May the nostalgia be with you because this game simply is not that good in this day and age.
You couldn’t escape this game when it was released. It was VERY popular and for good reason. At the time this was truly a great game and I remember renting it and being blown away by this game as a kid but I never finished it. Fast forward to my knowledge landing me on the fact that both titles are Backwards compatible with the series X. I wanted to sit down and finally play through both titles. I went in with very minimal expectations since games from the 360 can truly be hit or miss in terms of how they hold up today and sheesh this game didn’t hold up very well. HOWEVER! That isn’t to say its bad because it isn’t and if anything if this game would receive a remake that fixes my issues I have no doubt it can be a great game but as it stands the game is fine at most.
What are my issues?
Keep in mind I am talking with my experience on the Xbox series X version of this game which I would assume would be the best way to play this game nowadays in terms of consoles. To begin , combat while fun on one hand grows extremely frustrating on the other hand. The game constantly fights against you with a terrible lock on system , delay in skills/ combos and extremely annoying enemy types on harder difficulties. To explain, there is a huge delay in when you can use your next attack so for example if you finish a combo and want to jump or back off you will have to wait a few seconds which can really mess you up. This hits harder when you simply want to jump sometimes because the delay is atrocious enough to make you mess up multiple times during certain segments. Specific skills have animations that you NEED to sit through so if you fight multiple enemies and do a combo that has a finishing animation you will be left wide open which is annoying since you would at least assume that you wouldn’t be able to take damage during animations like those. Furthermore, the lock on system will randomly jump to multiple enemies and sometimes even lock onto an enemy that is already dead. When you combine these two things together it makes for an extremely frustrating experience as half of your deaths will be due to the controls just not working in your own favor. However , the enemies will not make this any easier as some enemy types can stun lock you to death , kill you in 2 shots or just act very weird making it awkward to get hits in. Beyond that there are bugs and glitches ranging from the game enemies clipping into the environment , skills not hitting enemies for whatever reason to the game just hard crashing ( which only happened once luckily). Hell the wait time to even load back in after death is so damn long you can probably watch the whole titanic before you load back in. To make the loading times even more annoying you are frozen still while the game loads back in for like 5 seconds so if you die in an area where the checkpoint has enemies right away YOU CAN GET HIT AS YOU WAIT TO BE ABLE TO MOVE. Moving on, I played on the hardest difficulty you can play for the first time since you have to beat the game once to unlock its actual hardest difficulty. Overall the game is very cheesable but very annoying at some parts and it left me not wanting to replay this game again because I can only imagine how annoying the last difficulty will be.
What did I enjoy?
Not all is bad with this game because honestly I still enjoyed it a decent amount despite its flaws. First the bosses imo are very cool and I love how the final boss of the game gives you two options leading you to 2 different endings. When the combat wants to work properly I can take a hint of what could have been because I truly believe a ironed out version of this combat can be amazing. The story while not amazing is honestly enjoyable and the voice acting performances were well done imo. Environments are nice albeit very linear usually.
In the end
Its tragic because I wanted my return to this title to be way better than it ended up being so I am curious to see how the second title will hold up since I remember even less about that one.
You couldn’t escape this game when it was released. It was VERY popular and for good reason. At the time this was truly a great game and I remember renting it and being blown away by this game as a kid but I never finished it. Fast forward to my knowledge landing me on the fact that both titles are Backwards compatible with the series X. I wanted to sit down and finally play through both titles. I went in with very minimal expectations since games from the 360 can truly be hit or miss in terms of how they hold up today and sheesh this game didn’t hold up very well. HOWEVER! That isn’t to say its bad because it isn’t and if anything if this game would receive a remake that fixes my issues I have no doubt it can be a great game but as it stands the game is fine at most.
What are my issues?
Keep in mind I am talking with my experience on the Xbox series X version of this game which I would assume would be the best way to play this game nowadays in terms of consoles. To begin , combat while fun on one hand grows extremely frustrating on the other hand. The game constantly fights against you with a terrible lock on system , delay in skills/ combos and extremely annoying enemy types on harder difficulties. To explain, there is a huge delay in when you can use your next attack so for example if you finish a combo and want to jump or back off you will have to wait a few seconds which can really mess you up. This hits harder when you simply want to jump sometimes because the delay is atrocious enough to make you mess up multiple times during certain segments. Specific skills have animations that you NEED to sit through so if you fight multiple enemies and do a combo that has a finishing animation you will be left wide open which is annoying since you would at least assume that you wouldn’t be able to take damage during animations like those. Furthermore, the lock on system will randomly jump to multiple enemies and sometimes even lock onto an enemy that is already dead. When you combine these two things together it makes for an extremely frustrating experience as half of your deaths will be due to the controls just not working in your own favor. However , the enemies will not make this any easier as some enemy types can stun lock you to death , kill you in 2 shots or just act very weird making it awkward to get hits in. Beyond that there are bugs and glitches ranging from the game enemies clipping into the environment , skills not hitting enemies for whatever reason to the game just hard crashing ( which only happened once luckily). Hell the wait time to even load back in after death is so damn long you can probably watch the whole titanic before you load back in. To make the loading times even more annoying you are frozen still while the game loads back in for like 5 seconds so if you die in an area where the checkpoint has enemies right away YOU CAN GET HIT AS YOU WAIT TO BE ABLE TO MOVE. Moving on, I played on the hardest difficulty you can play for the first time since you have to beat the game once to unlock its actual hardest difficulty. Overall the game is very cheesable but very annoying at some parts and it left me not wanting to replay this game again because I can only imagine how annoying the last difficulty will be.
What did I enjoy?
Not all is bad with this game because honestly I still enjoyed it a decent amount despite its flaws. First the bosses imo are very cool and I love how the final boss of the game gives you two options leading you to 2 different endings. When the combat wants to work properly I can take a hint of what could have been because I truly believe a ironed out version of this combat can be amazing. The story while not amazing is honestly enjoyable and the voice acting performances were well done imo. Environments are nice albeit very linear usually.
In the end
Its tragic because I wanted my return to this title to be way better than it ended up being so I am curious to see how the second title will hold up since I remember even less about that one.