off to torturing Joel more, in what can only be described as the most disgusting uncensored hate fuck scene I've ever witnessed in a video game.
Joel died for this by the way
Abby is an absolutely despicable, irredeemable piece of shit. Even Mel, the pregnant lady, said it herself. And yet we are supposed to side with her? And we are supposed to believe that Ellie is totally okay with letting her go? Are you guys out of your fucking minds?? Seriously, I-I...
Wow, I can't even put into words how shocking this is. This is just.. Wow. I thought the Star Wars sequel trilogy was bad. The Last of Us 2 might actually gave me more respect towards that.
Abby is nothing but a projection for Drukkman's distaste for Joel.
Hell, look at the box art for the game's Special Edition. Joel isn't on the fuckin' cover. But do you know who is?
Yep. Abby.
So what was the moral of the story?
REVENGE IS BAD OOOOH
SENSELESS KILLING IS BAAAAD
APPRECIATE THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS EVEN THOUGH WE TOOK ALL CONTROL AWAY FROM YOU HOW DO YOU FEEL?!
Ellie carves a murderous, bloody path across the land, like in that game Hatred, where the main protagonist just senselessly slaughters innocent people on sight because life is shit and nilhisitic according to him. But the ONE person that Ellie doesn't kill is the one who started this whole ordeal in the first place, which just made the whole journey a giant fucking waste of time.
Slaughtering hundreds of random people across the game as Ellie is made as if what you are doing is bad and wrong, but the moment that Ellie is seconds away from drowning Abby, after everything that she has done, is the moment where Ellie has an epiphany where REVENGE IS BAD.
It dives into the topic of the cycle of violence, but it fucking shows us and lets us cause that violence. Oh yeah, violence ends the cycle of violence, isn't that right guys?
The game forces you repeatedly into situations where you MUST kill the enemies to advance the plot, including dogs. This game promotes dog killing and killing pregnant women (Ellie kills Mel). However you want to kill the dogs, you can do it. You can stab them in the neck, set them on fire, and even blow their legs off. I'm not kidding. It is absolutely vile.
At least the dogs in Wolfenstein were Nazi trained to eat human flesh, and the dogs in the old Modern Warfare games were trained by the opposing military threat and you have to choice but to defend yourself.
But these dogs aren't Nazi trained or military trained.
These are just regular guard dogs being protective of their owners. This is fucking demented, and perhaps I am saying this because I own pets myself.
But this is all meant to make Ellie look like an even bigger maniacal shithead just to make Abby look better. There is literally a scene where Ellie kills Abby's guard dog in an act of self defense, but then after that it goes into a flashback where Abby is seen playing with the dogs.
And they do this not once, but two times.
See, see? Ellie kills dogs but Abby saves them and plays with them. Her father saved a zebra and therefore you should like him.
Do you like Abby yet?
Do you?
DO YOU?!
And going back to the whole Mel scene, Ellie stabs her in the throat, and that was the moment that the coat opens up and Ellie sees the baby that she just killed.
"Oh no!! Ellie just killed a pregnant woman? What are the ramifications of that?!"
Uh, none??
None.
It's never mentioned again.
Wait, what's that? It's never mentioned again. Just like with the deaths of Manny, Nora, Yara, Owen, Jessie, none of their deaths are mentioned after they die. Soooo.. what was the point?
This is just childish levels of manipulation and stupidity.
You know this whole Abby shit is bad when they hid Abby in all the trailers pre-release but then also releases an Abby Trailer 6 months after the game comes out, which just shows the level of sheer incompetence that is going on at Naughty Dog right now.
Christ, I didn't even get into the other characters. You have other characters in Abby's group. You have Manny who at the start is vicious, he spits on our father figure's dead body and just goes around shouting PENEDJO every five fucking minutes but then later on he is all like "Ayyyyy I am Manny, I get all the pussy, I fuck her, and a her, and a her, and I got a sex dungeon in the city where I do my fucking!"
Oh? Manny is meant to be likeable?
And then Owen does remain relatively consistent throughout, that is until he gets Mel pregnant but then cheats on her with Abby...
Oh good God...
And Mel is the bestest ever surgeon and the bestest ever archer, and then Yara comes along, and Lev comes along, and Lev is a transexual who wants his mother to accept him in a world where people are getting eaten by fucking PLANT MONSTERS, and being raped, murdered, and looted by bandits, random strangers, and faction groups.
This is a world where you're trying to get a roof over your head, where you're trying to find a meal, where you're trying to get clothes, where you're trying to gear yourself up to survive against hordes of infected, but no, we gotta worry about gender and being accepted. In the zombie apocalypse. Sweet fucking Jesus.
Yara's arm becomes septic and it needs to be operated on so then Abby goes off to find the tools needed and she has to look after Lev, Joel and Ellie style, which in game takes around 2 and a half hours. But then that was all a waste of time because she ends up dying trying to protect Lev against a WLF attack, cause well, the WLF are at war with the Scars.
And before that happens, Lev goes back to the village of Haven where his mother is, because he wants his mom to accept him as a boy instead of a girl, but his mother hates the idea of that, so she tries to kill fuckin' him, so then Lev ends up killing his own mother.
Just... What the fuck, dude.
And all the while this is happening, there is a goddamn faction war going on in the background where the WLF and the Scars are slaughtering each other.
The WLF is the organization that Abby works for. Because Lev is a Scar, Abby vows by her life to protect him, and because of this, the WLF labels Abby as a traitor, so they try to kill her. So you and Lev are literally going around killing hundreds of your own people.
Then you reach the village of the Scars, then you're shooting at people on a horse and everything and everyone is burning around you, and then you're fighting this HUGE guy with a sledgehammer and it's just like....
Jesus Christ my braaaaainnn!
You guys are juggling so many balls at once that you forgot what you were supposed to be doing. This game is so fucking bloated. It needed to be trimmed down by at least 8-10 hours. Because most of the time it is going nowhere trying to build all of these characters to try to make them likeable and it's just so messy.
You're just going here to here, here to here, here to here, and you don't feel as if there is a reason for doing any of it.
And the infected have become completely trivialized in this game. The infected are everything that drives the plot of the first game, but here, they barely mean anything.
And Ellie's immunity to the infection doesn't mean anything anymore either. There is a moment in the game where Ellie and her girlfriend Dina are running from a horde of Infected and Ellie's gas mask breaks, because she is trying to hide her immunity. Dina is horrified by the fact that Ellie is breathing in spores. When they get to the theater, Ellie reveals to Dina that she was bitten many years ago but she never turned, because she is immune.
It's supposed to be a moment of revelation, and what does Dina do? She decides to COUNTERACT Ellie by saying "Oh! I think I'm pregnant!!"
And it's such a comical CW moment. Nothing ever gets to sit and rest. It feels like Ellie and Dina are less like lovers and more like two middle aged men trying to one up each other.
Dina doesn't even get that much development throughout. Her motivations are never clear as to why she wants to go with Ellie. All the game tells you is that the two of them started dating the day that Joel dies and all of a sudden we are expected to be attached to the two of them, without any sort of prior development.
And while Joel was having his head smashed in by Abby, Ellie and Dina neglect their patrol by smoking weed, talking about a kiss the two had the day before, and then proceed to have off screen sex with each other.
In the beginning of the game, Abby and her crew are absolutely vicious and unforgiving, but then later on, none of them reflect on what they did, especially Abby. She doesn't reflect on anything or regret anything that she did. In fact, they turn all of these characters into completely different people just to try to get the player to sympathize and relate to them, and it is just so basic, manipulative, and flat out childish.
It's almost like this game was made by a nihilist serial killer hiding underneath its wretched skin ready to murder everything that you loved about your childhood.
We have waited 7 years for a continuation to The Last of Us 1, and when we finally get it, they shit all over Joel and Ellie, they make you focus on entirely different characters that you just can't relate or connect to, and yet you spend more time with them than with the characters that you have been waiting all these years to play as, and by the end of the game everyone is either dead or broken.
And all of the new characters that you do actually like in this game are again, dead, gone, or broken.
Remember that scene in Last of Us 1 just before Joel and Ellie get to the Firefly Hospital, Ellie tells Joel that everything that they had been through cannot be for nothing? Well sorry to say kiddo, but everything you went through was all for nothing in the end. You lost your father figure, you lost your girlfriend and her child, you lost your friend Jessie, your Uncle in law Tommy lost his wife and disappeared as a crippled man, and you lost your fingers so you can't play guitar anymore.
This really is the most miserable end to a game in history. Then again, the whole game is miserable. Nothing gets to sit in. There is no light hearted moments to speak of in this game. The first game had some funny and light hearted moments in it to break up the sorrow moments. But in The Last of Us 2, the whole game is just compounded misery porn.
There is so much darkness, so much hatred and sorrow, that it just becomes extremely tiring after a while. I became desensitized and immune to it eventually. And it gets to a point of parody, because it's nothing but people dying and suffering. It's death, death, death, death, death, death, death, and more goddamn death.
And this constant death makes it extremely difficult to get attached to anyone, so when someone does die, I couldn't give a shit. Because almost every fucking person in this game gets killed off. Joel, Jessie, Owen, Manny, Mel, Nora, Yara, etc.
The game fantasizes and promotes really god awful shit like dog killing and sending out pregnant women to the frontlines of combat with a fucking UNBORN CHILD. What?!
So it wants to be against the cycle of violence and how revenge is bad, but it glorifies the very thing that it's fighting against, it's very hypocritical.
"But, but, but, but, Kat, that's the whole point of the game. Look at the reaction it's getting from you. That's why Neil Drukkman did it. He did it to SuBveRt OuR ExPectAtIons."
tongue spitting noises
By subverting our expectations you mean by giving us something that none of us have asked for. By appealing to everyone but your loyal customers, the people who are fucking woke activists, people who don't actually buy, play, and support your products in the first place. Neil Drukkman set out to make a game that HE wanted to make that HE wanted it to be made just to pander. The moment you decided to go against your fans and kiss Anita Sarkeesian's feet was the moment you fucked up, Neil. Because now most people have completely lost interest in not just this game, but also the future of your company.
This game is the equivalent of someone having daddy issues seeking therapeutic relief by channeling all of his hatred into a video game narrative and then shitting all over people who are either white, male, straight, or a combination of all three.
You have divided your customer base like what Disney and Lucasfilm is doing with Star Wars. And look at how that is turning out for the franchise.
All I can say is lmfao and good luck in the future, because you're gonna really need it.
This game is the textbook example of how NOT to make a sequel to a beloved game. You guys really should take a look at the book called "Customer Service for Dummies." and then come back to us when you guys have an idea on how to make good video games again.
[GAMEPLAY]
There isn't much to talk about here. Outdated would be the best word to describe it. Aside from a few rope puzzles and safe code cracking sequences, this game barely does anything to evolve the gameplay from the first game. The shooting is still as clunky as the first game, and there is now a jump button, and a dodge button unlike in the first game, oh yeeaah.
It also rehashes the same melee mechanics from the first game. You just mash square mindlessly except this time you push L1 to dodge which somehow makes combat flow even slower, because there are times where you HAVE to push dodge or else your enemy will just keep endlessly attacking you.
According from what I have read online, the jump button was invented in 1978. So excuse me for not shitting my bed with excitement with this new addition to the franchise, a game mechanic that is literally as old as a fucking Back to the Future Delorian car.
Also you barely ever use the jump button so that's nice as well.
The game also has the exact same crafting mechanics from the first game, almost every item requires the same ingredients to make just like in the first game, except now you can craft things like explosive arrows and oil can suppressors.
You can also go prone and hide in tall grass.
Um, can I just address something?
Metal Gear Solid 2 from 2001 did all of this before. Suppressors, proning, CQC combat, it even had dive rolling, all of this was done before, so what exactly did The Last of Us 2 bring to the table in terms of innovating the gameplay again?
It feels like this game is stuck in the last generation, because it just rehashes the gameplay mechanics from the first game. It's The Last of Us 1, but worse. A lot worse. That's the best I can describe it.
There are many other games that do stealth better than this, there are hundreds of games that do shooting better than this, and there are thousands of games that have a better story than this.
Abby is so "badass and cool" that she gets all of the best weapons and upgrades in the game.
Because unlike Ellie, Abby gets a flamethrower, a hunting pistol that is capable of one shotting enemies, a double barrel shotgun with incendiary rounds, a crossbow, and a semi-auto assault rifle.
I swear to God this game was designed to be Abby and Lev's game instead of Joel and Ellie's.
Funny enough, watching Abby run around aimlessly punching the ever living shit out of people with her massive WWE arms is one of the best parts about this game. There's just something so utterly stupid about it, it's hilarious. Like watching a female version of Hulk Hogan going ape shit on zombies and other people.
Watching her sprinting and pinning someone on a wall while screaming "FUCK YOU BRO" and then punching them to death is all I think about in my head.
The stealth mechanics are still exactly the same as well. You can stab people repeatedly in the neck as you please and delight in the blood gurgling sounds as your enemy fears for his/her shambling of their mortal coil.
And when you're running around being a murderous psychopath, you are running around listening to pointless exposition as you are picking up crap all over the place.
Pick up shit there, pick up shit there, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick. It's literally a picking up crap simulator.
The first game had this too but at least the characters and the writing actually broke up the repetition of jogging around and looting for materials, it felt real and grounded.
Since you fight dogs now, you can actually see them in your Listen Mode. You can also see them tracking your scent. I'm sorry but I'm pretty sure that you can't be stinky enough to be able to literally SEE your own stench..using..your ears..
Uhhhh, what??
Am I fuckin' crazy or does this make no sense at all?
And holy mother of shit, the violence in this game is just horrifying. It is unnecessarily gory, and I've played every DOOM game. The first Last of Us game had violent stuff in it as well but it was kept at a moderate level. I like violent video games, but they went above and beyond to make the violence in Last of Us 2 as sadistic and uncomfortable as humanly possible. It really doesn't help that you seem to fight a lot more human enemies than infected which just makes it all more unpleasant.
And in the first game, Joel only had to commit violent deeds because he did it to protect Ellie. But Ellie in The Last of Us 2 just goes on a murderous rampage, and some of the shit that she does in this game is so, so much worse than the shit that Joel did.
Enemies scream and shout out each other's names when killed in a pathetic attempt to generate empathy, which is yet another stupid gimmick just to make the player feel bad.
This is a game where you are forced to be a bloodthirsty murderous cunt, takes away any sort of player agency, all with Ellie saying stupid insults and comments, and all the while, the game is trying to have some sort of bulked narrative that tries to teach you about the consequences of your actions.
This is a game where it is essentially a murder simulator, but then stupidly thought that the player would feel bad about the choices that they DID NOT make. It's embarrassing.
I will say one thing and say that they did do a great job with all the accessibility settings. They went all out to make The Last of Us 2 the most accessible game ever. There are like 60 different options to choose from . You can basically play the game however you want. The game has gotten much deserved praise from disabled people.
But, does that mean anything in the end? Because even though the game is the most accessible game out there right now, and even if the gameplay was more polished and had more mechanics to truly evolve it, and even if the game is the most beautiful looking game I've ever seen, why the hell would you want to play it anyway? The game is miserable from beginning to end. No matter how good the gameplay is, the story is still shit, and the game hates you for playing it.
This is basically the equivalent of giving your money to a friend to go bring back some breakfast for the two of you from iHop, but then when he comes home he spits in your food, because you two have certain.. disagreements with each other.
We don't play The Last of Us because we can punch people, craft molotov cocktails to throw at dogs, stab people in the throat, move objects around to solve trivial puzzles, and blow people's legs off with a shotgun. We play The Last of Us for the story. And if the story is bad, the game is bad. That's just by the by.
[FINAL THOUGHTS]
I may have slagged the shit out of this game, but there are good things about it as I have mentioned before. Beautiful graphics and animations, the weapon upgrading is both eye and ear candy, the guns feel good to use despite the clunky aiming, and the soundtrack, while isn't as good as the first games', it's still really damn good. And the praise it got for the insane amount of accessibility options from disabled gamers is heartfelt.
But all of the good of this game is completely overshadowed by everything that is wrong with it. It's a very pretty game, but that's all I can say about it. Playing through it is just fuckin' insufferable.
I've never played a game that is so aggressively against the player in everything it stands for. It is quite literally an anti-video game.
As if it wasn't enough that this game is as truly horrific as it was, it's even worse when you consider just how awfully the developers were treated at Naughty Dog just to churn this shit out. This is just another reason on top of everything else that is simply why I just can't support this game. Neil Drukkman crunched the living shit out his development team to the point that employees had to be hospitalized, I wish I was joking.
Throughout the course of development between Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us 2, there has been around a 70% employee turnover, for multiple reasons. They were given unpaid overtime, the work conditions were toxic as hell, and they hated the direction Neil Drukkman took the story in. This is the largest amount of employee turnover I have ever seen for a game studio.
These guys had to start hiring people in the film and television industry for assistance because they simply were losing too many people who worked on previous games. It is a total fucking disaster.
Not to mention Neil Drukkman attacked the fans on social media, not only calling us bigots, homophobic, sexist, etc. for hating the direction he took the story in, but also actively tried to take down YouTube channels and ruin their livelihoods who dared to talk about the god awful decisions he made with the characters and the direction of the story in contrast to the first game, and how it just rectons everything for the sake of promoting his ABBY SMASH character.
If you dared to question Neil, you would get labeled as a phobic or something, when it has nothing to do with that. I don't care what your gender or sexual orientation is. I am a Pansexual femboy, and my last ex girlfriend was trans.
I'm just mad that you took everything I loved about the Last of Us 1 and had none of it carry over into Part 2. I have seen Sonic the Hedgehog fan fiction that is written way better than this. I've seen better writing choices in modern Pokemon movies.
Neil Drukkman sacrifices the artistic integrity of the first game and what everyone loved about it for the sake of pushing stereotypes of intersectional groups, yet he is so surprised when none of us liked that. It's fucking cheap, lazy, and disrespectful to the people who worked really hard on that game.
I know that Haley Gross is the Co-Director, but it's very clear who had all of the power in this shitty theater play.
All of this destruction for the sake of pandering to Anita Sarkeesian and people like her, like the LGBT community and the Social Justice Warrior community. But even the LGBT and some SJWs themselves fucking hate the game. So they even failed to appeal to the very people that they were trying to pander to. That's just humiliating.
All over Twitter are hundreds of pictures of unsold copies of the game from all over the world, just sitting and rotting on store shelves. There's fucking thousands of them!!
I've seen streamers taking the discs out and cutting the damn things up live on stream. I've seen how Neil Drukkman provoked the people who hated The Last of Us 2 by telling us that he was having his fanboy army spam voting for the game to win Game of the Year, and what happened? People like myself responded and got Ghost of Tsushima to win.
Drukkman is such a spiteful, hateful little man is he not? The fact that he is so smug all the time really speaks volumes of his character.
A lot of these Last of Us 2 copies were returned, because people don't want them. It got to the point where stores that sold games were rejecting any more returns because there were just too many copies, they couldn't handle any more.
You wanna know what this reminds of? E.T. the Extra Terrestrial on the Atari 2600. Yeah, it's that fucking bad. Maybe it won't be long until someone tries to bury all of the copies in a landfill, if they can't be given away for free. Even then, you would have to pay me to play this shit again.
I know that the game did make record sales in its opening week, and I think it was the #6 best selling game of 2020 period, but here is something you have to consider. The fact that the game dropped in sales at least 80% globally in week two, and considering the massive amount of returns of the game has, where do you think it is right now, if these sites actually updated the numbers after all the returns? In 6 months time, or even a year, where is it gonna be? I'm pretty sure around half of the copies that were sold were given back to stores, that's just speculation after seeing photos of resales on Twitter for 2+ hours.
The game will only sell a small fraction of what The Last of Us 1 did, so when you think about that, that's terrible for a sequel to a beloved game, especially when you compare it to other high quality Sony exclusive games like, I don't know..
God of War?
Horizon Zero Dawn?
Days Gone?
Marvel's Spider-Man?
Who knows, Sony and Naughty Dog might have lost money on this game. The best comparison I could make are the Justice League and Birds of Prey movies.
You guys at Naughty Dog preach about women while at the same time, you are the type who cancel other people who have their own opinions and thoughts. COUGH GINA CARANO
But this is where we are at in 21st century entertainment. Where companies are selfish people by nature. If a game isn't stuffed to the brim with greedy anti-consumer microtransactions, it's stuffed to the brim with anti-consumer ultra progressive and hateful woke identity politics and vicious hypocritical rhetoric.
Because that's what they want to give us apparently.
It's almost as if there is no such thing as escapism in our video games anymore. Everything now has to be political and preachy or else we are bigots who need to be "educated"... Wha??
I have nothing against women and feminism, but if you are one of those radical extremists that tells me that I should be dead or my livelihood should burn to the ground because I am an independent person with my own thoughts and opinions and they don't fall under your agenda, then I will just say that you are no better than the spread of Communism propaganda during the late 20th century.
[FINAL MESSAGE TO NEIL DRUKKMAN]
This is a game that wants to make you miserable and at a price. Neil Drukkman went on record by saying that The Last of Us 2 is about hatred. Well congratulations, Neil, because almost everyone hates this game, and almost everyone hates you.
I don't hate you solely because of the fact that you are a leftist, Neil. I hate you because you botched this highly anticipated game with your dreadful writing, and then you tried to blame it on the supposed sexism and homophobia of the "alt-Right", which is just so outrageous.
You shoved politics down our throats, so now people like myself are forced to talk about it even though I frankly hate doing so.
And it's terrible, because politics are never an easy thing to talk about without getting someone triggered, hence why I get so pissed when I see this shit in my games.
I really hate talking about politics, but this game forces it upon me, so it's literally designed to be a trap.
I'm just a guy who bitches about games from the comfort of my basement. But if Naughty Dog wants to talk about the gator underneath the bed, I gotta fuckin' talk about the gator underneath the bed. And I knew before I even wrote this review that I was going to get some shit for it. But that is the risk that I have to take in order to get my opinions out there.
Neil even went as far as to pull off a Kurt Cobain by saying "If you don't like it then don't buy it."
Yeah, because that worked so well when EA did it when people were complaining about Battlefield 5.
This game really has brought out the worst in people. It's a game that is a culmination of all of 2020's hatred and malice. Is this what video games are trying to be now? Less like fun games and more like 50 shades of gray progressive vessels to preach to the audience?
You lied to people using dishonest promotional material just to sell more copies at launch.
You tried to cowardly screw over the YouTube community with false DMCA takedown claims and nearly ruined years of work into their channels because they had the audacity to call you out on your shitty writing choices, even innocent people who just reported on the fact that the game's spoilers were leaked months before release. Livestreams were shut down mid-session just for simply discussing this whole shitshow going down.
Hell, even memes on Twitter were taken down. MEMES!
What the fuck was the point of that? The only thing that did was expose you for abusing copyright.
(Can I just mention that all of this is illegal because it violates Fair Use policy?)
You completely changed the personalities of beloved characters from the first game for the sake of creating artificial conflict.
You killed off Joel in the most traumatizing and disrespectful way you could have done it.
You took everything about Ellie that we loved in the first game and utterly butchered her while also taking away everything that she fought for.
You forced us to play as a character we didn't want to for 10+ hours straight who murdered Joel in a lazy half-assed attempt to get us to sympathize with her.
You made us kill and brutalize dogs in the most inhumane ways possible after you said we wouldn't have to.
You lied to everyone by saying that Ellie was the only playable character in the game.
You made the zombies in this zombie apocalypse game irrelevant.
You made us watch an utterly gross explicit uncensored Abby sex scene despite of Sony's hypocritical stance on censorship policies.
You shoved representation and bulking women down our throats to get extra doggie treats from Anita Sarkeesian.
And I know I have mentioned Anita a lot but that's only cause she was involved in the development of this game. It turns out that Anita served as a lot of inspiration for Neil's abortion of a story.
You gave Abby, the clear villain, the only good ending out of everyone else in this game.
7 years of development and this was the best that you could come up with? Seriously, you are a disgrace to video game development and the gaming community at large. Your presence is a plague in an industry that millions upon millions of people have expressed so much passion for. You went as far as to put your employees' health in jeopardy as long as it meant that you could shove the game out the door as quick as possible. You have no respect for the art form that you are supposed to represent.
Joel and Ellie, and your fans of the first Last of Us game, deserved so much better than what you have done to them. All I can say is fuck you, dude, you manipulative piece of shit.
And yet games journalism and media is just eating it the fuck up while also siding with the corporation. It's a very fucked up situation.
Well, guess I'll just go back to Days Gone and Ghost of Tsushima, at least those guys actually care about their fans.
And I doubt that the TV show and the Multiplayer to The Last of Us 2 will fully ever come to fruition and reach their full potential, considering how badly received the single player is being received. It will literally be a Game of Thrones situation where everyone will have lost interest and will just move onto other things instead.
I mean you know it's bad when only around a week and a half after the game came out, I went on Twitter and saw pictures of the game being sold for only $40 by major retailers such as WalMart, Target, Best Buy, etc.
There are very few other AAA games that has been put into a position like this. And the developers at Naughty Dog have no one to blame but themselves.
3/10
Edit: And the comments to this are already fucking priceless.
"DUDE so are you saying FFVIIR, Nioh 2, and Days Gone were also desperate? That they had to go on $20 sales because they were losing
Money? Or do you think it was just because EVERY PS4 GAME WENT ON SALE FOR BLACK FRIDAY LOL"
Yeah no fucking shit, Sherlock. But all of those games that I mentioned in my response are games that have come out long before The Last of Us 2 did. The Last of Us 2 is less than a year old and even right now, I could dead ass go to my local Gamestop a couple miles from my home, and grab a mint condition copy of the game for $18-25, when other games like FFVIIR, Sekiro, Kingdom Hearts 3 with the ReMind DLC, Metro Exodus, and Remnant from the Ashes are still going for $30-45. And these games have not went on sale Digitally as many times as The Last of Us 2 did.
It won't be long until I probably start seeing the game inside of bargain bins at my local Family Dollar.
You wanna know why these other games go on sale? Lemme tell you sweetheart. It's not because these developers are desperate to sell more copies, they're just making it easier for people to afford them, especially considering how tough times have gotten this past year. Money has become harder to come by, more people are stuck in their houses everyday with nothing better to do. What is your excuse?
Ghost of Tsushima went on sale Digitally only a couple months after release but that's only cause physical copies were selling like hotcakes. So much so that it's pretty much impossible to find any. Stores were completely empty of them. And since the free Multiplayer update was coming which brought the hype train right back up again, people wanted the game more than ever.
That's called releasing a quality product and being committed to it to keeping your fans happy. You keep good relations with your consumers, they will keep coming back and investing in your product(s). That's how business works.
Or at least, that's how it should work.. But this AAA gaming industry never really learn anything do they?
2018
Easily one of the worst games ever created and this is all due to one man's lunacy. It's a game that completely disregards both disabilities and the art form of making games.
The Quiet Man is a game that is completely silent, which just completely ruins the player experience. You cannot hear anything, and there are no subtitles, none for people that are speaking, and none for signs. That is until a patch came out later that put the sound back in but I'll talk about that later. Because the game has no sound, you will not understand anything that is going on throughout.
It's a beat em' up game with hilariously bad animations and wonky hit registration. The graphics are murky, and it just looks ugly as all hell. Even if the fighting mechanics were well crafted, it doesn't matter because again, you can't fucking hear anything. Also the game is extremely formulaic.
It goes like this: Cutscene, then you walk into a room, you fight some guys, then walk into another room, fight some more guys, then another cutscene, then some more fighting gameplay, and then another cutscene. And it just goes on and on until the game is finished. Repetition is putting it lightly.
The lack of all the audio is the fault of Kensei Fujinaka, the game's Producer. I'd like to quote some things that he said in an interview as to why the game is like this, and it makes so little fucking sense that you can't help but just laugh at it.
"Words are truly amazing. They possess the power even to change the world. This is undeniable. For me, words are as precious as they are valuable. That said, I believe we as humans are capable of connections that transcend words - for example, an infant need only to look into the mother's eyes to know he is safe and loved.
And in a world that overflows with cascades of words taken for granted. I can't help but think that it's often difficult to realize such connections exist. Words shape consciousness, indeed, some even say that "words are life." But what if we were to cast away such a life? What if somehow, we were able to understand one another through connections formed heart to heart, soul to soul, and could once again look into another's eyes and form a bond so pure?
This concept lies at the core of The Quiet Man. Feelings that remain after words are abandoned, feelings that can be conveyed even without words - aren't these the feelings that are so important in this life?"
So if you have no idea what you just read and if you don't understand how that relates to the context of this game, then let me answer that for you: It fucking doesn't. Kensei Fujinaka has made a game that doesn't even reflect to what the hell he is even saying.
Words are not sound, but this game HAS words. They're used as a form of communication just like me and you do. The presentation of the game is void of words, but only because it is void of SOUND.
The main character Dane, can clearly speak, even though the premise of the game is that he's deaf. And while he does at times act like a deaf person should, we can't hear him or anyone else ourselves. Basically, this Producer made a game that clashes with his own ideology and just misses the point entirely. The guy just doesn't understand how being deaf actually fuckin' works.
If I was a deaf person I would be pretty fucking insulted because of how poorly this game portrays what it's actually like to be deaf. There is no attempt whatsoever to educate on what it's like to live without one of your senses. It just presents itself and expects the player to make sense of its ridiculousness without giving any necessary context to how a deaf person perceives the world around them.
So instead, it feels like you were just robbed of one of your senses at random and you have to navigate yourself without the necessary preparation a deaf person has had beforehand. It just blows my mind that a game like this was even made.
The intent of this game was to put us into the shoes of Dane, but it doesn't work because Dane knows what is going on, but we DON'T, and there lies the problem. The gameplay only serves as a driver for the story in order to excuse itself as a video game.
This game is not just an insult to deaf people, but it's also an insult to both game narratives and game development as a whole, because everything in this game is DELIBERATE.
The funny thing is though, even when the sound is turned back on, it's still extremely hard to make sense of the story. It's a revenge story that doesn't make any sense. The voice acting is awful, the presentation is crappy, and it has twist ending that involves Dane...transforming into a superhero.
...What?
Anyway, a week after this game came out, a patch was released that put the sound back in. And after that, Producer Kensei Fujinaka responds to all of the negative reception, and if you thought the first quote was nonsensical, holy fuck it pales in comparison to this quote, in what can only be described as utterly ass-backwards:
"What really happened on that fated night... If the truth is indeed which that remains after words are thrown away, then can we resist the powers of reality that is spun from these words? I want to find what is truly important, without being misled by these overflowing words.
And with only that, do I honestly want to look at it carefully. That wish has driven me to make a story without words. However, when making this theme, that just wasn't enough. Yes, it really felt like "half" was missing. Approximately one week after release, via a free patch update, The Quiet Man will be reborn. A second version with sound and words called The Quiet Man: Answered.
The story will bring light to the truth, and maybe even uproot the mystery that was thought to have been solved as if to say, "I knew nothing at all..." The first version that threw words away. The second version, that brought words back in. A story dramatically transformed. This is the completed experience.
And so with everyone, I want to ask this: Can we really be strong to say we do not need words, even if we need them? In a word overflowing with words, can we really find something beyond them?"
And there you have it. A game created by a person with an over-inflated ego that has attempted to shit all over the artistial integrity of stories and video game development. A person who doesn't even understand his own ideology. This level of gross incompetence can only be described as meme-worthy.
Thank you Fujinaka for showing us just how much you have no fucking idea how to make video games and write stories. Maybe you should join Hollywood instead, they don't really have any standards whatsoever.
1/10
The Quiet Man is a game that is completely silent, which just completely ruins the player experience. You cannot hear anything, and there are no subtitles, none for people that are speaking, and none for signs. That is until a patch came out later that put the sound back in but I'll talk about that later. Because the game has no sound, you will not understand anything that is going on throughout.
It's a beat em' up game with hilariously bad animations and wonky hit registration. The graphics are murky, and it just looks ugly as all hell. Even if the fighting mechanics were well crafted, it doesn't matter because again, you can't fucking hear anything. Also the game is extremely formulaic.
It goes like this: Cutscene, then you walk into a room, you fight some guys, then walk into another room, fight some more guys, then another cutscene, then some more fighting gameplay, and then another cutscene. And it just goes on and on until the game is finished. Repetition is putting it lightly.
The lack of all the audio is the fault of Kensei Fujinaka, the game's Producer. I'd like to quote some things that he said in an interview as to why the game is like this, and it makes so little fucking sense that you can't help but just laugh at it.
"Words are truly amazing. They possess the power even to change the world. This is undeniable. For me, words are as precious as they are valuable. That said, I believe we as humans are capable of connections that transcend words - for example, an infant need only to look into the mother's eyes to know he is safe and loved.
And in a world that overflows with cascades of words taken for granted. I can't help but think that it's often difficult to realize such connections exist. Words shape consciousness, indeed, some even say that "words are life." But what if we were to cast away such a life? What if somehow, we were able to understand one another through connections formed heart to heart, soul to soul, and could once again look into another's eyes and form a bond so pure?
This concept lies at the core of The Quiet Man. Feelings that remain after words are abandoned, feelings that can be conveyed even without words - aren't these the feelings that are so important in this life?"
So if you have no idea what you just read and if you don't understand how that relates to the context of this game, then let me answer that for you: It fucking doesn't. Kensei Fujinaka has made a game that doesn't even reflect to what the hell he is even saying.
Words are not sound, but this game HAS words. They're used as a form of communication just like me and you do. The presentation of the game is void of words, but only because it is void of SOUND.
The main character Dane, can clearly speak, even though the premise of the game is that he's deaf. And while he does at times act like a deaf person should, we can't hear him or anyone else ourselves. Basically, this Producer made a game that clashes with his own ideology and just misses the point entirely. The guy just doesn't understand how being deaf actually fuckin' works.
If I was a deaf person I would be pretty fucking insulted because of how poorly this game portrays what it's actually like to be deaf. There is no attempt whatsoever to educate on what it's like to live without one of your senses. It just presents itself and expects the player to make sense of its ridiculousness without giving any necessary context to how a deaf person perceives the world around them.
So instead, it feels like you were just robbed of one of your senses at random and you have to navigate yourself without the necessary preparation a deaf person has had beforehand. It just blows my mind that a game like this was even made.
The intent of this game was to put us into the shoes of Dane, but it doesn't work because Dane knows what is going on, but we DON'T, and there lies the problem. The gameplay only serves as a driver for the story in order to excuse itself as a video game.
This game is not just an insult to deaf people, but it's also an insult to both game narratives and game development as a whole, because everything in this game is DELIBERATE.
The funny thing is though, even when the sound is turned back on, it's still extremely hard to make sense of the story. It's a revenge story that doesn't make any sense. The voice acting is awful, the presentation is crappy, and it has twist ending that involves Dane...transforming into a superhero.
...What?
Anyway, a week after this game came out, a patch was released that put the sound back in. And after that, Producer Kensei Fujinaka responds to all of the negative reception, and if you thought the first quote was nonsensical, holy fuck it pales in comparison to this quote, in what can only be described as utterly ass-backwards:
"What really happened on that fated night... If the truth is indeed which that remains after words are thrown away, then can we resist the powers of reality that is spun from these words? I want to find what is truly important, without being misled by these overflowing words.
And with only that, do I honestly want to look at it carefully. That wish has driven me to make a story without words. However, when making this theme, that just wasn't enough. Yes, it really felt like "half" was missing. Approximately one week after release, via a free patch update, The Quiet Man will be reborn. A second version with sound and words called The Quiet Man: Answered.
The story will bring light to the truth, and maybe even uproot the mystery that was thought to have been solved as if to say, "I knew nothing at all..." The first version that threw words away. The second version, that brought words back in. A story dramatically transformed. This is the completed experience.
And so with everyone, I want to ask this: Can we really be strong to say we do not need words, even if we need them? In a word overflowing with words, can we really find something beyond them?"
And there you have it. A game created by a person with an over-inflated ego that has attempted to shit all over the artistial integrity of stories and video game development. A person who doesn't even understand his own ideology. This level of gross incompetence can only be described as meme-worthy.
Thank you Fujinaka for showing us just how much you have no fucking idea how to make video games and write stories. Maybe you should join Hollywood instead, they don't really have any standards whatsoever.
1/10
2004
When you think of the 90s, you think of the Console Wars and lots of gross-out humor in entertainment, even more so than nowadays.
This game is not only gross but it's a tech-demo made for the Genesis in 2004... a whole 7 seven years after the console was discontinued.
The demo was created in Venezuela. That would mean that this is the definitive Venezuelan bus simulator.
What makes this game so astounding is that there are literally three things you can do: you can drive forwards and honk your horn, BUT, you can also drive backwards. Yeah, eat your heart out, Desert Bus.
And if that wasn't enough, just listen to this amazing title screen music!
https://youtu.be/sC0cvwnG0Ik
This game is not only gross but it's a tech-demo made for the Genesis in 2004... a whole 7 seven years after the console was discontinued.
The demo was created in Venezuela. That would mean that this is the definitive Venezuelan bus simulator.
What makes this game so astounding is that there are literally three things you can do: you can drive forwards and honk your horn, BUT, you can also drive backwards. Yeah, eat your heart out, Desert Bus.
And if that wasn't enough, just listen to this amazing title screen music!
https://youtu.be/sC0cvwnG0Ik
Jesus Christ, I don't think I have ever felt so stone cold after playing this game. I wanted to jump into this game thinking that Konami could not have done me so wrong.
Going into this game blind was like going into the gas room in MGS1 without the 02 Mask.
I was eager to see how magnificent this entry could have been since it's the very last game before Kojima was booted out of Konami for good, and I would have assumed he would go out with an absolute bang. I adore the Metal Gear series. Pretty much every game from Solid 1-4 are within my top 15 favorite games of all time. But to see The Phantom Pain as a complete letdown is just depressing.
When Ground Zeroes came out I had some concern in regards to the direction the franchise was being taken in. And to be honest I thought that this game was completely unnecessary considering how masterfully Metal Gear Solid 4 concluded the saga. But regardless I got really damn hyped from all the trailers of The Phantom Pain.
I was like Come on, this is Metal Gear Solid 5, it's gonna be fucking amazing!! I don't understand what exactly is going on, but it looks really damn exciting. And oh my god Kaz Miller and Ocelot are here, THAT'S MY DAD RIGHT THERE!
And the games media hyped the game up as well with 10/10 Masterpiece reviews and whatnot. But upon playing this game, it wasn't just a disappointment... it was worse. Oh Sweet goggly Jesus on a tricycle it's a lot worse.
This review is going to contain spoilers for Metal Gear Solid 1, 3, and 4. Read this at your own discretion. But this is necessary so I can expose just how atrocious the narrative is in MGS5.
{ Story }
You know, even though MGS4 ended everything so well, something about it just made me crave more. Whether a continued adventure of Big Boss was worth telling even though it was rounded out so well in Snake Eater was up to debate.
But what we did end up getting is just a stale, laborious, underwhelming, and flat-out balls to the wall frustrating experience. And that's not even the worst of it.
The game is unfinished, terribly paced, and the most creatively bankrupt entry the series has ever seen, well, at least until Metal Gear Survive came out, but uhhh, heh heh heh.... Oh man. What the fuck even is Metal Gear Survive?? Lmao
MGS5 just feels pointless because anyone who has played the previous games will already have known the fates of all the characters. MGS3 was a great prequel in the sense that it told a story that we couldn't infer already. Back then before Snake Eater we didn't understand how Big Boss became the villain he was in the first two Metal Gear Solid games or much about him at all. But seeing that story play out was intriguing.
Then MGS3 comes along and perfectly tied itself in with MGS1 with the creation of FOX-HOUND and leaving on an excellent note. The government made this guy fuckin' kill his mentor/best friend, so you can see how he would become the dodgy bastard he was later on. And then the credits music would kick in and you're just like "holy shit, that was amazing."
There was no need to have a bunch of sequels that would amount to just giving us meaningless information. Seriously, I just don't understand what the point of Peace Walker, Ground Zeroes, and the Phantom Pain are.
Well, does The Phantom Pain tell a good story? Well, to justify the game's existence, there are a lot, and I mean a lot of retcons in here, but even then, the things that they could have done to make the game worthwhile and a worthy successor to MGS3 and 4 is far overshadowed by a story dedicated to a lame ass skullface villain and Kojima's new sniper bikini waifu.
The one big thing that would have been amazing was some more development given to Zero and giving some more explanation as to him being the main bad guy of the whole series. Because that major twist just came out of the blue and it was a pretty hard pill to swallow. But no, that shit isn't expanded upon in The Phantom Pain.
How about the relationship between Big Boss and Liquid? That would have been pretty sick as well. But no, not much really happens in this game. Hell, it doesn't even elaborate on Big Boss's villany, and there actually is a reason for that. I mean, the game didn't really have to after Snake Eater's ending, but they might as well have made him a pretty big asshole after the shit that happened to him, making his later actions justifiable.
Now lemme talk about Cipher. Jesus what a disappoinment of an antagonist this guy is. They hype this guy up in all the trailers for years until release but then he turns out to be one of the biggest jokers the franchise has ever seen.
Basically he creates some virus that can wipe out all the people he pleases and then he builds a Metal Gear and accidentally fucking kills himself with it. Whoops!! You see, he needed that Metal Gear because it was like very 2 Spooky 4 Me and the whole planet was gonna lose their collective shit. Also he hates Zero for some reason, that's never explained. Whatever I guess.
Remember that one trailer where Snake is walking down this hellish corridor and he is surrounded by dead bodies and you had that amazing music playing in the background? I thought no doubt that would have some insane impact on the characters and the story. But, no. It's just some self-contained mission where you walk around and slaughter terminally ill people... Good God.
Or how about Zero? I couldn't wait to see him in this game as an antagonist. He sounded really awesome in the trailers.
...
Wait, what's that? He's not in the game? He is just in some cassette tapes?
..Oh. Okay then.
Oh yeah, I mentioned Liquid was in this game. I wonder what kind of amazing scenes we are gonna get with him. Well first off, he is barely ever given any screen time because the cutscenes are so short and are spread so far and in-between, and at the end of the game he just.. leaves Mother Base. And the final mission was cut from the game so... there goes that plotline. So much for being able to see Liquid use that Metal Gear he hopped into.
And the whole Huey arc is just insanely predictable. We already know he has to be alive for the other games so of course he is going to be shipped off.
What about Quiet the sniper lady? Man, what a deep character she was... She says almost nothing for the entirety of the game so I don't really get how I'm supposed to connect to her. All I know is that she wanted vengeance for the condition that she was given but really, it's just.. dumb as hell. Apparently she has to wear less clothing so that she can breathe because she got some virus and was nearly drowned by some Russian soldiers. Hmm...
But then that plotline gets dropped in favor of her wanting that Big Boss dick.
But the one moment in the whole game that pissed me off so much to no end and made me absolutely despise the narrative of this game, was the sudden twist with Big Boss himself.
See, it turns out that Big Boss is not actually Big Boss. The real Big Boss disappeared randomly after the prologue of the game. So you're telling me this mute asshole that I have been playing as throughout this 40-50 hour game was never actually Big Boss, but just some random guy who is using the name of Big Boss?
Whaaaaaa??
This shit just comes out of absolutely nowhere and I am expected to just accept it. Wouldn't that mean that this game doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things because it doesn't affect anything that happens later on in the timeline?
What was the point of playing it then?!!
Agh, I'm gonna have a stroke. It's like a bad fever dream. I hate this story. Fuck this story. This game has the worst methods of presenting its narrative in the whole series. It needs to die. It's like the game is actively trying to waste the player's time. I don't think I have seen such disregard towards the established universe. It's like the people who wrote the narrative for this game have never actually played the other games or even know what Metal Gear is.
There are no Codec conversations, the cutscenes are spread far and in-between hours upon hours of gameplay, and the cutscenes are a small fraction in length compared to the older games, so the narrative just breadcrumbs you the whole time. It's just not like what we got before.
Story is almost everything in Metal Gear, but when you botched the story and the lore, you have essentially botched the whole game and have made it very, very difficult for the player to get engaged, regardless of how good the gameplay is. Too bad the gameplay in this game is also shit.
And I don't give a fuck about the cassette tapes. Defenders of this story try to say that you have to listen to the cassette tapes in order to get more context, but, I'm sorry??
Why are important story elements being hidden behind cassette tapes? You don't fucking put important story details inside of items that are meant to be OPTIONAL. And what if you're missing cassette tapes? What, I gotta look up guides on the internet just so I can obtain items containing story information, instead of it being provided in the game itself, like, I don't know...
Cutscenes? Codec conversations?
This is seriously some of the dumbest shit I have ever heard of.
{ Gameplay }
The gameplay in this game suffers from what I like to call Mafia 3 Syndrome. Because the minute to minute gameplay moments in this game are just repetitive busywork. It's like playing Death Stranding but in the Metal Gear universe.
Everything in this game just feels laborious, which sucks because what you gotta give credit towards Metal Gear as a franchise for is how everything the player participates in affects the story and the world. Level after level, cutscene after cutscene, scenario after scenario, it was never ending how much these games tried to blow your mind.
The missions in Phantom Pain feel like they were just put in for the hell of it. There are around 50 Main Missions in the whole game, but 90% of them don't have anything to do with progressing the story.
Mission 3: Eliminate the Spetsnaz Commander
Mission 4: Identify and destroy the comms equipment at the Eastern Communications Post
Mission 5: Extract the captive engineer
Mission 6: Secure the Honey Bee rocket launcher
Mission 7: Eliminate three commanders at three different locations
Mission 8: Destroy three tanks
Mission 9: Destroy an armored vehicle and multiple gunships
Mission 10: Extract the Mujahideen prisoner
Mission 13: Shut down the oil transfer pump
Mission 15: Destroy Walker Gears
Mission 17: Extract two Intel Team members being held captive
Mission 18: Eliminate a former rebel soldier, eliminate 5 prisoners being held captive held at Kungenga Mine, extract child prisoner
Mission 19: Identify and eliminate the PF commander, the Major
Mission 20: Extract Shabani
Mission 21: Identify and eliminate the CFA Official
Mission 22: Eliminate the enemy commander
Mission 23: EXTRACT THE WHITE MAMB--
Fuuuuuckk meeeeeee!!!
Do you see what I'm getting at here? Does this sound boring to you or what? Because trust me, it will be after a while. And you wanna know what's funny? All 17 of these missions I just listed have NOTHING to do with advancing the plot. It's all just meant to pad out the run time. It's all just filler. Only a few of these missions actually matter in terms of giving the player what they were waiting for.
There are about 50 Missions in this game, not including the Side Ops.
And even then, the cutscenes themselves are either underwhelming, they dump pointless exposition, they're way too short, or the performances are very awkwardly done.
Seriously, why am I doing all of this shit? None of it relates to the narrative. I'm only doing it because Kaz told me to do it I guess. And this can make the more bullshit sections in the game that much more frustrating, and trust me, this game has the most balls to the wall aggravating parts in the whole franchise. Lemme give you a little experience of mine:
Mission 29
Oh ho ho my fucking God, Mission 29.
Mission 29 is basically where you rescue this guy named Code Talker who actually knows the solution to curing the disease that caused a severe epidemic on Mother Base. But then the helicopter gets attacked by these teleporting, bullet sponge enemies called the Skulls and it crashes.
So you have to protect Code Talker while also fighting off the Skulls but there are major problems with this.
The Skulls are absolute fucking bullet sponges, they are almost bulletproof meaning that you will be wasting mags upon mags upon mags of ammo just to kill one of them. A rocket launcher is literally the most effective way to damage them and yet there are times where they teleport in front of me and I ended up blowing myself up and dying like a complete dumbass. So I either use up time and ammo just simply shooting at them or go the more dangerous approach and risk killing myself with a rocket just so I can effectively damage them.
These fuckers are more bullet spongy than a Tom Clancy's The Division 1 boss. They just don't fucking die.
Not to mention shooting at them risks me getting shot as well, and since Snake is more nimble than a flacid penis, I literally have to run and take cover just after taking a few shots. And yet it takes AN ETERNITY for your health to regen, meaning you can get damaged while taking cover trying to recover.
It really does make me miss the days of Metal Gear where we had health bars and Rations. But then The Phantom Pain comes along and goes the Call of Duty route with regenerating health bullshit.
But then I get ass fucked again because taking cover and sitting still risks me getting hit by rocks that rise from the ground underneath me, and if I don't move my ass, the rock will explode, and I'm even a foot too close to it, the explosion will kill me in 1 hit. Not to mention one of the Skulls can throw rocks at me, and another two can teleport in front of me and hit me with a machete which brings me down to near death. So basically, I gotta be moving at all times.
There is so much fucking multi-tasking you have to do, and it just feels like I am ill-equipped to handle what the game is throwing at me despite being almost 30 hours into it. It seems like the developers' idea of challenge is to just spam the player with bulletproof enemies and yet you can barely take any damage yourself.
I spent an hour beforehand just developing new weapons and equipment in case of a section like this, and yet I am still being anally molested from every direction.
I got so aggravated that I had to stop playing. And normally I don't do that when I play games. It's that kind of atrocious design choice that made me stop playing the game in the first place. And after that insane onslaught I just thought to myself
"No wonder I never finished this game."
It's bad enough the game suffers from an insanely underwhelming and disappointing story that just rectons everything before it. And it's further exaserbated by monotonous and utterly irritating gameplay.
Metal Gear has always had hits and misses in the gameplay department, but if a section was getting on the nerves in the older games, you would know that afterwards there would be some insane payoff.
But here in Phantom Pain whenever I was getting really agitated during a mission, all I knew was that after that I would be put back onto a helicopter and Kaz would tell me what everything that I just went through was super "important."
In Metal Gear Solid 4 if I was blowing the fuck out of things for 10-15 minutes it was because Raiden was fighting Vamp and he needed some backup while he activated Metal Gear Rex. There was purpose behind doing what I was doing, not just because some guy told me to do it.
Not to mention I was gitty every 5-10 minutes during MGS4. It was full of absolutely incredible moments, all of my questions and desires being fully addressed. But in MGS5, nothing like that ever happens.
I mean, I was really fucking hyped when I saw Ocelot and Kaz on screen during the introduction but then after that I proceeded to be bored for the next 5+ hours, watching unskippable chopper rides to every mission and doing the same shit over and over and over again for little to no payoff, and watching the same credit sequences over and over again for no fucking reason. And I have to traverse an empty map for 5-10 minutes before I can even start the mission to begin with.
Seriously, why are there credits in every mission?? Something about it feels wrong. I'm pretty sure this is a game Kojima made, I don't need to see his name pop up on the screen every single time a mission starts. I get it, this is a Kojima game. But I doubt he was proud of it. Far from it.
If anything Kojima must have been fuckin' embarrassed of this game.
It also doesn't help that the credits spoil the characters that are going to be in the mission. I don't think I have seen any other game that does this shit.
There are quite a lot of weapons in this game but you are restricted to three at a time. So the nuts on the fly arsenal of MGS4 is gone. And you don't even get anything cool like a doll that possesses enemies. But why have that when you can just run up to someone, hit Right Bumper and instantly knock them out? Or just shoot everyone in the head with a tranquilizer pistol?
But what pisses me off the most is how developing new equipment works. I don't know it 100%, but from what I know, as you expand Mother Base and build expansions, you get more space to hire staff.
There are many different divisions, but the one for developing new weapons and equipment is the R&D Team. It levels up depending on two factors: The number of staff and the rankings of each staff member. Staff can range from E to S++.
As the division levels up, you unlock more stuff to develop. Better guns, upgrades, etc.
And as you develop weapons, you unlock Tiers for that specific weapon. The higher the Tier, the better the gun performs. But you need to develop one Tier before you can develop the next one. But it gets worse.
For every single item you develop, weapons, skins, and every other item in the game, you have to wait on a timer for the item to be developed before you can use it. And the higher Grade the item is, the longer the timer. Those higher Grade items can actually take between 1-4 HOURS to develop.
Are you kidding me?? Is this a Triple A Metal Gear Solid game or a fucking mobile game? Why are there timers in this game?
Not just the weapons, but expanding the Mother Base takes time as well. Remember what I said earlier, you expand the different base facilities in Mother Base so you can hire more staff.
Doing this requires resources. But getting these resources requires you to grind. Either by farming them in the open world or by doing mundane challenges. There are 7 divisions:
Command Platform
Combat Unit Platform
R&D Platform
Base Development Platform
Support Platform
Intel Platform
Medical Platform
Now, imagine having to grind resources to expand every single one of these divisions. Some of these are really fuckin' important. Now, imagine having to wait in between expansions.
There are 4 levels of expansion. And the higher the level, the longer it takes to reach the next one. And it can take upwards of 24 HOURS to finish.
Unless..
There is a catch.
Unless you spend MB Coins to instantly skip the wait. What are MB Coins?
What do you think? They're fucking mictrotransactions. Of course right?
Konami has the fucking audacity to charge players real world money in their single player game in order to make grinding less tedious and time consuming. It's all over their Online mode as well. Many character skins, gun camos, and ACTUAL WEAPONS, they are locked behind paywalls.
Mictrotransactions. In a Metal Gear Solid game.
They played us like a damn fiddle.
You could easily say fuck this game merely because of the fact that there are paywalls in a single player Metal Gear Solid game but bringing up everything else in this review wouldn't be favorable either.
Also, there is no reason to be on Mother Base. There is literally nothing to do on it aside from participating in a shooting range or walking up to your staff and watch them salute at you all the time. It's just an empty base with barely any people on it. Oh, and you can beat the shit out your staff. Which increases their morale... for some reason. Jesus that just sounds masochistic.
You can get companions in this game like a horse, a wolf, and human buddies like Quiet, but it doesn't really change the game much except how easy you want enemies to get killed without your involvement. Or make traversing the empty wasteland less time consuming and tedious.
Since this game is open world you have to traverse an empty map with nothing happening on it for a period of time in between missions, when you're not stuck waiting in a chopper. Yeah! Progress!!
I think that's the most stupefying aspect of this game being open world. Nothing ever happens in it aside from weather changes. This is supposed to be a game where you're taking back Mother Base and fighting a war against Cipher, not to mention the Afghans are at war with the Russians. Where is the conflict?? Why isn't there anyone fighting each other?
Instead you run around a map where it's just you and the open wilderness with no one to meet and talk to. And there aren't any locations that would provide diversity to the gameplay that would justify an open world setting. It comes nowhere near as close as many other open world titles already on the market.
This means that there isn't much incentive to explore the map. Also, you are restricted as to where you can go. If you wanted to travel from one part of the map to the other, you're not able to take any shortcuts.
And there is no Fast Travel. Well kinda. But it's one of the worst implementations of Fast Travel I've ever seen in a video game.
If you want to go somewhere in a hurry, you have to call in the chopper, go to the landing zone, get on the chopper, wait for it to take off, sit in a loading screen, then you pull up the iDroid to select the landing zone you want to go to, then you're put into the preparation screen where you choose your weapons, equipment, buddies, etc. Then you sit in another loading screen, and then when the game loads you still have to wait for the chopper to land so you can get off of it. And after that, you still have to travel to the mission objective.
Wow. Just... Wow. This is just Insanity. All of this bullshit just to FAST TRAVEL? It's not even Fast Travel, it's fuckin' Slow Travel. It's actually faster to just get on your horse or a jeep and ride there.
Not to mention, you have to follow all of the roads, which makes traveling from Point A to B even longer.
You can't get on top of any of the mountains, which means two things: you can't take shortcuts and you can't get any vantage points when approaching an enemy base. Want to go prone on a cliff and take out enemies down below with a sniper rifle?
Well tough shit. You can't do that.
The AI in this game is laughably bad. They have such a small field of vision you can stand in front of an outpost in broad daylight and they won't see you. They also walk on predetermined paths so you can expect them to be in the same spots all the time.
Another thing that breaks the stealth in this game is that when you are spotted, the game goes into slow motion, in which you have a few seconds to take out the enemy before he alerts his comrades. And this means that you can just run and gun everything if you have any suppressed guns. And since you can call as many Supply Drops as you want from your base, you can have an infinite supply of ammo and suppressors.
Even then, the AI are insanely inconsistent. When you're not detected, you can just shoot everyone in the head and clear out outposts with not much effort, but if you do get detected.. you get fucking bombarded.
Seriously, you get spotted by one guy and immediately the entire base, outpost, or whatever are instantly notified of your location. And this begins an absolute onslaught of enemies swarming you and shooting at you from many different angles, whether on foot, in an attack helicopter, on a Walker Gear, etc.
There are literally two states of play: Not detected or getting bombarded from every angle. And remember, you can't take much damage in this game, and health regeneration is slow as fuck. Know what that means? You gotta camp. It's probably the most viable option for surviving gunfights.
Remember how many rockets you could tank in the older Metal Gear games? Well you'd be lucky if you can take more than one in Phantom Pain, regardless of impact.
It also doesn't help that there is no mini-map in this game unlike in the previous games. All you get is some binoculars to ping enemies and an area on the map screen on where the enemy could be. Meaning you will be opening up the map constantly just to see where enemies are located and that's just fun isn't it?
Boss fights are almost completely mitigated in this game. Remember all the legendary iconic boss fights from the older games?
Name any and or every boss off the top of your head from MGS 1-4. Almost all of them are beloved moments in each game in one way or another.
But here we have.. hide from Quiet the sniper lady, ram a human torch Colonel Volgin (who says nothing by the way) into a river, or.. hide and escape from a Metal Gear, or my favorite, teleporting rock fucking bullet sponges in Mission 29.
Are these even boss fights? These feel nothing like the ones we were used to. Since when were basic bitch bullet sponge enemies considered a boss fight, or running away from a Metal Gear?
Seriously, even the BNB from MGS4 are like legends compared to this shit. Remember Laughing Octopus? How she would play all of those tricks on you and then she tries to grab you in that weird skintight outfit making you question what she is?
And then Drebin calls you on the Codec and gives you a fucked up backstory on the person you just killed, giving you added context to the horrors of war and what impact that has led on the world of that game. That shit is on a whole other level compared to the shit in Phantom Pain.
Hell, there isn't even a final boss fight. Yeah, no joke. Think about Metal Gear for a second again.
Every single Metal Gear game had legendary final bosses.
MGS1, Metal Gear Rex and escaping Liquid Snake while shooting at him on a jeep
MGS2, Solidus Snake
MGS3, The Boss
MGS4, Liquid Ocelot
ALL of these guys are legendary. These are all absolutely incredible final bosses, some of the greatest fights in video game history.
But then Phantom Pain just.. ends. And I guess this is due to the cut content from the game. Though from what I have read and seen, the cut content just consists of fighting the same bosses for a second time so welp, that sucks. So much for making up.
In fact, unlocking the last few missions of the game requires playing through older missions you already completed but on Hard difficulty. Seriously?? I mean, I guess I'm not surprised. This game is nothing but padding.
The boss fights here don't feature any of the creativity or enginuity that the boss fights from the previous games had.
And the enemy variety here is completely lacking. There are no cool, interesting enemies like the Gecko from MGS4 or anything like that. It's just a regular guy, a regular guy with armor, a guy driving around in a Walker Gear, a guy in an attack helicopter or a tank, or annoying as fuck bullet sponge enemies that can turn people into zombies. Yeah, zombies, real creative guys.
This game also has a habit with following too many modern video game sins. The first mission of the game is nothing but lying in a bed for 10-15 minutes and then once you finally have control you are crawling on the floor at a snail's pace while tutorials pop on the screen and scripted segments happen in front of you.
And this mission goes on for like an hour.
And whenever you reach a certain moment in the game you are forced to just walk and listen to people talk. I'm used to this in games but here it just feels so unnecessary.
Another thing that you gotta give credit towards MGS is that despite people bemoaning the series for its very ample use of long ass cutscenes, you still had 100% control the second you hit gameplay. And you were not interrupted during gameplay with Codec conversations unless if you really wanted to listen to the dialogue.
The only times you would get Codec conversations in the middle of gameplay is either for tutorials or for major story revelations containing lots of character development.
Not to mention you can choose to ignore the tutorial calls. And the calls that you are forced to pick up you can skip them as well. But I don't see why you would though, I love being in the Codec as much as I could. I love listening to the characters talk, which is further complimented by the masterfully done performances.
Even MGS4, which is a game that gets criticized for its over abundance of cutscenes and narrative, the moment you were in the game, you were in the game. No interruptions or slowdown because of condescending tutorials, forced walking sections, and scripted segments.
This shit in MGS5 leads to one of the most, if not the most awkward moments in all of Metal Gear: The fucking jeep ride.
Yeah, one of the trailers had some amazing music, but then the music is used not during a boss fight or some insane moment in the game, but during a long ass, boring, and very awkward jeep ride.
"Big Boss" just sitting there, quietly, not saying a word, staring dead eye at Cipher as he reveals his master plan and it was one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen in a game. I couldn't help but lose control of my laughter at this. How was this okay? I don't understand it. That music was just gone to waste.
{ Final Thoughts }
Well.. what more can I say? I hate this game. I think that I have made that pretty clear. This game is a disgrace to the lineage of Metal Gear. It just doesn't feel like a Metal Gear game at all. This is one of the most disappointing games I've ever played.
Metal Gear is a very story heavy franchise, and it's fucking awesome, and it's complimented by just as awesome gameplay. But here we have laborious, tedious, and frustrating gameplay complimented by a paper thin plot that is badly told.
And that just isn't what Metal Gear is no matter how you put it. I love Metal Gear. I remember MGS1 being one of the first PS1 games I ever played. I was only like, eight or nine years old when I played it, and I loved the series ever since.
I have a burning passion for this series as these games culminated in me getting exposed to a community where I met a good chunk of my bestest friends because they share the same love for Metal Gear as I do.
I've owned this game since 2017 and to this day I have never finished the game to completion. I must have come back to this like 3 or 4 times, and every time I struggled to get through it.
The game lacks any sort of end goal so I as a player don't have the motivation to care about it.
Metal Gear was one of the few franchises that had not been ruined yet. It was on a massive killstreak but to see it go out on Phantom Pain and Metal Gear Survive considering that MGS4 had such a good climax is just depressing.
I have absolutely no respect towards Konami as they are mainly responsible for the game being the way it is. I feel for Kojima. I could tell that he just didn't want to make this game but he was forced to by Konami because their stocks were plummeting and they needed a new console game, so they just thought "Let's make Kojima make another Metal Gear game."
Even though he wanted the series to end after MGS4. It also doesn't help that Konami cut off the budget at some point during development forcing the team to cut content and release the game early, and from I've read online, the team were under pressure because they were being spied on by Konami.
I also don't find it coincidental that as soon as the game released, Kojima was immediately relieved from the company and was not allowed to attend any award ceremonies. So I can tell in the back of my mind, Konami is to blame for all of this.
Just like with Silent Hill and Castlevania, Metal Gear has only become an afterthought in Konami's minds. Metal Gear is now only a cash grab. Oh, and a series of Pachinko machines (slot machines).
Yeah remember when Konami announced that Snake Eater Pachinko machine? That still makes me sick in the stomach to this day, and.. watching my favorite Tactical Espionage Third Person Action franchise that gave me a fetish for eye patches go down this dark path is just, really sad to me.
Thank you Konami for taking my childhood and not letting it die on a sunrising mountain Red Dead Redemption 2 style, but in a ravaging burning house fire or a nuclear explosion.
At least I still have the older games. To me, Metal Gear ended after MGS4.
Because The Phantom Pain literally gives me phantom pain.
4/10
Going into this game blind was like going into the gas room in MGS1 without the 02 Mask.
I was eager to see how magnificent this entry could have been since it's the very last game before Kojima was booted out of Konami for good, and I would have assumed he would go out with an absolute bang. I adore the Metal Gear series. Pretty much every game from Solid 1-4 are within my top 15 favorite games of all time. But to see The Phantom Pain as a complete letdown is just depressing.
When Ground Zeroes came out I had some concern in regards to the direction the franchise was being taken in. And to be honest I thought that this game was completely unnecessary considering how masterfully Metal Gear Solid 4 concluded the saga. But regardless I got really damn hyped from all the trailers of The Phantom Pain.
I was like Come on, this is Metal Gear Solid 5, it's gonna be fucking amazing!! I don't understand what exactly is going on, but it looks really damn exciting. And oh my god Kaz Miller and Ocelot are here, THAT'S MY DAD RIGHT THERE!
And the games media hyped the game up as well with 10/10 Masterpiece reviews and whatnot. But upon playing this game, it wasn't just a disappointment... it was worse. Oh Sweet goggly Jesus on a tricycle it's a lot worse.
This review is going to contain spoilers for Metal Gear Solid 1, 3, and 4. Read this at your own discretion. But this is necessary so I can expose just how atrocious the narrative is in MGS5.
{ Story }
You know, even though MGS4 ended everything so well, something about it just made me crave more. Whether a continued adventure of Big Boss was worth telling even though it was rounded out so well in Snake Eater was up to debate.
But what we did end up getting is just a stale, laborious, underwhelming, and flat-out balls to the wall frustrating experience. And that's not even the worst of it.
The game is unfinished, terribly paced, and the most creatively bankrupt entry the series has ever seen, well, at least until Metal Gear Survive came out, but uhhh, heh heh heh.... Oh man. What the fuck even is Metal Gear Survive?? Lmao
MGS5 just feels pointless because anyone who has played the previous games will already have known the fates of all the characters. MGS3 was a great prequel in the sense that it told a story that we couldn't infer already. Back then before Snake Eater we didn't understand how Big Boss became the villain he was in the first two Metal Gear Solid games or much about him at all. But seeing that story play out was intriguing.
Then MGS3 comes along and perfectly tied itself in with MGS1 with the creation of FOX-HOUND and leaving on an excellent note. The government made this guy fuckin' kill his mentor/best friend, so you can see how he would become the dodgy bastard he was later on. And then the credits music would kick in and you're just like "holy shit, that was amazing."
There was no need to have a bunch of sequels that would amount to just giving us meaningless information. Seriously, I just don't understand what the point of Peace Walker, Ground Zeroes, and the Phantom Pain are.
Well, does The Phantom Pain tell a good story? Well, to justify the game's existence, there are a lot, and I mean a lot of retcons in here, but even then, the things that they could have done to make the game worthwhile and a worthy successor to MGS3 and 4 is far overshadowed by a story dedicated to a lame ass skullface villain and Kojima's new sniper bikini waifu.
The one big thing that would have been amazing was some more development given to Zero and giving some more explanation as to him being the main bad guy of the whole series. Because that major twist just came out of the blue and it was a pretty hard pill to swallow. But no, that shit isn't expanded upon in The Phantom Pain.
How about the relationship between Big Boss and Liquid? That would have been pretty sick as well. But no, not much really happens in this game. Hell, it doesn't even elaborate on Big Boss's villany, and there actually is a reason for that. I mean, the game didn't really have to after Snake Eater's ending, but they might as well have made him a pretty big asshole after the shit that happened to him, making his later actions justifiable.
Now lemme talk about Cipher. Jesus what a disappoinment of an antagonist this guy is. They hype this guy up in all the trailers for years until release but then he turns out to be one of the biggest jokers the franchise has ever seen.
Basically he creates some virus that can wipe out all the people he pleases and then he builds a Metal Gear and accidentally fucking kills himself with it. Whoops!! You see, he needed that Metal Gear because it was like very 2 Spooky 4 Me and the whole planet was gonna lose their collective shit. Also he hates Zero for some reason, that's never explained. Whatever I guess.
Remember that one trailer where Snake is walking down this hellish corridor and he is surrounded by dead bodies and you had that amazing music playing in the background? I thought no doubt that would have some insane impact on the characters and the story. But, no. It's just some self-contained mission where you walk around and slaughter terminally ill people... Good God.
Or how about Zero? I couldn't wait to see him in this game as an antagonist. He sounded really awesome in the trailers.
...
Wait, what's that? He's not in the game? He is just in some cassette tapes?
..Oh. Okay then.
Oh yeah, I mentioned Liquid was in this game. I wonder what kind of amazing scenes we are gonna get with him. Well first off, he is barely ever given any screen time because the cutscenes are so short and are spread so far and in-between, and at the end of the game he just.. leaves Mother Base. And the final mission was cut from the game so... there goes that plotline. So much for being able to see Liquid use that Metal Gear he hopped into.
And the whole Huey arc is just insanely predictable. We already know he has to be alive for the other games so of course he is going to be shipped off.
What about Quiet the sniper lady? Man, what a deep character she was... She says almost nothing for the entirety of the game so I don't really get how I'm supposed to connect to her. All I know is that she wanted vengeance for the condition that she was given but really, it's just.. dumb as hell. Apparently she has to wear less clothing so that she can breathe because she got some virus and was nearly drowned by some Russian soldiers. Hmm...
But then that plotline gets dropped in favor of her wanting that Big Boss dick.
But the one moment in the whole game that pissed me off so much to no end and made me absolutely despise the narrative of this game, was the sudden twist with Big Boss himself.
See, it turns out that Big Boss is not actually Big Boss. The real Big Boss disappeared randomly after the prologue of the game. So you're telling me this mute asshole that I have been playing as throughout this 40-50 hour game was never actually Big Boss, but just some random guy who is using the name of Big Boss?
Whaaaaaa??
This shit just comes out of absolutely nowhere and I am expected to just accept it. Wouldn't that mean that this game doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things because it doesn't affect anything that happens later on in the timeline?
What was the point of playing it then?!!
Agh, I'm gonna have a stroke. It's like a bad fever dream. I hate this story. Fuck this story. This game has the worst methods of presenting its narrative in the whole series. It needs to die. It's like the game is actively trying to waste the player's time. I don't think I have seen such disregard towards the established universe. It's like the people who wrote the narrative for this game have never actually played the other games or even know what Metal Gear is.
There are no Codec conversations, the cutscenes are spread far and in-between hours upon hours of gameplay, and the cutscenes are a small fraction in length compared to the older games, so the narrative just breadcrumbs you the whole time. It's just not like what we got before.
Story is almost everything in Metal Gear, but when you botched the story and the lore, you have essentially botched the whole game and have made it very, very difficult for the player to get engaged, regardless of how good the gameplay is. Too bad the gameplay in this game is also shit.
And I don't give a fuck about the cassette tapes. Defenders of this story try to say that you have to listen to the cassette tapes in order to get more context, but, I'm sorry??
Why are important story elements being hidden behind cassette tapes? You don't fucking put important story details inside of items that are meant to be OPTIONAL. And what if you're missing cassette tapes? What, I gotta look up guides on the internet just so I can obtain items containing story information, instead of it being provided in the game itself, like, I don't know...
Cutscenes? Codec conversations?
This is seriously some of the dumbest shit I have ever heard of.
{ Gameplay }
The gameplay in this game suffers from what I like to call Mafia 3 Syndrome. Because the minute to minute gameplay moments in this game are just repetitive busywork. It's like playing Death Stranding but in the Metal Gear universe.
Everything in this game just feels laborious, which sucks because what you gotta give credit towards Metal Gear as a franchise for is how everything the player participates in affects the story and the world. Level after level, cutscene after cutscene, scenario after scenario, it was never ending how much these games tried to blow your mind.
The missions in Phantom Pain feel like they were just put in for the hell of it. There are around 50 Main Missions in the whole game, but 90% of them don't have anything to do with progressing the story.
Mission 3: Eliminate the Spetsnaz Commander
Mission 4: Identify and destroy the comms equipment at the Eastern Communications Post
Mission 5: Extract the captive engineer
Mission 6: Secure the Honey Bee rocket launcher
Mission 7: Eliminate three commanders at three different locations
Mission 8: Destroy three tanks
Mission 9: Destroy an armored vehicle and multiple gunships
Mission 10: Extract the Mujahideen prisoner
Mission 13: Shut down the oil transfer pump
Mission 15: Destroy Walker Gears
Mission 17: Extract two Intel Team members being held captive
Mission 18: Eliminate a former rebel soldier, eliminate 5 prisoners being held captive held at Kungenga Mine, extract child prisoner
Mission 19: Identify and eliminate the PF commander, the Major
Mission 20: Extract Shabani
Mission 21: Identify and eliminate the CFA Official
Mission 22: Eliminate the enemy commander
Mission 23: EXTRACT THE WHITE MAMB--
Fuuuuuckk meeeeeee!!!
Do you see what I'm getting at here? Does this sound boring to you or what? Because trust me, it will be after a while. And you wanna know what's funny? All 17 of these missions I just listed have NOTHING to do with advancing the plot. It's all just meant to pad out the run time. It's all just filler. Only a few of these missions actually matter in terms of giving the player what they were waiting for.
There are about 50 Missions in this game, not including the Side Ops.
And even then, the cutscenes themselves are either underwhelming, they dump pointless exposition, they're way too short, or the performances are very awkwardly done.
Seriously, why am I doing all of this shit? None of it relates to the narrative. I'm only doing it because Kaz told me to do it I guess. And this can make the more bullshit sections in the game that much more frustrating, and trust me, this game has the most balls to the wall aggravating parts in the whole franchise. Lemme give you a little experience of mine:
Mission 29
Oh ho ho my fucking God, Mission 29.
Mission 29 is basically where you rescue this guy named Code Talker who actually knows the solution to curing the disease that caused a severe epidemic on Mother Base. But then the helicopter gets attacked by these teleporting, bullet sponge enemies called the Skulls and it crashes.
So you have to protect Code Talker while also fighting off the Skulls but there are major problems with this.
The Skulls are absolute fucking bullet sponges, they are almost bulletproof meaning that you will be wasting mags upon mags upon mags of ammo just to kill one of them. A rocket launcher is literally the most effective way to damage them and yet there are times where they teleport in front of me and I ended up blowing myself up and dying like a complete dumbass. So I either use up time and ammo just simply shooting at them or go the more dangerous approach and risk killing myself with a rocket just so I can effectively damage them.
These fuckers are more bullet spongy than a Tom Clancy's The Division 1 boss. They just don't fucking die.
Not to mention shooting at them risks me getting shot as well, and since Snake is more nimble than a flacid penis, I literally have to run and take cover just after taking a few shots. And yet it takes AN ETERNITY for your health to regen, meaning you can get damaged while taking cover trying to recover.
It really does make me miss the days of Metal Gear where we had health bars and Rations. But then The Phantom Pain comes along and goes the Call of Duty route with regenerating health bullshit.
But then I get ass fucked again because taking cover and sitting still risks me getting hit by rocks that rise from the ground underneath me, and if I don't move my ass, the rock will explode, and I'm even a foot too close to it, the explosion will kill me in 1 hit. Not to mention one of the Skulls can throw rocks at me, and another two can teleport in front of me and hit me with a machete which brings me down to near death. So basically, I gotta be moving at all times.
There is so much fucking multi-tasking you have to do, and it just feels like I am ill-equipped to handle what the game is throwing at me despite being almost 30 hours into it. It seems like the developers' idea of challenge is to just spam the player with bulletproof enemies and yet you can barely take any damage yourself.
I spent an hour beforehand just developing new weapons and equipment in case of a section like this, and yet I am still being anally molested from every direction.
I got so aggravated that I had to stop playing. And normally I don't do that when I play games. It's that kind of atrocious design choice that made me stop playing the game in the first place. And after that insane onslaught I just thought to myself
"No wonder I never finished this game."
It's bad enough the game suffers from an insanely underwhelming and disappointing story that just rectons everything before it. And it's further exaserbated by monotonous and utterly irritating gameplay.
Metal Gear has always had hits and misses in the gameplay department, but if a section was getting on the nerves in the older games, you would know that afterwards there would be some insane payoff.
But here in Phantom Pain whenever I was getting really agitated during a mission, all I knew was that after that I would be put back onto a helicopter and Kaz would tell me what everything that I just went through was super "important."
In Metal Gear Solid 4 if I was blowing the fuck out of things for 10-15 minutes it was because Raiden was fighting Vamp and he needed some backup while he activated Metal Gear Rex. There was purpose behind doing what I was doing, not just because some guy told me to do it.
Not to mention I was gitty every 5-10 minutes during MGS4. It was full of absolutely incredible moments, all of my questions and desires being fully addressed. But in MGS5, nothing like that ever happens.
I mean, I was really fucking hyped when I saw Ocelot and Kaz on screen during the introduction but then after that I proceeded to be bored for the next 5+ hours, watching unskippable chopper rides to every mission and doing the same shit over and over and over again for little to no payoff, and watching the same credit sequences over and over again for no fucking reason. And I have to traverse an empty map for 5-10 minutes before I can even start the mission to begin with.
Seriously, why are there credits in every mission?? Something about it feels wrong. I'm pretty sure this is a game Kojima made, I don't need to see his name pop up on the screen every single time a mission starts. I get it, this is a Kojima game. But I doubt he was proud of it. Far from it.
If anything Kojima must have been fuckin' embarrassed of this game.
It also doesn't help that the credits spoil the characters that are going to be in the mission. I don't think I have seen any other game that does this shit.
There are quite a lot of weapons in this game but you are restricted to three at a time. So the nuts on the fly arsenal of MGS4 is gone. And you don't even get anything cool like a doll that possesses enemies. But why have that when you can just run up to someone, hit Right Bumper and instantly knock them out? Or just shoot everyone in the head with a tranquilizer pistol?
But what pisses me off the most is how developing new equipment works. I don't know it 100%, but from what I know, as you expand Mother Base and build expansions, you get more space to hire staff.
There are many different divisions, but the one for developing new weapons and equipment is the R&D Team. It levels up depending on two factors: The number of staff and the rankings of each staff member. Staff can range from E to S++.
As the division levels up, you unlock more stuff to develop. Better guns, upgrades, etc.
And as you develop weapons, you unlock Tiers for that specific weapon. The higher the Tier, the better the gun performs. But you need to develop one Tier before you can develop the next one. But it gets worse.
For every single item you develop, weapons, skins, and every other item in the game, you have to wait on a timer for the item to be developed before you can use it. And the higher Grade the item is, the longer the timer. Those higher Grade items can actually take between 1-4 HOURS to develop.
Are you kidding me?? Is this a Triple A Metal Gear Solid game or a fucking mobile game? Why are there timers in this game?
Not just the weapons, but expanding the Mother Base takes time as well. Remember what I said earlier, you expand the different base facilities in Mother Base so you can hire more staff.
Doing this requires resources. But getting these resources requires you to grind. Either by farming them in the open world or by doing mundane challenges. There are 7 divisions:
Command Platform
Combat Unit Platform
R&D Platform
Base Development Platform
Support Platform
Intel Platform
Medical Platform
Now, imagine having to grind resources to expand every single one of these divisions. Some of these are really fuckin' important. Now, imagine having to wait in between expansions.
There are 4 levels of expansion. And the higher the level, the longer it takes to reach the next one. And it can take upwards of 24 HOURS to finish.
Unless..
There is a catch.
Unless you spend MB Coins to instantly skip the wait. What are MB Coins?
What do you think? They're fucking mictrotransactions. Of course right?
Konami has the fucking audacity to charge players real world money in their single player game in order to make grinding less tedious and time consuming. It's all over their Online mode as well. Many character skins, gun camos, and ACTUAL WEAPONS, they are locked behind paywalls.
Mictrotransactions. In a Metal Gear Solid game.
They played us like a damn fiddle.
You could easily say fuck this game merely because of the fact that there are paywalls in a single player Metal Gear Solid game but bringing up everything else in this review wouldn't be favorable either.
Also, there is no reason to be on Mother Base. There is literally nothing to do on it aside from participating in a shooting range or walking up to your staff and watch them salute at you all the time. It's just an empty base with barely any people on it. Oh, and you can beat the shit out your staff. Which increases their morale... for some reason. Jesus that just sounds masochistic.
You can get companions in this game like a horse, a wolf, and human buddies like Quiet, but it doesn't really change the game much except how easy you want enemies to get killed without your involvement. Or make traversing the empty wasteland less time consuming and tedious.
Since this game is open world you have to traverse an empty map with nothing happening on it for a period of time in between missions, when you're not stuck waiting in a chopper. Yeah! Progress!!
I think that's the most stupefying aspect of this game being open world. Nothing ever happens in it aside from weather changes. This is supposed to be a game where you're taking back Mother Base and fighting a war against Cipher, not to mention the Afghans are at war with the Russians. Where is the conflict?? Why isn't there anyone fighting each other?
Instead you run around a map where it's just you and the open wilderness with no one to meet and talk to. And there aren't any locations that would provide diversity to the gameplay that would justify an open world setting. It comes nowhere near as close as many other open world titles already on the market.
This means that there isn't much incentive to explore the map. Also, you are restricted as to where you can go. If you wanted to travel from one part of the map to the other, you're not able to take any shortcuts.
And there is no Fast Travel. Well kinda. But it's one of the worst implementations of Fast Travel I've ever seen in a video game.
If you want to go somewhere in a hurry, you have to call in the chopper, go to the landing zone, get on the chopper, wait for it to take off, sit in a loading screen, then you pull up the iDroid to select the landing zone you want to go to, then you're put into the preparation screen where you choose your weapons, equipment, buddies, etc. Then you sit in another loading screen, and then when the game loads you still have to wait for the chopper to land so you can get off of it. And after that, you still have to travel to the mission objective.
Wow. Just... Wow. This is just Insanity. All of this bullshit just to FAST TRAVEL? It's not even Fast Travel, it's fuckin' Slow Travel. It's actually faster to just get on your horse or a jeep and ride there.
Not to mention, you have to follow all of the roads, which makes traveling from Point A to B even longer.
You can't get on top of any of the mountains, which means two things: you can't take shortcuts and you can't get any vantage points when approaching an enemy base. Want to go prone on a cliff and take out enemies down below with a sniper rifle?
Well tough shit. You can't do that.
The AI in this game is laughably bad. They have such a small field of vision you can stand in front of an outpost in broad daylight and they won't see you. They also walk on predetermined paths so you can expect them to be in the same spots all the time.
Another thing that breaks the stealth in this game is that when you are spotted, the game goes into slow motion, in which you have a few seconds to take out the enemy before he alerts his comrades. And this means that you can just run and gun everything if you have any suppressed guns. And since you can call as many Supply Drops as you want from your base, you can have an infinite supply of ammo and suppressors.
Even then, the AI are insanely inconsistent. When you're not detected, you can just shoot everyone in the head and clear out outposts with not much effort, but if you do get detected.. you get fucking bombarded.
Seriously, you get spotted by one guy and immediately the entire base, outpost, or whatever are instantly notified of your location. And this begins an absolute onslaught of enemies swarming you and shooting at you from many different angles, whether on foot, in an attack helicopter, on a Walker Gear, etc.
There are literally two states of play: Not detected or getting bombarded from every angle. And remember, you can't take much damage in this game, and health regeneration is slow as fuck. Know what that means? You gotta camp. It's probably the most viable option for surviving gunfights.
Remember how many rockets you could tank in the older Metal Gear games? Well you'd be lucky if you can take more than one in Phantom Pain, regardless of impact.
It also doesn't help that there is no mini-map in this game unlike in the previous games. All you get is some binoculars to ping enemies and an area on the map screen on where the enemy could be. Meaning you will be opening up the map constantly just to see where enemies are located and that's just fun isn't it?
Boss fights are almost completely mitigated in this game. Remember all the legendary iconic boss fights from the older games?
Name any and or every boss off the top of your head from MGS 1-4. Almost all of them are beloved moments in each game in one way or another.
But here we have.. hide from Quiet the sniper lady, ram a human torch Colonel Volgin (who says nothing by the way) into a river, or.. hide and escape from a Metal Gear, or my favorite, teleporting rock fucking bullet sponges in Mission 29.
Are these even boss fights? These feel nothing like the ones we were used to. Since when were basic bitch bullet sponge enemies considered a boss fight, or running away from a Metal Gear?
Seriously, even the BNB from MGS4 are like legends compared to this shit. Remember Laughing Octopus? How she would play all of those tricks on you and then she tries to grab you in that weird skintight outfit making you question what she is?
And then Drebin calls you on the Codec and gives you a fucked up backstory on the person you just killed, giving you added context to the horrors of war and what impact that has led on the world of that game. That shit is on a whole other level compared to the shit in Phantom Pain.
Hell, there isn't even a final boss fight. Yeah, no joke. Think about Metal Gear for a second again.
Every single Metal Gear game had legendary final bosses.
MGS1, Metal Gear Rex and escaping Liquid Snake while shooting at him on a jeep
MGS2, Solidus Snake
MGS3, The Boss
MGS4, Liquid Ocelot
ALL of these guys are legendary. These are all absolutely incredible final bosses, some of the greatest fights in video game history.
But then Phantom Pain just.. ends. And I guess this is due to the cut content from the game. Though from what I have read and seen, the cut content just consists of fighting the same bosses for a second time so welp, that sucks. So much for making up.
In fact, unlocking the last few missions of the game requires playing through older missions you already completed but on Hard difficulty. Seriously?? I mean, I guess I'm not surprised. This game is nothing but padding.
The boss fights here don't feature any of the creativity or enginuity that the boss fights from the previous games had.
And the enemy variety here is completely lacking. There are no cool, interesting enemies like the Gecko from MGS4 or anything like that. It's just a regular guy, a regular guy with armor, a guy driving around in a Walker Gear, a guy in an attack helicopter or a tank, or annoying as fuck bullet sponge enemies that can turn people into zombies. Yeah, zombies, real creative guys.
This game also has a habit with following too many modern video game sins. The first mission of the game is nothing but lying in a bed for 10-15 minutes and then once you finally have control you are crawling on the floor at a snail's pace while tutorials pop on the screen and scripted segments happen in front of you.
And this mission goes on for like an hour.
And whenever you reach a certain moment in the game you are forced to just walk and listen to people talk. I'm used to this in games but here it just feels so unnecessary.
Another thing that you gotta give credit towards MGS is that despite people bemoaning the series for its very ample use of long ass cutscenes, you still had 100% control the second you hit gameplay. And you were not interrupted during gameplay with Codec conversations unless if you really wanted to listen to the dialogue.
The only times you would get Codec conversations in the middle of gameplay is either for tutorials or for major story revelations containing lots of character development.
Not to mention you can choose to ignore the tutorial calls. And the calls that you are forced to pick up you can skip them as well. But I don't see why you would though, I love being in the Codec as much as I could. I love listening to the characters talk, which is further complimented by the masterfully done performances.
Even MGS4, which is a game that gets criticized for its over abundance of cutscenes and narrative, the moment you were in the game, you were in the game. No interruptions or slowdown because of condescending tutorials, forced walking sections, and scripted segments.
This shit in MGS5 leads to one of the most, if not the most awkward moments in all of Metal Gear: The fucking jeep ride.
Yeah, one of the trailers had some amazing music, but then the music is used not during a boss fight or some insane moment in the game, but during a long ass, boring, and very awkward jeep ride.
"Big Boss" just sitting there, quietly, not saying a word, staring dead eye at Cipher as he reveals his master plan and it was one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen in a game. I couldn't help but lose control of my laughter at this. How was this okay? I don't understand it. That music was just gone to waste.
{ Final Thoughts }
Well.. what more can I say? I hate this game. I think that I have made that pretty clear. This game is a disgrace to the lineage of Metal Gear. It just doesn't feel like a Metal Gear game at all. This is one of the most disappointing games I've ever played.
Metal Gear is a very story heavy franchise, and it's fucking awesome, and it's complimented by just as awesome gameplay. But here we have laborious, tedious, and frustrating gameplay complimented by a paper thin plot that is badly told.
And that just isn't what Metal Gear is no matter how you put it. I love Metal Gear. I remember MGS1 being one of the first PS1 games I ever played. I was only like, eight or nine years old when I played it, and I loved the series ever since.
I have a burning passion for this series as these games culminated in me getting exposed to a community where I met a good chunk of my bestest friends because they share the same love for Metal Gear as I do.
I've owned this game since 2017 and to this day I have never finished the game to completion. I must have come back to this like 3 or 4 times, and every time I struggled to get through it.
The game lacks any sort of end goal so I as a player don't have the motivation to care about it.
Metal Gear was one of the few franchises that had not been ruined yet. It was on a massive killstreak but to see it go out on Phantom Pain and Metal Gear Survive considering that MGS4 had such a good climax is just depressing.
I have absolutely no respect towards Konami as they are mainly responsible for the game being the way it is. I feel for Kojima. I could tell that he just didn't want to make this game but he was forced to by Konami because their stocks were plummeting and they needed a new console game, so they just thought "Let's make Kojima make another Metal Gear game."
Even though he wanted the series to end after MGS4. It also doesn't help that Konami cut off the budget at some point during development forcing the team to cut content and release the game early, and from I've read online, the team were under pressure because they were being spied on by Konami.
I also don't find it coincidental that as soon as the game released, Kojima was immediately relieved from the company and was not allowed to attend any award ceremonies. So I can tell in the back of my mind, Konami is to blame for all of this.
Just like with Silent Hill and Castlevania, Metal Gear has only become an afterthought in Konami's minds. Metal Gear is now only a cash grab. Oh, and a series of Pachinko machines (slot machines).
Yeah remember when Konami announced that Snake Eater Pachinko machine? That still makes me sick in the stomach to this day, and.. watching my favorite Tactical Espionage Third Person Action franchise that gave me a fetish for eye patches go down this dark path is just, really sad to me.
Thank you Konami for taking my childhood and not letting it die on a sunrising mountain Red Dead Redemption 2 style, but in a ravaging burning house fire or a nuclear explosion.
At least I still have the older games. To me, Metal Gear ended after MGS4.
Because The Phantom Pain literally gives me phantom pain.
4/10
1996
The progenitor to Survival Horror shambles its way into gaming history. This was definitely one of the biggest games to ever have come out in the 32-bit era. It was a killer app for the PS1 and a massive success for Capcom. It's been 25 years since this game came out. Are you feeling old yet? Cause I sure do.
I was actually born the same year that this game came out, but I would never get the chance to play it until I was around 13 years old. I did play the other games like Code Veronica, RE4, RE5, and the RE Outbreak games (absolutely underrated), but I wouldn't play the original PS1 trilogy until they were put onto the PS3 Store.
Not to mention I was too scared shitless to play them when I was younger anyway. I used to watch my two older brothers play Resident Evil 2 and 3 but there were moments where I got so scared that I would run into another room and cover my ears because they blasted that shit on the TV.
And I honestly don't blame my younger self, because even 10 years later, at 23 years old, there was a very unexpected moment in Resident Evil 1 that actually made me jump, probably cause the dated graphics and sounds just made it even creepier. I'm referring to the Forest scene when he jumps at you as a zombie when attempting to pick up the grenade launcher.
I had never seen that happen before, so when it did happen my whole body just recoiled. Perhaps it's because I hate jumpscares in games, but that just shows that even 25 years later this game can still get the jump on you and make you piss yourself. That's how revolutionary these older games are. Timeless classics that are still a joy to play to this day.
{ Story }
July 24th, 1998
A series of mysterious murders take place in the Arklay Mountains, located on the outskirts of Raccoon City. The Elite S.T.A.R.S team (Special Tactics and Rescue Service) are dispatched to investigate. The Bravo Team were first sent but they have lost contact with HQ, so then the Alpha Team are dispatched to investigate their disappearance.
But fuck that!! We have a sick casting intro to show off first!
- Chris (cancer is for pussies!!) Redfield
- Jill (best fucking girl!) Valentine
- Barry (what is it?!) Burton
- Rebecca (don't call me little girl!) Chambers
- And Albert (the greatest fucking haircut in all of humanity!) Wesker
cough!! cough!!
I don't know what's wrong with me. I do apologize.
Okay so uh, after that mind boggling intro we are thrusted into the Spenser Mansion. Chris goes missing after the team flee from a pack of infected dogs, one of your comrades gets eaten alive, and your helicopter pilot Brad takes off on his own like an asshole. Not long after that you encounter one of its inhabitants, who has been zombified. The FMV cutscene where he is chowing down on one of your comrades is still creepy to this day.
It reminds of a lot of those creepy stop-motion animations I used to watch when I was younger.
After that Wesker goes missing as well. So the mission becomes simple: Look for any survivors and find a way out of here, while also uncovering the mystery as to why the damn place is overrun with zombies and other horrifying creatures. It's a goal that is consistent in every early Resident Evil game. It's short, sweet, to the point, and it's a good excuse to go blow off zombie heads with a shotgun.
The storytelling is not why these games are so renowned. It's the atmosphere, the emphasis on survival, the horrifying monsters, the iconic characters, and the sick ass soundtracks.
But there are memos you can obtain that give you more backstory on what happened to the residents that were here. The Itchy, Tasty... memo comes to my mind when I think of them, that one was my favorite, as it shows the horrors of the process of turning, and how it makes the person go mentally insane, especially since the virus doesn't cause any pain.
{ Gameplay }
I played Code Veronica a lot before playing these older games so I was already used to the tank controls. I always found it funny that there was a significant amount of complaints when it came to the tank controls.
It's a third person survival shooter with fixed camera angles. The tank controls work perfectly for a game like this, and I'll explain why.
Pushing up makes you go forward no matter which direction you are facing. Pushing down makes you go backwards, pushing left or right makes you rotate left or right. Which means that every time the camera angle changes, you don't have to reorient your movement on the control pad or thumbstick.
There are games that have this constant problem where the camera changes perspective but there are no tank controls, meaning now you are pushing the direction the opposite way, and it can get disorienting. You have to reconfigure your movement with each camera change. But you don't have to worry about that in Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc.
Which is why I believe tank controls are perfect for these games. It just feels a lot more natural. The game would have been much more clunky if it had 3D movement controls with a fixed camera.
What's very interesting about this game is that your gameplay experience is dependant on what version of the game you are playing.
When Capcom launched this game in Japan, it was easier than the Western release. For example when draw your weapon in Biohazard (the Japanese name for Resident Evil), your aim will snap to its nearest target, and pushing L1 lets you either switch targets or snap your aim back onto your enemy if they move off course. So if you're fighting anything other than a zombie, this makes the combat so much better.
But in the vanilla Western release of Resident Evil, the auto aim was cut out on purpose. They also removed some ammo spawns and spawned more enemies to make the game harder.
From what I have read, the reason why Capcom did this was because of game rentals over here in the States. In Japan, game rentals were banned, so Capcom made the English version of this game harder to squeeze out extra rental money, because you couldn't complete the game in one sitting. The internet wasn't as big as it is now. The only efficient way you could get a guide was to buy a Strategy Guide but those were like half the price of the game itself.
I can get why Capcom did this, but to purposely hamstring your game for the sake of extra money is bullshit. Capcom did put the auto aim back into the game but it was only for future versions such as the Director's Cut and the Windows 95 PC Version, and oh man, I will get into that later. The Director's Cut version is just.. ugh.
But I will give my opinion on which version you should play, because there are like 5 different versions of the game, not including the 2002 Gamecube Remake.
There are two characters you get to play as, each one with their own scenarios which take 3-5 hours to beat each if it's your first playthrough. You can choose between Chris and the dreamy Jill Valentine.
Jill is basically the Easy Mode of this game, because she gets two more inventory slots than Chris, she gets a grenade launcher early on, and she has a lockpick which she can use to open certain doors and drawers that contain ammo, Ink Ribbons, and the Magnum, the most powerful weapon in the game.
Chris gets none of this. And in order to open drawers you need Small Keys, which actually takes up a whole inventory slot for some fucking reason. Jill gets 8 inventory slots, whereas Chris only gets 6. Even two inventory slots makes a big difference because that means that you will be backtracking to an Item Box more often than you would be with Jill.
Be honest, Chris sucks in this game.
Since this is a Survival Horror game, the goal is about escaping rather than fighting everything head on, because ammo and healing items are limited. Once you run out of resources, you're fucked. This is where the survival part comes in.
Which means that every single enemy encounter in this game means that your brain needs to make quick decision making. Do you waste bullets and shoot the enemy down so that you don't have to worry about them anymore? Or do you risk taking damage and running past them so you can save your ammo? But if you take too much damage you need to use healing items which are also limited.
What sucks is that many of the areas are tight hallways in which you must kill the enemies to avoid taking damage, but that has become a habit in these games, but it isn't as bad as Resident Evil 0.
I swear to God that whole game is just narrow corridor after narrow corridor. Most of the time you have to fight to progress. Also doesn't help that you have to control two characters and your partner can get hit while you're trying to progress. Ugh.
The herb mixing also has strategy behind it. Herbs take up inventory space, but you can combine herbs to save up space. And which herbs you should combine is another layer on top of the decision making.
There are three types of herbs: Green (G), Red (R), and Blue (B). You have free reign on how you want to combine them. Green herbs restore health and blue herbs cure poison.
And red herbs combined with a green herb fully restores your health. Red herbs cannot be used alone though, they have to be combined with a green herb before it can be used. And only a maximum of three herbs can be combined.
G: Heals 25% of your health
G + G: Heals 50% of your health
G + G + G: Heals 100% of your health
G + R: Heals 100% of your health
B: Heals poison
G + B: Heals 25% of your health and cures poison
G + R + B: Heals 100% of your health and cures poison
There's also the question of what weapon would work best against each enemy. The pistol is good for taking down zombies and dogs, but the pistol is not very good for zombie crowd control. A shotgun would be much better for this situation. And because of the pistol's low damage, it's not meant for CQC (close quarters combat). A shotgun is good against larger enemies like Hunters and Spiders, but the Grenade Launcher is way better because Hunters die in like one shot from that.
The Magnum is best for 1v1 boss fight situations since it does the most damage in the game besides a rocket launcher, but Acid Grenade Rounds are just as good.
Yeah uh, if you're arachnophobic like me, you're probably gonna fuckin' hate this game because you fight giant infected tarantulas. Hell, there is a boss fight (that you can skip) where you engage a fucking HUGE tarantula. I mean, that kind of shit is why I dropped Metro Exodus. I can't handle spiders being right up in my face. I will actually have heart failure.
The spiders in the Gamecube Remake are easily the grossest enemies in the game. They look disgusting, they move funny, they spit acid at you, and when they die their babies come out of them and come after you. Just.... Uggghhh!!
I'm so happy the spiders didn't return in Resident Evil 2 and 3 Remakes.
Just writing about them is making me shiver with serious unease. My anxiety just shot up. Moving on.
Acid Grenade Rounds deal the most damage as opposed to Regular or Incendiary Grenade Rounds, but those are harder to come by. The harder the weapon hits, the less common ammo is for that weapon. So you really have to conserve your most powerful ammo for boss fights and whatnot.
Be careful when using the Grenade Launcher. There are three different types of grenades, but you have to use up all six shots of ammo before you can reload the launcher with a different ammo type.
Also, aiming up with a shotgun when a zombie is right in front of you will let you blow their head clean off with one shot. And if more than one zombie is close enough you can blow off their heads as well. But you can also risk getting a hickey while doing so. Don't let em get too close.
The Item Box is one the most important aspects about these older games, because you can't drop items, but every item can be dropped into a box and then retrieved from any other box.
How does that work? shrug Video game logic. But imagine if it wasn't like this. The flow of the game would be so much worse, it would be a real pain.
This is one of the only RE games that does not have the 180ยฐ quick turn. The quick turn actually wouldn't be a thing until Resident Evil 3. So sometimes it can be a pain in the ass having to painstakingly spin around to attack an enemy, especially if it's a Hunter.
And in the later games, your character's movement would be dependent on how much health they have. Getting into the Danger state makes them move like 80% slower. But in RE1 this is not a thing. And to be honest, I actually prefer that.
Because control is not being completely stripped away from you from losing too much health. It's already enough punishment that you're about to die and lose your progress. Why also make it impossible to get away from enemies?
When you die you have to reload your save file. You can only save your game using Ink Ribbons and even these are limited. So it adds yet another layer of decision making.
Saving too often would mean that you won't have Ink Ribbons for when you really need them, and it also affects what Rank you get when beating the game along with how long you take to beat it. Getting a better Rank will unlock better rewards like infinite ammo weaponry.
But the game does give you a lot of Ink Ribbons, so I doubt that you will actually run out of them, at least I never did.
I didn't find the puzzles to be too difficult. When I was younger I had a harder time navigating through the mansion than actually solving some of the puzzles. Though I do remember getting pretty stumped trying to find all the MO discs near the end of the game, but a quick YouTube vid helps.
Normally I hate puzzles when it comes to games but Resident Evil is an exception because the payoff is so worth it. Not to mention we have YouTube guides these days if you do get really stumped.
It really is amazing how well the gameplay holds up. The later games have more polish but the very first game set the standard for Survival Horror gameplay. It had a foundation and the later games just expanded upon it without changing it completely, that is until the later games after Code Veronica.
This game is the equivalent of playing chess. Every move you do is dependant on your wit and quick decision making, and every situation can be approached a different way. It's something that just doesn't get old any time soon.
{ Presentation }
The atmosphere of this game is executed flawlessly. The mansion looks more like a hospital than a lived in abode. I can clearly tell something is not right with this place. If you grew up with zombie movies from the 60s to the 90s and then played this game, then you must have felt like you were playing a George Romero movie. And it's intoxicating.
The mansion just looks unsettling. And what makes it even more unsettling is the lack of music at times. There is a good amount of tracks in this game, but the silence also plays into the atmosphere, it makes me feel really alone, and it's quite unnerving compared to the over the top action scenes from the later Resident Evil games.
It shows how far we have come in this genre. Man, I fuckin' miss games like this. I love modern Survival Horror games like The Evil Within 2, but you just don't see this style of game anymore.
The door animations were used as loading screens for the next area but it also gives you a feeling of tense unease, not knowing what might be on the other side of that door.
The character models and animations are jank as shit but that's the whole beauty of it. It just adds onto the charm.
The overall presentation of this game is a little bland and grayish compared to the later games, but you really can't criticize a game that took the first major step into a new gaming genre. That would be like staring at a nice painting only to bitch about the frame the picture was put in.
The narrative is a bit weak, but I enjoy the ride and the payoff is worth the journey, but god damn, the voice acting in this game is beyond appalling. It does add to the cheesey over the top action vibes of the later games, but sadly the performances can hurl you out of the experience like you're on a fucking trebuchet.
The voice acting in this game is such a meme that it even made a Guinness World Record.
Perhaps this is just another victim of poor localization that plagued this era of gaming. But it's not all bad. There are some hilarious moments in this game. Any scene that involves Barry I am all for it. But if you want prettier graphics and better acting then just play the Gamecube Remake. I'm pretty sure everyone, even if they haven't played the game, know about the Jill Sandwich joke that Barry makes.
Hell, there was an easter egg of that in Dead Rising. I always found this really funny, but in the middle of saying "Jill Sandwich", the voice actor for Barry coughs, so it sounds like he is saying Jibble Sandwich.
{ Best Version? }
The 2002 Gamecube Remake is a different ball park, so I'm just going to talk about the original 1996 game's ports.
But damn, this is really hard to decide... I have played the vanilla version of RE1 but I also played the Director's Cut but my god I can't stand that version. And yet it's more accessible for casual players. Lemme explain why I don't like the Director's Cut.
For some reason the opening intro is in black and white instead of color. And the gore was all censored. Also they changed the soundtrack. The original version of the game had an excellent soundtrack, but the Director Cut's soundtrack is so fucking dreadful that it can take you out of the experience like with the voice acting.
Some tracks sound so bad that it makes me wonder how they thought that it was okay to release it, like the Basement music. It just sounds like a horde of elephants having oral intercourse with each other.
The Basement music in vanilla RE1 sounds WAY better. Some tracks also just don't sound as good. Why couldn't we just have the original soundtrack??
There are some good things about the Director's Cut. The auto aim is here for one thing, there are extra costumes for Chris and Jill, and there's the Advanced difficulty mode. Did you know that before you select the Advanced difficulty, holding right on the D-Pad for a few seconds will turn on double ammunition?
So now if you want to play this game on PS1 you have to decide. Do you sacrifice the auto aim for the aesthetics of the vanilla game? Or do you prioritize accessibility but you get an utterly butchered soundtrack and censored violence in the FMV cutscenes?
Then there is the Windows 95 PC version. The soundtrack and the gore are back to the way they should be, thank God for that, and the auto aim is here as well. What's amazing about this port is that unlike every other version of this game, you can skip the door animations. And holy fuck this makes the game go by so much quicker. Constantly going through doors and watching the animations every single time can really add onto the play time.
One thing that can be a bit off putting is that the enemies ooze out green blood instead of red, but maybe you'll get used to it. You can also get exclusive infinite ammo weapons like an Uzi for Jill and a Light Machine Gun for Chris. So you you relive your Rambo fantasies, baby.
It's actually pretty easy to get this game running on a modern day system thanks to the PC Wiki.
Then there is the Sega Saturn version.
This version also retains the original soundtrack from the PS1 vanilla release, but just like the vanilla PS1 version, there's no auto aim.
And this is the only port to have the Battle Mode, which is a mini-game like The Mercenaries in the other games.
You have to proceed to a certain destination within a certain time limit while killing enemies to add more time. The mini-game can be unlocked either by completing the game and saving the clear file, or by inputting a cheat code using a second-player controller with a save file set anywhere and then you hold X, Y, and Z and press Start at the title screen.
Finally there is the Nintendo DS port. Which is pretty cool because you got to play Resident Evil but on the go, but to be honest, I don't see why you would play this. All of the sound effects, music, and graphics are really compressed. It's like playing Resident Evil 2 on the N64.
I'd honestly rather just play the original PS1 or Sega Saturn version emulated on my cell phone. You're able to connect a PS4 controller to your cell phone via Bluetooth so you can play the game like that, so again, why play the DS version? Because you get a map on the bottom screen? Because the knife now has a quick select button?
Ehhhh... Yeah I'm good.
{ Final Thoughts }
This wasn't my first Resident Evil game and hell, it's definitely not the best Resident Evil, but it's the most important one. It grew on me a lot as I kept playing it. It's the game that brought horror gaming to the masses. And the Gamecube Remake is even better. The other original RE games are much better, but those games would have never existed if not for this one.
If not for the success Resident Evil 1, we probably would not have gotten games like Parasite Eve, Silent Hill, Dino Crisis, Fatal Frame, Eternal Darkness, hell even modern Survival Horror games like The Evil Within and Dead Space.
There are hundreds of games that owe at least a little credit to the original Resident Evil. You owe it to yourself to play this game at least once. Or hell, play the Remake that's even better. Just, play it goddamn it lol.
8/10
Have a nice day, Jill Sandwiches. ๐งก
I was actually born the same year that this game came out, but I would never get the chance to play it until I was around 13 years old. I did play the other games like Code Veronica, RE4, RE5, and the RE Outbreak games (absolutely underrated), but I wouldn't play the original PS1 trilogy until they were put onto the PS3 Store.
Not to mention I was too scared shitless to play them when I was younger anyway. I used to watch my two older brothers play Resident Evil 2 and 3 but there were moments where I got so scared that I would run into another room and cover my ears because they blasted that shit on the TV.
And I honestly don't blame my younger self, because even 10 years later, at 23 years old, there was a very unexpected moment in Resident Evil 1 that actually made me jump, probably cause the dated graphics and sounds just made it even creepier. I'm referring to the Forest scene when he jumps at you as a zombie when attempting to pick up the grenade launcher.
I had never seen that happen before, so when it did happen my whole body just recoiled. Perhaps it's because I hate jumpscares in games, but that just shows that even 25 years later this game can still get the jump on you and make you piss yourself. That's how revolutionary these older games are. Timeless classics that are still a joy to play to this day.
{ Story }
July 24th, 1998
A series of mysterious murders take place in the Arklay Mountains, located on the outskirts of Raccoon City. The Elite S.T.A.R.S team (Special Tactics and Rescue Service) are dispatched to investigate. The Bravo Team were first sent but they have lost contact with HQ, so then the Alpha Team are dispatched to investigate their disappearance.
But fuck that!! We have a sick casting intro to show off first!
- Chris (cancer is for pussies!!) Redfield
- Jill (best fucking girl!) Valentine
- Barry (what is it?!) Burton
- Rebecca (don't call me little girl!) Chambers
- And Albert (the greatest fucking haircut in all of humanity!) Wesker
cough!! cough!!
I don't know what's wrong with me. I do apologize.
Okay so uh, after that mind boggling intro we are thrusted into the Spenser Mansion. Chris goes missing after the team flee from a pack of infected dogs, one of your comrades gets eaten alive, and your helicopter pilot Brad takes off on his own like an asshole. Not long after that you encounter one of its inhabitants, who has been zombified. The FMV cutscene where he is chowing down on one of your comrades is still creepy to this day.
It reminds of a lot of those creepy stop-motion animations I used to watch when I was younger.
After that Wesker goes missing as well. So the mission becomes simple: Look for any survivors and find a way out of here, while also uncovering the mystery as to why the damn place is overrun with zombies and other horrifying creatures. It's a goal that is consistent in every early Resident Evil game. It's short, sweet, to the point, and it's a good excuse to go blow off zombie heads with a shotgun.
The storytelling is not why these games are so renowned. It's the atmosphere, the emphasis on survival, the horrifying monsters, the iconic characters, and the sick ass soundtracks.
But there are memos you can obtain that give you more backstory on what happened to the residents that were here. The Itchy, Tasty... memo comes to my mind when I think of them, that one was my favorite, as it shows the horrors of the process of turning, and how it makes the person go mentally insane, especially since the virus doesn't cause any pain.
{ Gameplay }
I played Code Veronica a lot before playing these older games so I was already used to the tank controls. I always found it funny that there was a significant amount of complaints when it came to the tank controls.
It's a third person survival shooter with fixed camera angles. The tank controls work perfectly for a game like this, and I'll explain why.
Pushing up makes you go forward no matter which direction you are facing. Pushing down makes you go backwards, pushing left or right makes you rotate left or right. Which means that every time the camera angle changes, you don't have to reorient your movement on the control pad or thumbstick.
There are games that have this constant problem where the camera changes perspective but there are no tank controls, meaning now you are pushing the direction the opposite way, and it can get disorienting. You have to reconfigure your movement with each camera change. But you don't have to worry about that in Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc.
Which is why I believe tank controls are perfect for these games. It just feels a lot more natural. The game would have been much more clunky if it had 3D movement controls with a fixed camera.
What's very interesting about this game is that your gameplay experience is dependant on what version of the game you are playing.
When Capcom launched this game in Japan, it was easier than the Western release. For example when draw your weapon in Biohazard (the Japanese name for Resident Evil), your aim will snap to its nearest target, and pushing L1 lets you either switch targets or snap your aim back onto your enemy if they move off course. So if you're fighting anything other than a zombie, this makes the combat so much better.
But in the vanilla Western release of Resident Evil, the auto aim was cut out on purpose. They also removed some ammo spawns and spawned more enemies to make the game harder.
From what I have read, the reason why Capcom did this was because of game rentals over here in the States. In Japan, game rentals were banned, so Capcom made the English version of this game harder to squeeze out extra rental money, because you couldn't complete the game in one sitting. The internet wasn't as big as it is now. The only efficient way you could get a guide was to buy a Strategy Guide but those were like half the price of the game itself.
I can get why Capcom did this, but to purposely hamstring your game for the sake of extra money is bullshit. Capcom did put the auto aim back into the game but it was only for future versions such as the Director's Cut and the Windows 95 PC Version, and oh man, I will get into that later. The Director's Cut version is just.. ugh.
But I will give my opinion on which version you should play, because there are like 5 different versions of the game, not including the 2002 Gamecube Remake.
There are two characters you get to play as, each one with their own scenarios which take 3-5 hours to beat each if it's your first playthrough. You can choose between Chris and the dreamy Jill Valentine.
Jill is basically the Easy Mode of this game, because she gets two more inventory slots than Chris, she gets a grenade launcher early on, and she has a lockpick which she can use to open certain doors and drawers that contain ammo, Ink Ribbons, and the Magnum, the most powerful weapon in the game.
Chris gets none of this. And in order to open drawers you need Small Keys, which actually takes up a whole inventory slot for some fucking reason. Jill gets 8 inventory slots, whereas Chris only gets 6. Even two inventory slots makes a big difference because that means that you will be backtracking to an Item Box more often than you would be with Jill.
Be honest, Chris sucks in this game.
Since this is a Survival Horror game, the goal is about escaping rather than fighting everything head on, because ammo and healing items are limited. Once you run out of resources, you're fucked. This is where the survival part comes in.
Which means that every single enemy encounter in this game means that your brain needs to make quick decision making. Do you waste bullets and shoot the enemy down so that you don't have to worry about them anymore? Or do you risk taking damage and running past them so you can save your ammo? But if you take too much damage you need to use healing items which are also limited.
What sucks is that many of the areas are tight hallways in which you must kill the enemies to avoid taking damage, but that has become a habit in these games, but it isn't as bad as Resident Evil 0.
I swear to God that whole game is just narrow corridor after narrow corridor. Most of the time you have to fight to progress. Also doesn't help that you have to control two characters and your partner can get hit while you're trying to progress. Ugh.
The herb mixing also has strategy behind it. Herbs take up inventory space, but you can combine herbs to save up space. And which herbs you should combine is another layer on top of the decision making.
There are three types of herbs: Green (G), Red (R), and Blue (B). You have free reign on how you want to combine them. Green herbs restore health and blue herbs cure poison.
And red herbs combined with a green herb fully restores your health. Red herbs cannot be used alone though, they have to be combined with a green herb before it can be used. And only a maximum of three herbs can be combined.
G: Heals 25% of your health
G + G: Heals 50% of your health
G + G + G: Heals 100% of your health
G + R: Heals 100% of your health
B: Heals poison
G + B: Heals 25% of your health and cures poison
G + R + B: Heals 100% of your health and cures poison
There's also the question of what weapon would work best against each enemy. The pistol is good for taking down zombies and dogs, but the pistol is not very good for zombie crowd control. A shotgun would be much better for this situation. And because of the pistol's low damage, it's not meant for CQC (close quarters combat). A shotgun is good against larger enemies like Hunters and Spiders, but the Grenade Launcher is way better because Hunters die in like one shot from that.
The Magnum is best for 1v1 boss fight situations since it does the most damage in the game besides a rocket launcher, but Acid Grenade Rounds are just as good.
Yeah uh, if you're arachnophobic like me, you're probably gonna fuckin' hate this game because you fight giant infected tarantulas. Hell, there is a boss fight (that you can skip) where you engage a fucking HUGE tarantula. I mean, that kind of shit is why I dropped Metro Exodus. I can't handle spiders being right up in my face. I will actually have heart failure.
The spiders in the Gamecube Remake are easily the grossest enemies in the game. They look disgusting, they move funny, they spit acid at you, and when they die their babies come out of them and come after you. Just.... Uggghhh!!
I'm so happy the spiders didn't return in Resident Evil 2 and 3 Remakes.
Just writing about them is making me shiver with serious unease. My anxiety just shot up. Moving on.
Acid Grenade Rounds deal the most damage as opposed to Regular or Incendiary Grenade Rounds, but those are harder to come by. The harder the weapon hits, the less common ammo is for that weapon. So you really have to conserve your most powerful ammo for boss fights and whatnot.
Be careful when using the Grenade Launcher. There are three different types of grenades, but you have to use up all six shots of ammo before you can reload the launcher with a different ammo type.
Also, aiming up with a shotgun when a zombie is right in front of you will let you blow their head clean off with one shot. And if more than one zombie is close enough you can blow off their heads as well. But you can also risk getting a hickey while doing so. Don't let em get too close.
The Item Box is one the most important aspects about these older games, because you can't drop items, but every item can be dropped into a box and then retrieved from any other box.
How does that work? shrug Video game logic. But imagine if it wasn't like this. The flow of the game would be so much worse, it would be a real pain.
This is one of the only RE games that does not have the 180ยฐ quick turn. The quick turn actually wouldn't be a thing until Resident Evil 3. So sometimes it can be a pain in the ass having to painstakingly spin around to attack an enemy, especially if it's a Hunter.
And in the later games, your character's movement would be dependent on how much health they have. Getting into the Danger state makes them move like 80% slower. But in RE1 this is not a thing. And to be honest, I actually prefer that.
Because control is not being completely stripped away from you from losing too much health. It's already enough punishment that you're about to die and lose your progress. Why also make it impossible to get away from enemies?
When you die you have to reload your save file. You can only save your game using Ink Ribbons and even these are limited. So it adds yet another layer of decision making.
Saving too often would mean that you won't have Ink Ribbons for when you really need them, and it also affects what Rank you get when beating the game along with how long you take to beat it. Getting a better Rank will unlock better rewards like infinite ammo weaponry.
But the game does give you a lot of Ink Ribbons, so I doubt that you will actually run out of them, at least I never did.
I didn't find the puzzles to be too difficult. When I was younger I had a harder time navigating through the mansion than actually solving some of the puzzles. Though I do remember getting pretty stumped trying to find all the MO discs near the end of the game, but a quick YouTube vid helps.
Normally I hate puzzles when it comes to games but Resident Evil is an exception because the payoff is so worth it. Not to mention we have YouTube guides these days if you do get really stumped.
It really is amazing how well the gameplay holds up. The later games have more polish but the very first game set the standard for Survival Horror gameplay. It had a foundation and the later games just expanded upon it without changing it completely, that is until the later games after Code Veronica.
This game is the equivalent of playing chess. Every move you do is dependant on your wit and quick decision making, and every situation can be approached a different way. It's something that just doesn't get old any time soon.
{ Presentation }
The atmosphere of this game is executed flawlessly. The mansion looks more like a hospital than a lived in abode. I can clearly tell something is not right with this place. If you grew up with zombie movies from the 60s to the 90s and then played this game, then you must have felt like you were playing a George Romero movie. And it's intoxicating.
The mansion just looks unsettling. And what makes it even more unsettling is the lack of music at times. There is a good amount of tracks in this game, but the silence also plays into the atmosphere, it makes me feel really alone, and it's quite unnerving compared to the over the top action scenes from the later Resident Evil games.
It shows how far we have come in this genre. Man, I fuckin' miss games like this. I love modern Survival Horror games like The Evil Within 2, but you just don't see this style of game anymore.
The door animations were used as loading screens for the next area but it also gives you a feeling of tense unease, not knowing what might be on the other side of that door.
The character models and animations are jank as shit but that's the whole beauty of it. It just adds onto the charm.
The overall presentation of this game is a little bland and grayish compared to the later games, but you really can't criticize a game that took the first major step into a new gaming genre. That would be like staring at a nice painting only to bitch about the frame the picture was put in.
The narrative is a bit weak, but I enjoy the ride and the payoff is worth the journey, but god damn, the voice acting in this game is beyond appalling. It does add to the cheesey over the top action vibes of the later games, but sadly the performances can hurl you out of the experience like you're on a fucking trebuchet.
The voice acting in this game is such a meme that it even made a Guinness World Record.
Perhaps this is just another victim of poor localization that plagued this era of gaming. But it's not all bad. There are some hilarious moments in this game. Any scene that involves Barry I am all for it. But if you want prettier graphics and better acting then just play the Gamecube Remake. I'm pretty sure everyone, even if they haven't played the game, know about the Jill Sandwich joke that Barry makes.
Hell, there was an easter egg of that in Dead Rising. I always found this really funny, but in the middle of saying "Jill Sandwich", the voice actor for Barry coughs, so it sounds like he is saying Jibble Sandwich.
{ Best Version? }
The 2002 Gamecube Remake is a different ball park, so I'm just going to talk about the original 1996 game's ports.
But damn, this is really hard to decide... I have played the vanilla version of RE1 but I also played the Director's Cut but my god I can't stand that version. And yet it's more accessible for casual players. Lemme explain why I don't like the Director's Cut.
For some reason the opening intro is in black and white instead of color. And the gore was all censored. Also they changed the soundtrack. The original version of the game had an excellent soundtrack, but the Director Cut's soundtrack is so fucking dreadful that it can take you out of the experience like with the voice acting.
Some tracks sound so bad that it makes me wonder how they thought that it was okay to release it, like the Basement music. It just sounds like a horde of elephants having oral intercourse with each other.
The Basement music in vanilla RE1 sounds WAY better. Some tracks also just don't sound as good. Why couldn't we just have the original soundtrack??
There are some good things about the Director's Cut. The auto aim is here for one thing, there are extra costumes for Chris and Jill, and there's the Advanced difficulty mode. Did you know that before you select the Advanced difficulty, holding right on the D-Pad for a few seconds will turn on double ammunition?
So now if you want to play this game on PS1 you have to decide. Do you sacrifice the auto aim for the aesthetics of the vanilla game? Or do you prioritize accessibility but you get an utterly butchered soundtrack and censored violence in the FMV cutscenes?
Then there is the Windows 95 PC version. The soundtrack and the gore are back to the way they should be, thank God for that, and the auto aim is here as well. What's amazing about this port is that unlike every other version of this game, you can skip the door animations. And holy fuck this makes the game go by so much quicker. Constantly going through doors and watching the animations every single time can really add onto the play time.
One thing that can be a bit off putting is that the enemies ooze out green blood instead of red, but maybe you'll get used to it. You can also get exclusive infinite ammo weapons like an Uzi for Jill and a Light Machine Gun for Chris. So you you relive your Rambo fantasies, baby.
It's actually pretty easy to get this game running on a modern day system thanks to the PC Wiki.
Then there is the Sega Saturn version.
This version also retains the original soundtrack from the PS1 vanilla release, but just like the vanilla PS1 version, there's no auto aim.
And this is the only port to have the Battle Mode, which is a mini-game like The Mercenaries in the other games.
You have to proceed to a certain destination within a certain time limit while killing enemies to add more time. The mini-game can be unlocked either by completing the game and saving the clear file, or by inputting a cheat code using a second-player controller with a save file set anywhere and then you hold X, Y, and Z and press Start at the title screen.
Finally there is the Nintendo DS port. Which is pretty cool because you got to play Resident Evil but on the go, but to be honest, I don't see why you would play this. All of the sound effects, music, and graphics are really compressed. It's like playing Resident Evil 2 on the N64.
I'd honestly rather just play the original PS1 or Sega Saturn version emulated on my cell phone. You're able to connect a PS4 controller to your cell phone via Bluetooth so you can play the game like that, so again, why play the DS version? Because you get a map on the bottom screen? Because the knife now has a quick select button?
Ehhhh... Yeah I'm good.
{ Final Thoughts }
This wasn't my first Resident Evil game and hell, it's definitely not the best Resident Evil, but it's the most important one. It grew on me a lot as I kept playing it. It's the game that brought horror gaming to the masses. And the Gamecube Remake is even better. The other original RE games are much better, but those games would have never existed if not for this one.
If not for the success Resident Evil 1, we probably would not have gotten games like Parasite Eve, Silent Hill, Dino Crisis, Fatal Frame, Eternal Darkness, hell even modern Survival Horror games like The Evil Within and Dead Space.
There are hundreds of games that owe at least a little credit to the original Resident Evil. You owe it to yourself to play this game at least once. Or hell, play the Remake that's even better. Just, play it goddamn it lol.
8/10
Have a nice day, Jill Sandwiches. ๐งก
2004
This is one of the most broken games that has ever been made, and this is mostly due to the fact that the developer ran out of funds to polish the game after the publisher were on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. Combine that with the fact that the game had a development team of around 7 people, and you have a recipe for disaster.
For starters, if you try to run this game on Windows 7 or higher, it will refuse to even load up. This is because every time a cutscene has to load, you'll be met with an infinite black screen. So if you remove all of the cutscenes from its folder, the game will work like normal, but even then, the game crashes all the time, and it's actually impossible to even finish it for most people, which I'll get into later. The game works fine on Vista, but any operating system other than that will require you to remove the cutscenes from the game.
[STORY]
The crazy thing is, the concept of this game is really interesting. The story of this game actually gets my attention, but it's ruined by just how awfully it's presented. The character models look like shit aside from the protagonist, the graphics are ugly as fuck, the voice acting is a disgrace, the pacing is all over the place, there are countless exposition dumps, and it just doesn't make any sense sometimes. Not to mention the levels barely correlate with the story, nor are they connected to each other, which just makes the story even more confusing than it already is. One level you'll be in a research facility, but then the next level is in either Hell, or in a stage that looks like a Looney Tunes cartoon shooting at cartoon characters with little explanation, I'm not kidding. And then the next level after that will be semi-open world in Central Park with insane amounts of backtracking. This game is just batshit fucking insane, it reminds me a lot of the Postal games.
The level design is like this because the developers did not want all of the them to look similar to each other, so each stage was designed differently in tone, and I can kind of understand that, but that just makes the tone of the game a jumbled mess, it's just incredibly inconsistent.
[CORE GAMEPLAY]
This is a First-Person Shooter, and just like the story, the core gameplay mechanics are busted. The hit detection is wonky, and the AI are totally braindead. They stand in one spot and just let you riddle them with bullets. And if they're holding a melee weapon, they charge at you head-on with no sense of logic. Sometimes they'll do a cartwheel... to dodge bullets. Very smart indeed.
The AI can go from braindead to physic cybernetic beings that know your exact positioning at all times, because the moment you turn a corner, they automatically shoot at you with insane accuracy.
The game also has a leaning mechanic, but not only can you lean only if you're against a wall, but you can't actually shoot while leaning, so what was the point of adding it in?? Instead, the leaning is used to see who's around the corner, as if the game was supposed to have stealth mechanics, considering the fact that you get a pistol and an SMG with suppressors.
The game also has supernatural abilities similar to Remedy's Control (PS4, 2019) such as self-healing, invisibility, slow-motion, and a shield. But there is are two major problems with this. The first problem is that you can only use these abilities in limited quantity, because they don't recharge. Instead you have to find items in the stage to use them more, but they're rare throughout, which means you have to conserve them, but you're never gonna know when you have to use them, which means that you will restarting a stage a lot either because you are forced to, or you are inevitably killed. It's trial and error and it's repetitive.
The second issue is that the balance of these powers are shot to shit as well, and some of them just break the game entirely. The healing is almost pointless, because it's a waste when you have to use it because the AI can just laser you as soon as you are in their line of sight. The invisibility is pretty much broken because enemies either never see you or they'll still see you regardless, so again, trial and error. The slow-motion is borderline pointless, because it creates an insane blur effect that will make your eyes fucking ooze blood. Also, if you die while the slow-motion is active, the game will crash. Always.
The shield is also pointless because you can't see enemy gunfire, nor is there any feedback to it getting shot, so you'll just be wasting your power meter because you don't even know if you're getting shot.
[GAME BREAKING BUGS]
So if you even manage to get the game to run, it is buggy as fuck. There are issues like camera clipping, sound effect bugs, weapon misalignment, falling through the map and dying in some areas, the FOV is absolutely appalling, enemies getting stuck standing up when they die, and there are constant amounts of crashing. It crashes sometimes when you try to load a save file, it crashes when you die while in slow-motion, it can crash during cutscenes, etc. And you wanna know the worst part? The game is unbeatable. Well, for most people, and this is where it gets interesting.
So what do I mean by that? Well, there is a stage later on in the game where as soon as it starts, you die. There is no way to get past it, because even if you use the console to fix this bug, you will get met with an error window called "Open GL Error: #436." There is no way to fix this bug, and there is no way to skip this level. Period. End of story. It is ultimately because of a software breaking bug where the DRM would read the copy of the game as pirated and you can't continue, and it is an issue that persists even to this day. There are copies of the game where the bug does not exist, but those are insanely rare. The only way to fix it is if the developer were to terminate the DRM entirely, but that never happened, because the studio disbanded many, many years ago, so many copies of the game still remain unbeatable. However, you can still watch the rest of the game on YouTube. This is a game that I came across randomly on YouTube and I wanted to research it and then play it myself. Yes, I'm not joking, I played this game. I still own a desktop with Windows Vista. You can find copies of this game on eBay for like $10, but the copy I own is unfinishable.
I really, really wanted to experience this game after watching people play and talk about it, so in a sick sense of curiosity, I wanted to play this game myself just to see how bad it really was. And yeah, this is definitely one of the worst games I've ever played, but the development team did have a ton of fun making this game despite all of the hardships, and they did move on years later to assist in game development for AAA companies such as Square Enix, so that's cool. A good ending for a game that saw the light of day but never reached its full potential.
For starters, if you try to run this game on Windows 7 or higher, it will refuse to even load up. This is because every time a cutscene has to load, you'll be met with an infinite black screen. So if you remove all of the cutscenes from its folder, the game will work like normal, but even then, the game crashes all the time, and it's actually impossible to even finish it for most people, which I'll get into later. The game works fine on Vista, but any operating system other than that will require you to remove the cutscenes from the game.
[STORY]
The crazy thing is, the concept of this game is really interesting. The story of this game actually gets my attention, but it's ruined by just how awfully it's presented. The character models look like shit aside from the protagonist, the graphics are ugly as fuck, the voice acting is a disgrace, the pacing is all over the place, there are countless exposition dumps, and it just doesn't make any sense sometimes. Not to mention the levels barely correlate with the story, nor are they connected to each other, which just makes the story even more confusing than it already is. One level you'll be in a research facility, but then the next level is in either Hell, or in a stage that looks like a Looney Tunes cartoon shooting at cartoon characters with little explanation, I'm not kidding. And then the next level after that will be semi-open world in Central Park with insane amounts of backtracking. This game is just batshit fucking insane, it reminds me a lot of the Postal games.
The level design is like this because the developers did not want all of the them to look similar to each other, so each stage was designed differently in tone, and I can kind of understand that, but that just makes the tone of the game a jumbled mess, it's just incredibly inconsistent.
[CORE GAMEPLAY]
This is a First-Person Shooter, and just like the story, the core gameplay mechanics are busted. The hit detection is wonky, and the AI are totally braindead. They stand in one spot and just let you riddle them with bullets. And if they're holding a melee weapon, they charge at you head-on with no sense of logic. Sometimes they'll do a cartwheel... to dodge bullets. Very smart indeed.
The AI can go from braindead to physic cybernetic beings that know your exact positioning at all times, because the moment you turn a corner, they automatically shoot at you with insane accuracy.
The game also has a leaning mechanic, but not only can you lean only if you're against a wall, but you can't actually shoot while leaning, so what was the point of adding it in?? Instead, the leaning is used to see who's around the corner, as if the game was supposed to have stealth mechanics, considering the fact that you get a pistol and an SMG with suppressors.
The game also has supernatural abilities similar to Remedy's Control (PS4, 2019) such as self-healing, invisibility, slow-motion, and a shield. But there is are two major problems with this. The first problem is that you can only use these abilities in limited quantity, because they don't recharge. Instead you have to find items in the stage to use them more, but they're rare throughout, which means you have to conserve them, but you're never gonna know when you have to use them, which means that you will restarting a stage a lot either because you are forced to, or you are inevitably killed. It's trial and error and it's repetitive.
The second issue is that the balance of these powers are shot to shit as well, and some of them just break the game entirely. The healing is almost pointless, because it's a waste when you have to use it because the AI can just laser you as soon as you are in their line of sight. The invisibility is pretty much broken because enemies either never see you or they'll still see you regardless, so again, trial and error. The slow-motion is borderline pointless, because it creates an insane blur effect that will make your eyes fucking ooze blood. Also, if you die while the slow-motion is active, the game will crash. Always.
The shield is also pointless because you can't see enemy gunfire, nor is there any feedback to it getting shot, so you'll just be wasting your power meter because you don't even know if you're getting shot.
[GAME BREAKING BUGS]
So if you even manage to get the game to run, it is buggy as fuck. There are issues like camera clipping, sound effect bugs, weapon misalignment, falling through the map and dying in some areas, the FOV is absolutely appalling, enemies getting stuck standing up when they die, and there are constant amounts of crashing. It crashes sometimes when you try to load a save file, it crashes when you die while in slow-motion, it can crash during cutscenes, etc. And you wanna know the worst part? The game is unbeatable. Well, for most people, and this is where it gets interesting.
So what do I mean by that? Well, there is a stage later on in the game where as soon as it starts, you die. There is no way to get past it, because even if you use the console to fix this bug, you will get met with an error window called "Open GL Error: #436." There is no way to fix this bug, and there is no way to skip this level. Period. End of story. It is ultimately because of a software breaking bug where the DRM would read the copy of the game as pirated and you can't continue, and it is an issue that persists even to this day. There are copies of the game where the bug does not exist, but those are insanely rare. The only way to fix it is if the developer were to terminate the DRM entirely, but that never happened, because the studio disbanded many, many years ago, so many copies of the game still remain unbeatable. However, you can still watch the rest of the game on YouTube. This is a game that I came across randomly on YouTube and I wanted to research it and then play it myself. Yes, I'm not joking, I played this game. I still own a desktop with Windows Vista. You can find copies of this game on eBay for like $10, but the copy I own is unfinishable.
I really, really wanted to experience this game after watching people play and talk about it, so in a sick sense of curiosity, I wanted to play this game myself just to see how bad it really was. And yeah, this is definitely one of the worst games I've ever played, but the development team did have a ton of fun making this game despite all of the hardships, and they did move on years later to assist in game development for AAA companies such as Square Enix, so that's cool. A good ending for a game that saw the light of day but never reached its full potential.
1998
Resident Evil 1 was the progenitor of the Survival Horror gaming genre and it was one of the biggest games of the PS1 era.
It's a very important game that should be experienced at least once, and it set the foundation for its onslaught of sequels to come.
Though the lack of auto aim, the pissing about in the mansion hallways, the very atrocious voice acting, the absolutely appalling soundtrack in the Director's Cut version of the the game, and the fact that Chris Redfield straight up sucks to play as, resulted in a jank as shit experience.
Regardless, I love RE1. I played many of the later games before the original PS1 trilogy, but playing the original RE game for the first time at 13 years old gave me respect towards it, and it grew on me the more I played it. And the Gamecube Remake is even better. It's an awesome game that has aged like fine wine.
But when I saw Resident Evil 2 for the first time, that shit just blew my fucking mind. My 8 year old self could not comprehend it. I used to watch my two older brothers play it and I was so shit scared that I would run into another room and cover my ears because they played it pretty loudly on the television. The scene that made me get this way was the Licker scene. Sweet Jesus that shit scared the fuck out of me when I was a kid. I had never seen anything like it.
But when you are born in the same generation as me, or even the generation before that, a game like RE1 and 2 must have blown your mind. It was like playing a George Romero film. A zombie movie that you PLAYED.
Which sounds hilariously dumb by today's standards, but back then, this was mind boggling.
When I was a kid I was playing PS1 games like Crash Bandicoot, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, Metal Gear Solid, Spider-Man, Tomb Raider, and random sports games.
But seeing something like Resident Evil 2 and the original Silent Hill fuckin' petrified me. I hated scary games. Even these days I hate games and movies that have jumpscares in them. I actually wouldn't get the chance to play Resident Evil 2 along with 1 and 3 until I was 13 years old when the games were put onto the PlayStation 3 Store, and I got them all as a Christmas gift.
Christmas 2009 to be specific.
I played RE1 first, and I thought it was great, loved it. But Resident Evil 2, oh ho ho ho ho, that game rocked my world. I played Code Veronica, RE4, and even RE5 before this one, but it became my most favorite out of all of them. I was fucking obsessed with this game, I couldn't get enough of it.
I spent hours all day and all night throughout my Christmas vacation playing Resident Evil 2, trying to unlock every secret that this game had to offer. My older brother got really nostalgic watching me playing it. It was a great thing. And little did my younger self know that in about 10 years from then, the game would get a remake like with RE1, and this might sound like an underrated opinion, and the remake would be even better than the PS1 original.
Yeah, I actually think RE2 Remake is even better than the original. It just takes everything that was good about the original game and expanded the lore and the narrative, while also adding in a lot more content to give you more bang for your buck.
It was like playing Resident Evil 4, but it was Resident Evil 2, with absolutely stunning optimization and graphics. It's what you would want in a classic Resident Evil game but with a modern spin on it, but that's a topic for a different review. I'm just gonna talk about the original RE2.
{ Story }
The plot of this game starts three months after the events of RE1. The members of the S.T.A.R.S team had exposed Albert Wesker and the evil Umbrella corporation as the ones responsible for the creation and outbreak of the T-Virus in the Spenser Mansion, but the public would not believe them.
The virus would end up leaking into Raccoon City via infected rats and the place starts getting infested with zombies and other horrific shit. Our protagonists this time are Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield, the sister of Chris Redfield from RE1. And Leon is a rookie cop fresh from, dare I say it, Police Academy, on his first day as an officer in Raccoon City. And Claire is looking for her brother who went missing after the events of RE1.
And this game kicks off with Leon and Claire taking a trip to Zombie City, where the brains are warm and the beer is shitty, and they quickly find out that Raccoon City is infested with zombies. So their mission is simple: Split up, look for any survivors, and get the fuck out. It's a simple setup but that's really all the encouragement you need. It gets more in-depth as you go on but it's easy to follow, and it's compelling in a melodramatic sort of way.
It's very schlocky but I find it endearing and totally 90s, and this further translates to the voice acting; it's cheesy as shit but it's a massive improvement over the voice acting in the first Resident Evil game.
The voice acting just adds onto Resident Evil 2's charm. And yeah it could have been better with a more gritty story, but if you're in the mood for a plot that would make most slasher films embarrassed to be around, then RE2 will be a totally entertaining experience indeed. What it lacks in its storytelling ability makes up for it with its atmosphere and immersion.
It turns out that the plot for this game was designed to be like a metaverse, where multiple storylines can happen simultaneously, in the same way for example, the MCU (Marvel Universe). So for example Resident Evil 3 with Jill Valentine trying to escape Raccoon City is in the same time frame maybe a little before or after Resident Evil 2's events. It's like Resident Evil 6 where all 4 Campaigns follow a single overarching story.
{ Gameplay }
RE2's gameplay and presentation make up for its story, and the developers really make that the case. All of the issues that were in RE1 have been addressed, and the pacing is a lot faster than its predecessor.
The main game is broken up into two parts: Scenarios A and B, and whichever character you want to play as is completely up to you. But whichever character you select for Scenario A, you have to play as the opposite character for Scenario B.
What's really cool is that there are little story nuances that you won't see in one character's scenario as opposed to the other one.
So for example if you play Leon A and then Claire B, there will be story easter eggs that you won't see if you were to play Claire A and then Leon B. So this encourages multiple playthroughs to see every single asset in the story, which is quite a nice touch. And each Scenario isn't that long. First timers can complete all 4 Scenarios in 8-12 hours, I think.. I'm just assuming.
The controls are significantly improved from the first RE game. They feel even more fluid and responsive than before. The first game was restrictive in its controls, especially if you played the vanilla release of the game, but there is still no 180ยฐ turn yet. We wouldn't get that until Resident Evil 3.
Since this is a Survival Horror game, the goal is about escaping rather than fighting everything head on, because ammo and healing items are limited. Once you run out of ammo and whatnot, you're screwed, which is where where the survival aspect comes into play.
In RE1, every single enemy encounter meant that your brain needed to make quick decision making. Do you waste bullets and shoot the enemy down so that you don't have to worry about them anymore? Or do you risk taking damage and running past them so you can save your ammo? But if you take too much damage you need to use healing items which are also limited.
And this can make RE1 a pretty challenging game, difficult in some parts.
RE2 also has this but it seems like you get much more ammo and healing items than before, which makes the game easy. This is the easiest classic RE game in my opinion, because of how much ammo the game gives you. Even on Normal difficulty, which is the highest difficulty the game has, I still find the game too easy. If you play on Easy or Rookie mode, the game practically LETS you win.
Not to mention both Leon and Claire start off with 8 inventory slots which can be upgraded to 10, and there are less tight corridors than before, meaning you can just run past some enemies without having to fight at all.
And the puzzles are piss easy as well, and maybe that's cause a few of the puzzles in RE1 were ball breaking at best, not to mention navigating the mansion is busywork in itself.
The Ink Ribbons make a return making each save a thought provoking and tense experience.
The aiming of your weapon is improved and you're also able to snap onto your target or swap targets with the push of the L1 button.
Combat can be avoided for the most part, but it's the catharsis of blowing off zombie heads, torsos, and legs, that makes me come back to this game again and again, I just never get tired of it.
Like with RE1, the herb mixing also has strategy behind it. Herbs take up inventory space, but you can combine herbs to save up space. And which herbs you should combine is another layer on top of the decision making.
There are three types of herbs: Green (G), Red (R), and Blue (B). You have free reign on how you want to combine them. Green herbs restore health and blue herbs cure poison.
And red herbs combined with a green herb fully restores your health. Red herbs cannot be used alone though, they have to be combined with a green herb before it can be used, and only a maximum of three herbs can be combined into one.
G: Heals 25% of your health
G + G: Heals 50% of your health
G + G + G: Heals 100% of your health
G + R: Heals 100% of your health
B: Heals poison
G + B: Heals 25% of your health and cures poison
G + R + B: Heals 100% of your health and cures poison
What you should keep in mind though is that using First Aid Sprays can lower your Grade at the end of the scenario. You should only use them if you REALLY have to. Getting a low ranking is dependant on four things:
- Your total play time
- How many times you saved
- How many First Aid Sprays you used
- How much you used special weapons that take up two inventory slots such as the Machine Gun and Arc Thrower (or the lightning gun as I like to call it).
Getting a high ranking is important because you can unlock weapons with infinite ammo like a Rocket Launcher, a Minigun, a Desert Eagle, and a Sub Machine Gun. These weapons pretty much kill everything instantly, they're amazing rewards that are worth the effort.
Or you could just play the Rookie Mode and use the Rocket Launcher, Minigun, and Sub Machine Gun right off the bat if you just want to fuck around and pretend you are motherfuckin' John Rambo lol.
Getting a high ranking can also unlock Battle Mode which is a mode where you fight enemies under a time limit and reach a destination like in Code Veronica, and another mode called the 4th Survivor, in which you play as Hunk as you rush to the Raccoon Police Department to deliver a sample of the G-Virus to Umbrella.
And then there is the Tofu Survivor mode. It's the same as playing as Hunk, except you are a giant walking block of tofu, with a lot more health, but with no weapons other than a knife. This is probably the best mode ever, because it's absolutely ridiculous, and it makes me laugh every time I watch or play it. I was really happy when they brought this mode back in the remake.
The amount of content on the disc is pretty awesome. But, the content that is unlocked from the start of the game is dependant on what version of the game you are playing.
There is a gripe I have with the gameplay in this game and it's how the Condition system works.
Basically, your character's movement is dependent on how much health they have. Getting into the Danger state makes them move like 80% slower. But in Resident Evil 1, that wasn't a thing. And to be honest I actually preferred that.
Because control is not being completely stripped away from me from losing too much health. It's already enough punishment that I'm about to die and lose my current progress. Why also make it impossible to get away from enemies?? I get that it's supposed to make the situation more intense, but at the end of the day it's kinda bullshit.
Now I'm gonna talk about the weapons, my personal favorite part.
From pistols, to shotguns, a crossbow, rocket launchers, a lightning gun, a flamethrower, a Desert Eagle, a MAC10 Submachine Gun, a grenade launcher, a minigun, this game has some incredible fucking weaponry. Almost all of them feel so good to use. The gunplay in this game is sooooo satisfying.
The sound design of the weapons are just amazing. The Desert Eagle, the upgraded shotgun, the MAC10, the rocket launcher, and the minigun sound absolutely ORGASMIC.
People like to say that RE4 was the first game to invent the term "Gun Porn" but in my opinion that shit started with RE2.
Leon's arsenal consists of a standard pistol which can be upgraded to a three round burst which is pretty good, a shotgun which can be upgraded, a Desert Eagle which can be upgraded, which is the best weapon for bosses, a Flamethrower which I don't really use that much but it's cool.
The upgraded shotgun is my favorite weapon in the game because the sound of it is incredible and it kills most enemies in 1-2 shots. It's so powerful that it nearly knocks Leon off his feet with every pull of the trigger which is pretty funny.
Claire's arsenal isn't as good though. She gets a standard pistol (cannot be upgraded), she can get a Colt Single Action Army revolver which is pretty good, a Crossbow, which is good for zombies but it's not that great overall, the Arc Thrower which is funny to use to watch zombies shudder with electricity, but just like the Flamethrower, it's not that great, I don't really use it that much, but the best weapon for Claire is the Grenade Launcher.
There are three different types of grenades: Acid, Flame, and Explosive Rounds. The Acid Rounds are like the Desert Eagle in terms of power, they can kill most enemies in 1-2 shots, and they're damn good for bosses.
I wish that Claire had the Shotgun instead of the Crossbow, because the Crossbow is weaker and it just doesn't have that consistent UMPH, if you know what I mean by that. It just doesn't feel as satisfying to use. But if that doesn't bother you then all the power to you. But then again maybe that's why she has the grenade launcher.
The rankings in the Japanese version of RE2 (Biohazard 2) range from D, the lowest, to S, the highest. And in the West we got E to A.
EA's Dick. It's In Your Ass.
Lol sorry.
Anyway, I want to point this out for a good reason. If you look at the Western manuals for Resident Evil 2, it says that you are able to achieve the S ranking. However, this is a typo.
The English manuals of Resident Evil 2 were direct translations of the Japanese manuals for Biohazard 2. So the rest of us Westerners were literally pulling our friggin' hair out trying to get the S rank.
There were people arguing about this in forums, chatrooms, and even in the playgrounds for many years.
Family members were divided, friends separated with each other, and people even ended up rioting in the streets and torched the Capcom development studio for their treachery.
Okay I'm just joking that didn't actually happen lol.
But anyway if you got a Western A ranking, you got the Japanese S rank. Got it? Good!! And that's that.
{ Presentation and Soundtrack }
The soundtrack is fantastic in this game. The music production is way ahead of its time and is a huge improvement over the first game, and is a perfect conduit to the atmosphere. Take the R.P.D. basement music for example. It gives me a sense of dark, sinister oppression and it's almost suffocating in a way, it just feels.. dreadful. It's that crushing sense of being alone and it just enhances this game so much.
The music is masterfully crafted in this game. It gets intense when there is a boss fight or a chase sequence, and then the more lonely moments are accompanied by dreadful, creepy ambient music. The music accompanied with the gruesome sound effects can really put a shiver up my spine. This game deserves the full use of your sound system of choice. This game is a master class of audio.
This is also one of the prettiest looking games on the PS1. The backdrops and pre-rendered backgrounds look amazing for the time, they're just so rich in detail. And instead of insanely awkward real actors for the FMV cutscenes, RE2 uses CG character models for the FMV cutscenes which just feels more appropriate. Great graphics, amazing sounds and music, improved gameplay, iconic loveable characters, RE2 really has it all.
{ Best Version? }
This is pretty difficult to decide.
There are so many damn ports of this game. Unlike Resident Evil 1, there really is no wrong way to play this game, except for one version.
It has been released on the PS1, Nintendo 64, PC, Nintendo GameCube, the Tiger Game.com of all fucking things, and the Sega Dreamcast. Every version of this game are relatively the same, except for the N64 version.
Since the N64 uses cartridges instead of discs, there was less storage to put RE2 on it. So all of the sounds, cutscenes, and music is compressed. It's amazing they even managed to put RE2 onto a single Nintendo 64 cartridge to begin with, but I don't see why you would ever play that version aside from morbid curiosity.
The content on the disc varies on what version you are playing, and whether it's all unlocked at the start or not.
If you want to know what each version of the game has what content, YouTuber Lotus Prince made a very comprehensive guide on every single version of RE2 released. It's both an entertaining and informative video. I definitely recommend a watch. I will link it for you. You're welcome.
https://youtu.be/TQGlB1LITGA
{ Final Thoughts }
This game's legacy is pretty extraordinary. Producer Shinji Mikami went on to make other awesome games after RE2 such as RE4, Beautiful Joe, Dino Crisis, Shadow of the Damned, The Evil Within 1 and 2, and God Hand.
And Director Hideki Kamiya would go on to make games like Devil May Cry, Okami, and Bayonetta.
To say that these two guy's careers were largely elevated by Resident Evil 2's success is an understatement. This is the best RE game in the franchise, and I'm happy with all of the countless hours of enjoyment that this game has given me and all my other friends. I'm really thankful to everyone who made this game possible.
This game has so much replay value that I just never get bored of it. I come back to it again and again, which is a testament to its design and execution. And funny enough the remake is even better in my opinion, but that's a topic for a different review.
Whether it's the original game or the remake, this game is a masterpiece. It served as a gateway for Survival Horror games for many generations to come. Amazingly enough there are people out there who have never played this game still, hence why this review is so long. But I still wanted to make this review an enjoyable read for both veterans and newcomers. Just, play this damn game, if you haven't already, shame on you. I give this game a Jill Sandwich out of 10.
(10/10)
It's a very important game that should be experienced at least once, and it set the foundation for its onslaught of sequels to come.
Though the lack of auto aim, the pissing about in the mansion hallways, the very atrocious voice acting, the absolutely appalling soundtrack in the Director's Cut version of the the game, and the fact that Chris Redfield straight up sucks to play as, resulted in a jank as shit experience.
Regardless, I love RE1. I played many of the later games before the original PS1 trilogy, but playing the original RE game for the first time at 13 years old gave me respect towards it, and it grew on me the more I played it. And the Gamecube Remake is even better. It's an awesome game that has aged like fine wine.
But when I saw Resident Evil 2 for the first time, that shit just blew my fucking mind. My 8 year old self could not comprehend it. I used to watch my two older brothers play it and I was so shit scared that I would run into another room and cover my ears because they played it pretty loudly on the television. The scene that made me get this way was the Licker scene. Sweet Jesus that shit scared the fuck out of me when I was a kid. I had never seen anything like it.
But when you are born in the same generation as me, or even the generation before that, a game like RE1 and 2 must have blown your mind. It was like playing a George Romero film. A zombie movie that you PLAYED.
Which sounds hilariously dumb by today's standards, but back then, this was mind boggling.
When I was a kid I was playing PS1 games like Crash Bandicoot, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, Metal Gear Solid, Spider-Man, Tomb Raider, and random sports games.
But seeing something like Resident Evil 2 and the original Silent Hill fuckin' petrified me. I hated scary games. Even these days I hate games and movies that have jumpscares in them. I actually wouldn't get the chance to play Resident Evil 2 along with 1 and 3 until I was 13 years old when the games were put onto the PlayStation 3 Store, and I got them all as a Christmas gift.
Christmas 2009 to be specific.
I played RE1 first, and I thought it was great, loved it. But Resident Evil 2, oh ho ho ho ho, that game rocked my world. I played Code Veronica, RE4, and even RE5 before this one, but it became my most favorite out of all of them. I was fucking obsessed with this game, I couldn't get enough of it.
I spent hours all day and all night throughout my Christmas vacation playing Resident Evil 2, trying to unlock every secret that this game had to offer. My older brother got really nostalgic watching me playing it. It was a great thing. And little did my younger self know that in about 10 years from then, the game would get a remake like with RE1, and this might sound like an underrated opinion, and the remake would be even better than the PS1 original.
Yeah, I actually think RE2 Remake is even better than the original. It just takes everything that was good about the original game and expanded the lore and the narrative, while also adding in a lot more content to give you more bang for your buck.
It was like playing Resident Evil 4, but it was Resident Evil 2, with absolutely stunning optimization and graphics. It's what you would want in a classic Resident Evil game but with a modern spin on it, but that's a topic for a different review. I'm just gonna talk about the original RE2.
{ Story }
The plot of this game starts three months after the events of RE1. The members of the S.T.A.R.S team had exposed Albert Wesker and the evil Umbrella corporation as the ones responsible for the creation and outbreak of the T-Virus in the Spenser Mansion, but the public would not believe them.
The virus would end up leaking into Raccoon City via infected rats and the place starts getting infested with zombies and other horrific shit. Our protagonists this time are Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield, the sister of Chris Redfield from RE1. And Leon is a rookie cop fresh from, dare I say it, Police Academy, on his first day as an officer in Raccoon City. And Claire is looking for her brother who went missing after the events of RE1.
And this game kicks off with Leon and Claire taking a trip to Zombie City, where the brains are warm and the beer is shitty, and they quickly find out that Raccoon City is infested with zombies. So their mission is simple: Split up, look for any survivors, and get the fuck out. It's a simple setup but that's really all the encouragement you need. It gets more in-depth as you go on but it's easy to follow, and it's compelling in a melodramatic sort of way.
It's very schlocky but I find it endearing and totally 90s, and this further translates to the voice acting; it's cheesy as shit but it's a massive improvement over the voice acting in the first Resident Evil game.
The voice acting just adds onto Resident Evil 2's charm. And yeah it could have been better with a more gritty story, but if you're in the mood for a plot that would make most slasher films embarrassed to be around, then RE2 will be a totally entertaining experience indeed. What it lacks in its storytelling ability makes up for it with its atmosphere and immersion.
It turns out that the plot for this game was designed to be like a metaverse, where multiple storylines can happen simultaneously, in the same way for example, the MCU (Marvel Universe). So for example Resident Evil 3 with Jill Valentine trying to escape Raccoon City is in the same time frame maybe a little before or after Resident Evil 2's events. It's like Resident Evil 6 where all 4 Campaigns follow a single overarching story.
{ Gameplay }
RE2's gameplay and presentation make up for its story, and the developers really make that the case. All of the issues that were in RE1 have been addressed, and the pacing is a lot faster than its predecessor.
The main game is broken up into two parts: Scenarios A and B, and whichever character you want to play as is completely up to you. But whichever character you select for Scenario A, you have to play as the opposite character for Scenario B.
What's really cool is that there are little story nuances that you won't see in one character's scenario as opposed to the other one.
So for example if you play Leon A and then Claire B, there will be story easter eggs that you won't see if you were to play Claire A and then Leon B. So this encourages multiple playthroughs to see every single asset in the story, which is quite a nice touch. And each Scenario isn't that long. First timers can complete all 4 Scenarios in 8-12 hours, I think.. I'm just assuming.
The controls are significantly improved from the first RE game. They feel even more fluid and responsive than before. The first game was restrictive in its controls, especially if you played the vanilla release of the game, but there is still no 180ยฐ turn yet. We wouldn't get that until Resident Evil 3.
Since this is a Survival Horror game, the goal is about escaping rather than fighting everything head on, because ammo and healing items are limited. Once you run out of ammo and whatnot, you're screwed, which is where where the survival aspect comes into play.
In RE1, every single enemy encounter meant that your brain needed to make quick decision making. Do you waste bullets and shoot the enemy down so that you don't have to worry about them anymore? Or do you risk taking damage and running past them so you can save your ammo? But if you take too much damage you need to use healing items which are also limited.
And this can make RE1 a pretty challenging game, difficult in some parts.
RE2 also has this but it seems like you get much more ammo and healing items than before, which makes the game easy. This is the easiest classic RE game in my opinion, because of how much ammo the game gives you. Even on Normal difficulty, which is the highest difficulty the game has, I still find the game too easy. If you play on Easy or Rookie mode, the game practically LETS you win.
Not to mention both Leon and Claire start off with 8 inventory slots which can be upgraded to 10, and there are less tight corridors than before, meaning you can just run past some enemies without having to fight at all.
And the puzzles are piss easy as well, and maybe that's cause a few of the puzzles in RE1 were ball breaking at best, not to mention navigating the mansion is busywork in itself.
The Ink Ribbons make a return making each save a thought provoking and tense experience.
The aiming of your weapon is improved and you're also able to snap onto your target or swap targets with the push of the L1 button.
Combat can be avoided for the most part, but it's the catharsis of blowing off zombie heads, torsos, and legs, that makes me come back to this game again and again, I just never get tired of it.
Like with RE1, the herb mixing also has strategy behind it. Herbs take up inventory space, but you can combine herbs to save up space. And which herbs you should combine is another layer on top of the decision making.
There are three types of herbs: Green (G), Red (R), and Blue (B). You have free reign on how you want to combine them. Green herbs restore health and blue herbs cure poison.
And red herbs combined with a green herb fully restores your health. Red herbs cannot be used alone though, they have to be combined with a green herb before it can be used, and only a maximum of three herbs can be combined into one.
G: Heals 25% of your health
G + G: Heals 50% of your health
G + G + G: Heals 100% of your health
G + R: Heals 100% of your health
B: Heals poison
G + B: Heals 25% of your health and cures poison
G + R + B: Heals 100% of your health and cures poison
What you should keep in mind though is that using First Aid Sprays can lower your Grade at the end of the scenario. You should only use them if you REALLY have to. Getting a low ranking is dependant on four things:
- Your total play time
- How many times you saved
- How many First Aid Sprays you used
- How much you used special weapons that take up two inventory slots such as the Machine Gun and Arc Thrower (or the lightning gun as I like to call it).
Getting a high ranking is important because you can unlock weapons with infinite ammo like a Rocket Launcher, a Minigun, a Desert Eagle, and a Sub Machine Gun. These weapons pretty much kill everything instantly, they're amazing rewards that are worth the effort.
Or you could just play the Rookie Mode and use the Rocket Launcher, Minigun, and Sub Machine Gun right off the bat if you just want to fuck around and pretend you are motherfuckin' John Rambo lol.
Getting a high ranking can also unlock Battle Mode which is a mode where you fight enemies under a time limit and reach a destination like in Code Veronica, and another mode called the 4th Survivor, in which you play as Hunk as you rush to the Raccoon Police Department to deliver a sample of the G-Virus to Umbrella.
And then there is the Tofu Survivor mode. It's the same as playing as Hunk, except you are a giant walking block of tofu, with a lot more health, but with no weapons other than a knife. This is probably the best mode ever, because it's absolutely ridiculous, and it makes me laugh every time I watch or play it. I was really happy when they brought this mode back in the remake.
The amount of content on the disc is pretty awesome. But, the content that is unlocked from the start of the game is dependant on what version of the game you are playing.
There is a gripe I have with the gameplay in this game and it's how the Condition system works.
Basically, your character's movement is dependent on how much health they have. Getting into the Danger state makes them move like 80% slower. But in Resident Evil 1, that wasn't a thing. And to be honest I actually preferred that.
Because control is not being completely stripped away from me from losing too much health. It's already enough punishment that I'm about to die and lose my current progress. Why also make it impossible to get away from enemies?? I get that it's supposed to make the situation more intense, but at the end of the day it's kinda bullshit.
Now I'm gonna talk about the weapons, my personal favorite part.
From pistols, to shotguns, a crossbow, rocket launchers, a lightning gun, a flamethrower, a Desert Eagle, a MAC10 Submachine Gun, a grenade launcher, a minigun, this game has some incredible fucking weaponry. Almost all of them feel so good to use. The gunplay in this game is sooooo satisfying.
The sound design of the weapons are just amazing. The Desert Eagle, the upgraded shotgun, the MAC10, the rocket launcher, and the minigun sound absolutely ORGASMIC.
People like to say that RE4 was the first game to invent the term "Gun Porn" but in my opinion that shit started with RE2.
Leon's arsenal consists of a standard pistol which can be upgraded to a three round burst which is pretty good, a shotgun which can be upgraded, a Desert Eagle which can be upgraded, which is the best weapon for bosses, a Flamethrower which I don't really use that much but it's cool.
The upgraded shotgun is my favorite weapon in the game because the sound of it is incredible and it kills most enemies in 1-2 shots. It's so powerful that it nearly knocks Leon off his feet with every pull of the trigger which is pretty funny.
Claire's arsenal isn't as good though. She gets a standard pistol (cannot be upgraded), she can get a Colt Single Action Army revolver which is pretty good, a Crossbow, which is good for zombies but it's not that great overall, the Arc Thrower which is funny to use to watch zombies shudder with electricity, but just like the Flamethrower, it's not that great, I don't really use it that much, but the best weapon for Claire is the Grenade Launcher.
There are three different types of grenades: Acid, Flame, and Explosive Rounds. The Acid Rounds are like the Desert Eagle in terms of power, they can kill most enemies in 1-2 shots, and they're damn good for bosses.
I wish that Claire had the Shotgun instead of the Crossbow, because the Crossbow is weaker and it just doesn't have that consistent UMPH, if you know what I mean by that. It just doesn't feel as satisfying to use. But if that doesn't bother you then all the power to you. But then again maybe that's why she has the grenade launcher.
The rankings in the Japanese version of RE2 (Biohazard 2) range from D, the lowest, to S, the highest. And in the West we got E to A.
EA's Dick. It's In Your Ass.
Lol sorry.
Anyway, I want to point this out for a good reason. If you look at the Western manuals for Resident Evil 2, it says that you are able to achieve the S ranking. However, this is a typo.
The English manuals of Resident Evil 2 were direct translations of the Japanese manuals for Biohazard 2. So the rest of us Westerners were literally pulling our friggin' hair out trying to get the S rank.
There were people arguing about this in forums, chatrooms, and even in the playgrounds for many years.
Family members were divided, friends separated with each other, and people even ended up rioting in the streets and torched the Capcom development studio for their treachery.
Okay I'm just joking that didn't actually happen lol.
But anyway if you got a Western A ranking, you got the Japanese S rank. Got it? Good!! And that's that.
{ Presentation and Soundtrack }
The soundtrack is fantastic in this game. The music production is way ahead of its time and is a huge improvement over the first game, and is a perfect conduit to the atmosphere. Take the R.P.D. basement music for example. It gives me a sense of dark, sinister oppression and it's almost suffocating in a way, it just feels.. dreadful. It's that crushing sense of being alone and it just enhances this game so much.
The music is masterfully crafted in this game. It gets intense when there is a boss fight or a chase sequence, and then the more lonely moments are accompanied by dreadful, creepy ambient music. The music accompanied with the gruesome sound effects can really put a shiver up my spine. This game deserves the full use of your sound system of choice. This game is a master class of audio.
This is also one of the prettiest looking games on the PS1. The backdrops and pre-rendered backgrounds look amazing for the time, they're just so rich in detail. And instead of insanely awkward real actors for the FMV cutscenes, RE2 uses CG character models for the FMV cutscenes which just feels more appropriate. Great graphics, amazing sounds and music, improved gameplay, iconic loveable characters, RE2 really has it all.
{ Best Version? }
This is pretty difficult to decide.
There are so many damn ports of this game. Unlike Resident Evil 1, there really is no wrong way to play this game, except for one version.
It has been released on the PS1, Nintendo 64, PC, Nintendo GameCube, the Tiger Game.com of all fucking things, and the Sega Dreamcast. Every version of this game are relatively the same, except for the N64 version.
Since the N64 uses cartridges instead of discs, there was less storage to put RE2 on it. So all of the sounds, cutscenes, and music is compressed. It's amazing they even managed to put RE2 onto a single Nintendo 64 cartridge to begin with, but I don't see why you would ever play that version aside from morbid curiosity.
The content on the disc varies on what version you are playing, and whether it's all unlocked at the start or not.
If you want to know what each version of the game has what content, YouTuber Lotus Prince made a very comprehensive guide on every single version of RE2 released. It's both an entertaining and informative video. I definitely recommend a watch. I will link it for you. You're welcome.
https://youtu.be/TQGlB1LITGA
{ Final Thoughts }
This game's legacy is pretty extraordinary. Producer Shinji Mikami went on to make other awesome games after RE2 such as RE4, Beautiful Joe, Dino Crisis, Shadow of the Damned, The Evil Within 1 and 2, and God Hand.
And Director Hideki Kamiya would go on to make games like Devil May Cry, Okami, and Bayonetta.
To say that these two guy's careers were largely elevated by Resident Evil 2's success is an understatement. This is the best RE game in the franchise, and I'm happy with all of the countless hours of enjoyment that this game has given me and all my other friends. I'm really thankful to everyone who made this game possible.
This game has so much replay value that I just never get bored of it. I come back to it again and again, which is a testament to its design and execution. And funny enough the remake is even better in my opinion, but that's a topic for a different review.
Whether it's the original game or the remake, this game is a masterpiece. It served as a gateway for Survival Horror games for many generations to come. Amazingly enough there are people out there who have never played this game still, hence why this review is so long. But I still wanted to make this review an enjoyable read for both veterans and newcomers. Just, play this damn game, if you haven't already, shame on you. I give this game a Jill Sandwich out of 10.
(10/10)
2015
Atrocious. Tedious. Unfun. Those are a few words that can describe this entire game in a nutshell.
This is a Multiplayer First Person Shooter that suffers from schizophrenia, as it doesnโt seem to understand what kind of game it wants to be. I havenโt seen a shooter game that has had an identity crisis this bad since Resident Evil 6. No disrespect to RE6 though, I fuckinโ love that game.
[ ๐พ๐ค๐ง๐ ๐๐๐ข๐๐ฅ๐ก๐๐ฎ ]
Christ on a bike where do I even start with this? So itโs an FPS game set during an apocalypse, but the apocalypse setting has no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever and Iโll get into that. The game plays like your generic Call of Duty esque casual twitch shooter but it fails hard at trying to be just that. There are HUGE issues that actually makes this game just un-fucking-bearable to play. Lemme start with how gear works.
{ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ช๐ฃ๐จ ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐๐ฆ๐ช๐๐ฅ๐ข๐๐ฃ๐ฉ }
How guns work in this game is that they are divided by tiers. Every gun has a tier, and they go from 1-5. The higher the tier, the better the gun performs, things like less recoil, more damage, more range, etc. The difference between a level 1 weapon and a level 5 one is like night and day. You get higher tier guns by leveling up your faction and rank, but this shit takes fucking forever. It takes a ton of matches just to go up by one level. And even then, you still need to spend Silver to buy the gun, and this shit takes quite the grind to get as well.
Leveling up your armor will increase things like bullet defense, explosion resistance, and oxygen capacity. To do this you spend either Scrap or Gold. Scrap is earned from playing matches like with Silver but again, itโs on the grindy side. Also, to put attachments on your guns, you need to purchase them with Gold or Scrap as well. So you need Scrap for both armor upgrading AND for getting attachments. Or you could spend Gold. You wanna put a suppressor or a 2.5x ACOG scope on your gun? 500 Gold please. To get Gold you do either two things: spend real world money or you can turn a certain amount of Silver into Gold.
Now with what I just said you can most likely tell what Iโm getting at from a mile away.
Of fucking course this game is Pay 2 Win. This is a Free-To-Play game so thatโs obvious right? But this game just goes way too fucking far with this, itโs flat out egregious. Getting higher tier equipment and attachments is actually much easier if you just spend money on them. This game is insanely unforgiving to new players.
Itโs a broken system, because if youโre a new player to this game youโre going to get fucking slaughtered, because most lobbies have players in them who already have max level gear, so youโre at a huge disadvantage already. It turns into Shoot First, Die First: The Video Game, because many times it doesnโt matter if you take the first shot, youโre most likely gonna die to your enemy because your gear is underleveled. Is this fucking Warframe PvP? It also doesnโt help that the matchmaking is just a big piss stain. Most of the time the max gear level, max level players get paired up against noobs with level 1 or 2 gear, itโs just plain unfair.
There are also preset kits that you can purchase with Gold. Itโs a bundle that comes with a couple leveled up guns and armor, such as the Bandit Bundle and the Survivor Bundle. The game doesnโt even try to hide this shit. Itโs like buying a preset class in a Call of Duty game.
There are also events that sell players exclusive weaponry like an AK12, a PP19 Bizon, and a PKP. And yes, these guns are max tier. Theyโre fully modded. And theyโre expensive as fuck.
{ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ฅ๐จ }
This is the main reason why I believe that this game just has an identity crisis. The maps in this game are so fucking shit that itโs giving me flashbacks to the maps from Modern Warfare 2019โs Multiplayer. The game has a max of 8v8 lobbies but the maps are WAY too complex in their size and verticality to only have this little amount of players in it. The maps are designed like the lobbies should be 16v16.
Not only are they large, but almost every building can be entered, and some of them have multiple floors. There are also many spots that are just empty space and serve no purpose. Every goddamn map in this game is like this. This is a huge problem because it makes the game flow SO much slower, because most of the match will be spent with you running around trying to find someone to shoot.
The game has that mechanic from COD and Battlefield where shooting a gun without a suppressor will make you pop up on the mini-map as a big red dot.
Almost every single match Iโve played ends before either team can even reach the score limit. And matches last up to 12 minutes. This game has a pretty quick TTK (Time To Kill), so do you play the game like itโs COD and just sprint everywhere, or do you take it slow and play it like a more tactical game like Squad, Rainbow Six Siege, or CSGO? Oh, and did I mention that this game has a stamina mechanic? Of course, make the game flow even slower than it already is.
The game wants to be a fast paced casual game like COD but the maps do not suit that type of playstyle, so in reality, you canโt play the game like itโs COD, and Iโll get into that. Thereโs another issue. There are no random spawns. Every respawn is always in one part of the map. Itโs like how in Overwatch each team has a base where everyone always spawns at. The problem with this is that it also creates the issue of getting spawn killed repeatedly. The enemy is always gonna know where you are going to spawn, so theyโre just gonna camp the spawns and wait for you to move. And that leads into my next biggest complaint
[ ๐พ๐๐ข๐ฅ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐๐ฃ๐๐ฅ๐๐ง ๐๐ฅ๐๐ข ]
Do you hate getting sniped from across the map by a prone player in any of the Battlefield games? HOO BOY are you gonna fucking despise this game. I donโt think I'm exaggerating when I say that the game has hands down the worst camping and sniper spam Iโve ever seen in a game like this. The single shot sniper rifles are straight up overpowered. 90-95% percent of the time they will one shot kill you to the body. Iโve taken shots to the leg and still died in one shot. It doesnโt matter what rifle it is nor does it even matter that much what tier it is, the single shot sniper rifles can one shot body kill you and from ridiculous ranges almost every time. Hell, it doesnโt even matter if the enemy has a suppressor on the gun, most of the time youโre still gonna get one shotted. So itโs no wonder why thereโs so fucking many of them.
And because of how large the maps are and how you can go inside every building, the maps and the sniper players go hand in hand. Most of the time youโre gonna get shot from out of nowhere. The enemies could be fucking anywhere. They could shoot at you from a window in a 2 or 3 story building, they could be crouched around a corner somewhere, they could be hiding in a bush, or theyโre in their spawn hiding with a sniper rifle. Itโs just a giant fucking campfest. Iโve seen less camping in Rainbow Six Siege, and that game is designed around tugging your sapi plated dick in a sweaty corner.
So because of the large maps, the low lobby numbers, the verticality of each map, the spawns, the stamina mechanic, and the fact that sniper rifles are fucking broken, it all creates a game where you are punished for moving. Itโs the exact same shit that Modern Warfare suffers from. The flow of each match is all over the fucking place. Itโs slower than a turd coming out of the ass of a fuckinโ sloth. Hell, even Semi Auto Sniper Rifles are really powerful because of low recoil and it only takes 2 body shots to kill someone. Everywhere I go I just get fucked.
Go left, I get sniped
Go right, I get sniped
Go middle, I get killed by a corner camper
I respawn, I get killed by a guy crouched in a corner next to my spawn point.
You see why this just sounds fucking excruciating?
Itโs a game that is both Pay 2 Win, and the map design makes it extremely campy. And it doesnโt matter what game mode I play. Whether itโs Team Deathmatch, Slaughter, Search and Destroy, Domination, Capture the Flag, etc. The game is chock full of this unbalanced bullshit. Even a mode like Slaughter, where itโs supposed to be faster paced because the maps are smaller, is still shit because of the snipers, the camping, and the spawn system. Enemies are either camping on your side of the map, or theyโre sitting nice and comfy on their side of their map waiting for you to approach them. Every killcam I watch is just some guy sitting ADS with a sniper rifle waiting for me to show up or theyโre sitting ADS behind a headglitch with an assault rifle. Do I need to mention again these fucking people have tier 5 guns?
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ฉ๐ฉ๐๐ฃ๐ ]
This is a game that is supposed to be set during an apocalypse, and yet, the game manages to fuck that up. Because the setting has no bearing on how the game plays. It has no bearing on the fact that you can run around with a PPSH, an AKM, or a Mosin Nagant with 3-5 mags of ammunition, or a semi automatic shotgun with ONE HUNDRED reserve ammo. You can also find ammo boxes to refill all your ammo around the map, and they are shown to the player on their mini-map. The game is called Survarium and yet it does not play like a survival game, it just tries to imitate Call of Duty, so why the fuck is this game even set in the apocolypse? The apocalypse setting is just used as a cosmetic rather than a gameplay changer. If anything, the apocalyptic setting just makes the game more annoying to play.
Imagine just how cool how different this game could have been to other shooters if there was a survival aspect to it. Where there are very scarce resources, meaning you have to be very resourceful with your ammo and whatnot.
Kinda like how The Last of Usโs Multiplayer worked. Ammo and resources are scarce as fuck but you can craft more ammo with Parts which you get when you kill other players or find them and other resources in supply boxes scattered around the map. Not to mention armor had to be crafted with Parts as well and it can break after just a few shots. This creates a very tense cat and mouse type of game where every shot counts and you have to carefully use your items wisely, and it worked really well. It also worked because the maps werenโt that big and it was 4v4. This game could have done something like that, but no, itโs just a ripoff of COD, and a shitty one at that.
[ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ก ๐๐๐ค๐ช๐๐๐ฉ๐จ ]
It seems like the developers just do not give a fuck about this game or never did. Either that or they have bitten off more than they could chew. There is a huge lack of transparency and communication when it comes to player feedback. The developers seem to be more worried about making money rather than actually fixing anything, by adding in more and more guns and other items that players are unwilling to pay for, instead of delivering what they promised.
As early as 2013 there was an open world aspect of the game that was promised but it never came, the next year it was promised but it never came again, and then the next year after that it never came, so on and so forth. The development of this game has just been way too slow. This game is now at least 7 years old and it still feels like a game in beta, like itโs unfinished. And as time went on they just decided to just keep adding more stupid shit into the game, because they just donโt have a clear vision of the project, nor passion for it. And this reflects in how they respond to criticism.
From what Iโve been reading on Steam and forums, the developers canโt seem to take it, as they tend to delete and ban Tweets and other posts made by people speaking out about the retarded choices theyโve been making with the game. Voice your concerns with the company even with good intention, and you get silenced. So good to know that these are the kind of people who shat out this fucking garbage pile out. To be honest, Iโm not surprised. Current day Naughty Dog would get along with you guys very fucking well.
I wonder when, just fucking when, we reach a point in time where these companies start being held accountable for inherently breaking the law with violating Fair Use policy trying to shield themselves from valid criticism. But that's the mentality of game companies nowadays: Release a broken unfinished product, charge people ridiculous amounts for it, and when people call you out on it, you either ignore it or respond back with malicious intent.
I feel sorry for the people who were actually passionate about this pathetic excuse of a product. Why is this shit still even on Steam?? If anything itโs just a goddamn waste of precious hard drive space.
Fuck this company, fuck this game.
2/10
This is a Multiplayer First Person Shooter that suffers from schizophrenia, as it doesnโt seem to understand what kind of game it wants to be. I havenโt seen a shooter game that has had an identity crisis this bad since Resident Evil 6. No disrespect to RE6 though, I fuckinโ love that game.
[ ๐พ๐ค๐ง๐ ๐๐๐ข๐๐ฅ๐ก๐๐ฎ ]
Christ on a bike where do I even start with this? So itโs an FPS game set during an apocalypse, but the apocalypse setting has no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever and Iโll get into that. The game plays like your generic Call of Duty esque casual twitch shooter but it fails hard at trying to be just that. There are HUGE issues that actually makes this game just un-fucking-bearable to play. Lemme start with how gear works.
{ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ช๐ฃ๐จ ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐๐ฆ๐ช๐๐ฅ๐ข๐๐ฃ๐ฉ }
How guns work in this game is that they are divided by tiers. Every gun has a tier, and they go from 1-5. The higher the tier, the better the gun performs, things like less recoil, more damage, more range, etc. The difference between a level 1 weapon and a level 5 one is like night and day. You get higher tier guns by leveling up your faction and rank, but this shit takes fucking forever. It takes a ton of matches just to go up by one level. And even then, you still need to spend Silver to buy the gun, and this shit takes quite the grind to get as well.
Leveling up your armor will increase things like bullet defense, explosion resistance, and oxygen capacity. To do this you spend either Scrap or Gold. Scrap is earned from playing matches like with Silver but again, itโs on the grindy side. Also, to put attachments on your guns, you need to purchase them with Gold or Scrap as well. So you need Scrap for both armor upgrading AND for getting attachments. Or you could spend Gold. You wanna put a suppressor or a 2.5x ACOG scope on your gun? 500 Gold please. To get Gold you do either two things: spend real world money or you can turn a certain amount of Silver into Gold.
Now with what I just said you can most likely tell what Iโm getting at from a mile away.
Of fucking course this game is Pay 2 Win. This is a Free-To-Play game so thatโs obvious right? But this game just goes way too fucking far with this, itโs flat out egregious. Getting higher tier equipment and attachments is actually much easier if you just spend money on them. This game is insanely unforgiving to new players.
Itโs a broken system, because if youโre a new player to this game youโre going to get fucking slaughtered, because most lobbies have players in them who already have max level gear, so youโre at a huge disadvantage already. It turns into Shoot First, Die First: The Video Game, because many times it doesnโt matter if you take the first shot, youโre most likely gonna die to your enemy because your gear is underleveled. Is this fucking Warframe PvP? It also doesnโt help that the matchmaking is just a big piss stain. Most of the time the max gear level, max level players get paired up against noobs with level 1 or 2 gear, itโs just plain unfair.
There are also preset kits that you can purchase with Gold. Itโs a bundle that comes with a couple leveled up guns and armor, such as the Bandit Bundle and the Survivor Bundle. The game doesnโt even try to hide this shit. Itโs like buying a preset class in a Call of Duty game.
There are also events that sell players exclusive weaponry like an AK12, a PP19 Bizon, and a PKP. And yes, these guns are max tier. Theyโre fully modded. And theyโre expensive as fuck.
{ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ฅ๐จ }
This is the main reason why I believe that this game just has an identity crisis. The maps in this game are so fucking shit that itโs giving me flashbacks to the maps from Modern Warfare 2019โs Multiplayer. The game has a max of 8v8 lobbies but the maps are WAY too complex in their size and verticality to only have this little amount of players in it. The maps are designed like the lobbies should be 16v16.
Not only are they large, but almost every building can be entered, and some of them have multiple floors. There are also many spots that are just empty space and serve no purpose. Every goddamn map in this game is like this. This is a huge problem because it makes the game flow SO much slower, because most of the match will be spent with you running around trying to find someone to shoot.
The game has that mechanic from COD and Battlefield where shooting a gun without a suppressor will make you pop up on the mini-map as a big red dot.
Almost every single match Iโve played ends before either team can even reach the score limit. And matches last up to 12 minutes. This game has a pretty quick TTK (Time To Kill), so do you play the game like itโs COD and just sprint everywhere, or do you take it slow and play it like a more tactical game like Squad, Rainbow Six Siege, or CSGO? Oh, and did I mention that this game has a stamina mechanic? Of course, make the game flow even slower than it already is.
The game wants to be a fast paced casual game like COD but the maps do not suit that type of playstyle, so in reality, you canโt play the game like itโs COD, and Iโll get into that. Thereโs another issue. There are no random spawns. Every respawn is always in one part of the map. Itโs like how in Overwatch each team has a base where everyone always spawns at. The problem with this is that it also creates the issue of getting spawn killed repeatedly. The enemy is always gonna know where you are going to spawn, so theyโre just gonna camp the spawns and wait for you to move. And that leads into my next biggest complaint
[ ๐พ๐๐ข๐ฅ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐๐ฃ๐๐ฅ๐๐ง ๐๐ฅ๐๐ข ]
Do you hate getting sniped from across the map by a prone player in any of the Battlefield games? HOO BOY are you gonna fucking despise this game. I donโt think I'm exaggerating when I say that the game has hands down the worst camping and sniper spam Iโve ever seen in a game like this. The single shot sniper rifles are straight up overpowered. 90-95% percent of the time they will one shot kill you to the body. Iโve taken shots to the leg and still died in one shot. It doesnโt matter what rifle it is nor does it even matter that much what tier it is, the single shot sniper rifles can one shot body kill you and from ridiculous ranges almost every time. Hell, it doesnโt even matter if the enemy has a suppressor on the gun, most of the time youโre still gonna get one shotted. So itโs no wonder why thereโs so fucking many of them.
And because of how large the maps are and how you can go inside every building, the maps and the sniper players go hand in hand. Most of the time youโre gonna get shot from out of nowhere. The enemies could be fucking anywhere. They could shoot at you from a window in a 2 or 3 story building, they could be crouched around a corner somewhere, they could be hiding in a bush, or theyโre in their spawn hiding with a sniper rifle. Itโs just a giant fucking campfest. Iโve seen less camping in Rainbow Six Siege, and that game is designed around tugging your sapi plated dick in a sweaty corner.
So because of the large maps, the low lobby numbers, the verticality of each map, the spawns, the stamina mechanic, and the fact that sniper rifles are fucking broken, it all creates a game where you are punished for moving. Itโs the exact same shit that Modern Warfare suffers from. The flow of each match is all over the fucking place. Itโs slower than a turd coming out of the ass of a fuckinโ sloth. Hell, even Semi Auto Sniper Rifles are really powerful because of low recoil and it only takes 2 body shots to kill someone. Everywhere I go I just get fucked.
Go left, I get sniped
Go right, I get sniped
Go middle, I get killed by a corner camper
I respawn, I get killed by a guy crouched in a corner next to my spawn point.
You see why this just sounds fucking excruciating?
Itโs a game that is both Pay 2 Win, and the map design makes it extremely campy. And it doesnโt matter what game mode I play. Whether itโs Team Deathmatch, Slaughter, Search and Destroy, Domination, Capture the Flag, etc. The game is chock full of this unbalanced bullshit. Even a mode like Slaughter, where itโs supposed to be faster paced because the maps are smaller, is still shit because of the snipers, the camping, and the spawn system. Enemies are either camping on your side of the map, or theyโre sitting nice and comfy on their side of their map waiting for you to approach them. Every killcam I watch is just some guy sitting ADS with a sniper rifle waiting for me to show up or theyโre sitting ADS behind a headglitch with an assault rifle. Do I need to mention again these fucking people have tier 5 guns?
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ฉ๐ฉ๐๐ฃ๐ ]
This is a game that is supposed to be set during an apocalypse, and yet, the game manages to fuck that up. Because the setting has no bearing on how the game plays. It has no bearing on the fact that you can run around with a PPSH, an AKM, or a Mosin Nagant with 3-5 mags of ammunition, or a semi automatic shotgun with ONE HUNDRED reserve ammo. You can also find ammo boxes to refill all your ammo around the map, and they are shown to the player on their mini-map. The game is called Survarium and yet it does not play like a survival game, it just tries to imitate Call of Duty, so why the fuck is this game even set in the apocolypse? The apocalypse setting is just used as a cosmetic rather than a gameplay changer. If anything, the apocalyptic setting just makes the game more annoying to play.
Imagine just how cool how different this game could have been to other shooters if there was a survival aspect to it. Where there are very scarce resources, meaning you have to be very resourceful with your ammo and whatnot.
Kinda like how The Last of Usโs Multiplayer worked. Ammo and resources are scarce as fuck but you can craft more ammo with Parts which you get when you kill other players or find them and other resources in supply boxes scattered around the map. Not to mention armor had to be crafted with Parts as well and it can break after just a few shots. This creates a very tense cat and mouse type of game where every shot counts and you have to carefully use your items wisely, and it worked really well. It also worked because the maps werenโt that big and it was 4v4. This game could have done something like that, but no, itโs just a ripoff of COD, and a shitty one at that.
[ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ก ๐๐๐ค๐ช๐๐๐ฉ๐จ ]
It seems like the developers just do not give a fuck about this game or never did. Either that or they have bitten off more than they could chew. There is a huge lack of transparency and communication when it comes to player feedback. The developers seem to be more worried about making money rather than actually fixing anything, by adding in more and more guns and other items that players are unwilling to pay for, instead of delivering what they promised.
As early as 2013 there was an open world aspect of the game that was promised but it never came, the next year it was promised but it never came again, and then the next year after that it never came, so on and so forth. The development of this game has just been way too slow. This game is now at least 7 years old and it still feels like a game in beta, like itโs unfinished. And as time went on they just decided to just keep adding more stupid shit into the game, because they just donโt have a clear vision of the project, nor passion for it. And this reflects in how they respond to criticism.
From what Iโve been reading on Steam and forums, the developers canโt seem to take it, as they tend to delete and ban Tweets and other posts made by people speaking out about the retarded choices theyโve been making with the game. Voice your concerns with the company even with good intention, and you get silenced. So good to know that these are the kind of people who shat out this fucking garbage pile out. To be honest, Iโm not surprised. Current day Naughty Dog would get along with you guys very fucking well.
I wonder when, just fucking when, we reach a point in time where these companies start being held accountable for inherently breaking the law with violating Fair Use policy trying to shield themselves from valid criticism. But that's the mentality of game companies nowadays: Release a broken unfinished product, charge people ridiculous amounts for it, and when people call you out on it, you either ignore it or respond back with malicious intent.
I feel sorry for the people who were actually passionate about this pathetic excuse of a product. Why is this shit still even on Steam?? If anything itโs just a goddamn waste of precious hard drive space.
Fuck this company, fuck this game.
2/10
2021
This is one of the most hilarious games I've played in quite a while. It was only $1 and it was damn worth it.
It really does show that indie developers and random nobodies are able to whip up something far more enjoyable and with little to no budget than a multi-billion dollar AAA corporation with hundreds of developers behind the studio.
I have played this game for a good 5-10 hours and I honestly can't get enough of it.
This is obviously a parody of Battlefield 2042 except that unlike Battlefield 2042, it's actually fun to play.
The best comparison I can make with this game is Phantom Forces from Roblox, just not as functional as that.
Unlike 2042, you can actually run this game. I play games with a low range graphics card, but despite this, I can still run the game relatively well.
It's actually well optimized which is pretty surprising to me regardless of the overly simplistic graphics.
This is a game that was made under the Unity engine, which might sound like a red alarm since engines like Unity and Unreal Engine 4 are quite infamous for many college intern bathroom projects with asset flips being sold on Steam when they should be free to play, but, this game feels like it was made by people who actually gives a shit about making a good game, or at the very least try.
Unlike Battlefield 2042, this game actually has
-No microtransactions
-ALL text chat
-Named teams like USA and Russia
-Functional gunplay mechanics
-No profanity filters
-A scoreboard with stats for every player in the lobby
-A region changer and fully working server browser
-Hell, you can even add your friends to an in-game friend list and join on them (though you have to make sure you have the same region selected as them)
The game also has voice chat, and again, this makes the experience even funnier.
You are also able to customize loadouts before you jump into a match as well. You get a total of 5 loadouts.
There are a total of 3 assault rifles
(M4A1, AK-47, FN SCAR)
One shotgun
(M3)
5 SMGs
(Vector, MX9, Uzi, P90, MP5)
3 sniper rifles
(M40A1, M107, SVD)
An RPG-7
And 4 Pistols
(Glock 17, M9, M1911, P250)
All of this adds up to a total of 17 weapons.
That's almost as many as BF2042 (the game has 22 weapons).
DICEโฆ Seriously? Already it's a bad sign when a $1 indie game has just as many weapons as a AAA game that must have cost $100M or $200M to make.
So about the weapons, they all feel good to use. The recoil for some of the weapons are a bit high, but there is practically no bullet spread, and the hit detection, while it is wonky, is still functional.
The animations are quite well done. I especially like the reload animation for the M3 shotgun and the sound it makes when loading each shot into the chamber
Speaking of sounds, there are hitmarkers, but the sound effect is just the one ripped straight out of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2.
You thought I wouldn't notice? I know the sound of an old Modern Warfare hitmarker when I hear one. Lmao
Also the loading screens in this game are just great. Some of them made me burst out laughing. They're just meant to make fun of EA and DICE which is always appreciated.
There's also a cheeky feature that is meant to take a jab at Battlefield 2042 where you can purposely lower the frame rate and play the game at 20 FPS. That's just fucking brilliant lmfao
And there's even a mode where you can freely get into a hovercraft and fly it around like a fuckin' airplane which is meant to take yet another jab at the absolute joke of a state that 2042 is in at the moment.
It very well encapsulates the thought process behind releasing a game in a broken unfinished state, charging players full price for it, and then you have to wait 6-12 months for the patches and DLC to roll in before the game is actually in a state that is worth playing.
I like to call this the OYL Effect, or One Year Later Effect. Just like with Cyberpunk 2077.
Although, lord knows how much longer until that piece of shit is worth playing a second time.
As much as I have praised this game, there are issues I have with the game. Some minor, some major. The game is in Beta and it's only been out for less than a week so hopefully with enough support then the game will be way better.
Let's start with the weapon customization
[ ๐ผ๐๐๐ผ๐พ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ]
You are able to customize your guns with attachments. There are 5 different sights to put on your guns. Sights like the Red Dot Sight, Holographic Sight, Coyote Reflex Sight, and the 2x Scope.
However, the only other attachment that you can put on your guns are suppressors. However, I don't see the point of a suppressor because the game doesn't actually have a system implemented into the mini-map or in the gunplay where suppressors would actually have a purpose to be used.
Typically in Battlefield games, when you put a suppressor on your gun, you are sacrificing a certain amount of bullet velocity, effective damage range, and even bullet spread for the sake of keeping yourself hidden on the mini-map while firing your weapon.
However with this game, putting a suppressor on your gun doesn't really affect it in any way, the only difference is that gunshots are slightly quieter, which I guess is a bonus.
But this game also has a mini-map, however you can't actually see enemy positions on it when they fire their weapons.
So what's the point in using a suppressor?
Hell, what's the point in even having a mini-map if you can't see enemies on it? I'll get into that more in the next segment but since the only other attachment that you can equip is a suppressor, it makes me hope that we get more in the future.
Barrel attachments, extended magazines, a foregrip to reduce recoil, hell, give us the ability to change the scope on the sniper rifles.
Yeah, you can't actually change the scopes on the snipers. I hope this also changes.
Also I should mention this now but good God the M3 shotgun needs to be nerfed. It's the only one in the game but it's stupidly overpowered. The one shot kill range is flat out ridiculous. It ain't a shotgun, it's a goddamn sniper rifle. And it's spammed a lot. It can be genuinely really annoying to play against, especially since many of the full auto guns have high recoil and the character models have awkward hit boxes.
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐-๐๐ผ๐ ]
Mini-maps in some games are pretty important. In Battlefield games, it's a very critical and vital tool for big picture situational awareness and allows for more complex decision making in the game. It also allows players to learn the layout of every map. It just makes navigation easier.
It can genuinely increase the skill gap and strategy to the gameplay and make the difference between a skilled or noob player.
However like I said earlier, you can't see enemy positions on the mini-map, and this is a problem because
1. It makes using a suppressor almost pointless
2. You can just get shot from out of nowhere but not know where you took the fire from, especially since the TTK (Time to Kill) is very fast and the kill-cam is broken at the moment.
Half the time I get shot I'm just like "Who is shooting me?? Where is it coming from?"
You could also use the mini-map to learn the layout of each map however it's not even zoomed out enough so you can actually see where exactly you are. You can't zoom it out, you can't make it bigger, etc.
One last thing, there are three modes, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Domination.
In Domination, you can see every capture point on the mini-map, however if you move too far away, the flag icons will disappear from the mini-map's field of view.
But you can still see the capture points on your screen anyway regardless of how far away you are. So then why would you look at the mini-map?? It's a waste of time and it could even get you killed.
All of this just makes the addition of a mini-map borderline pointless, especially since you can also see your teammate icons on screen as well regardless of distance.
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ผ๐๐๐ ]
The spawns need definitive work, since as of right now, some of these spawns are flat out fuckin' appalling. Sometimes enemies spawn right in back of me, other times they spawn right in front of me so I end up killing them the moment they spawn, so at times it actually makes me feel bad, even though I shouldn't really take it seriously.
The one shopping mall map is just an absolute clusterfuck, same with City 2042. Everyone just spawns all over the goddamn place, either in front or in back of each other. Those maps needs to have a serious rework with the spawns, because everyone just spawns on top of each other a lot and it can get pretty annoying at times.
And the flashbangs, oh my Lord, the flashbangs. The flashbang spam is enough to give me fuckin' tinnitus. Every time people spawn they just chuck all of their flashes and sometimes all I hear is the sound of a flashbang explosion, you know, that horrible ear raping sound that'll make your asshole bleed.
I hear it a lot. Yes it did make me laugh my ass off for 10 minutes straight because everyone lost their shit about it, but it just shows that both the flashes and the spawns need a rework. The effective range of the flashbang is just too high.
Also, the sound of the flashbang is just too loud, it's actually gonna make me go deaf.
Again, hopefully there are improvements to this.
[ ๐๐๐ผ๐๐ ]
There are no stat displays for any of the weapons, so this does make it difficult to know which guns are better than another (cause there are some differences between each weapon).
[ ๐๐๐ ๐ฝ๐๐๐ ]
I haven't mentioned it up until now but damn this game is fucking buggy. I already talked about the awful spawns but in just my second match of playing, I fell through the map on City 2042 and died numerous times.
It got to a point where I was in a 1v1 with another player and I actually died many more times from falling through the map. He wouldn't stop falling through the map and dying either.
I mentioned earlier that the kill-cam is broken. When I get shot, the kill-cam actually pans in the opposite direction from where I got shot from. So I would get killed and the camera would just point at nothing.
There's also a bug where the text in the chat box when you're typing not only clips out of the box, but it even goes off screen if your message is too long.
I'm not sure if this is also a bug or not, but if you go into the loadouts, there are categories for melee, grenades, and player models, however when you click to change any of them, nothing appears.
This is either two things: a bug, or content that hasn't been released yet. Only time will tell.
I've also had a problem where sometimes when I sprint but then I stop, my character gets stuck in the sprinting animation and I can't aim down sights, unless I either shoot my weapon or I swap to my sidearm.
And then there is a bug where the game won't let me pick a team so I can actually spawn, but then I was able to fix this by just selecting to spectate teammates, and then the game will let me choose my team.
And lastly, choosing your loadout is jank as fuck. The only way to know what loadout you're gonna spawn with is to go into the loadout screen, click the loadout to customize it, then you back out of every menu until you get to the spawn button, then you can spawn with said specific loadout.
Why not have a loadout selection screen before you spawn?
[ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ก ๐๐๐ค๐ช๐๐๐ฉ๐จ ]
I actually wasn't expecting to go so in depth into a game that is literally worth a goddamn dollar on Steam, but underneath all the issues that I have with the game and the glitches and bad spawns, is a game that has potential.
It's actually way more fun than any other EA game that I have played in a long time. This game genuinely made me smile and laugh my ass off multiple times.
Though by listing all the criticisms that I or anyone else has with the game will help support it so that it becomes better than what it is at the moment. Again, the game is less than a week old and it's still in beta, so only time will tell if big changes are made to it.
The game already has quite a cult following and pretty much every Steam review I read says that even this shit is better than BF 2042. So you know you done fucked up somewhere when even indie games kick your ass in many ways.
This is actually a game where I want to gift it to all of my friends just so that we could all play it together. And you should do that as well. Cause the game is actually worth it. You'll surely get way more value.
7/10
It really does show that indie developers and random nobodies are able to whip up something far more enjoyable and with little to no budget than a multi-billion dollar AAA corporation with hundreds of developers behind the studio.
I have played this game for a good 5-10 hours and I honestly can't get enough of it.
This is obviously a parody of Battlefield 2042 except that unlike Battlefield 2042, it's actually fun to play.
The best comparison I can make with this game is Phantom Forces from Roblox, just not as functional as that.
Unlike 2042, you can actually run this game. I play games with a low range graphics card, but despite this, I can still run the game relatively well.
It's actually well optimized which is pretty surprising to me regardless of the overly simplistic graphics.
This is a game that was made under the Unity engine, which might sound like a red alarm since engines like Unity and Unreal Engine 4 are quite infamous for many college intern bathroom projects with asset flips being sold on Steam when they should be free to play, but, this game feels like it was made by people who actually gives a shit about making a good game, or at the very least try.
Unlike Battlefield 2042, this game actually has
-No microtransactions
-ALL text chat
-Named teams like USA and Russia
-Functional gunplay mechanics
-No profanity filters
-A scoreboard with stats for every player in the lobby
-A region changer and fully working server browser
-Hell, you can even add your friends to an in-game friend list and join on them (though you have to make sure you have the same region selected as them)
The game also has voice chat, and again, this makes the experience even funnier.
You are also able to customize loadouts before you jump into a match as well. You get a total of 5 loadouts.
There are a total of 3 assault rifles
(M4A1, AK-47, FN SCAR)
One shotgun
(M3)
5 SMGs
(Vector, MX9, Uzi, P90, MP5)
3 sniper rifles
(M40A1, M107, SVD)
An RPG-7
And 4 Pistols
(Glock 17, M9, M1911, P250)
All of this adds up to a total of 17 weapons.
That's almost as many as BF2042 (the game has 22 weapons).
DICEโฆ Seriously? Already it's a bad sign when a $1 indie game has just as many weapons as a AAA game that must have cost $100M or $200M to make.
So about the weapons, they all feel good to use. The recoil for some of the weapons are a bit high, but there is practically no bullet spread, and the hit detection, while it is wonky, is still functional.
The animations are quite well done. I especially like the reload animation for the M3 shotgun and the sound it makes when loading each shot into the chamber
Speaking of sounds, there are hitmarkers, but the sound effect is just the one ripped straight out of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2.
You thought I wouldn't notice? I know the sound of an old Modern Warfare hitmarker when I hear one. Lmao
Also the loading screens in this game are just great. Some of them made me burst out laughing. They're just meant to make fun of EA and DICE which is always appreciated.
There's also a cheeky feature that is meant to take a jab at Battlefield 2042 where you can purposely lower the frame rate and play the game at 20 FPS. That's just fucking brilliant lmfao
And there's even a mode where you can freely get into a hovercraft and fly it around like a fuckin' airplane which is meant to take yet another jab at the absolute joke of a state that 2042 is in at the moment.
It very well encapsulates the thought process behind releasing a game in a broken unfinished state, charging players full price for it, and then you have to wait 6-12 months for the patches and DLC to roll in before the game is actually in a state that is worth playing.
I like to call this the OYL Effect, or One Year Later Effect. Just like with Cyberpunk 2077.
Although, lord knows how much longer until that piece of shit is worth playing a second time.
As much as I have praised this game, there are issues I have with the game. Some minor, some major. The game is in Beta and it's only been out for less than a week so hopefully with enough support then the game will be way better.
Let's start with the weapon customization
[ ๐ผ๐๐๐ผ๐พ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ]
You are able to customize your guns with attachments. There are 5 different sights to put on your guns. Sights like the Red Dot Sight, Holographic Sight, Coyote Reflex Sight, and the 2x Scope.
However, the only other attachment that you can put on your guns are suppressors. However, I don't see the point of a suppressor because the game doesn't actually have a system implemented into the mini-map or in the gunplay where suppressors would actually have a purpose to be used.
Typically in Battlefield games, when you put a suppressor on your gun, you are sacrificing a certain amount of bullet velocity, effective damage range, and even bullet spread for the sake of keeping yourself hidden on the mini-map while firing your weapon.
However with this game, putting a suppressor on your gun doesn't really affect it in any way, the only difference is that gunshots are slightly quieter, which I guess is a bonus.
But this game also has a mini-map, however you can't actually see enemy positions on it when they fire their weapons.
So what's the point in using a suppressor?
Hell, what's the point in even having a mini-map if you can't see enemies on it? I'll get into that more in the next segment but since the only other attachment that you can equip is a suppressor, it makes me hope that we get more in the future.
Barrel attachments, extended magazines, a foregrip to reduce recoil, hell, give us the ability to change the scope on the sniper rifles.
Yeah, you can't actually change the scopes on the snipers. I hope this also changes.
Also I should mention this now but good God the M3 shotgun needs to be nerfed. It's the only one in the game but it's stupidly overpowered. The one shot kill range is flat out ridiculous. It ain't a shotgun, it's a goddamn sniper rifle. And it's spammed a lot. It can be genuinely really annoying to play against, especially since many of the full auto guns have high recoil and the character models have awkward hit boxes.
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐-๐๐ผ๐ ]
Mini-maps in some games are pretty important. In Battlefield games, it's a very critical and vital tool for big picture situational awareness and allows for more complex decision making in the game. It also allows players to learn the layout of every map. It just makes navigation easier.
It can genuinely increase the skill gap and strategy to the gameplay and make the difference between a skilled or noob player.
However like I said earlier, you can't see enemy positions on the mini-map, and this is a problem because
1. It makes using a suppressor almost pointless
2. You can just get shot from out of nowhere but not know where you took the fire from, especially since the TTK (Time to Kill) is very fast and the kill-cam is broken at the moment.
Half the time I get shot I'm just like "Who is shooting me?? Where is it coming from?"
You could also use the mini-map to learn the layout of each map however it's not even zoomed out enough so you can actually see where exactly you are. You can't zoom it out, you can't make it bigger, etc.
One last thing, there are three modes, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Domination.
In Domination, you can see every capture point on the mini-map, however if you move too far away, the flag icons will disappear from the mini-map's field of view.
But you can still see the capture points on your screen anyway regardless of how far away you are. So then why would you look at the mini-map?? It's a waste of time and it could even get you killed.
All of this just makes the addition of a mini-map borderline pointless, especially since you can also see your teammate icons on screen as well regardless of distance.
[ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ผ๐๐๐ ]
The spawns need definitive work, since as of right now, some of these spawns are flat out fuckin' appalling. Sometimes enemies spawn right in back of me, other times they spawn right in front of me so I end up killing them the moment they spawn, so at times it actually makes me feel bad, even though I shouldn't really take it seriously.
The one shopping mall map is just an absolute clusterfuck, same with City 2042. Everyone just spawns all over the goddamn place, either in front or in back of each other. Those maps needs to have a serious rework with the spawns, because everyone just spawns on top of each other a lot and it can get pretty annoying at times.
And the flashbangs, oh my Lord, the flashbangs. The flashbang spam is enough to give me fuckin' tinnitus. Every time people spawn they just chuck all of their flashes and sometimes all I hear is the sound of a flashbang explosion, you know, that horrible ear raping sound that'll make your asshole bleed.
I hear it a lot. Yes it did make me laugh my ass off for 10 minutes straight because everyone lost their shit about it, but it just shows that both the flashes and the spawns need a rework. The effective range of the flashbang is just too high.
Also, the sound of the flashbang is just too loud, it's actually gonna make me go deaf.
Again, hopefully there are improvements to this.
[ ๐๐๐ผ๐๐ ]
There are no stat displays for any of the weapons, so this does make it difficult to know which guns are better than another (cause there are some differences between each weapon).
[ ๐๐๐ ๐ฝ๐๐๐ ]
I haven't mentioned it up until now but damn this game is fucking buggy. I already talked about the awful spawns but in just my second match of playing, I fell through the map on City 2042 and died numerous times.
It got to a point where I was in a 1v1 with another player and I actually died many more times from falling through the map. He wouldn't stop falling through the map and dying either.
I mentioned earlier that the kill-cam is broken. When I get shot, the kill-cam actually pans in the opposite direction from where I got shot from. So I would get killed and the camera would just point at nothing.
There's also a bug where the text in the chat box when you're typing not only clips out of the box, but it even goes off screen if your message is too long.
I'm not sure if this is also a bug or not, but if you go into the loadouts, there are categories for melee, grenades, and player models, however when you click to change any of them, nothing appears.
This is either two things: a bug, or content that hasn't been released yet. Only time will tell.
I've also had a problem where sometimes when I sprint but then I stop, my character gets stuck in the sprinting animation and I can't aim down sights, unless I either shoot my weapon or I swap to my sidearm.
And then there is a bug where the game won't let me pick a team so I can actually spawn, but then I was able to fix this by just selecting to spectate teammates, and then the game will let me choose my team.
And lastly, choosing your loadout is jank as fuck. The only way to know what loadout you're gonna spawn with is to go into the loadout screen, click the loadout to customize it, then you back out of every menu until you get to the spawn button, then you can spawn with said specific loadout.
Why not have a loadout selection screen before you spawn?
[ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐ก ๐๐๐ค๐ช๐๐๐ฉ๐จ ]
I actually wasn't expecting to go so in depth into a game that is literally worth a goddamn dollar on Steam, but underneath all the issues that I have with the game and the glitches and bad spawns, is a game that has potential.
It's actually way more fun than any other EA game that I have played in a long time. This game genuinely made me smile and laugh my ass off multiple times.
Though by listing all the criticisms that I or anyone else has with the game will help support it so that it becomes better than what it is at the moment. Again, the game is less than a week old and it's still in beta, so only time will tell if big changes are made to it.
The game already has quite a cult following and pretty much every Steam review I read says that even this shit is better than BF 2042. So you know you done fucked up somewhere when even indie games kick your ass in many ways.
This is actually a game where I want to gift it to all of my friends just so that we could all play it together. And you should do that as well. Cause the game is actually worth it. You'll surely get way more value.
7/10