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

Oh my fuckin' god I remember this game. I used to play the shit out of this when I was a kid. This was the kind of game you would play back in the day when there was no internet or when your dial-up connection was on the fritz again lol.

Lot of these old PCs would come pre-installed with Solitaire, Paint, Minesweeper, and of course this game.

I was like 7 or 8 years old when I played this for the first time. I used to visit my cousin's house frequently and while he was in the living room playing games like Grand Theft Auto 3 and State of Emergency on the PS2, I would play on his PC in his bedroom and it would have this game installed on it.

See, the grownups like my brother would play games on PC like DOOM and Mafia, but me, I would play this.

The amount of childhood memories that came back to me after seeing this game again actually made me feel EXPERIENCE TRANQUILITY.

The kids in school would play this all the time as well and I would also play this along with Super Mario Flash games.

I find it hard to believe I'm getting so nostalgic over a fuckin' pinball game but here I am lmao.

But the game really is iconic. Of course, playing it isn't as satisfying as playing on a real pinball machine, obviously you can't slam your keys harder to hit the ball harder, but what makes it special is the presentation.

The old school pre-rendered graphics, the sound of a Deloran taking off when you start up the game, and the general sound effects while playing, especially when you rack in a multipier, it's all as iconic as Ferrero Rocher chocolate.

The sound effects are so well known that they were used in music such as You Better Move by Lil Vert Uzi, which, if anyone has ever listened to that song will might have unlocked any sort of small memory they had with this game.

But there is also the mentality of achieving that high score. Racking up as many points as possible so that you could show it off with your friends or your siblings. I would play this game with relatives and whoever got the highest score would get to play on the PS2 or the Xbox. I would play for hours on end just so that I can get a minimum of 5 million points, it was that addicting.

These days there are better pinball games out there, but this one in particular is special to me because it takes me a back to a much simpler time. It's like I'm having a fuckin' mid-life crisis at the age of 24 lmao.

You can pretty much download this game and play it whenever you want to, which is a fun ass game to play either whenever you're really bored, or God Forbid, the Wi-Fi goes out.

Fun Fact: Would you believe that this game is actually one part of a three table experience? This three table pinball game is called Full-Tilt! Pinball

3D Pinball Space Cadet is just a demo of Full Tilt. The game actually came on a CD-ROM that you would purchase and then insert into your PC.

There were actually updates given to the Space Cadet table in this full release such as higher saturation, an altered design on the table itself, the inclusion of multi ball play, additional background music, and the ability to play at full screen at higher resolutions of up to 1024 x 768, which on a CRT display looks really really nice, and for its time, it's pretty damn impressive.

The second table is themed after pirates and going on a quest for booty and then the third one is a medieval dragon's lair style in which you go on "Quests", obtain weapons and armor, and then slay a dragon.

Slaying a dragon, in a fucking pinball game. Even nowadays that sounds cool as shit. I never got a chance to play that though as I never knew that this whole time, Space Cadet was just a demo.

Imagine that. My generation was raised playing a demo without even realizing the whole time that it was a demo. What an absolute epic fail for the people who were in charge of marketing lol.

8/10 (9/10 for Full-Tilt version)

10/10 Nostalgia

This is one of the most boring, soulless, repetitive, frustrating, and dysfunctional games Ubisoft has ever produced by far. This is the Ghost Recon Breakpoint of the Watch Dogs series. It's the Death Stranding of 2020, and even saying that would be a disservice to Death Stranding.

This game was so fuckin' boring that I didn't bother to finish it. Everything in this game is just a giant phoned on, copy and pasted asset flip that charged people $60-90 at launch. I love the first two Watch Dogs games, but this, this is just.. what the hell is this shit?

See, Watch Dogs 1 was great because of it's great storytelling and characters, as well as its realistic world that was ahead of its time.

And Watch Dogs 2 was great because of its insanely addictive, fun as hell gameplay that is always a joy, especially with a friend.

But Watch Dogs Legion? Besides the hacking gimmick, it feels nothing like a Watch Dogs game. There is nothing that makes it stand out. It's a downgrade in every way. It doesn't do anything to innovate the gameplay or improve the storytelling from the previous game.

{ Presentation }

This game is borderline ugly to look at. This looks like a game released in 2014 instead of 2020, it is the bare minimum in terms of overall graphics. How does Watch Dogs 2, which came out almost 5 years ago, look five times better than Legion? The city is so gray that it feels like I'm looking at a 1930s black and white horror film. The character models can range from looking decent to absolutely fucking hideous. I have never seen British people that look and dress like the ones in Watch Dogs Legion.

A lot of the sound effects were carried over from previous games as well. And many of the buildings look copy and pasted. It's like someone built a city out of paper mache but used their own spit instead of water.

This game has some of the worst voice acting I've heard in a game since Megaman X4 on the PS1 and Ride to Hell Retribution on the PS3.

The voices do not match with the character models speaking, the dialects are all wrong, and everyone speaks like they have.. mental problems.

Oi love, are you wit DedSec? Do you happen to hav' a fuckin' ciggy on ya, mate?

Those Albion pricks overran me CToS servers like a bunch of FOOKIN' hyenas!

FOOKIN' LASER SIGHTS!

Seriously, who in the hell speaks like that?? I may live in America but I have never heard any person living in the UK talk like that. This is stereotype incarnate. I'm best friends with both British and Scottish people, and even they say they have never heard people speak like this. This is downright offensive to European culture.

It turns out they were so lazy with this game that they didn't even bother to hire actual British people to voice the characters. Instead, they just took American voice actors and pitched their voices to make them sound British. I wish I was joking. I don't think I've ever heard of someone doing this. Why??

Also, it seems like they hired only 5 voice actors for all the characters, because many of the NPCs that you can recruit sound the same as one another.

These guys sound really fuckin' bored, like they just didn't want to be there. There is just no effort put into any of the voice work here.

Even Bagley, who is supposed to be a comic relief AI character, is just so annoying. Just because he is an AI doesn't mean that he is automatically a funny or interesting character. Every time he speaks it just makes me cringe.
He has the most generic one liners and everything he says just comes off as unfunny or just irritating.

And I also find it funny that the developers seem to think that making an AI cuss makes him a more fleshed out character.

Oh my god, an AI just swore! That automatically makes him funny!

It also doesn't help that because he is an AI he has even less effort put into his voice acting than everyone else in this game. There is literally no emotion behind it.

You guys should really learn a lesson or two from WALL-E.

It just makes me beg that there was an option in the settings so I could just turn Bagley off completely so I never have to listen to him again. But no, he will be stuck in your fucking head for the entirety of the game.

I feel like that Arnold Schwarzenegger clip where he screams "SHUT UUUUUUUUUUP!!"

Because that is what you will feel like after listening to this garbage heap talk for another 10 seconds longer than necessary.

{ Story }

Just like with the city, the story is the same copy and pasted bullshit in almost every modern Ubisoft game where it's about a tyrannical government that use fear and intimidation to tighten its grip on the world.

Just like with Assassin's Creed, just like with Ghost Recon, just like with The Division. It's the same shit you've seen over and over again.

The government has actively began witch hunting both DedSec members and the supporters of DedSec. And after an AI that works for Albion starts a literal act of terrorism by setting off bombs on innocent civilians in London, the game starts off and you are free to start recruiting people to your cause.

Not only is this plot lazily phoned in, but there is no character development what so ever. See the thing is, the premise of this game is that you are able to play as anyone you want in this game. Any NPC in this game can join you. But this actually really hurts the narrative. Because you can play as literally anyone, there is no room for any development.

There is no character that is more developed than another one. They all relatively act the same.
Obviously you can't develop over 300 playable characters, but this central game mechanic prevents the story from flourishing, because it lacks a protagonist or a small group of main characters that you could relate to and root for.

There is no one that you can really attach yourself to. And the other characters that are only in cutscenes don't have any traits that make them stand out. Again, copy and pasted personalities. And a lot of the dialgoue is cringy. It also really doesn't help that the performances are beyond appalling.

Everyone in this game are as generic as plain bread with mayonnaise on it. This game has such an ugly style and there is no substance to it.
The story is almost non-existent here. The story in Watch Dogs 2 was lackluster compared to the first game, but even that game had a narrative that was way better than this game. For one thing I actually liked the characters in Watch Dogs 2.

But in Legion, I have no idea who I'm supposed to get attached to. So everyone in this game just comes off as psyhotic terrorists that seek therapeutic relief by mercilessly murdering the military in cold blood.

Apparently DedSec do not approve of killing people, that they resort to non-lethal tactics, but that makes no sense because there are characters who have guns like AKs, MP5s, and fuckin' M249 light machine guns, and you are never punished for killing other people.

The only punishment you get is that you can't recruit that person. You can literally murder innocent bystanders on the sidewalk and there is no consequence for doing it.

Hell, there's a stealth takedown where you can snap a person's neck. How in the hell is that non-lethal?? This shit just makes no sense. It's hypocritical.

There are times where the game tries to be serious, like with the whole Clan Kelly and human trafficking thing, but I can't take it seriously, because everything about this game is just ridiculous.

I can literally walk around as a 70 year old lady in a bikini wearing a pig mask, who takes 5 whole seconds to climb shit, and do stealth takedowns on people with a taser. How can I take this game seriously?

And there are times where the game tries to be humourous but a lot of the jokes just fall flat.

{ Gameplay }

If you have played any other third person shooter made by Ubisoft then this game will feel at home, but even then, the core gameplay loop is so boring and repetitive. This game will put your ass to sleep. Do you have any trouble sleeping? Because I swear to God, put on this game and within 30-45 minutes you'll probably be out like a light. It's more exciting to watch paint dry.

The core missions are always the same shit: Grab a car and bring it to this specific location, kill this group of people, start a hack on this object and stand next to it until the download reaches 100% while fighting off infinitely respawning enemies, save this hostage, use the spider drone and go through vents until you reach a terminal you need to hack into, solve yet another god forsaken piece of shit laser puzzle, etc.

It's literally the same shit we have done in the last two Watch Dogs games. If you have played those games, then you have played this one. There is no variety. You're just doing the same shit on repeat over and over again.

And the character recruiting isn't much better. Before you can recruit the person you want to, you need to do a job for them and help them with their trivial bullshit, and then they will consider joining you. But the jobs they give you is just the same shit you have been doing already: Grab a vehicle and bring it somewhere, rescue this person's friend being held captive, kill this group of people, etc.

Though what is frustrating is that there are times where these missions don't always go the way you intend. There are times where trial and error can fuck you over and you end up failing the mission. There were times where I actually failed the mission for no reason.

And if you fail the mission, then you lose the potential to recruit that person. So you gotta wait for Bagley to get back to them so you can try the mission again, because there is no restart option.

So you risk getting yourself killed only to get bent over by the game and you wasted your time. And dying in this game is actually pretty infuriating at times. Because your character soaks so little damage that they're nimbler than loose leaf paper. And yet the enemies are fucking bullet sponges.

And if you die, your Operative gets sent to the hospital or is sent to prison. And you have to wait a certain amount of time before you can play as them again, which can take upwards of 35 minutes of play time.

Can I just say something?

Why in the holy mother of fuck are there timers in this game? Why are we restricted to playing as the characters we want to?

From a cosmetic perspective, there were Operatives that I really liked, but if I die I gotta play as someone else that I don't want to. Another person who has a hideous voice and is damn ugly.

There's no such thing as a barber shop or a shop where you can get a voice changer in this game. Plus, some characters have weapon loadouts that are way superior to others. So if you have a character that you really like, well then prepare to get pretty aggravated if you die.

And if you run out of characters that use actual guns, well then prepare for even more pain. Because then you'll be forced to use the default stun guns. Your first Operatives get stun guns and yet the game makes you fight enemies wearing body armor and wielding full-auto lethal machine guns and shotguns, which is just unfair.

The stun guns are the weakest weapons in the game, and yet they are so common.

Why can't we just have our own loadouts? Why can't we just use whatever weapons we want? Why the fuck are weapons restricted to certain characters? Whatever happened to the gun shops from the first Watch Dogs game? Whatever happened to the 3D Gun Printer from Watch Dogs 2?

Also, you can't buy cars in this game either. Cars are restricted to certain Operatives as well. Do I even need to explain what is wrong with this??

The shooting mechanics are okay. Having strong aim assist allows your aim to snap onto your target when pushing the aim button, but shooting people doesn't feel natural because enemies soak up so many bullets. It feels less like playing a Watch Dogs game and more like an RPG shooter like Borderlands or The Division.

Why is this so common in Ubisoft games now? It seems like a lot of these newer games have enemies that are complete bullet sponges. It just makes gunfights more annoying than they need to be.

Oh, and speaking of the spider drone, there are many, many times where you need to use the spider drone in certain missions.

In this game you get to choose a gadget and it works on a cooldown. There's gadgets like an invisibility cloak, the spider drone, an EMP grenade, explosive homing drones, and an electric brass knuckle.

But since so many of these missions require the spider drone, you might as well just use that for the whole game.

Especially since most of the Tech Points, which you need to purchase and upgrade your perks, hacks, and gadgets, also require the spider drone as well as the big flying drone that the Construction Worker can spawn in.

The stealth mechanics are an absolute joke in this game. It's not even stealth. There is a perk you can get very early on where if you do a takedown on someone, you can cloak their body so no one can find it. And this just breaks the stealth in two, because you can just chain takedown enemies and no one will ever suspect a thing. The overall intelligence of the AI is laughable.

This game has some of the worst driving I've ever experienced in an open world game. It's not as bad as Cyberpunk but it's not far off. No matter what vehicle you're driving, they all control like they're driving on baby vomit.

Here is a comparison: There's this really awful 90s cartoon called Mega Babies, and there was a clip in this one episode where one of the babies vomits like a volcanic erruption into the street, and a bunch of cop cars drive into it and they swivel and slide in 180s down the road.

That's what the driving feels like in Watch Dogs Legion.

There are so many instances where you try to make a turn but you end up hitting something. The handling of each car is an absolute travesty. The traction is beyond fucked up, and every car just feels way too heavy.

Trying to evade police is a bitch and a half because so many of the vehicles control like the tires are made out of ice. Just try to dodge traffic at high speeds, I guarantee you will slam into almost everything.

This game is also ridiculously buggy even in its current state. I've seen the obligatory falling through the map glitches, cars just flying into the sky for no reason, textures not loading up properly, missions sometimes not starting when standing on the objective marker, enemies walking through walls, water glitching out, and game crashes. And I mean A LOT of crashes.

I remember watching one of my best friends play the game and he crashed right after he finished the fucking tutorial. Only 10-15 minutes in, and he didn't even go out into the open world yet and his game crashed.

My game has only crashed once out of the time that I spent with it, but once the Online mode came out I was crashing left and right, to the point that I couldn't even play the goddamn game.

{ Multiplayer }

The Online mode for this game was delayed for many months so that they could focus more on optimizing the Single Player. But if the Single Player was in this state at launch, imagine what it would have been like if they didn't delay Online.

Regardless, this is one of the most pathetic Online modes I've seen in quite a long time.

Let me start off with the most offensive problem. The game does not support cross generation play. So if you play on PS4 or PS5 and you have friends who play on a different console, you CANNOT play with them. Being able to play with my friends was the reason why I even fucking picked up this game.

I have friends who own the game on PS5, and one of them legitimately broke his copy of the game because this game is so shit that it lacks the most basic necessities like cross gen compatibility, and he was angry that he spent $65 on a game that he can't even fuckin' play with me.

Also, setting your lobbies to Private doesn't mean shit, because if you want to do Co-Op missions with your friends, random people will still be dropped into your game. So then what is the point of it?? The amount of people that you will be kicking out because of this is just ridiculous.

Also, none of your Operatives will carry over into the Online mode. And your first Operatives will again, start off with those goddamn stun guns. And yet you have to fight enemies wearing full tactical gear body armor with shotguns, light machine guns, and submachine guns. It's dumb as hell. And the enemies are somehow even MORE bullet spongy than the ones in the Campaign. What the fuck.

Also you are very restricted on who you can recruit. The whole premise of this game is that you can recruit anyone and everyone, but for some fucked up reason, you can only recruit people in Online if you have Influence.

Where do you get Influence?
Oh ho ho ho ho....

deep breaths

You get it from the fucking Battle Pass. That's right. A central game mechanic is being restricted via a fucking BATTLE PASS.

I mean, the Battle Pass is free, but that still means that you have to do tedious grinding for hours on end just so you can get the Operatives you want. And some of these Operatives are damn expensive. And you still need more Influence on top of that so you upgrade your perks and gadgets.

Literally everything is being locked behind this Battle Pass, and it's just so stupid. There's more logic to be found in Flat Earth Theories.

The servers are so so bad. The lag is insane, cars just pop up from thin air, and disconnects are really common. And I have crashed so many times that I just couldn't bother. I've seen this game running at 20 FPS or lower, the lag is that bad.

I'm not over exaggerating when I say this, but I have crashed 8 times in the span of an hour trying to play a single Co-Op mission in the Online. I'm dead serious. I wish it was a joke. This game crashed so frequently that it was pretty much impossible to even play it. I would crash within 10-15 seconds of starting a mission. Only after a patch came out a couple days after launch was I actually able to play it without crashing so much, but the crashing still happens from time to time.

Even when I don't crash, every few minutes I get a pop up on the screen that says that I disconnected from the Ubisoft servers and then I have to push X and wait for it to reconnect.

There are so little missions to do in this mode. There are only like 6 standard Co-Op missions which means it gets old pretty quickly. You are also unable to leave a mission with your friends after finishing it. You have to leave the mission by yourself back into Free Roam and then invite all your friends back into your party. Then there are the Tactical Ops missions, which are basically Raids.

Also for some reason there are plenty of solo missions. Solo missions in an Online Multiplayer mode? What??

And these Tactical Op missions are the fucking worst for multiple reasons. Again, you can't play these ops with friends privately, unless if you get a full squad. You HAVE to play with other random people. Which means that they just won't communicate with you. And if it's a stealth mission then prepare for even more torment, because your teammates will get you fucked all the time.

One time I had to cuss someone out in game chat and make him leave because we were doing a stealth mission, and he kept getting detected and getting us all killed but then he tries to put the blame on me.

There are quite a lot of window lickers that play this game. Because it's so common to have random teammates that just won't pay attention or straight up refuse to do what you need them to.

Literally the second Tactical Op mission involves you and your team having to travel on foot through the streets to find some code you need to download so you can fight these attack drones. And I swear to God, it's the second mission, but it will be the mission you'll most likely quit.

Because the drones are immune to bullets. You have to download a viral code and then upload it to the central big drone to make the smaller ones vulnerable, but there are many major problems with this:

1. You have to stand right in front of the drone to hack it so you'll get shot while doing so

2. A single shot from a drone will either kill you or get you to near death

3. It takes a shitload and I mean a SHITLOAD of bullets to take one down

4. You have to fight 4 of these fucking drones

5. Your teammates will most likely get detected before you even get the code so prepare to restart a lot

6. These Tactical Ops don't have any checkpoints. You have to complete a mission in one perfect run or else you start from the beginning

The only way I was able to beat this mission was to have two different teams of two take down each drone one by one but by using that flying drone and staying directly above the drone while hacking it so that it doesn't shoot us.

Oh my god. Sweet fucking Jesus on a tricycle. Did nobody test this shit before releasing it? Oh right. This is Ubisoft. They don't really test anything anymore do they..?

And many of these issues plague all of the other missions. And they also have the same repetitive dribble from the Single Player. Hack this and stand next to it for 5 minutes, drive this car and drop it off, fight off waves of infinitely respawning enemies and drones while defending something, etc.

And what is it with Ubisoft and drones? Why are there drones in almost every damn one of these games? Can you guys stop with the drones? It's getting really annoying now.

I know the Online mode is still fresh, and it can actually be quite fun when play with a competent group of people, but considering how much it was delayed, and considering how much damn fun the online play was in Watch Dogs 1 and 2, I expected better than this. Way better. I'm sure that some of these issues will be fixed but I'm not really holding my breath considering overall how underwhelming it is.

{ Final Thoughts }

Ubisoft has a habit for the past 5 years or so where they have the same formulaic approach in almost every one of their games: Make an open world game, make it a third-person or first-person shooter, have a half assed story with characters they don't develop or barely develop at all, make it explorable even though there is barely anything to find, and make it lack any substance or identity, with the same rinse and repeat gameplay loop that is so boring that it can be used as a sleeping med.

And the Online for this game is the most broken mode I've seen since the Special Ops missions from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019.

I paid $20 for this game and I still feel like I've been ripped off. This game is just so unpolished, so heartless, and it reeks of laziness and greediness.

Because of course, there is a microtransaction store where you can buy Watch Dogs Coins. Which you use to purchase Operatives, cosmetics, gun skins, car skins, and XP boosters.

So I guess you can see where Ubisoft's priorities were. And so much for giving respect to beloved franchises like Rayman, icons that made your company what it is now, since his 25th Anniversary was last year but you instead announce yet another Rabbids game and other trash like Watch Dogs Legion and ASSassin's Creed Valhalla.

Fuck this game.

3/10

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 180° 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. 🧡

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 180° 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)

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

This game. Goddamn, this game.

Okay so let me just get this out of the way quickly: This game is my 2nd favorite entry in the Resident Evil franchise. This game is nothing but nostalgia to me and is the perfect companion to RE2, which is hands down the best game in this series.

It's crazy to think that originally, this game wasn't supposed to be the 3rd game in the series. In fact there were multiple games being developed by Capcom at the time.

One of these projects would be led by Director Hideiki Kamiya, in which it would have been the full debut of the Umbrella badass Hunk from RE2. In the game he was to infiltrate a cruise ship to steal a sample of the G-Virus.

Though Shinji Mikami didn't think that it would have been a good fit as an RE game because it was taking a much more action orientated approach. So it was shelved and later revived as

Devil May Cry. Fuck yeah.

The whole boat idea wouldn't be used until Resident Evil Revelations.
And Capcom had an exclusively deal with Sony so their next game had to be a mainline, numbered RE game. Thus the RE3 I know and love to this day was born.

{ Story }

This game takes place some time before and after the events of RE2.
The dreamy Jill Valentine is stuck in her apartment following the outbreak of the T-Virus in Raccoon City. Very noticeably phased after the events of RE1, she is fueled by revenge on the Umbrella Corporation, so she seeks to escape the city and take them down once and for all, but in a boob tube and a mini skirt.

Yeah, not the kind of attire I would personally pick during a fuckin' zombie apocalypse and a battle against an evil corporation. But for all the horny teenagers in the year 2000, this was fan-service with a capital F.

The intro to this game is probably my favorite in this whole series.
The zombies and BOWs (Bio Organic Weapons) overwhelming every street is just dreadful.

Literally everyone, even the police and the mercenary force sent in by Umbrella are just defenseless. Everyone just gets fucking slaughtered. It seems like the people here haven't watched enough zombie flicks to deal with the infected. It really does set the tone that things are fucked up beyond recognition.

Out of all three intros to each RE game so far, this is the most oppressing and bleak. A conflict that was destined to be one-sided. To Umbrella, this is just another guinea pig test.

This game is even more aggressively paced than RE2. It just keeps getting faster with each game.

So we start our adventure with Jill getting blown out of her apartment for some reason, and we are thrown directly into the streets of Raccoon City.

Umbrella are self-aware of the fact that the S.T.A.R.S members are living proof that they are the ones responsible for the creation and outbreak of the T and G-Viruses in the Spenser Mansion and Raccoon City. So they create an almighty bio weapon called the Nemesis to hunt them all down, Jill being one of the former members.

And the Nemesis is the most horrific antagonist I've ever seen in a video game. A mixture of Jason Vorhees and the Terminator. It leads to some incredibly tense encounters. I mean just look at that face. He's such a smug motherfucker, I love it.

Like the Licker scene from RE2, the moment I saw the Nemesis I was just horrified. I had never seen anything like it when I was just a child. And just like with RE2, I watched my brothers play the game, well try to, instead of playing it myself.

Jill will also bump into mercenaries on the bankroll of Umbrella on a mission to "help survivors."

Fat chance.

One of these members is named Carlos, he is your tag partner for this game. And his main objective is to fuck Jill.

Lol that's just a joke but he's basically Billy Cohen from RE0, but a Spanish version.

Since this game is back to a single disc, the story isn't as fleshed out as RE2. I can excuse that since this game came out only a year after RE2. Not to mention the gameplay is so fun that I never get bored of it.

However there are two major things that gives this game major replay value. One of these things is that you can change the outcome of the story. This the first RE game and probably the only one to give the player the ability to affect how the story plays out, thanks to the large amount of cutscenes and multiple endings.

Throughout the game you will be given one of two choices to approach a certain situation.

Like for example, going to the restaurant and fleeing into the basement to get away from Nemesis instead of running into the kitchen and blowing him up.

Or attempt to pull the brakes on the train instead of jumping out of the window because it loses control.

These choices, depending on what you select, can actually give you different cutscenes as well as placing the player in different areas.

You can even affect what boss fights you participate in depending on what you choose.

What this does is encourage multiple playthroughs to see every single asset in the story which is an excellent idea, considering this game is only half of RE2's length.

And the other major reason is the RNG during the gameplay, but I will talk about that in the Gameplay section.

What they managed to accomplish in just a year after RE2 is mind-blowing.

{ Gameplay }

Now this, THIS is the good shit. The best adjective I would use to describe it is sexy.

This is the best controlling game out of all the classic RE games. They have been polished to a real mirror shine. This game invented so many revolutionary mechanics that would be used in future games to this very day.

Where should I start?

Well, this is the first game to have the 180° quick turn. Which means that you can instantly turn yourself around with just the push of Down on the D-Pad and Square. It's fucking ace. It's responsive, it's snappy, it's fluent, it's sheer perfection. And it makes getting away from enemies an absolute breeze.

Gone are the days of having to painstakingly turn yourself around manually and risk getting hit by enemies while doing so.

This is also the first game to give you the ability to shove away zombies and dodge attacks.

By pushing R1 or holding R1 and pushing X just as a zombie is about to grab you, Jill will just shove them away instead of just taking a hickey to the chin like in the older games.

The instruction manual says that you do this by rapidly mashing L1, L2, R1, and R2 but don't fall for it. That doesn't actually work.

The older games also had a problem where if you get pincered by zombies, then you can get bitten from both in front and in back of you with no real means of defending yourself.

But if you take a bite in RE3 and another zombie is about to grab you again, Jill will shove away the zombie automatically, which can really save your life.

If you're fighting anything other than a zombie, you can dodge attacks by pushing R1 or R1 + X as the enemy is about to attack you though the timing can vary on what weapon you are holding. It does help but it's a shotty mechanic. Because if you don't have enough space to dodge you can still get hit.

Dodging doesn't make you invincible like in the later games.

Jill will do the standard backward dodge though occasionally she will roll, which uses up a lot of space meaning there is a chance you can still get hit while doing it which just sucks. If you're up against a wall or something you can still get hit while dodging. But having this mechanic at all is better than nothing.

This is the first RE game where you are able to skip the cutscenes. Which makes the game go by so much quicker during a 2nd playthrough. As much as I love RE2, not being able to skip the cutscenes can be a bitch and a half.

This is also the first game to have the Gunpowder mechanic. If you're playing on Hard Mode, ammo is not as common as it was in RE2. That is where the Gunpowder comes in.

You are able to create ammunition out of this Gunpowder. There are two types of Gunpowder: Gunpowder A, B, and C. Just like herbs, it can be combined with each other to create different types of ammo. And the most powerful ammunition can be synthesized.

NOTE: To obtain Gunpowder C, you need to mix Gunpowder A with Gunpowder B.

Here is a list of all of the ammo that can be created from Gunpowder combinations:

[ Handgun Ammo Combos ]

A: 15 Handgun ammo
A + A: 35 Handgun ammo
A + A + A: 55 Handgun ammo
B + B + A: 60 Handgun ammo

[ Shotgun Shell Combos ]

B: 7 Shotgun shells
B + B: 18 Shotgun shells
A + A + B: 22 Shotgun shells
B + B + B: 30 Shotgun shells

[ Grenade Launcher Round Combos ]

C: 10 Grenade Rounds
A + C: 10 Flame Rounds
B + C: 10 Acid Rounds
C + C: 10 Freeze Rounds

A + 6 Grenade Rounds: 6 Flame Rounds

A + A + 6 Grenade Rounds: 12 Flame Rounds

A + A + A + 6 Grenade Rounds: 18 Flame Rounds

B + 6 Grenade Rounds: 6 Acid Rounds

B + B + 6 Grenade Rounds: 12 Acid Rounds

B + B + B + 6 Grenade Rounds: 18 Acid Rounds

C + 6 Grenade Rounds: 6 Freeze Rounds

C + C + 6 Grenade Rounds: 12 Freeze Rounds

C + C + C + 6 Grenade Rounds: 18 Freeze Rounds

[ Magnum Round Combo ]

C + C + C: 24 Magnum Rounds

This gunpowder only comes in limited quantity, so be wise on what you want to create. Despite the faster facing and more aggressive gameplay, this is still a survival game at the end of the day.

And just like with my RE1 and RE2 reviews, I will leave a list of all the herb combinations.

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

With faster, more polished gameplay comes a much bigger threat than Mr. X from RE2 and that's the Nemesis. He's fast, he has a RE5 Chris Redfield punch that hurts, he can toss Jill around like a sack of potatoes, and he can use a rocket launcher, which really hurts if you get hit by it, and he has a fetish for tentacle hentai.

Just like a feminist on Twitter he will fucking stop at nothing to cancel the living shit out of you. He reeeally craves a Jill on rye. You can choose to either fight him or run away from the big bastard, and the latter is the recommended option. Because just like the Terminator he just does not fuckin' die, and he can seriously fuck you sideways if you don't know what you're doing.

The Nemesis is actually weak against certain ammunition so he's not completely invincible.

If you actually are ballsy enough to fight him, then knocking him out by shooting him will cause him to drop an item. These items can range from gun parts to healing items. Keep in mind that you can only get these items playing on Hard Mode. And they are dropped in this specific order:

1st knockdown: Eagle Parts A

2nd knockdown: Eagle Parts B

3rd knockdown: First Aid Box

4th knockdown: M37 Parts A

5th knockdown: M37 Parts B

6th knockdown: Another First Aid Box

7th knockdown: Either the Assault Rifle or Infinite Ammo for any one of your weapons (you can only get that after beating the game.)

The Eagle Parts are parts for the Handgun which makes it stronger, and the M37 Parts can turn the Shotgun into a powerful lever action rifle.

If you're playing this game for the first time, I do not advise fighting Nemesis just to get these rewards until you have at least beaten the game. Or have an idea on how to fight him properly.

There will be times you will have to fight him as a boss fight, but fucking hell he can be difficult to deal with.

There is one part in the game where you fight him at a clock tower and even now as a veteran player who has been playing this game for years now, I still die a few times trying to beat the son of a bitch.

His punches and his rocket launcher just hit you like an 18 wheeler. Dying here can be easy if you're not careful.

Also, about Hard Mode.. If you are playing this game for the first time, do yourself a favor, and do not play this game on Easy Mode.

Why?

Because Easy Mode is literally what I like to call Game Journalism difficulty, or Dean Takahashi Mode.

The game just holds your hand through everything. It's so piss easy that it practically lets you win. It's like playing Rookie Mode in RE2. The game gives you the Assault Rifle, Handgun, Shotgun, Magnum, a First Aid Box, maximum ammunition for each weapon, infinite Ink Ribbons, and the amount of ammo obtained from a pickup is increased by 2 or 3x.

There is no challenge to be found and the point of a Survival Horror game is completely lost when the game just gives you everything so you can just Bullet Hell everything.

Don't let Hard Mode intimidate you. It's not actually a Hard Mode difficulty. Hard Mode is just the name for the game's Normal difficulty. If you want the true Survival Horror experience, play Hard Mode.

The game isn't that hard. Just dealing with the Nemesis can be a pain at times.

Out of the classic RE trilogy, this is the toughest one of them all, but even then, the game does a great job with balancing its difficulty.

Now I'm talk about the RNG. And this is what makes the game fresh to play with each playthrough despite how short the game is compared to RE2.

All of the enemy placements, item placements, and the moments that Nemesis appears can change when you play the game during a 2nd playthrough. For example in the City Park, you could walk down to the water walkway and there will be zombies, but then in your next playthrough, Hunters can pop up.

So every time you play, something different can happen. Sometimes Nemesis will appear in one area, and then the next time he doesn't.

Maybe choosing what to do during a cutscene can also change what enemies will spawn in. This gives the game unique flavor as you most likely will never know what you will run into.

There is also a moment in the game where a key item will change location depending on what you choose during a cutscene when Nemesis pops up.

Little details like that makes the game fresh. Some might find it annoying, I think it's unique, and it's what makes RE3 stand out from the other games.

Now I'm gonna talk about the weapons, my favorite part.

Jill's arsenal consists of a standard Pistol and a Shotgun which both can be upgraded as mentioned in the Nemesis rewards, a Magnum, which is one of the best guns for boss fights, a Grenade Launcher, a Mine Thrower which I don't use that much, it's pretty powerful but you get almost no extra ammo for it, an Assault Rifle, which is a great for crowd control and has plenty of ammo, and you can also unlock infinite ammo weaponry like a Rocket Launcher and a Minigun.

The Grenade Launcher can fire Flame, Acid, Freeze, and Explosive Rounds, and the most powerful out of all of these are the Acid Rounds. They just demolish bosses. But they suck against Nemesis so use something else.

This is the first game in the series where you are able to unlock infinite ammo for any weapon found in Jill's journey.

You do this by playing The Mercenaries, unlocked after beating the game. All you do is kill enemies while reaching a certain destination under a time limit. Killing multiple enemies adds a bigger increase to the timer, as well as dodging attacks.

When you beat the mode you get Points, and then you spend these Points on whatever gun you wish to unlock infinite ammo for. Each one has a different cost but if you want all guns with infinite ammo unlocked at once, there's a bundle you can purchase for 10000 Points. Getting that amount of points is on the grindy side, though there are easy tricks you can do to get more Points at a faster rate.

And just like RE2, the gunplay in this game is fantastic. Each gun feels great to use. You can just feel the impact of each shot. Combine this with the orgasmic sound effects, and it's a game that deserves the use of your best headphones of choice. The gunplay feedback is among the best in the series.

Just like with RE2, this game is a blast to play. It's excellent gameplay still holds up even to this day. It's a game that I just don't get bored of which is a testament to its design.

It's the catharsis of creating tons of different kinds of ammo with Gunpowder, blowing off zombie heads, shooting explosive barrels to blow multiple enemies into pieces at once, the adrenaline rushes of engaging Nemesis, and finding new surprises with every playthrough because of the RNG system, makes the game always fun for me. This game is a fucking joy to play.

{ Presentation and Soundtrack }

The first thing I noticed when I was younger is that for the first time, you're actually outside.

I know you were outside in RE2 but that was for like 10 minutes in the introduction. But in RE3, the majority of the game is you running around the zombified alleyways and streets of the Raccoon City, which changes the mood from loneliness to paranoia.

With every street and alleyway you run down, you don't know what you're gonna encounter. Capcom really went out all out with this game's production value, it just pushed the PS1 to its limits.

This game is beautiful to look at. The backdrops and pre-rendered backgrounds are even more detailed than the ones in RE2, there are no sharp edges anywhere, and the FMV cutscenes are probably the best looking on the PS1. They're just so clear and very detailed. You can see the rotting flesh on each zombie, it's just grotesque, it's like moldy pizza.

And Jill's character model is a lot more detailed than before. There are multiple different kinds of ways to die which can affect Jill's character model. For example when she gets eaten by a zombie or a dog you can see the bite marks and gashes on her skin.

And when Nemesis shoves that lovely hentai tentacle of his inside of Jill her skin changes to a purpleish color which implies that Nemesis just injected her with the T-Virus.

I really love little details like that. I can tell the developers took a big step to give Jill as much detail as they could.

The soundtrack is brilliant just like RE2, but RE2 still has the edge over RE3 to me. You can hear the ambience in the music as gunshots and people dying can be heard in the distance. It gives me a bigger sense of dread than RE2. But there is no doubt that this game has better boss music.

The music that plays when you fight a boss is so goddamn addictive I just hum it to myself. This game is just junk food for my eyes and ears.

{ Best Version? }

There really is no wrong way to play this game, but as much as I have played the PS1 version, it's actually not the best version in my opinion. This game was released on the PS1, Sega Dreamcast, PC, and the Nintendo Gamecube.

The only difference with the Gamecube version is that the FMV cutscenes run at 60 FPS. I think it's 60 FPS, I could be wrong about that.

And the Sega Dreamcast version is better graphically than the PS1, with 480p resolution and a higher polygon count, but does that really matter since we have the PC version?

Out of all of these versions, the best one would have to be the PC version.

Why? One word: Mods.

Holy shit, the mods for this game. There are tons of texture, high resolution, and challenge mods like Nightmare Mode that just can completely change how we played RE3.

Oh, and you can skip the door animations. You enter a lot, and I mean a lot of doors in this game. The play time reaaaally adds up when you have to watch door animations 90% of the whole game.

Being able to skip these animations can be a godsend when you just want to breeze through the game. And the game is pretty easy to get running on a modern day system thanks to the PC Wiki.

{ Final Thoughts }

This definitely was the swan song of the RE games on the RE1. Originally Code Veronica was to be the true sequel to RE2 but because of the whole Sony exclusively deal, Code Veronica was treated as a like a spin off game, and to be honest that was the better choice.

RE3 is amazing. This game is just as good as RE2 despite being shorter. The amount that was accomplished between RE2 and RE3 is almost paranormal. The content and replay value on the disc is staggering, it's both eye and ear candy, and the Nemesis must have made many kids and teenagers easily shit themselves.

If only was the remake was as good.. Even thinking about that lukewarm half-assed remake still annoys me to shit. But that's a topic for a different review. I was actually so disappointed from RE3 Remake that it was the main reason why I even went back to the original game in the first place.

And the moment I started playing through this game, I just said two words: "That's better." It really just shows how timeless the original release is.

I give this game 9 Jill Sandwiches out of 10.

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

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

Don't Even Think? More like

Don't Even Think About Playing This Game

This may be the worst Battle Royale game I've ever played. And I've played Fortnite and The Culling 2 for fuck sake. It had a pretty interesting concept but is the equivalent of driving a school bus full of children at 60MPH down a 90° angled road and slamming face first into a highway.

This game's servers were shut down in 2020 and honestly, thank God for that.

{ Core Gameplay }

Where do I even start with this? Well.. it's a Battle Royale game with a really small map for BR standards. The goal is to either be the last one standing or to escape via helicopter by activating three SOS points that spawn randomly on the map.

Not only do you have to kill other players but you also have to escape or kill a werewolf. Everyone is a regular person, but one player gets to play as a werewolf, and the goal as a werewolf is simple: kill everyone before they either kill you or escape. Which sounds cool right?

Well, there are quite a few things that completely ruins what seemed like fun.

Let me state the biggest and most obvious problem, and that's the frame rate. Holy mother of shit, the frame rate. This game was not even that graphically impressive and the map is so small, and yet, this game had one of the worst frame rates I've ever seen in a video game.

This game's frame rate is just as bad as DayZ on the PS4 and PS5.

The slowdown and frame fluctuations are so bad that it made the game virtually unplayable. Trying to participate in gun fights when the FPS is dipping all the time can be absolutely aggravating.

I remember playing this game when it first came out on the PS4 and I swear to God I was getting like, 10-25 FPS at all times. And the game still had that problem all the way until it shut down. It was actually unbearable.

Another problem is the aiming. It's really clunky. You can aim in either third person or first person but it seems like aiming in first person is even worse than the third person aiming. It's so wonky and it's insanely difficult to hit targets at CQC range. It also doesn't help that for some reason, you jump so goddamn high.

Know what that means? It's a war of attrition, because your opponents will just jump around all the place and it's insanely hard to hit your shots on them. I've seen gunfights where enemies are just jump shotting each other like they're on the fucking moon.

So you have an awful frame rate, terrible gun aiming, and enemies just jump around like they're wearing Call of Duty exo suits. And all of this makes shooting at enemies, the most BASIC aspect of a Battle Royale game, a complete chore to do.

Not to mention your enemies are bullet sponges. The TTK (Time to Kill) was really slow. I could be using a Kar98 bolt action sniper rifle and I still had to hit someone with it at least 5 times before they die. So imagine trying to hit your opponent multiple times with a single shot weapon while they're jumping around all over the place. It's a fucking joke. A shotgun is pretty much the only useful weapon for dealing with other players.

Or, you wanna know another viable strategy? Melee. Yeah that's right. Since it's such a bitch to land your shots in this game, it's actually easier to just run up to someone and melee them to death. There are melee weapons so that's all the more reason to use melee instead of guns. This game is just retarded.

Also, the game has a hunger system, and you had to eat food and stay warm to survive. If you run out of your hunger meter, or if your character gets too cold, your health will start to drain over time. Food is also used to restore your health. Food is plentiful so there wasn't a time where I died of starvation.

But the coldness? I had no idea that you were supposed to light fires in the various houses you go inside of. The game never explains it. Not to mention I assumed you would have needed a lighter or a torch or something, but no. You just walk up to a fireplace, push a button and it automatically lights up.

I didn't know your character was the fucking Human Torch. So a lot of my deaths, along with the amount of times I died to a werewolf, was me freezing to death not knowing how to warm myself up.

So what about werewolf? Well being a werewolf is no doubt the most fun part about the game. But that's just fun for you, not for everyone else. Because it seems the dumb fucks who programmed this game didn't seem to know what balancing is, because the werewolf is utterly broken.

Its weakness are silver bullets, however these are really hard to come by, so most likely you won't have enough to kill it. The werewolf also soaks up so much fucking damage before it dies anyway.

Also, when you get attacked by a werewolf, you can get stuck in an infinite stunlock, meaning you just have to sit there and watch as the werewolf completely fucks you up with no way of defending yourself. The werewolf also moves faster than the humans, meaning that it's impossible to run away from it.

So pretty much, if a werewolf spotted you, you may as well called yourself fucking dead. Because the werewolf was just way too overpowered. And this can just make the game an even bigger pain in the ass than it already was, because the werewolf just runs around slaughtering everyone before you even find another player.

Finding other players can be rare because everyone just dies early on. And when they don't die to other players, night time hits and the real carnage begins.

Of course, this being a free to play game, there were mictrotransactions in this game. Loot boxes, paid cosmetics, you name it. There were skins for both humans and the werewolves. The skins themselves do look nice, so I can clearly see where most of the effort went into with this game.

You know this game is shit when they prioritized monetization over actually optimizing the game to make it playable. And I doubt that anyone who actually spent their money on this game actually got it back, since this game was only live for around a year and a half.

The only good thing this game did for me was get me like, 60+ viewers on a Twitch livestream, because my title literally said "The Worst Battle Royale game ever made?!" And I wanted to expose what a heeping pile of garbage this game was.

Fuck this game.

2/10

So I just joined PC gaming a few weeks ago and the moment I gave out my Steam to some friends on Discord, one of them immediately gifted me this game, and he told me:

“If you are going to play PC, this is the first game that you absolutely should start with.”

I’ve never owned any Xbox consoles so I missed out on these games but I’ve heard a lot about them. Fast forward around 3 weeks later, and I think I have an addiction problem, the same kind when I played Killing Floor 2 for the first time.

This is the only game I’ve ever played where I can play as Jill Valentine, go to Disneyland, and shoot down hundreds of zombies with a Vietnam War era M16, but with 50 round magazines. I couldn’t even have dreamed of that shit, let alone make mods like that.

{ Core Gameplay }

Normally when I write reviews I go in-depth about story, gameplay, content, etc. I start off by talking about the story but.. I don’t know much about this game’s narrative at all really. I’ve been playing this game for at least a couple weeks now and I don’t think I’ve paid much attention to the overall narrative or the characters. I literally know nothing about this world. And that might sound unprofessional but for fuck sake, before I even started playing the game I got requested by my friends to download a shit load of mods for the game from the Steam Workshop. Speaking of mods, good fucking god, this game might have the largest selection of mods I’ve ever seen for a game. I have barely even touched the game’s standard maps, I’ve only just been playing on the modded ones because those are the ones that you should pay attention to.

Obviously the first maps I had to play on were the Resident Evil maps. And I mean like, the maps from the first three games on the PS1. What can I say? I fuckin’ love OG Resident Evil.

Does the narrative really matter in a game like this? I doubt it. I literally just did a quick synopsis search on the internet and it’s as basic as plain bread with mayonnaise on it. Do I care? Not really. And that’s because this game is one of the biggest joys to play through. This is one of the most fun games I’ve played in quite a while. It’s a 4 player Co-Op FPS game where you play on a “stage” and you have to get to a safe zone to progress to the next level. The amount of levels can vary depending on the stage. And the characters that you get to play also vary on what stage you’re about to play in. You fight off zombies and other infected monstrosities.

There are 8 different types of infected in this game:

You’ve got your Boomers which as the name implies, explode when shot and they can vomit on you which not only blinds you, but attracts common infected towards you

Your Hunters which disguise as regular infected but can lurk and pounce on you and you need a teammate to free you

Your Smokers which have fucking insane Resident Evil 2 Licker tongues that can grapple you, and again, you need a teammate’s help to get free, and they emit a blinding smoke when killed

Your Chargers which ram into you and other teammates and creates huge knockback and it also hurts

Your Jockeys which are quick little shits that are small and hard to hit, and yet again, you need an ally to free you because they can jump on top of you and your character just goes ape shit. Fuck Jockeys. Seriously, fuck them. I think I have gotten grappled by a Jockey more times than anything else in this game. These things can really be a pain in the ass.

Your Spitters which spit acid in a large area and that shit ultra fuckin hurts when standing in it for even more than a second

Your Tanks which are the strongest and most aggressive of all, being able to deal the most amount of damage and they take the longest to kill, you pretty much need the whole team wailing on them at once

And lastly the Witch. She’s like the Clickers from the Last of Us. Make noise when she is near, and she dashes towards your position and can fucking one hit down you. Hopefully your AI teammates aren’t stupid enough to shoot next ot her or you have teammates who actually know how to stealth past her instead of just blindly shooting.

This game is heavily reliant on teamwork and coordination, because it seems like I get grappled every 30 seconds to 5 minutes and need someone’s aid. Sometimes I’ll get grappled but then after I get freed I immediately get grappled again. One time I got grappled like 3 or 4 times within the span of 20 seconds. This game does not hold your hand at all when you're the last one alive, especially at higher difficulties, it does not pull its punches, which might suck ass from a bendy straw if you’ve got a bad team, or a toxic team that doesn't want to work with you.

It also sucks when you want to just play through the level casually and just take a breath, but your random teammates literally know the levels like their fucking lives depend on it so they speedrun through everything, and then proceed to bitch and whine in the game chat that you’re going too slow.

Seriously, I’ve had teammates like that. Like motherfucker, can I just get a grasp of the environment and get an understanding of playing on a mouse and keyboard for the first time? I understand you play this game until your body must be in the same shape as Nikocado Avocado’s Type 2 Diabetes, but just let a man who is new to PC learn how to play the damn game.

Some of these levels, despite the fast paced nature of the game, should be explored, because there are so many fucking easter eggs in this game it actually makes my head spin. There are not only countless references to past Valve games and this game’s predecessor, but also many other unrelated games and movies as well.

The good thing however is that if you do decide to play on your own, the AI are actually pretty competent. They can take down enemies efficiently, they never run out of ammo, they revive each other, hell, they even give you first aid kits and painkillers when you’re running low on health. If you go down a certain number of times you are dead until either two things:

Your team reaches a safe zone or they bring you back to life with a defibrillator. These are VERY rare to come across and you can only use it once. But if an AI dies you don’t need one. They’ll just respawn trapped in a room somewhere and you just have to free them. But for real players, you need a defibrillator.

You can’t give items to your teammates but you can use them on your teammates. Your friend needs temporary health? No problem! Just uncap a bottle of painkillers and pour the whole goddamn thing into your friend’s gullet. Risk of overdose don't mean shit in the zombie apocalypse.

Speaking of items, some of these can be a bit rare, so use them only if you really need to. There are health kits, painkillers, bile grenades (which attract the infected to the explosion), molotov cocktails, defibrillators, etc. Health kits are spread very far and inbetween levels. You get health kits at a safe zone, but after that, you’d be lucky to find more in the middle of the level. That’s why you have the ability to use them on your teammates.

Painkillers give you temporary health and they do last quite a while so it's a good substitute for a health hit.

When you finish a stage you and your team are given a score. Scores to things like most infected killed, most damage done to the Tank, most melee kills, etc. None of this really means anything but this is cool for me because I’ve always been competitive when it comes to games. Call me a boomer, but I really like going for those high scores, chasing those big numbers.

This game lacks any sort of progression system. And this is probably the most jarring aspect of this game to me. This point that I’m making can either make or break just how motivated you are to play the game, especially if you’re going through a headache trying to get through a stage on a higher difficulty.

There are no level ups, uprades, skill trees, or anything like that. So you as a player adapts to the game’s difficulty via your own skill and communication with your team rather than making your character stronger with skill trees and all that shit. But perhaps that’s the whole point of the game. It depends on how you look at it.

But, there is another but

There is also a lack of an in-game store to purchase items with an in-game currency by playing the game like you would expect in a typical AAA game. Things like character skins, artwork, gun skins, developer trailers, music from the soundtrack, extra levels, etc.

Sure the mods make up for this, but there isn’t really anything to work for in this game besides achievements and bragging rights. It’s just you and the game. And that’s it. You drop into a stage, you play through it, you get briefed on your performance, and that’s it. After that you move on to another stage. But, this game did come out in 2009 so I guess I’m not surprised.

This game came out during a time where Call of Duty Zombies was in its infancy, damn those were the glory days. Nowadays Zombies is so fucking overcomplicated with its mechanics that you mostly ignore it for the sake of just getting into the game as soon as possible.

But then you get ass fucked because you don’t know what to do. People just want to play the game and not have to resort to going on YouTube and look at 30 minute guide videos to learn how to play on a specific map. Black ops 3 and 4 are the fuckin’ worst when it comes to this.

There is a beauty to simplicity, and Left 4 Dead 2 is as straightforward as the stripper pole I dance on at Femboy Pole Position. But like I said, the lack of things to work for can either annoy you, or you’re fine with that. Personally, I have mixed feelings about it.

A part of me says that I love playing games where all I gotta do is invite my friends to a lobby and we can start playing immediately with no extra bullshit required.

But the other part of me craves something to work for and earn. Playing on the hardest difficulty? Yeah, no. Fuck that. It is not worth it. It isn't worth frustrating yourself and at the same time you're getting screamed at by dickish teammates over simple mistakes.
And that's why whenever the level changes and the difficulty randomly changes to the highest for some reason, everyone just votes for the difficulty to be turned down.

So about the weapons, there isn't much to talk about. Sidearms get infinite ammo but they're not very reliable. The pistol, even if you dual wield them, is pretty weak. And the Desert Eagle only has 8 shots in a mag. But not only does it take a few shots just to kill a single zombie, you're gonna be fighting hordes of them. So again, unreliable.

Melee weapons on the other hand are much better. They're great for crowd control and they don't break. If you see a melee weapon, just pick that up.

The Primary Weapons in this game are divided into Tiers. The higher the Tier, the better the gun.

Your Tier 1 weapons consist of a Pump Action Shotgun, an Uzi, and a Suppressed MAC10. They get the job done but once you encounter those Tier 3 Assault Rifles you will immediately swap out.

The Tier 2 Weapons are two Semi Auto Shotguns, a Hunting Rifle, and a Sniper Rifle. These rifles are very hard to come by, I've only ever gotten these weapons a few times, and even then, I just use the Tier 3 guns because you get them about halfway through a stage.

And then there are the Tier 3 guns.
You get an AK-47, an M16, and a SCAR-H.
They just tear through most infected within just a single mag. The M16 is my favorite weapon in this game. It's a classic choice. It hits hard, it's super accurate, it can hold 50 rounds in a magazine, it can get a laser sight attachment for extra accuracy, it's just an all around awesome gun. And the sound it makes when shooting is just orgasmic.
A full team with M16s can just fucking tear ass.

The AK-47 has more stopping power but has less ammo in a mag and it's less accurate than the M16, hence why I prefer it.

So I mentioned that I am relatively new to PC gaming. I've pretty much spent around the last 20 years of my life playing on console. I've grown up playing shooters competitively on PlayStation. But I decided to make the switch to PC instead of getting a PS5 this generation because it's been a desire for quite a while.

Also fuck Sony nowadays lol.

So playing on a mouse and keyboard for the very first time was insanely alien to me. Seriously, I've never played a game like this before. It took me at least a week and a half to get used to it. First of all, getting used to the sensitivity was a real challenge. Finding a sensitivity that wasn't too slow or fast was actually more difficult than on console.

But I haven't bothered messing around with my DPI as that would make things even more difficult. I mean, isn't that the point of in-game sensitivity options?

For at least the first week or two, it was pretty tough playing games on a mouse and keyboard. Finding the right sensitivity, getting used to the controls, and finding a proper technique for finger placement.

Sure I can connect a controller and play that way, but why do that? I wouldn't adapt that way. I wanna learn how to play games competitively on PC, and the only way to do that is to learn and get better.

So what did I do?

Well for the keyboard:

I have decided to use my middle finger for the W and S keys

My index finger for E, D, R, F, C, V, etc.

My ring finger for A, Q, TAB, and CAPSLK

My pinkie for Shift and CTRT

And my thumb for the Space Bar

If I have to push any of the number keys I will use either my middle finger or my index finger

This is what I have gotten used to. However if I'm able to, I change the Shift Key bind (usually for sprinting) to the thumb button on my mouse. It's easier, and it's something I'm just used to now.

Also I love that you are able to swap weapons with the mouse scroll, and pretty much almost every game has this feature.

The standard controls for this game are pretty ace. E for picking up items, opening doors, and reviving teammates

Right click for using healing items, mouse scroll for swapping weapons and items in your inventory on the right

And Space for jumping and CTRL for crouching.

Pretty standard stuff. I actually changed Crouch to the thumb button on my mouse. It's just easier for me. It's a personal preference. The standard controls for this game for the most part are perfect.

This is the one of the main games that has helped me get better at playing with a mouse and keyboard. The more I play, the more I wanted to improve and develop my own technique. The simplicity of both the controls and the gameplay made it very easy to just pick it up and play. It's a game that is very noob friendly for people who are new to this type of game, unless of course you want to torture yourself with Very Hard.

Because there are no objective markers, waypoints, or a map, you can get lost frequently as a blind player. I know I got lost often playing this game. Thankfully not every random player is a cunt and they can assist you if you do lose your way.

{ Presentation }

This is a game from the year 2009 and it manages to have more detail in its world than a lot of PS3 and PS4 games. I can literally read all the text on all of the signs, lying newspapers, billboards, hell even text on a wall made out of magic marker.

Again, there is a simplicity to the overall graphics, but the amount of visual clarity in the environment really just demonstrates just how much of a powerhouse the Source Engine is and PC engines in general.

I do get a lot of CSGO vibes from this game but obviously right? This game was made by the same company.

This game is pretty damn gory. It is fucking satisfying. I like how shooting infected in certain areas can tear their limbs off and whatnot. I can just feel the impact of each shot. The standard sound design of the weapons is fucking great. The animations also have that 2008 vibe to them but they're well done.

Overall this is a very pretty game for its time.

{ Final Thoughts }

This game has a very addictive gameplay loop to it. Combine this with the hundreds of mods like character skins, gun skins, enhanced weapon sound effects, custom maps, extra blood and gore mods, soundtrack mods, and combine this again with being able to play with your friends, and this makes for one of the most intoxicating experiences I've had in quite a long time.

I haven't had this much fun with a zombie arcade shooter like this since Killing Floor 2 on the PS4. I can only imagine how good it must be on PC. Can't wait. ❤️

However, be mindful of the amount of mods you download because some mods can clash with each other and prevent you from being able to start up a game. I had an issue where me and my three friends were attempting to play on a custom made Resident Evil map and we got stuck in infinite loading screens all because one of my friends had an extra gore mod enabled. That is literally the only reason why we couldn't start the match.

Sure I do have a couple gripes with a lack of progression, the lack of navigation, some toxicity in the community, and conflicting mods, but that is overshadowed by everything this game gets right. Not to mention, this is the kind of shit you would expect in a modern PC game like this. It's a must play, especially if you are new to FPS games on PC.

If I played this game back when it was new I probably would not have slept for several days.

Now uh, if you'll excuse me, I'm off for another session with some friends. Taking a trip to Devil Mountain as Rebecca Chambers from Resident Evil 0. Oh yeah, I'm making her a badass again.

9/10

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I am so completely split down the middle of how I feel about it. I don’t know if I hate this game or if I fucking love it.

This game just REEKS of the early 2000s and it has aged like the moldy milk stains on my apartment wall. It feels like this game was coded on a fucking Maxi Pad by a small team consisting of first year college interns. It’s so dated and yet it doesn’t feel outdated at the same time, I just can’t describe it..

I typically review games in a neat and detailed structure. For example, I start with the story, then I get into gameplay, content, etc. But this game is such a fucking enigma that it’s very hard trying to describe it in that kind of format. So instead I’ll just do Cons and Pros.

{ Cons }

The graphics look like a dog’s asshole even for 2003 standards, the textures look especially lousy, like they’re from a game that came out at least 5 years earlier, the character models look hideous and their animations are very unconvincing, the seams between each area of the town are hidden behind by these really ugly rock formations that just make each map look like jumbled messes, and special effects like explosions, fire, and cigarette smoke just looks cheap and unconvincing as well.

The movement and gunplay is the definition of JANK. Platforming, since there are moments in this game where you have to platform, is clunky as shit because of the slow movement speed. Guns deal the same amount of damage regardless of what part of the body you’re shooting, maybe except for the shotgun, but sometimes shots don’t register at all, and guns never need to be reloaded meaning that even guns like the shotgun and the pistol can be shot infinitely without reloading which is fucking ridiculous.

The weapon swapping mechanic is also incomprehensibly bad, and I don’t know if that’s by design or lack thereof. It’s clunky as fuck and there are many times where it takes longer than it should to equip the weapon I want to use.

The map is almost borderline useless. It doesn’t give you a clear indication of where you’re going, meaning you will be opening the map constantly just to see if you're going the right way. It's shit.

The main character is as bland as a snarky fuckboy in a low budget B movie, with every generic one liner you could think of and with a voice as monotone as when I had strep throat at 23 years old.

And the sense of humor in this game is as funny as watching your favorite actor end up in a crappy reality television show. It’s the kind of humor that middle school special ed kids would find hilarious. And I know this because I’ve been in one. For three years. I was a pretty stupid fucking kid back then.

Toilet jokes, piss and shit jokes, butt jokes, 9/11 jokes and Arab terrorist stereotyping, dick and balls jokes, homosexual gun toting rednecks, violent video game protestors, suicide jokes, the cops being fatfucks who love doughnuts trope, and the fact that fucking Gary Coleman is in this game. It’s all pretty low brow stuff. It’s all as tasteless as a military salt lick.

I do have a sense of humor, and granted this game did get some good laughs out of me, and obviously the developers went out of their way to make this game as over the top and offensive as possible, but even at the time that this came out, the game is politically incorrect in almost every way, it’s aged as badly as the first 2-3 seasons of South Park. It feels like the jokes here were written by a 10 year old at times.

The first Postal game was much darker but at the same time there was a tongue and cheek vibe to what you were doing despite it being a game that is centered around mass shooting, and it was at a subtle level, but now Postal 2’s sense of humor in a nutshell is

Piss onto a doughnut and feed it to a cop and watch in amazement as he pukes all of his intestines out!!

Yeah because for some reason there is a mechanic where you can unzip your junk and pee on people to make them vomit.

Also, this game is buggy as fuck. Good god this is a poorly programmed game.

I’ve encountered many bugs like graphical glitches, the engine doing weird shit with the textures, frame drops, even though I’m running this game on a high end PC so it’s clearly not an issue with the hardware, it’s just a bug in the game itself, getting stuck in areas that I can’t get out of so I have to reload my save, NPCs getting stuck in T-poses, NPCs walking around but without the walking animation, dead bodies getting stuck in walls and ceilings, falling through the map, NPCs forgetting how to use stairs so they just walk off and kill themselves, enemies shooting at you without aiming their guns, the bad gun hit registration, NPCs just exploding for no reason at all, and the NPCs getting stuck on fucking everything.

Doorways, stairways, walls, and even each other. There are also a lot of spots where you can just get on top of the map and stare off into the gray unprogrammed void of video game limbo. One time I had to start the whole game over from at least the 3rd or 4th day because some guy was blocking a door I needed to go through to get out but I couldn’t kill him, even if I loaded my save file.

The AI is also laughably bad. There is a lot of inconsistency to it. Enemies either stand there and let you shoot them or they are cybernetic beings that know your exact location and can shoot you the moment you turn a corner with insane accuracy.

I’m sure defenders of the game will say the bugs and glitches have added onto the game’s charm, and granted some of this shit can be funny, but all of these issues can impact the overall quality of the game. A lot of this shit has been ironed out since what I've been told, the game was much, much buggier in its early days. This game is running on an old ass Unreal 2 Engine from 2003 so I guess the developers can't really do any more, but damn, it's not really enough. The optimization of this game is rough even nowadays.

But, I do give the developers props for sticking to their guns and continue to support the game. There are only a couple other studios that continue to support and update games that are this old to this day.

{ Pros }

So with everything that I just talked about, you would think that I hate this game right? Well to be honest, I don’t actually. Something about the gameplay feels cathartic and charmful. It reminds me of a simpler time where games didn’t try to be these massive open world RPGs with a huge emphasis on cutscenes and presentation instead of just giving absolute freedom to the player in how they want to play the game. The best comparison I could give is Grand Theft Auto III.

Postal 2 right off the bat gives you the freedom to do whatever the hell you want and it gives you that free reign all the time. You can actually play this game like it’s fuckin’ Undertale and beat the game without killing a single person if you wanted to. And this in itself can make for a completely different kind of experience that you normally don’t get anywhere else, especially in the First Person Shooter market.

But it does have that GTA III jank where you have to play through each day to unlock more areas of the map which can be annoying, but being able to play each day however I want and take my time with everything is praise well deserved. The moment I start the game, I am free to do as I please. You wanna rampage? Well, do it, why not? There’s no one stopping you.

You wanna play the game like a pacifist? Knock yourself out. I'm sure that in itself can make for a pretty interesting playthrough.

And this free agency to the player can make for a game that feels unique in its own way, a game where you could just unwind and relax after a hard day of work, where you can relieve yourself and just turn your brain off for a couple hours.

And despite the bugs and glitches, the game can still be fun to play thanks to the very good gun aiming, the ridiculous arsenal of weapons, and the fact that the game makes you feel like an unstoppable badass.

Speaking of guns, there are a ridiculous amount of weapons in this game. You have your standard pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, grenades, molotov cocktails, a rocket launcher, a nightstick, and a chainsaw.

But you have other ridiculous shit like a homemade flamethrower, a diseased cow head that is so toxic that it causes people to vomit blood until they die, actual scissors that you can throw at people like shurikens, a napalm launcher, a taser, a shovel that can behead people (somebody clearly watched The Evil Dead), a protestor sign (so you can show off your alpha male weeb dominance), a pocket knife, hedge clippers that also behead people, and a gasoline canister so you can light people on fire and blow shit up. YEAH! WAR CRIMES!

Hey, it's not called the Genova Convention when you're playing this game. It's the Genova Suggestion.

And finally, there's a grenade launcher that shoots exploding cats and you can also use.. cats as a suppressor for your gun. I guess someone in the development team really fuckin' hated pussy but I digress.

There's also a nice little nod to the first Postal game where on the second day you can set a marching band on fire with molotov cocktails.

Despite the really fucking stupid humor in this game there are some jokes that were genuinuely witty and got a laugh out of me, like where you get people to sign a petition to get “whiny congressmen to play violent video games” which is probably the most accurate thing this game gets, or how the game breaks the 4th wall and makes fun of the player for saving way too often.

Or when on Friday you suddenly catch Gonorrhea so you take a visit to the Vend a Cure at the clinic and the robot AI asks you to pee in a cup. And doing so makes the AI respond in disgust.

And despite the game’s buggy nature, the game in the long run is fun to play. In a way, it’s nirvanic. As I kept playing, I actually got addicted to it. The cops aren’t really much of a threat, and maybe that's because of the piss poor AI, but it actually does add on to the freedom of just going around killing, looting, etc.

Also, I love how you can approach every situation in this game. For example, instead of cashing your check or buying milk from the store you can just fucking rob the place. I also like the amount of surprises and easter eggs to be found by exploring. If you can get on top of the rooftops you can find weapons and whatnot.

And one of the best things about the game is how the theme of the game changes depending on what time of year you’re playing in. For example on Valentine’s Day all of the NPCs walk around holding flowers and you can go to a kissing booth and pay $5 to kiss the gimp. On Saint Patrick’s Day you can find a little leprechaun running around and if you kill him before he reaches his pot of gold you get rewarded with a shitload of cash. And if you catch him he will grant you one wish but they’re all just tricks. For example, choosing “I wish for hot bitches to work my balls” will just spawn a bunch of flaming pit bulls that attack you.

On Easter you can actually engage in an epic boss fight against the Easter Bunny wearing a fucking kung fu outfit. On April Fools Day there will be a fake DLC menu and trying to buy anything doesn’t do anything except make the Postal guy scold you, you filthy gamer whale. And on Halloween, the NPCs will wear costumes, it will be night time and you can fight skeleton soldiers straight out of Army of Darkness, and ghosts can randomly appear. Also, all of the shovels are replaced with plastic devil pitchforks. Details like that can really add onto the game’s charm.

{ Final Thoughts }

So now with everything I’ve talked about you probably understand why I’m so split down the middle when it comes to this game. It’s not a great game by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a good game. There’s a lot the game has going for it but there are some serious strikes against it. It's very hit and miss in a lot of ways. Sure there is some quality here, but the lack of polish that the game presents even 17 years later really does not help. There is a semi lack of authenticity here. The gameplay and sense of humor has aged worse than 21st century American social justice.

I haven’t played a game this divisive in quite a while, but maybe it’s the good kind of divisive. I mean for fuck sake, the studio’s name is Running with Scissors. I can tell from that name alone that these guys are fucking cheeky.

I can tell the developers must have had a lot of fun making this game, but a lot of the content in this game can really rub you the wrong way because of how dated it all is. I give props to the developers for going out of their way and giving the middle finger to people who were bitching about the controversies of video games, and just wanted to make a game that is both offensive and yet fun to play at the same time, because at the end of the day, it’s just a fucking video game, it’s meant so you can simulate what you just can’t do in real life, but there is a somewhat lack of professionalism here, they’re definitely not Rockstar Games.

I prefer the more gritty, grounded, and yet very subtle tone of the original Postal over

HAHA pee pee poo poo titty cumslut terrorist neckbeard

But, it’s a fun game, they had fun making it, so it’s somewhat of a win win, and all of this shit just made the game more popular. I just wish it was executed better.

There’s a lot wrong with it, but there are many things it does well. Maybe if I played the expansions I’ll have a better view on it, but this review is just my opinion on the base experience.

I give this game 7 Gary Colemans out of 10.

It's a very average game and there aren't that many games out there like this one. It can be mindless fun and anyone who really likes old school FPS games will really get a kick out of it.

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 doesn’t seem to understand what kind of game it wants to be. I haven’t seen a shooter game that has had an identity crisis this bad since Resident Evil 6. No disrespect to RE6 though, I fuckin’ love that game.

[ 𝘾𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙂𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙮 ]

Christ on a bike where do I even start with this? So it’s an FPS game set during an apocalypse, but the apocalypse setting has no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever and I’ll 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.

{ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙂𝙪𝙣𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙀𝙦𝙪𝙞𝙥𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩 }

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, it’s 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 I’m getting at from a mile away.

Of fucking course this game is Pay 2 Win. This is a Free-To-Play game so that’s obvious right? But this game just goes way too fucking far with this, it’s 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.

It’s a broken system, because if you’re a new player to this game you’re going to get fucking slaughtered, because most lobbies have players in them who already have max level gear, so you’re at a huge disadvantage already. It turns into Shoot First, Die First: The Video Game, because many times it doesn’t matter if you take the first shot, you’re most likely gonna die to your enemy because your gear is underleveled. Is this fucking Warframe PvP? It also doesn’t 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, it’s just plain unfair.

There are also preset kits that you can purchase with Gold. It’s a bundle that comes with a couple leveled up guns and armor, such as the Bandit Bundle and the Survivor Bundle. The game doesn’t even try to hide this shit. It’s 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. They’re fully modded. And they’re expensive as fuck.

{ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙖𝙥𝙨 }

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 it’s giving me flashbacks to the maps from Modern Warfare 2019’s 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 I’ve 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 it’s 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 can’t play the game like it’s COD, and I’ll get into that. There’s another issue. There are no random spawns. Every respawn is always in one part of the map. It’s 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 they’re just gonna camp the spawns and wait for you to move. And that leads into my next biggest complaint

[ 𝘾𝙖𝙢𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙎𝙣𝙞𝙥𝙚𝙧 𝙎𝙥𝙖𝙢 ]

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 don’t think I'm exaggerating when I say that the game has hands down the worst camping and sniper spam I’ve 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. I’ve taken shots to the leg and still died in one shot. It doesn’t 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 doesn’t even matter if the enemy has a suppressor on the gun, most of the time you’re still gonna get one shotted. So it’s no wonder why there’s 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 you’re 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 they’re in their spawn hiding with a sniper rifle. It’s just a giant fucking campfest. I’ve 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. It’s the exact same shit that Modern Warfare suffers from. The flow of each match is all over the fucking place. It’s slower than a turd coming out of the ass of a fuckin’ 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?

It’s a game that is both Pay 2 Win, and the map design makes it extremely campy. And it doesn’t matter what game mode I play. Whether it’s 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 it’s 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 they’re 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 they’re sitting ADS behind a headglitch with an assault rifle. Do I need to mention again these fucking people have tier 5 guns?

[ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 ]

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 Us’s 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 weren’t that big and it was 4v4. This game could have done something like that, but no, it’s just a ripoff of COD, and a shitty one at that.

[ 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 ]

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 it’s unfinished. And as time went on they just decided to just keep adding more stupid shit into the game, because they just don’t have a clear vision of the project, nor passion for it. And this reflects in how they respond to criticism.

From what I’ve been reading on Steam and forums, the developers can’t seem to take it, as they tend to delete and ban Tweets and other posts made by people speaking out about the retarded choices they’ve 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, I’m 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 it’s just a goddamn waste of precious hard drive space.

Fuck this company, fuck this game.

2/10