Remember how ODST made me interested enough in the world of Halo to think about getting into the expanded universe? This game very quickly reversed that.

Nothing makes sense anymore, the covenant is the enemy again for reasons and you’re stuck fighting them in waves for the whole first hour without any motivation or direction or explanation, a new group called prometheans shows up and they’re just a chore all around, then an especially ugly alien comes out of a big metal egg, deletes a wall from reality and picks up Chief with magic, monologues at me, and is apparently a forerunner even though every previous game had clearly and explicitly set up humans to either be forerunners or their descendants, then he throws me away and leaves instead of killing me right there like he clearly could have and clearly wanted to. I almost dropped the game then and there, but decided to drop the difficulty to easy in hopes of moving faster instead. It worked, and I finished the game sooner than any of the others. But at what cost? The words “what” and “why” each ran through my head countless times, and increasingly often the further I got, but by the very end of the game, I involuntarily said out loud “what do you MEAN” way louder than I expected at 3:00 AM.

I just… why the covenant again? I thought that by the end of Halo 3, the covenant was either mostly or entirely dissolved, and even if it did stick around, the elites were betrayed, cast out, and slaughtered en masse by them, then rebelled in force, so why are elites part of the covenant again? “A lot can happen in four years” is not an explanation. Who are they? How did they get here? Are there still prophets? Why does this fake covenant do literally nothing at all for the entire story and then completely disappear without consequence? What’s going on? Why are we here? Is there a war going on, or are we just fighting because fighting is cool? Did we really just trade an entire franchise worth of grand war stories full of interesting circumstances and decently thought out worldbuilding implications for a “you’re the chosen one and you must fulfill your ancient destiny and beat the One Big Bad Guy” story? Completely undoing everything set up across five better games? So humanity is at risk again… just because? Is the Chief supposed to be the messiah now? And I’m supposed to just accept that it turns out everything was part of some grand plan? And I’m supposed to believe that the people responsible for such an immensely detailed plan that worked out better than even the most powerful of gods could have imagined, one of the most advanced civilizations ever to exist, had zero diplomatic capability whatsoever, never communicating at all with the ancient humans until it was way too late? What in the world is a “genesong” and why am I expected to just take that and run with it? Why does the entire world seemingly have no reaction to the fact that forerunners still exist? Why are be Cortana does is so extra naked now?

Speaking of Cortana, what happened to her? Where is she? This blue girl is definitely not her. In all the previous games, Cortana has been nothing but a pragmatic, quick-thinking, all-or-nothing defender of humanity who was willing to sacrifice herself – multiple times! – if it meant victory, and with no fear or hesitation. She had some sass, she had smarts in excess, and most importantly, she was reliable and straightforward. But in this game… Cortana is a moody little girl with a Chief complex throwing temper tantrums that probably couldn’t bring herself to speak up if her burger had pickles on it when she asked for none. She’s afraid of being shut down, when in the past she was entirely willing to blow herself up for humanity’s sake. If this was the same character, I’d expect her to shut herself down without hesitation at the first sign of “rampancy” which, by the way, is a (potentially) really interesting concept to me, which makes me even more upset at how amazingly poorly written it is here.

The idea that these AI constructs only have a short lifespan before they effectively think themselves to death has a lot of interesting implications, and could go in so many different directions… but there are two main problems with it in this game. First: I don’t care what anyone says, deterioration of an AI does not excuse a character becoming an entirely different character. If this is really what rampancy would do to her, at least show me that process and let me see it unfold, even if I still strongly believe that it doesn’t make sense. Don’t just make the character something completely different, come up with a word for why it happened, and expect me to simply accept that without question or thought. Second: Why is Cortana affected by this at all? Maybe she should be affected by it at some point, but at the very least, she should have a longer lifespan than typical AIs. This game even says it itself, Cortana is special, she was apparently the only AI ever made with a living human brain, she absorbed a bunch of forerunner stuff, and in an audio log, Halsey even said that she was at a loss regarding Cortana’s abilities and believed that the seven year lifespan might not apply to her. I ignored terminals in the original trilogy, especially 3 since they made no sense to me anyway and were easy to dismiss as little more than easter eggs for people that were into the viral marketing campaign – little did I know that nonsense is what this game was ultimately built on – but it’s hard to ignore an audio log with information this directly relevant and misaligned to the story of the same game it’s found in. The way Cortana is portrayed in this game feels like she was written by someone who just really didn’t like Cortana in the first place and had no qualms about ignoring consistency for the sake of self satisfaction.

And speaking of different… I get that the story of this game is meant to have a much more interpersonal character-focused angle, particularly in the relationship between Chief and Cortana, but… haven’t they only known each other for like, two weeks at this point? Why did they both suddenly go from being straightforward and efficient battlefield partners to some kind of deeply bonded dysfunctional family unit? Why is Chief all broken up about losing Cortana even though in Halo 2 he left her behind himself and was fine? And aside from Cortana’s temper tantrums, why do other characters throw temper tantrums? Why does a distinguished and decorated commander of the UNSC’s largest ship feel like he has any authority over Chief or anything related to ONI, and why is he such a child about it? Reach was full of melodrama, but at least it was internally consistent, this is just melodrama for the sake of melodrama and feels like a bad TV show. I have seen this game praised for its writing, praised for its characters, praised for Chief and Cortana in particular, praised for its emotional weight… and I can only sit here and wonder if we played the same game.

I didn’t like Reach, but at least it was still Halo. This is not Halo anymore, this is bad fanfiction. If this happened because of Reach, then Reach was a mistake too.

And don’t think I don’t have a lot of complaints aside from the writing. Art direction that looks only marginally better than the CE anniversary graphics filled with so much visual clutter that things – particularly the covenant – are hard to see a lot of the time, weapon and armor designs that are so disgustingly over the top and plastic-y that I probably wouldn’t have even realized this is a Halo game if they were shown to me before I started this journey, enemies redesigned into something much uglier for no good reason, wildly excessive post processing visual effects and particularly egregious screen shake that seriously harms visibility and makes the game exhausting to look at, environment design that goes so pointlessly far over the top with the two things it ever does that it all fades into a uniform mush of forgettable nothingness, level design that’s so one-note I could feel my brain going numb, music that puts me to sleep, sound design that’s simultaneously extremely overdone and incredibly generic to the point that it sounds like everything is three or four stock sound effects on top of each other (seriously, compare the carbine from 2 (original), 3, and 4,) often with a ton of unnecessary and distracting distortion, to the point that the warthog now sounds more like a dirt bike recorded in a closed room with a Turtle Beach microphone, also going so far as to fill the environment with tons of generic “futuristic” sound effects that are beyond unnecessary, making Sentinels sound like electronic fart machines, and even managing to make the Grunts even more generic than Reach already did, and many times more annoying… It truly feels like 343 made a conscious effort to make every wrong choice possible. And for a nice watery icing on this sad cake, I encountered more bugs in just the first three missions of this game than in the entire rest of the collection combined.

I’m not a first person shooter fan, they’re just not my cup of tea, and yet I enjoyed the original trilogy and especially ODST. Reach, while I didn’t enjoy it, was still at least worthy of respect. This game only serves to remind me of everything I hate about typical triple-A games and why typical mass-market first person shooters have negative appeal to me.

343 deciding to include this in the Master Chief Collection feels like a shameless attempt to ride the coattails of what Bungie accomplished without an ounce of respect or effort, like a bold assertion that 343 is not only just as good as Bungie was, but is actually better, and I’m not having it. I don’t have a way to play Halo 5 and I never will, and Halo Infinite never appealed to me because it’s an empty open world game, but after seeing this, I’m even less interested. If I ever end up rekindling that interest in the expanded universe, I better not see any of this nonsense treated with respect in it, because I don’t care what anyone says, this is not Halo to me and I will not treat it as such. And if I do see this in there, I’ll just ignore it. Fanfiction isn’t canon, after all.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-4)

Despite the absolute magnitude of the rock I’ve been living under, even I already knew how this game’s story was going to go. Even if I hadn’t seen it all over the internet already, I’d have known from the references to “remember Reach” in the previous games, particularly ODST. Knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t deter me though, because the experience of actually playing it myself is more important than worrying about whether or not I see a spoiler. Unfortunately…

This is, to me, the Ace Combat Assault Horizon of Halo games.

I cared more about Rookie than Noble Six, and Rookie was 100% silent. I liked Buck more than Carter, and I really didn’t like Buck. A lot of effort went into making these characters deaths, watching them drop one by one, carry emotional weight… and absolutely none of it landed for me. Jorge blows himself up, and it’s business as usual. Kat gets sniped and I am merely reminded that I never cared about her. Carter gets shot off screen so he can do a heroic kamikaze attack that does next to nothing anyway. Emile gets stabbed and… well, at least he yelled a bit and fought back, that was the first interesting character moment in the game. Jun, meanwhile, just flat out disappears because he’s so uninteresting and so unused that he wasn’t even worth killing off I guess.

The characters in all the previous Halo games were interesting because they actually had personalities, and a lot of them were either funny or simply cool. They all had their moments to stand out, and they all had something to pull me in and get me to take an interest and care about them one way or another. Not a single character in Reach has any of that. Everyone is dry, plain, matter of fact, straight business, no nonsense, no emotion, no personality, stale white bread. Kat and Jun being the worst offenders, with voices flatter than cardboard cutouts even among the deadpan cast. Heck, even the nameless expendable AI soldiers in previous games were more likeable than these people.

I get that the story of Reach is a tragedy, but all of Halo is a series of tragedies, so why couldn’t Reach have some levity and personality too? Even the grunts are flat and boring now! Even without changing anything else – and I do most definitely have other issues with this game – just adding some color to the dialogue would have gone a really long way. As it is, the dreary, gray, deadpan presentation from start to finish didn’t just prevent me from caring about a single character, but it also prevented me from caring about the story at all. Can’t get invested in a game that doesn’t appeal. I don’t understand why they felt the need to turn everything so dark and serious and “gritty” in a series known for and built upon… you know, not that.

Now let’s set all of that aside for a moment, because I have another reason that I couldn’t bring myself to care about the story. The pacing. This isn’t just the worst paced campaign in the series so far, it’s shockingly worse. Halo 2 had a huge difficulty spike, and it had its repetitive moments, but it never dragged on for too long (as Chief at least) and it didn’t feel unfair. Reach, however, dragged on for too long in every mission and regularly felt unfair, and I do strongly believe that “unfair” is the correct word to use here, because while I do openly admit to my own lack of skill in FPS games, I also don’t think it’s very nice to drop the player in a room with 20 enemies in it, only to throw in another 20 when you finish, and then another 20 for good measure. It’s just a slog, and one that’s very likely to lead to unexpected deaths when more than one of those enemies are capable of one hit kills, obviously making it even worse.

It feels like fake difficulty, something intended to simply make the game take longer without putting in the actual design work to do it right, even considering the apparent variety in mission types… which is odd, considering that there’s also plenty of plain and simple padding for time. The part where you do space combat should have been awesome, I liked controlling it and I love flight combat, but it goes on for three times longer than I wanted it to, remaining flatly one-note the entire time, and has no element of challenge at all. The part where you fly a helicopter around a city for 20 minutes moving from boring room to boring room to clear on foot, however, was never going to be awesome no matter what they did, and I wish that mission didn’t exist. Missions are also all full of waypoints and objective markers, making an already extremely linear and streamlined game feel even more brain dead.

The gameplay itself also got clunkier. Vehicles, while faster, feel worse to drive, especially the tank which is actually much slower and vastly worse handling than ever before. For some unimaginable reason, there’s a delay on reloading now, so if I do a melee attack and then hit the reload button, it doesn’t happen, I have to wait a whole second after the melee animation ends for the reload button to work. Even if the gun is empty and should automatically reload, it doesn’t happen until a full second after whatever interrupting animation is over. Sprinting was added, which I can only imagine was done as a result of outside pressure to conform with genre trends since Halo had never needed it before and still doesn’t benefit from it now… and sprinting is actually part of a different mechanic, being armor abilities, which also includes things like temporary invincibility, creating a hologram of yourself to draw fire, or shields, and all of these are physical items you have to pick up. The assault rifle is worse than it’s ever been, and the new gun, the DMR, is absurdly powerful, while also being almost completely outclassed by another new gun, the needle rifle, which for some reason is the loudest gun in the game despite being related to the needler, which is anything but loud. The sound design is louder in general, and I don’t mean volume; The increased aggression and grit of most sounds in this game could have made the game feel more impactful by adding punch and weight to your actions, but all it actually succeeds at doing here is making me uncomfortable, because it’s not punchy, it’s all just noisier.

Even the soundtrack fails compared to the previous games. Not because the music is bad, per se, it’s just… boring. So much of it only makes me think of generic war and action scenes, not Halo, and there’s so much more of it than there should be. The amount of time the trilogy spent with no music at all was an equally important aspect of what made their soundtracks so great, and while ODST played music more often, it did so thoughtfully and always set a specific strong tone with it, made even better by the fact that so much of the music was so mellow. In Reach, the tone is pretty much always just “action” with little to nothing else. Most of the times that the soundtrack does try to set a tone is in the death scenes that had no weight to me anyway.

Do you see why I see parallels between Reach and Assault Horizon? Music that’s not bad but definitely isn’t good considering the history, gameplay that’s slightly worse all around with a few questionable-at-best choices for good measure, boring and repetitive pacing made even worse by extended unwanted vehicle segments, and a story that chucks out everything that made other stories in the series great in exchange for something drab and painfully uninteresting, many of these choices likely resulting from external pressures to follow trends rather than focusing on the existing and beloved identity. Broad mass appeal was priority. Call of Duty-ification.

Even with all of that in mind, at least Reach is better for Halo than Assault Horizon was for Ace Combat in one way. I don’t regret playing it. Once. I feel like I learned from it. But I definitely don’t want to play it again.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-reach)

And now for something completely different.

I adore this game.

In the intro of this post, I mentioned that I saw similarities between Metroid Prime and Halo in the past. Playing through the trilogy now, though, made it clear that only a small number of those similarities manage to barely exist in the most surface level way, and aren’t even worth thinking about. Whatever my younger self saw to make that connection wasn’t wrong, but it certainly wasn’t truth. However… the first couple hours of this game made me feel a similar way. Exploring an empty, nearly silent city at night, all alone, outnumbered but not outgunned, exploring and investigating the environment to determine the path forward while utilizing a scan visor to identify objects of interest, and all with delectable atmospheric music playing? It’s a magical feeling.

Playing as an ODST was a very welcome change of pace. Not because Master Chief isn’t cool, but because it’s very apparent that there are plenty of other cool people in this world, and ODSTs are high on the list. They aren’t spartans, and yet they fight like spartans, and honestly, I think they look cooler than spartans. They get cooler gear too, I like the suppressed SMG and I love the suppressed pistol, or should I say, pocket sniper rifle.

The level and encounter design is very well laid out to create a much more weak and vulnerable feeling in the player, even at times encouraging you to sneak around enemies and avoid combat entirely, which is helped even further by your character actually breathing heavily and crying out in pain when they get shot, eventually taking a deep breath after taking cover before the huge red overlay on the screen fades away, which reminds you that these guys are probably the absolute peak of humanity to be able to recover their composure like that even while feeling vulnerable. That feeling of vulnerability remained persistent from start to finish, which is impressive considering that you wipe out effectively an entire small army in that time, and even if the canon isn’t what the gameplay reflects, the rookie survived all alone in a covenant occupied city for an entire night. Romeo survived the whole ordeal and continued to pull his weight as an instrumental part of the team even after getting slammed in the chest with an axe and tearing a slice out of his lung, all he needed was a bit of foam blasted in there.

And speaking of canon, the story of this game is a diamond. I don’t like Buck, and I especially don’t like his interactions with Dare, but that’s all I feel like complaining about. Characters talk a lot, there is a clear sequence of events other than simply killing your way through the game, the perspective of playing detective all night is just sublime, the sub-story told through the terminals is both compelling and actually has a connection to the gameplay… it’s not telling the kind of story that only a video game can tell, but it’s definitely telling a darn good one. I wasn’t just having fun playing a video game like before, I was genuinely enthralled by the things that were unfolding, and especially the way they were framed through flashbacks triggered by the rookie’s investigating.

The moment I got to the data center and saw an alien in there right after the system shut down, realizing that all the security camera footage I saw throughout the game along with the terminals was probably actually shown to the rookie by this guy, only to have my realization confirmed by what Dare said about him? Probably the most satisfying moment I’ve ever gotten from a linear cinematic narrative in a game of this scale. That moment instantly filled my head with tons of “what if” thoughts surrounding the prior events of the story – something none of the previous games even came close to doing – and got me invested enough to catch myself thinking it might be nice to get into the expanded universe sometime. That never happens.

The worst part of this game is that I will never be able to experience it for the first time again.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-odst)

It’s very fitting that the conclusion to the story also happens to be the best game in the trilogy by a country mile. Everything the first two games set up has been nearly perfected here, and somehow they managed to greatly increase the variety of weapons – even to the point of doubling the amount of grenade types – without making any of them feel redundant, overpowered or underpowered, or undesirable. Many weapons also have smaller magazines and less total ammo capacity now, more effectively encouraging the player to really utilize everything at their disposal than the previous games did. All the vehicles feel better, and there are more of them too. Every single level is impeccably designed and contains at least one huge setpiece, and the world design is truly like nothing else. The graphics are pure eye candy compared to before, the art direction is more beautiful than it’s ever been – even if I do hate bloom and think it’s excessive here – and the music reaches a new peak with especially delectable utilization of the main theme’s hook.

The only thing I can complain about is two specific aspects of the sound; One being that the overall volume is quite low, and for no good reason since I can clearly hear things ramming against a limiter when stuff gets loud enough, so it could have been louder not only without issue, but making it louder might have even improved the overall mix a bit. The previous games could be a bit too loud at times, but this is quite an overcorrection. The other sound issue is that voices are way too quiet in the mix, to the point that words are almost entirely inaudible at times, let alone understandable, making subtitles effectively mandatory… and the subtitles don’t even update to show a new line sometimes.

In terms of story, it’s in another league. Still nothing monumental, but the storytelling is so much more compelling here than in the predecessors, and so much more substantial. The cutscenes are all a thrill to watch now too, rather than simply moderately interesting, and they do some heavy lifting to create a much stronger sense of heroism and grandeur than before… even if there are some real dumb lines here and there. I kind of wish the Arbiter and the Elites got more than they did from the story, but knowing that this is a story of humanity, I can accept their relative sidelining and simply enjoy how cool it was to see them cooperate. The pacing of the campaign is also nothing short of perfection this time around, never moving too fast or wasting any time, from opening to conclusion… though I did get lost once or twice and waste a lot of time, but that was on me, not the game. On that topic, the opening gets the action started so fast that it’s – rather amusingly – a nearly seamless continuation from Halo 2’s cliffhanger, and the conclusion is simultaneously powerful and hilarious.

Once I got to the end of the game, I realized that I actually did complete this game on Xbox 360 when I was younger. I have a distinct memory of driving the warthog along that massive field of floating panels and thinking that it was stupid, and… yeah, it’s still kinda stupid, but in a cool and fun way. Oddly, that and the very beginning of the game are the only memories I retained, because every other moment felt completely fresh to me. After finishing the game, I was left with a strange feeling, knowing that I’m about 20 years late to this series and being sure I would have loved it at the time, yet also knowing that I apparently completed at least one of these three titles myself and didn’t remember a thing of value. That said, my memory is infamously full of holes, so maybe I did love it and simply forgot.

I have also well and truly run out of things to say about the game itself, because it’s the third of a trilogy where nothing really changes, it’s just great iteration on the same recipe. That leaves only my feelings to talk about, so I will say this: While playing CE, I was having some fun and loving the atmosphere. While playing 2, I was fascinated by the ambition and the sheer scale of the accomplishment in developing such a game under its circumstances, but admittedly was not having as much fun. While playing 3, for the first time, it truly clicked for me, and I was loving every bit of it. I couldn’t even explain exactly what made me feel that way or why if I tried, all I can tell you is that just by playing these games blind two decades later, I can plainly tell that Halo is special, and Halo 3 is doubly special. Knowing that this is where forge mode was introduced and for how long the entire Xbox community thrived with it at the time only makes that truth even clearer.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-3)

Easy things out of the way first: Battle rifle rules. Dual wielding is rad. The fact that melee attacks lunge you towards the enemy now is rad. The energy sword is rad. The Arbiter is rad. The narrative having so much more to it this time while still keeping it simple is rad. The fact that the game looks and sounds noticeably better even though the first already looked and sounded great is rad. To be clear, I played both on original graphics with original sound and music.

For the most part, this is a plain and simple overall leap forward, which is impressive enough on its own and made several times more impressive when you hear about the abysmal development circumstances that I don’t feel like talking about here. It is, however, just an iteration. A very good iteration, yes, but there is truly not much to talk about when so much can be boiled down to “it’s like the thing from the first game but better” so often.

With that out of the way, there are unfortunately some sore spots. My biggest problem with Halo 2 is the one area that saw a big step back compared to the first game: Downtime. The amount of downtime in the first game was unexpected, but it was well used and created a better experience. Meanwhile, in Halo 2, you get to spend an entire five minutes standing still on an elevator doing nothing at all, watching it go down one floor at a time, on a supposedly time-sensitive mission… and this is your introduction to playing as the Arbiter. I don’t know the history and don’t care to look it up so I could be wrong, but I know how much people hated Raiden in MGS2 for not being Snake, so I imagine there may have been a lot of people who hated the Arbiter for not being Chief, and being introduced to him like this definitely wouldn’t have helped. But, it’s not just him either, an even earlier part of the game sees you spend practically the entire length of the mission just driving a tank in what is effectively a straight line.

I also don’t usually complain about this kind of thing, but there was a big difficulty jump between this and the first game, and I wasn’t ready for it. Thankfully, checkpoints are still generous and respawn times are still short with no loading, but man, I did a lot of dying. I play too headstrong stupidly aggressively for shooters like this that require taking cover and such. Fortunately for me, there is a lot of ground that can simply be skipped. I ran past a lot of enemies without fighting them, and given how long some encounters seemed to feel, I think I could have ran past more than I did and saved myself the trouble. This isn’t exactly a good thing though, especially not when compared to the first game with level design as tight as it was.

And of course, this game ends with one of the most painful cliffhangers in all of video games, up there with Half-Life 2 Episode 2, but on the other end of the emotional spectrum. A cliffhanger I had only ever heard of through memes, so through some miracle, I have lived under a big enough rock up to this point that I didn’t actually know it was coming, and I was very, very confused. Considering the development, I can’t hold it against them now, in retrospect, but if this was one of my childhood games, I probably would have had a Heated Gamer Moment™ at the TV and remained upset for years. Chief’s arc goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing thanks to that ending, and Arbiter’s arc is painful to start and then seemingly turns around off screen. At least there is some comfort in knowing that the developers were themselves hugely pained and ashamed that they had to end it like this. They wished it could have been different no less than any of the players might have.

As much as Halo 2 is so many steps forward from CE, I don’t think I want to play it again any time soon. Maybe it’s worth playing one more time with the anniversary graphics after I learn to suck less, but that’s probably it for me.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-2)

This game is over two decades old and it holds up perfectly well today, on all fronts. If what I’ve heard about some more modern shooter campaigns is true, then this even stands above some of them despite its age. Beyond impressive, that. Though, that may just be my strange born-in-the-wrong-generation taste speaking, because there are a handful of old games I’ve discovered long after their popularity and love faded, unable to understand what so many other people in my age group may be complaining about. I am often unbothered by antiquated game design, except when it outright wastes my time or harms the game.

This isn’t coming from a place of absolute unfamiliarity with FPS games either. They’ve never been my favorite, but I’ve played enough of them, including some modern ones, to have a decent idea of what makes them fun to people who aren’t sweaty. Not being able to aim down sights in this game stuck out to me, but I’ve never been a fan of that mechanic anyway since it’s so often used not to increase accuracy further, but to bring it up to a reasonable standard, simultaneously making hip fire feel worse and adding a second action to what should only take one. The lack of a sprint button also sticks out, but I still can’t complain because the movement speed is fine and the game was designed around it. Movement and especially jumping is very floaty, but I still feel like I’m in complete control, so I don’t care.

Even if I didn’t already know just how unfathomably influential this game was on the industry when it came out, I would probably be able to assume it was as such by playing through it normally. I’m playing this at a resolution that people in 2001 couldn’t even dream of, and the MCC apparently has “enhanced” graphical fidelity somehow, these facts are not lost on me… but it looks so great! The age is showing, yes, obviously, but it has aged much better than many games of the time. Objects and textures definitely lack the kind of detail that newer games have, but the anniversary graphics prove very well that detail can sometimes do more harm than good, because by “updating” the look of the game, they increased the detail while also completely destroying every other aspect of the visuals. This game has a lot of atmosphere, just in the look. It conveys a lot purely through visuals and takes great advantage of darkness, both more effectively than many newer games I’ve played. It does all of that while also maintaining incredible visual clarity, another thing many newer games struggle with. Important things are bright and obvious, enemies are all brightly colored and extremely visually distinct from the environment, friendlies, and other enemies. Nothing ever gets lost in a mess of visual noise, because everything visible is simple and has simple purpose.

The atmosphere is already established as excellent and I haven’t even mentioned the music and sound design yet. Ambient noises are ever present and fully sell the atmosphere of whatever location you’re in at the time, which is great considering how much time the game spends with no music playing. When the music does play… it’s always perfect for the situation as it responds dynamically to the action, it hits hard even when the action isn’t there, it never fails to create a strong feeling, and it’s always exactly what they wanted players to feel. The people behind this soundtrack have their fingers in my brain and I think I’m okay with that. I could probably say more, but do I really need to? You don’t have to know anything about Halo or video games in general to know that Halo has good music, it’s a fact that is omnipresent. On earth, at least. Anybody who doesn’t know that the Halo soundtrack is really really good is an alien. Any aliens reading this, now you know how to better stay hidden among the humans, I got you covered.

The campaign itself is structured so nicely too, both in terms of gameplay and narrative. What surprised me the most was the amount of downtime there was. The game goes to great lengths to ensure that you’re never overwhelmed or fatigued by nonstop action, but also never bored by extended downtime. The total length of the campaign from start to finish is also right in the sweet spot, striking an impressive balance between taking its time and keeping it simple. Enemies are also more than just visually distinct, they are tactically distinct; Sometimes plasma weapons are the best bet, other times it’s a shotgun, some require you to get up close, others require distance. Enemies are also very well placed on the maps, always in just the right spots in just the right numbers to create a challenging experience and support the atmosphere that has been set.

On the narrative side, the majority of the storytelling is environmental and interactive, focusing more on creating a specific mood than compelling narration, conveying a story in the way only a video game can, and I loved every second of it. The story itself is pretty barebones and a bit silly at times, but I don’t care, the presentation is what matters most here and it does not disappoint. I was not expecting the introduction to the flood to be as tense as it was, considering the tone prior to that point. I also love the charm baked into all the characters. Marines that bicker about kill stealing and mock the enemy, grunts that scream and flee in terror if you kill an elite, or run towards their allies if you stick a grenade to them while doing so to an elite will cause them to charge at you instead… it’s so little, but it adds a lot.

None of this is to say or even imply that the game is without flaw. It may have changed the industry forever, but causing a revolution is not what makes a masterpiece. There were some areas that felt pretty repetitive, clearly padding for time. There were missing sound effects here and there. Many of the guns have an insanely wide firing pattern even at very close range – including the sniper rifle! – which is a pain to deal with on mouse and keyboard where aim assist is disabled. There are some enemies that felt a little cheap, since they could kill me in one hit with an energy sword or a rocket before I even knew they were there. Everything looks extremely similar while indoors too, so I had a hard time navigating in some places, even when the way forward was marked with a mysterious flashing light. Being the first in the series means that there was a lot of experimentation happening, and a lot yet to be figured out, and considering the time period and development circumstances, there were also hardware limitations to work around, so flaws and missteps are to be expected, but I do believe that the relatively small amount of them is impressively less than I would reasonably expect. I also suck at FPS games and died a lot in the later hours, but at least that exposed another quality of the game, being the frequent checkpoints and extremely fast respawn times getting me straight back into it without so much as a fade to black, let alone a loading screen.

I enjoyed Halo CE more than I expected, and may even play it again sooner rather than later.

Also, the assault rifle sucks.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-1)

I played this game in early access in the middle of 2022. Me playing any early access game is rare enough, there are apparently 29 games in my Steam library that were once in early access, only four of which being games I purchased myself during that time, and Sanabi was not one of those. A friend gifted it to me and simply said "you need to play this" and so I did. Version 1.0.11 already had me completely hooked, and I could tell right away that this was going to be an incredible game when it was finished. So, after getting to the end of the demo, I put it down and patiently waited. Eventually I forgot about it, because when it finally came out on November 8th of 2023, I didn't realize it happened until it was almost December, and by the time I got around to playing it properly, it had already seen several more patches... including the addition of a speedrun mode. That's how you know it's really a gem.

A certain rule of thumb has existed in the back of my brain for many years now. "If the game has a grappling hook that isn't a quicktime event, it's probably an amazing game." Hasn't failed me yet. Well, not only does Sanabi have a grappling hook, the grappling hook is the core of the gameplay. A 2D platformer built entirely around swinging with a grappling hook and using enemies as single-use springboards is a game made specifically for me, but also a dangerous concept, since it relies heavily on the controls feeling consistent, predictable, and extremely good. The player needs to always simultaneously feel fully in control, and on the razor's edge of control. Not an easy balance to achieve.

But thankfully, it's fully achieved here, even managing to never become frustrating because the incredible clarity of the controls makes it impossible to blame the game for a skill issue. Not that you'd be doing that very often anyway, however, because even when you're not playing well, flying around the map like Captain Korea still always looks and feels cool. The game only loses its footing for a moment in the later stages, because one of the cool setpieces feels really clunky compared to the rest of the game and overstays its welcome, but I find that easy to overlook since it only happens once. It's even easier to look past that hiccup when considering the sheer rush of dopamine the final chapter gives you, rushing through the game at full power feeling like a god. I'd be singing this game's praises even if it was just a platformer with nothing else of note to offer.

But simply building the entire game around perfect controls wasn't enough. They had everything, and needed more.

Sanabi is a visually breathtaking game that bleeds style no matter where you look, with another level of visual beauty added through the extremely expressive and stylish character animations, all well beyond any reasonable expectations for a team of this size - only five people, and starting out as college students no less - to produce. Sound design is also wonderfully chunky and crisp, adding a lot of weight to the already weighty visuals, and even notably improved since the early access build I originally played.

The original soundtrack is beyond perfect for the game as well, fitting flawlessly into every scene and elevating the experience greatly while also being simply fantastic music on its own, to the point that I will probably be listening to this soundtrack outside of the game from time to time - as music to lose myself in, not just background sound - which is something I do so rarely with games that I didn't even have a top five until now; Jet Lancer, Hypnagogia: Boundless Dreams, Doom 2016, Iridion II, and now Sanabi... and it takes position 2 in that list.

Games like this aren't expected to have much, if any, narrative either. Nobody would have complained if Sanabi didn't have a storyline, all it really needed was to say that a bad thing happened and you're going in to fix it. But of course, that wasn't enough for Wonder Potion. The story of Sanabi is more than simply present, it's compelling enough, interesting enough, and charming. It's not exactly revolutionary, but that doesn't matter, it's way better than it ever needed to be - much better than the disgraceful writing of some triple-A games that get showered with praise - and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

As I played, I figured out most of the reveals before they came to pass, but from what I've seen online, a lot of people didn't, and even if you do see things coming like I did, getting to the end still makes the second playthrough feel pretty different, so I can't even say predictability is a caveat here. The only real caveat is that towards the end of the game (but not at the end, pretty much just in chapter 4), the translation quality dips, and it can be a little jarring, occasionally causing me to need to reread lines... but I can't get mad at that. Oddly, the focus on the story seems a little controversial, because The Gamers™ hate reading and cutscenes in 2D platformers, even when it's as good as this.

Fortunately for them, they only have to deal with it once, because once you see the true ending of the game - continue the game if you went downstairs - speedrun mode is unlocked. No dialogue, no cutscenes, no boss fights, no loading screens, no fades to black, just a straightforward run through each chapter with nothing to distract you from the incredibly fun flow of swinging through levels quickly. Every time you complete a chapter in speedrun mode, the game kicks back to the title screen instead of back to the speedrun menu, which is unfortunate and annoying, but livable considering how fun it is to run through each chapter nonstop. I'll call it an enforced moment of respite. My first attempt ended up at a total time of 1:11:20, which felt pretty slow to me and did a very good job of showing me just how much I still have to learn, especially since I then found out the current record on speedrun.com at that time was 25:58. I will definitely be coming back to this for a long time.

The more I like a thing, the less I usually have to say about it. I've said as much as I can think of at this point, I don't know how to dig deeper into the details about why this game is so fantastic or what makes it feel so amazing to play. So just trust me bro. I'll close with this.

Wonder Potion had everything they needed and chose to go well above and beyond for the sake of their vision. The result is something to be very proud of, and I applaud them. Sanabi is absolutely one of the best games I've played, and an all time favorite.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/when-control-is-everything-and-everything-isnt-enough/)

As a concept, I both love and hate this. Hate, because even when presented as a joke or parody or what have you, terminally online behavior is repulsive to me, and especially streamer culture. Love, because I think the sheer depravity is funny.

In practice... I just don't get it. The first ending I got was the normie ending, which was pretty funny, and there were a couple other times that the game honestly made me laugh, but I quickly got bored and a little frustrated. There are 27 endings in this thing, and a few of them are really easy to trigger on accident while others have incredibly specific requirements, so sometimes even doing everything right for one ending will net you the wrong one because you ran out of time or incidentally triggered something else, forcing you to watch the sequence before you can reload. On top of that, out of the few endings I got, only a couple of them were interesting, so I well and truly lost interest in seeing the others myself when I could just look them up. I AM LEGEND was really funny though, funnier than it should have been when I got it. So is the one where everyone goes outside.

What really doesn't land for me, though, is the psychological aspect. The game even warns you that it might be bad for your mental health when it starts up, so clearly some parts of the game are intended to unsettle more than to be funny, but I never felt that. I only ever saw a dark parody in this game, no drama or horror. Doki Doki Literature Club this is most definitely not, despite being presented to me as similar by a few people. Honestly, the most uncomfortable part of the game for me was the audio, because the music can get really grating (though that is tonally appropriate and it perfectly fits the unhinged theme of the game, so this isn't a criticism,) and the effects that happen to the sound are sometimes painful, though that could just be me.

The horror element never unsettled me, the psychological element bounced right off me, I never felt sorrow or pity or what have you for the girl, I just felt completely and totally detached from the whole experience, only able to find humor here and there because no more substance materialized. After the humor wore off, there was nothing left to feel, and at that point, the horror became more annoying than anything else, given how abrupt and misplaced it occasionally seemed.

Am... am I the problem? Hmm. This might say more about me than it says about the game.

Regardless, it's good, just not for me. A million sales says it's worth a look. Plenty of cool fanart too.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/grab-bag-4/#needy-streamer-overload)

I remember when this game was new, and it was the most innovative shooter I'd seen in years. Don't think I played it since then, though, and revisiting it today, it's still an innovative concept, but with very little substance in the game itself. It's basically a fleshed out tech demo to showcase the concept of time that only moves when you move... which is fine, because that's a great concept and it's great to play. I beat it in an hour.

The story in the tutorial certainly exists, and the years have not been kind to it. At the time, I was enthralled by this game, the vague themes were enough for me to feel something and get drawn in, genuinely wanting nothing more than to keep playing, much like the player character. But once you know what to expect, and now that so many other games exist that take these vague themes and expand them into entire actual narratives, it feels a little silly. Quaint, even. But I still enjoy it. Getting past that, however, is where the real game is. Challenge mode and endless mode are way more fun than the tutorial, and I'm sure I'll keep revisiting those every now and then. I beat the katana-only challenge in another hour, and the speedrun challenge modes really caught my eye, because this game is a speedrunning dream.

Probably the most interesting part of this whole concept, though, is how well it was adapted into VR. The desktop game is great fun, but the VR game is an incredible feeling that still makes me feel that same magic as I did in 2016, even after the VR freshness wore off for me long ago. It's truly the same game, but the added dimension of interactivity changes everything. I just wish throwing things was easier.

There is nothing more I can say about this game that hasn't already been said. It's worth playing if you haven't already. I have to play MIND CONTROL DELETE eventually since I got it for free anyway.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/grab-bag-4/#superhot-vr)

Finally, I get to play the game I most wanted to play. The opportunity to confront my own nostalgia once again and see if a game I love holds up to my memories. I've done this before, and it has turned out rather poorly almost every time. I am pleased to report that this is not the case for GRID.

Moment one, the interface the game presents to you fully sets the tone for the rest of the game. Its visual style, audio style, and musical style all perfectly encapsulate the atmosphere of the rest of the game, and being a 3D menu, it's a joy to look at. Then it sends you to the main menu instead of dropping you straight into a race like so many other games, which I hugely appreciate since it allows me to actually set up my controls before seeing a car on screen. Press the button to start the game, then it drops you straight in, as all games should.

The first race has you in a gray Viper on the streets of San Francisco, a fast car on a technical track, but not too fast or too technical. The game wants you to feel afraid, like you're barely in control, which is further aided by the fact that there are several jumps on this track. One lap, and you're done. It doesn't matter where you finished, you just needed to finish for the game to open up to you. After that, you're introduced to your garage - which is actually the main menu - and the ability to race for other teams, which you need to do so you can make enough money to restore a classic Mustang that's been set up for you. These offers from other teams immediately demonstrate the variety on offer in this game and give you a chance to get a feel for some new things, but before too long, you've made your money, you've got your Mustang, and now you have your own team with your own livery and sponsors.

Once you have your team, you gain access to the real game. You see all the different leagues - USA, Europe, and Japan - open up for you, and your Mustang qualifies for one event in each. The paychecks for these events are much higher than you got before, allowing you to quite quickly build up a large garage and be able to race in more and more event types. Win enough races in a league, you unlock the next level of that league. Win all the races in a league...

In one of these leagues, you are introduced early to Ravenwest. The team behind that sleek gray livery on the Viper you got to drive in the beginning of the game, the livery that looks so much more imposing than any other team. Over the radio, unlike every other race, you are told with a reluctant, even slightly fearful delivery to simply do your best, because that's all you can do against them. They're world class. Sure enough, they are far more difficult than any other opponents you've faced, entirely in a league of their own. When a racing game creates difficulty by making one or two opponents way faster than the rest, it usually sucks, but when you frame that gap as an actual in-universe skill gap, it becomes compelling. If you win all the races in a league, you unlock a one-on-one race against a member of this team, and the reward for winning is astronomically high compared to any other event. They have been firmly established as the rivals to beat, their cars stand out compared to any other in the game, they are ever-present from start to finish, and they make you work to win. But of course, they never speak, they have no faces, the only personality you can assign to them is what you see on track. This is why I call them iconic. If you've played this game, particularly if you played it when you were young and less than a perfect driver, you remember the fear of facing the most difficult opponents in the game and how amazing it felt every time you managed to beat them. You remember Ravenwest as an icon of glory. A name that stands above all the rest. Maybe you even remember them as something above you, despite being second place by the time you finished. I know I did, I projected a lot of admiration onto that faceless team when I was young.

This is all excellent presentation, but that's not the end of it. Every single opponent is a consistently reoccurring name, and they're all members of their own teams, many of them based on real teams, and each with its own unique and good looking livery. They all have their own specialties, many of them have identifiable driving styles, and they all exist on the same leaderboards as you, always reminding you that they exist during your quest to reach the top. Not only that, but you also have the ability to hire all of them to drive for you instead. Every name on the leaderboard can be hired if you have the money they want and the reputation they expect, and they all have different skill sets. In races, when someone spins out or crashes, you're also very likely to hear their names spoken verbally to you, either over the radio or by an announcer. It may not be much, but combined with the rest of the game's presentation and atmosphere, it really ties the bow on top of the immersive package. And that's before considering the great soundtrack, or how tense races begin to feel whenever the in-race music kicks in, or the fact that the crowd noise actually makes sense and only comes from places where there are crowds. Also, mercifully, there are no air horns in the crowd here.

But for me, the best part of the presentation by a humongous margin is the fact that this is a racing game about racing. That's all. Just racing. Motorsport is the draw, motorsport is the cool factor, motorsport is the thing that you're playing for, and motorsport is the only thing you're getting. No clout chasing, no media breaks, no interviews, no public image, no fans, no corporate interest, nothing. Just. Racing. And it's enough! GRID isn't just a driving game to pick up and put down whenever and not think about, it's a genuinely compelling single player experience, without adding any extra maddening nonsense, because surprise surprise, racing is cool, and it doesn't need to be juiced up with gimmicks to be compelling. The only thing close to a gimmick here is the money, because you have to keep earning more and the woman in the menu always talks about how much money you're making, but I don't mind that, because it's your money for your team that you earn by winning races, there is no extra nonsense putting undue focus on the money.

I haven't even talked about the gameplay yet, and we've already identified the biggest problem with every GRID game that came after this one. This is what made us love GRID. Nobody was playing GRID because they wanted to feel like they're famous, or to pretend they're playing with the rich kids, we all played GRID because we enjoyed the feeling of being an up-and-coming independent racing driver, and that's all. No nonsense, it's a compelling single player experience that delivers the independent racing driver fantasy, and nothing else. This is the identity that the later games abandoned. This is the identity that GRID 2 threw away so it could poison the franchise with all the gimmicks that GRID was better off without.

So, the gameplay then. The pattern continues, because not only does this game present itself completely differently from the rest of the franchise, it also feels completely different. Cars are still prone to oversteer and they feel a bit floaty, yes, but the cars also all have weight to them, and in spite of the slipperiness, tons more grip than any of the later games. The handling here is tuned specifically for thrills, because the fast and loose handling combined with high grip, high slip angles, and weighty cars, makes for races where you feel like you're on the edge of control all the time. It's one of the most mechanically satisfying handling models in any pseudo-realistic racing game I've ever played. Sure, hardcore simulators will be more satisfying in their own way, and wild arcade racers where the vehicles may not even have wheels and travel at 500 miles an hour will definitely be more satisfying in the fast fun factor, but GRID, I think, is the best combination of those two extremes. The cars still handle like cars and come with all the same challenges, but with just enough silliness on top to keep you on your toes and smiling all the time, while also being simple enough to avoid being taken seriously and taking away from the pure fun of it. Only adding to that fun factor is that every car has its own unique driving feel, so picking your favorites is more than just a cosmetic choice. Some people, both past and present, complain that the car selection is a bit sparse for this game, but considering how good they all feel and the fact that they're all actually unique unlike so many other games, particularly from this time, I can't accept that criticism.

There is only one caveat to the handling model. Don't turn the assists off. It doesn't make the game more challenging, driving without assists in GRID will not make you faster, and it will not make you look cooler or feel better about yourself. Turning the assists off makes the game feel downright awful. The options shouldn't even exist, if you ask me. My first reflex in most racing games is to turn off all assists, because usually I prefer that, but all it did here was spoil my first few races, and had me thinking that something was deeply wrong.

The track variety in GRID is also excellent, having a lot more actual race circuits than the sequel, better race circuits than the sequel, vastly more variety within those circuits than the sequel, and vastly more interesting street circuits than the sequel due to the fact that each one is actually hand crafted and has extremely distinct character to differentiate them from each other instead of being built out of generic blocks in a sea of boring architecture. Who would have guessed that a racing game about racing would focus more on, you know, good race tracks? One of the circuits happens to be Circuit de la Sarthe, which GRID will make you very familiar with as you are given the opportunity to compete in a condensed, 12 minute version of the 24 Hours of Le Mans at the end of each season, complete with a day-night-day cycle on fast forward and a wonderfully over the top piece of music that starts playing near the end of the race and builds tension until finally reaching the crescendo when the race ends, which is great fun... but it does happen a lot, so I'm happy the option to skip that race is also available.

The fact that a 24 hour race is condensed down to 12 minutes should also make abundantly clear just how fast paced this game is. Aside from that admittedly frequent event, it is very rare to have a race last more than four minutes in GRID. Each event in a league consists of multiple rounds, so the very short races keep things quick and varied, never giving you the chance to get bored as you are continuously rapidly shuffled across regions and car types. The only way to stagnate is to specifically seek out the same race types over and over again. A few event types do last a bit longer than others due to having more rounds, like the knockout tournament events, but to compensate, each round is shorter, so the total event time is only slightly longer if that. And even with all of that said, you can still choose to quit at any time in the middle of an event, then resume later. The whole game is designed to keep things moving with fast action at all times, always keeping the fun factor maximized while delivering the racing fantasy in an effective way, while also truly respecting your time and allowing you to put it down whenever you want without consequence. You bought the game, and the game is here simply to please you, not to monopolize your attention. Refreshing.

There are more positives I could talk about, but I don't think they're particularly important, and I could probably go into more depth about a lot of what I said, but I believe my point is made. The game is great, unquestionably the best in the franchise. But that's not to say it is without its flaws. There are a lot of little things that could have been better, small details that could have added more, nitpicks here and there, but I'm not going to bother talking about any of those because none of them are important either, they didn't detract from my experience at all. Only two major flaws did, so that's all you get.

Obviously this game has an intense yellow filter, because of course it would, every game from this time did that. I hate it... but not nearly as much as I thought I would. Yellow filters make games look worse and cause environments to blend together into a bland indistinguishable mess, sure... but in GRID, they didn't just put on a gross filter, they leaned all the way into it. The filter in this game is actually part of its style, and it's treated as such, so all of the different environments still manage to stand out from one another despite being forced to share such similar colors, which I think is a testament to excellent design work on the tracks themselves. It would still absolutely look better without the filter, all games do, but I can live with this one considering how much work went into making this game work with it.

The biggest problem I have with GRID in the present day is definitely the difficulty. This game is very, very easy. Even against Ravenwest, I had pretty much no trouble. Growing up and getting good at things took a little bit of fun away. Now, I am definitely pretty good at racing games, but I'm nowhere near pro level, and I struggle to imagine my skill level being considered much more than "decently above average" at the best of times. My skill level is one shared by many, many people, quite the sizable audience I'd like to think, and the hardest difficulty in GRID is nowhere near enough to challenge it. I do appreciate the availability of easier options, and in this case, the lowest difficulty likely makes this game accessible to even the most casual of racing fans... but I wish there were more options higher up. It's a lot of fun to simply play the game thanks to how mechanically satisfying it is, sure, but I must admit that I sometimes miss the feeling of actually racing in a racing game. This complaint probably sounds like a humble brag to someone, and to that person I say play the game and see for yourself.

And that's the conclusion. Play this game. I don't care whether or not you've played GRID in the past, I'm telling you to play it now. Pick it up, download it by any means necessary, do whatever it takes to get this game and play it. Not only do I wish for more people to experience this game and see what a good, well crafted, well thought out, very well presented racing game - not a sim, a game - should be like, or because I want to prove that a racing game doesn't need annoying gimmicks to be compelling... I just think it's a good game and you deserve to have fun with it.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#grid)

Before I start talking about this game itself, there are two things I must front load you with.

Firstly, this game looks, sounds, and feels better in all regards compared to GRID Autosport, a game that's... only a year younger. The poly count is even noticeably higher in this game than its sequel. However, I did quickly notice that a shocking amount of this game is the same as Autosport. Menu presentation, the loading icon, the interface, the way flashbacks work, the big focus on sponsors, a lot of the same sounds, even parts of the handling model. Thing is, while all those things are the same, Autosport does them all far worse, which only makes me believe even more strongly that Autosport truly was nothing but a rushed mobile game published on every platform, built upon the gutted, downgraded, poorly repurposed and cobbled together remains of GRID 2. What a disgrace Autosport was.

And rather distressingly, I apparently had nearly 20 hours in this game before picking it back up, and the last time I played it was in 2015. That seems like more than enough time to come to a final conclusion without jumping the gun, which led me to think my preconceived notion that this game was bad, was right. Looking at the two games on Metacritic out of morbid curiosity and seeing that Autosport has an absolutely undeserved user score of 8.3 from 63 ratings while GRID 2 has only 5.9 from 658 ratings only added to the dread I felt, though the metascores were basically the same.

Now that the stage has been set, I can tell you why GRID 2 is a fine game.

Look at how far down you've scrolled on this page, how many games have been covered already. Look at how many games are between this and DIRT 2. Out of all those games, this is the game with the most personality, second only to DIRT 2 of course. 220 hours of gameplay between then and now, all spent in games with either zero personality or a sterile TV-friendly type of personality that may be immersive in F1, but is not appealing. This game has a strong personality, which was very refreshing after that long without one. Not only that, but it also has a clear identity in its overall presentation, and it has a clear stylistic direction. Everything about the game is built cohesively around one core concept - essentially taking over the world motorsport scene - it all feeds back into itself, and the result is a game that cannot be easily mistaken for any other. It helps that there's also a soundtrack in the game that is good, has more than three songs in it, and is actually present so you can... you know... hear it, ever. I really like the way the menus are presented through the garage you... live in? between races, and I especially like that this presentation changes as you progress in the game.

That's another thing this game actually does, unlike almost everything else I've played so far: Progression. It ain't deep, but GRID 2 sets you on a clear upward trajectory instead of hand waving the problem away and saying "do whatever you want" like certain games, or simply not providing any positive feedback for progress other than "great job, you won!" as you move through your options. You start in a given region, must perform well against a club to unlock the ability to continue racing them and start racing other clubs, then perform well in enough of those races to unlock the world series for the region, perform well there, and move on to the next season, ultimately replacing clubs with the new empire you created by beating them. All the while, the disembodied voices are telling you about the progress you're making and other things to do, and while it does get repetitive, it's varied and contextual enough to feel more like part of a reward than an empty affirmation. That's all it needs.

Surprisingly, the handling is also pretty satisfying here. All the cars drift, and drifting is always the fastest way around any corner, even if the handling style of your car says "grip" and even if it's front wheel drive. No matter how grippy the car realistically should be, it drifts. The handling model is also very loose and has a lot of inertia, so cars will turn in harder than you might expect, are prone to oversteer, and will continue in a direction for a bit after you straighten the steering. Even when you're not drifting, you're still drifting, because cars all have such an absurd amount of slip in all turns that you leave four distinct skid marks behind you while taking a high speed corner without trying to drift at all. That's just what "grip" means in GRID 2. This is clearly designed with a casual audience in mind, the kind of person that just wants some quick thrilling action, and that's okay, fun is fun.

I complained about the same behavior in Autosport, but there's a key difference between these two games, and it is that in this one, it's actually controlled. Despite always being sideways, I know where the car is going, I know what it's going to do, and I can respond accordingly without feeling like the game is ignoring me or the grip level is unpredictable, when it's working. It was designed this way purposefully, while the Autosport implementation was a haphazard rehashing in a seemingly desperate attempt to "fix" it after the backlash this game apparently received. I might have been part of that backlash, I wish I remembered my thoughts from back then to be sure, but today, I don't understand it. The handling is not realistic, and I definitely understand that many people prefer grippy cars over drifty ones, because that's me, I prefer that... but this is still fun to play, it's still well crafted. It's designed tightly enough for the player to always be in control to the best of their ability, but loosely enough to help the player always feel like they're on the edge of control, which, if you ask me, is probably the most satisfying feeling in a racing game when it's true, and the fact that the game actually has some sense of speed can only help matters. When the racing is close, this all makes it feel decently intense, especially in the few races where the soundtrack kicks in for the final stretch.

So overall, I absolutely think GRID 2 is a fine, well made, satisfying, fun, casual game. For about two hours.

See, despite everything, a satisfying driving experience and a decent level of single player progression is not enough to make a great game. GRID 2 falls apart in its content, because there is so little of it, really. Tracks repeat themselves often, which is normal and expected in a track racing game, but this game is mostly street racing, and there are apparently only two or three street courses for each region, making every single race feel even more homogeneous and stale than they already do thanks to the identical nondescript architecture that never changes and the complete lack of any memorable setpieces, since what they do have only blends into the same mass of forgettable blandness.

Making things worse is the introduction of "live races", which are misleadingly presented in-game as events where the track can change unpredictably during the race... which could be cool. The problem is that they aren't that, they're predetermined, maybe procedurally generated tracks that are made out of blocks from each city map, but to try and sell the illusion, the minimap is disabled. Wikipedia even gets that wrong and perpetuates the misleading presentation the game gives you. Unfortunately, the illusion is destroyed after your very first one, because after finishing almost any race, the game presents you with the online leaderboard for that race, which obviously wouldn't be possible if the tracks were truly dynamic, so the only thing that "live events" accomplish is fully exposing the lifeless nature of the streets in this game, since everything is made of just a few homogeneous, repetitive blocks that you will often see more than once in the same race, just like DIRT 4.

One would hope that the real tracks would at least then be the saving grace of the game, but no, unfortunately they only expose the limits of the otherwise satisfying handling. While there is some sense of speed on the streets, the tracks are all too big and wide for all but the fastest cars to actually feel fast, and the game forces you to keep driving the slower cars for far too long. On top of that, the slippery driving absolutely does not suit technical circuits, particularly in tight sequences of corners, because on one hand, grip being the slower method of driving means that you take turns slower than you should, and on the other hand, even though drifting is the fastest way around corners, it is very finicky about transitioning between corners quickly, so both options feel bad. It only starts to come together into something fun again after slogging through a lot of the same bland city streets and unsatisfying low tier tracks races. By the time I finally got to the point where the game gave me faster cars, the races had also become much longer and more numerous, so even if there was fun to be had with the faster cars, I was too sick of the game to find out.

Even though I praised the game for having progression, I unfortunately must also complain about the nature of it, because it's one of the methods I hate most. You're not racing to succeed as a team - you don't even have a team - you're not really racing to win the series, you're not really working your way up from the bottom to be the champion of anything... you're just trying to get famous. Your one and only metric of progress? Fans. Winning races gives you more fans. Sponsors pay you with more fans. Getting to the next series doesn't truly require certain wins, it just requires enough fans. Almost everything the disembodies voices say has something to do with fans. Every race is full of crowd noise and endless air horns, no matter where you are or what you're doing. Dear god, the air horns. You can hear bystanders yelling things like "that was awesome" and such as you go by. Major milestones are rewarded with ESPN SportsCenter talking about how cool and famous you are, the "superstar". Racing isn't cool enough, nobody really cares about racing, it's all about the clout, racing is just the vehicle with which to achieve more clout, clearly that's what motorsport is. The only thing worse than this to me is heavily corporate garbage, though this game isn't far from that either since the voices also love to remind you about the importance of sponsors, and the entire premise of the game is that you won a street race once and a rich dude liked the YouTube video and "invested" in you.

The fact that you're being supported by an investor is also the justification for getting everything for free, which kneecaps the already minimal progression. Money doesn't exist. Whenever there's an upcoming race that you don't have a car for, you get to pick one for free, and if you want the other one, just win a different race and now you have both. There is no value in anything, nothing to work for, only the next race and a bigger number. It's even worse if you own any DLC, because you simply get all the DLC cars instantly, causing you to start the game with a half full garage. A garage, mind you, that you never have full choice of, because every event has entirely arbitrary and often completely nonsensical limited car choices for you that do not apply the same way to your opponents. Too many times, I was not given the choice to drive the car I really wanted to drive, only to find that one or more of the opponents in a race do get to drive the car I wanted.

And to top off the major caveats, I have yet to mention the three strikes against the handling model that I otherwise liked.

Strike one: Bumps mean all bets are off. All notion of predictability and controllability go out the window if you hit a bump, pop a wheel onto a curb, drop a wheel into the ditch, or even just trying to drive normally if the road undulates just a little too much. The amount of camera shake at these times can get downright egregious, which doesn't help matters.

Strike two: Opponents are immovable objects, and they rarely seem to be aware you exist. They will often cut you off, drive into you, or just tap you a little bit at the least convenient time, all of which will cause you to lose control for a moment, only allowing you to recover if you're lucky enough. Pit maneuvers don't even work, they make you spin instead. Worse still, prolonged contact with an AI driver - which happens often through long corners when you're still trying to make it through the pack - takes almost all control away from you, to the point that even if you're both steering in the right direction and by all means should be able to make it through the corner, the fact that your cars are touching sends you both careening straight forward into the outside wall.

Strike three: Hilariously, painfully, bafflingly, impressively, ridiculously, unfathomably, ironically... how many more adverbs can I use here? In this game with its handling designed specifically to make every car drift all the time, and for drifting to be smooth, easily controllable, and satisfying... the dedicated drift events feel terrible. I genuinely cannot understand how this happened. The handling model changes ever so slightly in drift events and makes the car less predictable, less controllable, much more prone to spinning, feel slower and seriously underpowered, and makes it downright impossible to transition from corner to corner as if that wasn't hard enough already when the drifting worked, which also makes the absolutely nonsensically placed clipping points extremely difficult to actually drift close to. But most confusingly of all... it feels like in drift events, traction control gets turned on, while it's clearly off in the rest of the game. In many corners, even when I clearly had more than enough speed, my car still slowed to a crawl with only mild angle. I have never been unable to drift smoothly in a racing game that allows it, particularly ones with dedicated drift events, drifting is my thing, but I truly can't do it here.

For all the good this game does, it equally botches it all. The game is fundamentally fun, but can't sustain itself for more than short play sessions, requires a level of ignorance for even that to stay fun for long, and has a few glaring inconsistencies that kill the fun early when they rear their ugly heads. I haven't even mentioned the stupid difficulty problems, because this game not only commits the sin of making one or two drivers vastly faster than all the others, it also has AI that aren't aware about the ridiculous power of drifting and usually have more power and grip than you (the leaders, that is), which makes all races unfair in at least one way no matter what you do. The only praise I can give it without caveats is that it looks good, the music is good, and the cars sound good.

But above all others, there is one caveat that takes the cake. This game is not GRID.

Yes, I said this game has a strong identity, and it's true, it does. It just doesn't make sense as a sequel. Autosport had an identity crisis within its own game, but GRID 2 is an identity crisis. This isn't what made GRID so well loved at all. This doesn't even have a single thing in common with GRID, not at all. Both games have a strong identity, but they're completely separate over a vast gulf of differing personality, despite being presented as closely related. This, I believe, is the real reason so many people (including myself) were disappointed or even angry about this game when it was new, because we loved GRID and wanted more of it, and what we got was something completely different, something that lied about what it was. Ravenwest, the iconic main rivals of GRID, aren't even present as anything more than a little easter egg in the garage here. What really hurts is that for some reason, this is the formula Codemasters decided to stick with going forward, rather than realizing their mistake and re-examining the series roots - even GRID Legends, as far as I'm aware, still puts more emphasis on the "drama" and fame and how cool you are than on the racing, despite being closer to what we wanted than anything between it and the original. I'm confident that if this game had a new title, and all the other GRID games were part of that new franchise, they would all have been received much better by fans than they were... but especially GRID 2. All of my previous criticism would still apply, but removing the expectation of being a sequel to a beloved game would have made it much easier to accept.

My criticism comes from a place of love, not hate. Despite everything, I stand by my opening claim. GRID 2 is a fine game. The problem is how much better it could - should - have been. The resulting boredom and frustration was disheartening. This, too, I could not bring myself to finish. I won't be picking it up again.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#grid-2)

Before even launching this game, I noticed that apparently I've played it before. 96 minutes of play time, Steam tells me. That's a short time, and I don't remember it at all, so that wasn't a good sign.

Compared to 2019, this game is absolutely bursting with personality and motivation and structure and quality. Compared to anything else, though, it's still a charisma vacuum and it falls apart real fast. I couldn't bring myself to even try to finish this game either, and I really don't want to go in depth about why, so I'm only going to touch on a few things.

First, the structure. This is really the bare minimum for a career mode in a racing game. It's still just a list of events that you can do in largely whatever order you want, they just split them up into five different divisions with their own separate progression. Progress in all five divisions, you gain access to the sixth division. The only goal is to win all the races, and the only reason to do so is for the sake of doing so. You don't have your own team either, you're racing for other teams with no commitment or purpose, and your teammate is always useless. There isn't anything here to make it engaging, making this the sort of racing game that could only be enjoyed if it's the only racing game you have, because if you have just about anything else, it will probably be the game you choose to play over this one. Every event is simultaneously too short and too long; Too short because an entire season can be as little as three races, and too long because each race is at least several minutes long in a game that does not at all deliver the experience necessary to support that length. Making things worse is that each event in a given division is a set of multiple races, and it just drops you in there one after the other with no fanfare or preparation or introduction or transition or anything, not even any music that doesn't disappear into the background as empty noise, so nothing feels rewarding at all, especially in drift events where you have to repeat the same one-lap race no less than five times for a single event.

Which leads to the next problem, the complete lack of personality. The closest thing to an identity this game has is the fact that there are introductory videos for each of the divisions. Everything in this game is presented extremely flatly, coldly, and boringly. It's painfully sterile. Just looking at this game makes me feel bored. It doesn't make me feel dead inside like GRID 2019 or DIRT 5, but considering how far beneath the floor that bar is, that isn't exactly praise. There is no emotion at all in any voice at any point, and the voice clips become repetitive in less than half an hour. Not only does this game not make me feel compelled to continue playing it, the sheer boredom it delivers actively repels me from it. Now I understand why I didn't remember even a second of this game despite having apparently played it before. There is simply nothing to remember. Before I forget it again, though, I should mention that this game is not only lacking in personality, it also suffers from a severe identity crisis. It's trying to be realistic while also being intentionally unrealistic, and it did both things in the worst possible way. The realism is all the boring parts and none of the compelling parts, and the arcade style fantasy stuff is botched where present, and absent where expected.

And the last thing I'll touch on is, of course, the handling. It's heavy, slow, and extremely floaty, a nightmare combination of bad feel and bad control. Cars also all feel underpowered most of the time - definitely not helped by the abysmal sense of speed that also isn't helped with the ridiculously wide tracks - while also being extremely prone to sliding and spinning out, because the handling model here is tuned specifically for either drifting or understeer with little middle ground - including for the open wheelers! - which would at least be fine for the actual drift events if not for the fact that the cars being underpowered makes it hard to control them with the throttle, and the floaty handling makes them unpredictable at best, so it's not even good at the one thing it tries to do. Adding even more stupidity to the pile is the endurance events, where the entire gimmick is that you have to manage your tires by... not sliding. In a game that's designed specifically to make all the cars slide all the time, that punishes you for trying not to do that by slowing you down disproportionately. The driving feel in this game is bad enough with that in mind, but to top it all off, the camera angle is way too low, so you get bad visibility and more difficulty trying to judge distance between yourself and anything else, and for the final nail in the coffin, the sound is flat and boring at the best of times, and baffling at the worst of times, like how opponent cars just behind you sound like a jet afterburner.

Let's make this absolutely clear: I do not expect simulator-style handling from this game, nor did I expect it from GRID 2019 for that matter, nor do I want that. I am fully aware of what these games are, track-based pseudo-realistic arcade racers are rare and I love the concept and want more of them, so my problem with their handling is not that it isn't realistic enough. My problem with their handling is that it is bad. It honestly feels like a rushed mobile game built for tilt controls and people who don't play games. Given that the game not only exists on mobile, but looks and sounds pretty much exactly the same as on every other platform, and is not just the only game in the series available on mobile, but the only game from the whole company on mobile aside from years-later mobile ports of Very Old Games, I'm going to say that's probably exactly what it is.

I could talk more about this game if I had an ounce of interest left in me.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#grid-autosport)

This is depressing. There is nothing here. It's empty. Lifeless. Pointless. A reminder of the bleak, meaningless nature of existence itself. While it didn't immediately feel nearly as bad due to the fact that it isn't downright insulting, this game reminds me a lot of DIRT 5, but its soulless nature also reminds me a bit of Forza Motorsport 7. Flashy effects and annoying announcers, terrible handling model that's heavy, slow, slippery, needlessly punishing at times and impossible to go wrong at others, and unable to decide whether or not grip or drift is what it wants to be, made even worse by having a huge input delay on steering with a controller, a sense of speed so incredibly poor that 150 miles per hour feels like 50, brain dead AI, basically no music, sound design that can only be described as adequate, absolutely no motivation to play the game since the entire "career" is just a list of events to do in any order, so little care for player immersion that the game doesn't even ask for your name, nor does it even make you aware that you have a team, numbers flashing on the screen to constantly reward the player for doing anything at all - even just shifting gears - because modern games apparently need to be that way, a level system that functionally does nothing except feed the player constant micro-achievements for nothing, content prominently visible on the career menu that's locked behind DLC and only directs you to the store page... I could feel my soul dying as I played this. I did three races and uninstalled the game, then sat around feeling sad for a while. Not just sad that I played it, sad that it exists. The overwhelming nothingness provided by this game caused me to go outside and stare at the sun just to feel again. Nothing more needs to be said about this.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#grid-2019)

Well, once again this game is essentially just a small iteration on the last, it's 2019 again but with some improvements. The difference this time is that the improvements are technically small, but make a big difference in all the right ways. Sound is even better - way better - to the point that even though the accessibility option I loved is still not here, it's no longer a problem because the mixing on the high frequencies is so much better (particularly on the radio), the graphics are a little better again, especially for the tires, lighting, and basically everything except the cars and tracks, but who cares about that, all the graphical glitches I ever encountered since 2015 are finally gone, the UI is finally highly visible, and best of all...

I lied. This is actually a huge step in the right direction, not just an iteration.

First off, presentation has also significantly improved. The main menu is pretty much the same, the pre-race menus are the same too, but now there's a step in between those parts of the game, and in that area, information is presented in a much more interesting way. All of the changes and additions in this area also happen to make the career mode more personally immersive for the first time in the franchise by making the player character actually matter and have some traits that you can upgrade with money, which you now earn and negotiate for during contract renewals, and making the reputation you also earn not only actually visible somewhere now, but also actually meaningful on some level since your acclaim level is now what your contract negotiations are primarily reliant upon. Your teammate is actually useful now as well, for the first time ever, because instead of simply being your permanent rival, they actually help you by earning their own research points during practice sessions. Teamwork, what a concept. There's also more music, and better music, and I very much appreciate that the intro sequences for free practice and qualifying sessions just get music now instead of even more David Croft like the previous games. For being largely the same game as all the others, this one actually felt kind of refreshing to play, which was very welcome by this point.

Secondly, development is actually engaging now. Aside from the fact that your teammate now earns points alongside you, and you get a certain amount of points every week from your R&D departments, the research tree has been laid out differently and rebalanced in such a way that it forces you to make harder decisions more often, and all the AI teams now develop just as fast as you, which is refreshing after being able to leave everyone in the dust very quickly in the research department in every game since 2016. The best change is to the durability development, because while in previous games it was possible to prioritize any part you wanted immediately, now all the different components are locked behind other components, forcing you to devote more time and resources - and make more performance sacrifices - for the sake of durability, which you should definitely do since the upgrades also offer less benefit each, and durability is a much, MUCH bigger aspect of this game than any other. I didn't make it through a single race without seeing at least one AI driver retire or at least lose a lot of ground from a part failure, I experienced more reliability issues in this game than I did in all of the games since 2016 combined - though it still wasn't too much since I managed my worn parts well - and the AI experienced several times more between them all.

Speaking of the AI, though, that's another step up. AI drivers are a bit more predictable, and a lot more competitive, making races a lot more interesting... and it would also make races a lot less destructive if I wasn't so reckless, but they're AI, so I still pushed all kinds of gaps I shouldn't have. My favorite improvement to the AI, however, is that it seems like your teammate now scales their driving ability, at least partially, against your own performance instead of being entirely separate from you, which is great, I really like having my teammate drive comparably to me instead of halfway down the field. Driving for Renault, I was constantly on the podium despite the car most definitely not having the performance to manage that for the AI, and in every previous game, that was plainly visible in the massive performance gap between me and my teammate, but in this game, it didn't take long until he started climbing the field and getting closer and closer to me. We would have had a 1-2 finish in Baku if his engine didn't fail. I could be wrong, and to be fair, I drove with Hülkenberg in all the previous games and Ricciardo in this one... but I really don't think that's what changed the performance, the difference is too big.

The best improvement, however, is definitely the handling. It's the best it's ever been. Cars actually feel good to drive again, and it's nowhere near as punishing as the previous game, so there's actually room to have fun at higher levels instead of just fighting the car all the time. I can't explain exactly how this works or what changed to cause this, but I swear this game also makes downforce an easily felt effect... like, in all the previous games, F1 cars have just been super fast and super grippy, but in this game specifically, it really does feel like most of that grip is coming from downforce rather than only mechanical grip. And there's more of that stuff too, which thankfully for me, has made Catalunya feel good again, unlike the last two games! Eau Rouge and Raidillon at Spa are no longer a death gamble either, Singapore is fun again, it's actually possible to attack the kerbs again particularly in Monza, and so on and so forth. This is also the first game in the series where the different tire compounds actually feel different while driving, instead of simply being a time modifier, and there's a noticeable impact when pressing the overtake button, which is vastly more satisfying than the stupid manual 0-to-5 ERS management from before. On some tracks, mediums are actually better than softs, and that's interesting. All of these things plus the use of assists and the available low difficulty options come with the added bonus of making this by far the most accessible game in the series, while also being the most fun, and probably the one with the highest skill ceiling. I can actually reduce this entire physics model down to two words accurately. Those words are: Predictably challenging.

Cars are back to having enough grip, both mechanical and aerodynamic, that I can confidently drive without traction control once again without breaking traction unpredictably at any point, though I still chose to use medium. Turning off ABS is also more forgiving now than it used to be, but I still use it, so I am also very thankful that using it doesn't bring a huge performance penalty along, because I'm now sure the reason the braking was so bad in 2019 was because ABS only gave you 90% of your potential braking force. In this game, it's more like 98%. Without the assists, it's still very clear that everything that goes wrong is my own fault, I can't blame the game for any of it or ask for anything different, unlike 2019. The assists are comfy though, at least at the moment since I've been flying through so many games here, so I wanted to minimize time lost to mistakes. Maybe I'll turn these assists off in the future as I play more of this game, which I very much intend to do. This also all applies to the classics too, making this the first game since 2013 to actually improve them overall - even if 2013 does still win in presentation, not to mention the wonderful extra tracks it has that 2020 doesn't - since they all feel and sound good now, a feat which every game between then and now has only managed half of, if even that much.

Of course, I've been neglecting to mention the elephant in the room that is My Team. Even if this mode wasn't added to this game, it would still be by far the best in the series, but with My Team? It's not even a contest. It is as it sounds, you get to make your own team to compete against the existing ten, and you have to manage everything about it. Choose sponsors and accomplish each one's specific goals, pick your power unit supplier, hire a second driver and help them develop through the season while also having to pay their increasing contract fees, manage the activities you do between race weekends, spend money on upgrading your R&D facilities, and all of this on top of still needing to manage your resource points to develop the car the same way you would in regular career mode. Since all your facilities start out at zero, they require a lot of time to bring up to a good level. Development failure rates went as high as 40% for me, compared to 10% or so with an established team, and I swear these numbers are artificially low, because in the regular career mode I had a lot of development failures, but in this, most developments failed. The departments also still produce weekly resource points like every other team, but only a measly 80 in total at first, and that also requires a lot of money and time to improve.

It's not exactly groundbreaking, nor is it particularly deep, but it still manages to completely change the game into something far more engaging that it ever was. It turns out that the My Team car given to you also rocks. I found it much nicer to drive without even tuning anything (except the differential on-track through the MFD) than the Renault was at any point, and it performs so well with the Ferrari engine that I was regularly in the top ten - where I absolutely did not belong - in my first season, with the difficulty up to 92. The only thing I have to complain about with it is the lack of livery options - literally six total - available for your car, and that the extent of customization beyond that is only changing two or three colors on them. Fortunately, I don't care, so it didn't exactly harm my experience, but it's a very clear and glaring weak point from a general perspective. After playing through a season in this mode as well, I would go so far as to say this is the definitive F1 gaming experience. I would recommend this mode over the regular career mode for everyone. It's the first time in the series that I felt compelled to take a career into another season, which I will do eventually. When I do, I'll have to start a new game though, because starting with the Ferrari engine was a mistake. It's too much of an early advantage, and it also sounds the worst, plus it has a really annoying oscillating hissing sound in the green revs. Next time, I'll start with Honda - the best sounding of the engines - and probably crank the difficulty up to 100.

Going into this game, since I had already committed to finishing one full career season of each game, I knew I was going to have to put in two seasons for this one because of My Team, but I really didn't want to commit that kind of time at that point. Fortunately, 2020 has another godsent feature that slams it well above every other entry, and that is the option to shorten the season. The full season is 22 races, but you can choose to shorten it to 16 or even 10 races instead, and not only that, you get to pick exactly which races you want in the calendar! Going with a shorter season also increases the rate at which your parts wear out, and decreases the price of development proportionally, which is fantastic. So I went with a 10 race season and naturally, I picked only objectively good tracks, being Bahrain, Netherlands, Spain, France, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Singapore, Japan, and Brazil. It would have been better if I could also replace Monza with Imola for Italy, and I would have loved it if Malaysia was in this game so I could pick that instead of France, and since I'm dreaming already, replacing Catalunya with Jerez would have also been amazing... and I miss Valencia too, but I wouldn't replace any of these with it. Same for Hockenheim, actually. Abu Dhabi and Russia trail behind all of them and definitely wouldn't replace anything, even though I do like those tracks, and all the other tracks suck. Objectively, of course. Also, the Alpha Tauri is the best car on the grid, facts only.

I like this game enough that I did the unthinkable. I attempted to play it online with randoms. If you know me, you know. Unfortunately, thanks to the fact that this is an annualized series, most of the playerbase is gone, always chasing the latest title, but I did manage to get a couple races in with a few people. The racing was fine, but every single race had its own fresh and unique glitches I had never encountered before. It seems that this game is held together with tape and bubblegum, and the moment you go online, it all crumbles. There's a weekly challenge too, apparently, but it's locked, and I don't know why. Overall, not impressed. Multiplayer isn't the main draw of this game though, if you ask me, so I'm not going to hold any of this against it.

There is another elephant in the room, unfortunately. It's the reason why there were only six livery options for me. For some unholy reason, they put a battle pass type of thing in this game... in the single player. I hate that it's there, but what I hate even more than that is the presence of microtransactions in this game, also in the single player. You can spend real money to unlock more things from your battle pass, or buy liveries, racing suits, and dumb little dances for your driver to do on the podium. This has absolutely no place in this game, and if I were looking at buying this game now instead of whenever I somehow got it, that alone would have made the game a hard sell, even if EA hadn't bought Codemasters - because make no mistake, EA had no part in this, Codemasters did it all on their own. I am angry about it. Not like it matters though, the game is no longer for sale anyway thanks to EA's senseless greed. It's almost like annually released games are a bad and stupid thing that shouldn't happen. I wish whoever pushed for adding these accursed things to this game a very unlucky rest of their life, and all those involved in EA's decision to pull this game (and others) from sale a meaningfully unpleasant rest of their lives.

I will not - will never - set aside my extreme disapproval for microtransactions and addictive, psychologically manipulative design when forming a conclusion on a game, even when they have "no impact" on the game. Their mere presence will always make me like the game less. Fortunately, the rest of the game is still incredible, so even with that stain in consideration, I will stand by what I said: This is the best game in the franchise, and the definitive F1 gaming experience. Now that it's gone, it's still worth downloading even knowing that multiplayer may not be an option for you that way, or if you play on consoles, a used physical copy is worth it. None of the other games are worth your time, drive space, or money... except maybe 2013 with all the DLC included if you already have 2020 and want something more, rather than more of the same.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#f1-2020)

It's 2018 with fixed sound, better graphics, worse handling, and a couple of fictional drivers.

Once again, I think leaving it at that would have been funny, but I want to expand on some things that aren't sound or graphics because there's no point talking about those anymore. They are good, and I don't care to detail why. Most important of the things to detail, though, is the handling. I don't understand why it's so punishing. The cars feel mostly the same as they did in 2018, except with a little less grip and downforce, and now they also lose rear grip with the lightest touch, even on full traction control to an extent. It feels like those rear tires are half as wide as they really are. Braking also seems worse than before, it takes me longer to slow down in a straight line than it used to, and trail braking is very ineffective... but this only seems to apply to me, because the AI are all capable of stopping faster than I am. It's all so much worse for the newly added Formula 2 cars too, which are flat out not fun to drive thanks to how heavy and punishing they are. If it wasn't for that addition, this would have been an even smaller iteration than 2018 was, so I'm at least happy they were added even if I don't like them.

The addition of two fictional drivers and a few cutscenes with them during the F2 intro to career mode is also a nice touch, even if it doesn't really do anything and the drivers are one dimensional at best. One is a dick, the other is a team player, and that's as far as it goes... but it did affect the way I drove around them, and had me looking at four names in the standings instead of just two for a while, so they at least accomplished something. An equally appreciated little touch in this iteration is that your rivals now appear in some of the invitational events, which is very nice, it adds some motivation to accept them and you are now finally rewarded for participating in them with some reputation.

Something I don't understand about this game is how it manages to perform both way better and way worse on my computer. In 2018, there were several places where my frame rate would drop below 110, even down as far as 90 sometimes, and the highest uncapped frame rate I ever saw was 140. In 2019, my highest uncapped frame rate was double that and I never experienced any frame drops at all as a result... but when running above 60, the game feels like it's running at 30, no matter how high it really is, because the display is so rough. It's not stuttering, it's not lag, it's just... unsmooth. Turn on vsync which locks the game to 60 despite my refresh rate being higher, though, and it's perfect. After playing every other game up to now at 120, playing at 60 was quite a massive step down, but I still vastly prefer that over the mess of anything higher in this game.

Overall, I like 2019 more than 2018 almost exclusively because of the fixed sound. If not for that, the worse handling would probably turn me off the game, because playing 2019 is more of a race against yourself than a race again the pack, constantly worrying about keeping the car under control even with medium traction control enabled. My playthrough of this game was flashback city, and I really don't like that, I usually aim to use as little of those as possible. Oh, also the interface is more visible, which is nice. You can even move it wherever you want on the screen now, which would have been great if you could separate the MFD from the rev counter so it doesn't obstruct visibility with the gears in the center of the screen where I want them.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#f1-2019)