All this game really does is have Cyborg "Raiden" chop up MGS2/4 Raiden into chunks and say "OH WE'RE DONE HERE" and then explode any character development he had, the only thing that could have made this game's shitty story okay is if it was a prequel to 4, which was the original plan.

Most of the hype behind this game is not very deep, it's just about the boss fights, you sink into the game and most of what it has going on sucks, the point-to-point gameplay is bad and repetitive, the sub weapons are terrible and none of the codecs are worth interacting with, a first for the series.

What you're getting here really is just the boss fights and the funny one-liners they say in those cutscenes, the story is a shallow mockery of what literally every other game in the series (maybe not 5) does elegantly, by just being way too short and not having any depth to it, you could water the story down to "Raiden kills War capitalists" and all you'd be forgetting is the "dude is killing OKAY" parts that totally disregard the gameplay, and get answered in the story with "well no but i like it anyway xP"
The boss fights aren't very interesting either, it's all style no substance, you're just mashing parries until you enter the "ooo im so tired" phase rinse and repeat, at best sometimes they introduce a gimmicky mechanic.

This is the only spin-off that is in any way canon, unless you count PW, which you shouldn't, and it is by far the WORST falling behind even a game as flawed as 5, it exemplifies how little it takes to have something catch on in the modern times, you just need something really cool that can be consumed in a vacuum, it doesn't matter if it's a bad overall product, everyone will just remember the one cool part.

The damage this does to actual polished up indie titles is catastrophic, you'll see people talking about indie games in development being kind of cool, you look to see what it is and it's a game where you can parry literally everything, that's the only reason why it's "cool", Fucking rubbish.

Play the actual MGS games, (1-PW) they're amazing games with the original trilogy being some of the best games ever made in their genre, if not some of the best games ever.

Same problem as MW2019 but replace every scene that was pointlessly shocking with a scene and/or character that's pointlessly Hollywood-esque, also this game is drastically uglier.
The entire game means nothing anyways because the main bad guy you kill just comes back in a multiplayer season and says "nuh-uh" and everyone is okay with him now.

Multiplayer was tested by a group of white-collar workers to be as boring as possible, I was skipping like a little school-girl every day knowing that this game was dogshit and nobody liked it, and the sequel was received even worse, hope your studio burns down modern IW!

"This game is so well written, a true return to form!" a passerby says, as I watch cartoonishly evil Russian #376 kill another civilian.

"FPS games at their finest" says a lobotomy patient as I play through a scene where you go through with kidnapping a wife and child and threatening to shoot them, and shooting right next to them, which is okay because they're the wife and child of a SUPER-TERRORIST!

"A truly deep story" says an actor from the "Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2" commercial as I watch the game blame a real world incident where Americans were shooting civilians on the Russians.

"Makes you love the franchise all over again" says the voices in my head, as I play through the scene where you play as a little girl doing Dead By Daylight loops around a gigantic cartoonishly evil Russian man who just killed your father and is now coming to kill you.

"oh sick is this the one where it was like the old ones the multiplayer is awesome" says that one guy you played MW2 with back in 2009 who always camped in every room and spammed OMA Noob-tubes, as I finally beat the waterboarding mini-game and am given my reward.

This game is fucking soulless, the old Modern Warfare games had a bit of a unique charm that you'd only get out of old IW, and the newer CoD games at least tried to have something unique going on, but good job guys, you proved that you'll eat this grey awful mush as long as it reminds you of what you had like 15 years ago.

Also the multiplayer is doo-doo buttcheeks, even Vanguard is better because it had the decency to at least give you Ninja as a perk.

Mediocrity in its rawest form, take the shit level design, easy difficulty and bad hollywood-esque storytelling from Halo 3, then strip out half of the weapons and vehicles, dress it all up in the ugliest form of pointless grit, and you've got Halo: Reach.

I won't deny it's one of the better looking games in the series, but that's purely because they pumped more out of the consoles and devoted more time to fleshing out armor customization, and as a by-product (AFAIK) comes the shitty motion blur in the original, nothing about the dirt and scratches on every single wall and armor and muted colors makes the game look better.

Anyways, the campaign is shit, the levels are garbage, which gets a double "fuck you" for being both shit in the campaign and multiplayer, presumably because they had to be re-used for both, the weapons handle far worse because apparently being old-school like the original games means having guns that are RNG machines the moment you shoot more than once a second, and I really want to know who thought the shit mechanic of fall damage and the useless one of health-packs were worth bringing back.

Multiplayer is extra shit, again, most if not all of the base maps are recycled from the campaign and play like shit, there's far more verticality that makes gunfights a REAL match of who saw who first, and they are DAMN ugly, the RNG bullet spread is way more noticeable now, and it was so bad 343 had to patch it out, the armor abilities range from useless (decoy) to insanely poorly designed (sprint, armor lock, roll, jetpack, active camo)

Armor Lock and Jetpack tie for both being some of the worst designs ever put into a multiplayer game, Armor Lock lets you say "time-out, time-out!" so you can wait for your teammate to arrive, or just explode a vehicle if it crashes into you, and Jetpack just breaks map design, which they thankfully designed around... wait... what's that? They added CE maps into Reach's matchmaking pool? Well that's a fucking stupid idea? Surely they'll disable jetpacks so players don't jetpack up to and grab power weapons balanced around being risky to grab..... and the enemy team just snagged the Battle Canyon Rocket Launcher, great.

Having to have all the maps be padded out in length due to sprint and combat roll (sometimes? in some playlists it goes super fast and if you jump carries you long distances, and others you go nowhere and it's useless) is obnoxious, because nobody uses sprint because it's BORING!

Forge for the second time was turned into an actual map-maker, but the developers at Bungie were too busy picking their asses to do a good job so the creation tools suck and all the assets are grey, have fun.

Remember when I said they removed a bunch of content that was in 3? It goes deeper, they also have SHIT new content, like the Focus Rifle, Plasma Repeater, Needle Rifle, Concussion Rifle, and the Plasma Launcher, if you noticed, most of these are covenant weapons!

For the good things the game does? For one thing there's Invasion, really really well designed mode, Spartans vs Elites, with different UIs, their sides weaponry, and it scales over time as more objectives get captured, unfortunately in MCC it was put in the ranked playlist, so it's perma-dead, also the spawning behavior of having one teammate who is marked as your spawning buddy is stupid, and some of the objectives are a little ridiculous.

Forge being opened up to a large map was a large plus even if it was wasted on ugly assets and the modern industry style of not having specially designed kill-barriers that can be brute-forced to get past anyways, but just having a shitty "TURN BACK DUMBASS DEATH IN 10S" timer.

There's also.. uhh... finishers? I guess? They're a cool system, animated really well and none of the animations take too long.

As a final note, the story is complete and total tire-fire garbage, not only being a long fat shit all over the book The Fall of Reach, but just being a story about 6 chucklefucks having a competition of who can have the most heroic death possible, but no girls are allowed, the only character with any personality was Jorge, the ending "Objective: Survive" thing was a cool gimmick but that's about it, other than that it was just kind of neat to see a better model of Keyes, and an actual model of Halsey.

Third worst Halo campaign, only ahead of 4 and 5 because they're criminally boring.

Second worst Halo multiplayer, only ahead of CE because everything about CE aged like shit, including the things they brought back in Reach.

A lot of what this game has to say is done before, and it's execution may be pretty shallow in practice, and the gameplay may be nonexistent outside of like a handful of core moments, with the only other ones being in hangouts that let you pick between kinda sad story and TV static story but you get to play minigames (why not let you do both??)

Maybe it does do a shit job at illustrating that the town is a bit shitty with their strongest examples being "a cool restaurant shut down" and "theres birds in an abandoned spot" and "people dont like it when you climb on things but you do it anyways"

Maybe the strong visual identity of the game has minimal value other than looking kind of cool, with the dream segments meaning absolutely nothing but being kinda cool.

Maybe the world-building for the town is a bunch of vapid bullshit that was made up on the spot, and there's little thought into what goes on past what's directly shown to you.

Maybe Mae is a generic failure dropout protagonist and her strongest characteristics include being a bit eccentric and clingy to her childhood.

Maybe the 2 major side characters are cardboard cutouts that have their entire characters summed up in a description of their personality with "The disowned gay guy who hates the system but is really fun" and "The girl who is poor and sad"

Maybe the ending is terrible and uproots the interesting things the game was about to tell with some shitty supernatural garbage.

But I like this game, I like the things it tries to tell even if it's pretty shallow and doesn't say anything major, It resonates with me a lot, especially now just due to personal connections and me being a sucker for the art-style and music the game has, I was happier to have thought of all that could be going on in the town and the characters lives and how they'll turn out, than how disappointed I was when nothing gets explained and nobody gets developed.

I'm never going to play this game again though, because I would probably actually start to hate it, I played it so long ago, back in early 2018.

With the indie scene getting larger and larger, and hopefully with more people being interested in playing stuff that isn't dangled in front of them (seriously, either dig through obscure indies on steam, or even check out stuff on Itch!) I don't recommend this game, you'll probably find a thousand games that hit the notes that this game does but better, just lacking the elaborate production value to make a whole "thing" like NITW is, not that it really matters in the end.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a very interesting game, the second major game by auteur developer Lucas Pope of Papers Please fame both falling into a genre that I can only really describe as "Puzzle write-em-ups"

You start off as an investigator with a randomly chosen gender climbing on-board to a ship that has docked with all it's passengers either absent or dead, and with the power of a watch that lets you see a moment frozen in time of the events of their death, and you need to solve not only how they died, but who they are and what happened to everyone in general, even the ones you can't find a body for.

The idea is you start with the simple people to identify and going through every memory, and then going through and narrowing down and picking through every placement, nationality, rank, social grouping, hammock number, etc. until you've figured out what happened to every single person
...There's only one major issue though, this means after you've gone through every memory this is really boring, as not only is 60 crew members a lot to worry about, at no point can you just fast travel to memories, you have to walk around and enter each one, and the book menu is slow and annoying to use meaning quickly checking faces, memories and the different chapters is a HUGE pain in the ass.
Going through memories can be a bit annoying too, because you have to wait for the game to tell you that you're done looking and can leave, or it'll tell you to leave as you're checking out a more detailed scene, but it forces you to be railroaded into the next 4 scenes anyways, making figuring out how to get back to that last scene annoying, I have no idea why fast travel and not being forced to stay in/leave a memory being absent was not caught in playtesting to be a major issue.

However, the game is really unique and is a very unique thoughtfully put together puzzle, I'm trying carefully not to compliment the game for it's mystery, as there is none. Once you see the first beast on like the fourth memory (cool reveal though) the game has completely blown it's load on what the mystery is, it's incredibly predictable, Cursed treasure, Evil monsters... and that's about it, unless the unbelievable stupidity of the entire crew is supposed to be a part of that mystery as well.

I played another game with a similar premise to this on Itch.Io called "Once Upon a Crime in the Wild West" a few years ago, and although its execution in terms of function, voice acting and general what-have-yous was not nearly as good, the concept they had going was much more interesting, you're playing out the scenes (with an option to do so on the fly!) and connecting a train on to figure out who murdered who until you've solved the whole case, I feel like Lucas Pope got a bit carried away with the almost bureaucratic elements and it turned the game into a bit of a chore.

The only real criticism about the shallow story that I really have is that the crew are ridiculously stupid, they're accident prone as all hell, have a tendency to fall on their heads or die instantly to the slightest bop to said head, have nasty tunnel-vision, terrible hearing, and worst of all....

[SPOILER for what happened in the final chapter, The End]
All 4 of those guys got killed for no reason, the 3 trying to mutiny did it for absolutely no reason, for some reason assuming the Captain still had the shells, which he obviously did not and had thrown out, and even admits to this, only for them all to attack him anyways, dropping dead one after another without hesitating for a second, with all of the attacks from the sea-monsters already having come to pass for quite some time now, and with the actual chronology of everything, it's something that most of the VERY DWINDLING population of the crew should know about, also the Captain just coldly instakills one of the members of the crew he was implied to be decently close with.

I guess the excuse is that one of the crew members that bargained with the mermaids was killed frankly fucking ridiculously, who just gets spiked when clearly trying to bargain, making sure he dies so he can't let everyone know that everything is chill now, but wow, all this bending over backwards for setting up a shitty set of 4 deaths that serves no value other than being the tutorial, which probably could have been done just as well by moving around the whole scuffle around the first mutiny.

Still, great game and it's worth playing even past the many flaws, give it a try if you like experimental stuff.

Played on the fan PC port using the Render96 retexture/remodel mod

I've never actually beaten Super Mario 64, I've played it on dozens of occasions, getting to every level, getting most of the stars, but they were all separate instances and half the time powered by cheats, I've been in a bit of a 3D platformer mood recently so I sat down and went through the entire thing start to finish, and long story short, while my opinions have hardly changed for the game, it's really a landmark title and a great game.

In terms of how I feel after finally replaying it, best case scenario I can say that I've grown more fond of the control scheme than I was before, and worst case scenario I've really figured out how bad the level design is in the game.

Fundamentals wise the game is tight as hell, it's the major reason why the game is so great, the controls are just really really good, and it's fun to do what effectively feels like cheating to do some tight jumps to get a star without going through the objective the game intended.

Level design kind of reeks though, it's not offensively bad just a bit boring and simple, there are a few particularly bad ones like the water level though, and the ones with giant falls for every missed jump aren't an amazing experience, and it kind of sucks how generic a lot of the visuals are, most levels sharing a set of like 4-5 songs doesn't help either, the joy is just out of how often the levels are oversized playgrounds and have been designed thoughtlessly enough for you to be able to just hit some jump and snag a star because of it.

Power-ups aren't really worth noting, 2/3 of them are just basic tools to solve a problem you'd have with a puzzle, and the other one is a gimmick that rarely gets used that while cool for it's time, isn't fun to control.

Bosses are super forgettable, there's 3 that'd I'd consider actual boss-fights, and 1 of those 3 you can totally miss, there's King Bob-omb who's more of a tutorial, the bowser fights which are cakewalks with the third one being a bit annoying if you don't know how to chain throws together, and there's the hand fight in the desert level, they're all nothing special.

It's really interesting to look back and see how much this game really influenced the industry due to how much of a hit it was, it's still got a chokehold on the design of current 3D Mario games, and plenty of indie games take massive inspiration from it, though you'll just as often see a major inspiration by another game I plan to play eventually, Banjo-Kazooie.

I can't really say this game is one-of-a-kind though, as not only did the industry and indie devs follow in suit for years, but that Nintendo themselves did the same with most 3D Mario games lifting major elements from this, but it's definitely worth playing if you've even somewhat enjoyed anything that takes inspiration from this.

This is the game that really pushed me to my breaking point about Boomer Shooters where it's come to a point where I feel like I'd have more fun with Call of Duty 4, I just for the life of me can't really jive with this game, it's got some neat mechanics and tricks but I hate the core of it.

I hate the lack of real weapon variety outside of these shitty variants that don't change up the weapon enough, it's the exact same problem as Doom Eternal's weapon upgrades except Doom Eternal had a bunch of different weapons in general.

I hate dashes over just fast movement, one of these days I'm going to make a boomer shooter where you just play as the Scout from TF2 with a bunch of different weapons, it just feels a lot more elegant to dodge around with direct movement rather than the dedicated dodge button.

I HATE this parry system, I've only encountered one game where I felt like the parry system was a nice touch that added to the experience without hindering it, and that was fucking Pizza Tower, In Ultrakill it feels like the game expects you to master parry timings, because it turns otherwise difficult boss fights into total fucking cakewalks, it stops being cool after you realize that's what you were supposed to do and everyone else has probably done it at this point.

And man oh man, I don't think bosses belong in FPS games, these just kind of suck and are memory tests, if you have above average aim the accuracy is never an issue and it's just a memory game of dashing and parrying at the right moments, it's a snoozefest.

Regardless, the levels are well designed, there's a lot of fun secrets and it's a labor of love, it's not a bad game, I just don't like any of the major things that make it stand out, also Hakita is terminally unfunny.

Played through World of Assassination

Pretty much the same story gameplay wise as the first game, so I'll mainly just be talking about the experience with the different levels, the Sniper Assassin mode and potentially some personal thoughts as I played through more of the series.

Before that I want to iterate again, this always online shit is awful, and so are the elusive targets, whoever came up with this shit is a moron.

Anyways, the levels were just not it this time around, there's only 3 levels that are at the very least "good" because you're thrown so many levels which you can't dream of experimenting with until you've been railroaded through the "Mission Stories" and typically are overstuffed with NPCs because they're crowded third world areas or whatever, it's just a fucking disaster.

There was one out of those crappy bunch that had an interesting gimmick of an unknown target you have to discover... which went up in smoke when I was doing one of the "Mission Stories" and after fucking up disposing of a KOed disguise target and guard, a random NPC spotted me, so I just got frustrated and shot him before I reloaded my save, but right before I did that I was told "Great work 47, you found the target!" which really ruined any fun that could have been.

Anyways, halfway through you're dealt probably my favorite level in the reboot trilogy so far "Another Life" (not to be confused with A New Life from Blood Money) which is much more what you'd expect from the Hitman series, taking place in an American suburb with JUUUUST the right amount of NPCs, and there being plenty of things to explore, as well as having a lot of fun things around, and creative opportunities for kills, great time, didn't do any "Mission Stories" in it and managed to find a lot of interesting stuff regardless.

The other 2 levels I enjoyed were the 2 from the DLCs, one was the bank which was similarly good, but just not quite as good and a little hard to get around without following a "Mission Story" and the resort level which was just... Ok, I liked the fact that it was pretty open yet not too populated and filled with enough bushes that it basically invites you to just throw caution to the wind and try getting quick kills off by just popping them and immediately ducking into cover, in fact you can kill the first target within seconds of starting.

Story was a lot better this time, as in there's actually a story to follow, with things that happen and have weight in what happens in the actual levels, but it's nothing amazing, just some cheap b-movie spy thriller.

I tried to shift up my gameplay by forcing myself to experiment a little and not forcing myself to EXCLUSIVELY kill targets, to not feel as pressured, and I feel like I got a much better grip on the gameplay loop because of it this time around, but flaws with the AI are becoming more and more apparent, I hope the next time they do a set of Hitman games they lower the scope so they can tighten up things like AI.

EDIT: Whoops, forgot to mention Sniper Assassin!

It's okay, not really my thing, that's all.

I'm not "done" playing this game, but I really have just hit a point where I don't have much fun playing the game anymore, and am just sticking it to hang around with friends.

There's a million reasons why I could go into why it's kind of draining, but I'll just sum it up, it's just shallow, it's the Call of Duty of ARPGs, the gameplay is too easy and boring, it's laggy, there's a lot of clunkiness and the game is full price yet shoving MTX up your ass, with plans for paid DLCs in the future.

The nice things I can say of the game start and end with the visuals, it's a beautiful game, but there's no substance anywhere else, the story sucks, the characters aren't interesting, the cutscenes are boring and the pacing is glacial.

Just play D2 or even D3, this just isn't worth your time in it's current state.

Disclaimer: I played this through Hitman: World of Assassination, but you probably will be too as the original isn't available digitally anymore, and WoA is the same but better.

I was genuinely really surprised what I got here with Hitman, I expected a downgrade from the more old-school style im-sim-esque gameplay with a modern hand-holdy aspect to it, but what I ended up with was a love letter to those older types of game that tries and succeeds well enough to form a middle-ground between the two.

To start off, the game only guides you around if you, yourself actively choose to do the scripted kills, called the "Mission Stories" these can range from again, the scripted kills to just being your entry/disguise, and a lot of the time these are introduced to you by just eavesdropping on conversations other NPCs are having.
If I had to give one criticism about the aforementioned system though, it's that these are often available, and some (AFAIK) are for the most part meant to be accessed through just selecting them in the pause menu and it'll tell you them right off the bat, It would have been a lot nicer if you couldn't do this, but your ability to find them was far easier, either placing them closer to the entry point or highlighting them in your "Hitman Vision"

Another system I very much enjoyed was the mastery system, allowing you more unlocks to approach the area in a different way, let it be to help you get inside faster or start with a disguise, or give you some gear to get you around trickier areas, or just some tools to help you get to the next "Mission Story" it encourages having the game show you the ropes for a level, and you can either do more of the scripted stuff on a replay, or with your newfound tools, try experimenting by just doing whatever, just finding a good opportunity and taking out the target with a clean strike and zipping out of there, it's really good for encouraging replay value in a way that doesn't feel forced.

To add onto the replay value, there's challenges rewarding you for doing all sorts of things in a level, difficulties that make things a little more challenging by doubling down on guards and cameras, punishing more bloody kills by losing your disguises, and you've only got one save, there's also particular challenges rewarding you for doing things like beating it with only killing your target and not disguising ever, and also not being spotted ever, there's a lot to do for every single mission and it does a good job of getting you to learn the ropes while you're not experimenting.

And as a little extra note, the game is jam packed with a bunch of easter eggs or little references that pump the game full of some soul, you can tell that they had a lot of fun developing these games just the same as they did with the originals.

Onto the criticisms though.

As mentioned before, the "Mission story" system could do with more focus on discovering them rather than just hitting a button to be lead to the objective markers.

The story is absolutely dull, nothing is really happening, or at the very least nothing feels like it's happening, because it's just a bunch of cutscenes that don't impact the missions at all, other than a scene on the second to last mission, and it gets a bit dull only assassinating targets who have done bad, come on, it's a HITMAN game, I'd expect to at least start off with a few morally grey missions of just corporate sabotage, taking out suits by sneaking through office buildings.

There's this system called "Elusive targets" which is absolutely terrible, limited time targets that are gone forever (or at least a while) if you mess them up, The game has a lot of replay value as is and making them all permanent, including their rewards, wouldn't be a problem, I don't see any appeal for this.

Some of the levels in the middle of the game are a bit boring, particular the one set in Morocco and especially the one set in Colorado.
The one set in Morocco has a bad problem with just kind of squeezing you in tight locations with you having to navigate an overpopulated clusterfuck to try and find a way through, probably just having to jump to a "Mission Story" and it becomes really difficult to take some of the disguises, particularly the guy putting up flyers, because you have to follow him around for AGES before he's in a decent spot, which you're only getting away with due to bad NPC placement, which gets spotted soon after, not that it matters when you're gone (another criticism, why don't NPCs that you steal the outfit of get upset and compromise your outfit for everyone they're related with once they're woken up?)
The Colorado one is just stuffing you in this open hell-hole where you have to take out FOUR targets, 2 of them aren't too hard, the mission stories they have are easy enough to set up, and the third just stumbled upon my distraction I had accidentally set up when I was taking care of two guys I needed to KO and get past, so I just killed him and stuffed his body in a bush, but the fourth one? what a fucking pain in the ass, and I was doing the "Mission Story"
So first, you have to go listen to the guy's conversation about the Interpol badge, then you have to wait for the planets to align to steal it from him, because before you KO him, you have to wait for the guy just across from him to walk away, make sure the target and their entourage isn't coming, wait for his buddy to turn around, throw a weapon at his buddy, immediately choke the guy with the badge, snag it, and book it immediately, that's the hard part done.

Now you have to get to the target and talk to her to meet you at a specific location, but if you were using "The Point Man" disguise, you're just not allowed anywhere near the house, so you have to wait for her to finish whatever she's doing there or go back and get the "Militia Elite" disguise, once you talk to her you tell her to meet you by a lake, you go through this drawn out conversation, she does this annoying trope that a lot of mission stories have, where eventually they just say "Ok You beat the mission story, all guards fuck off" and then sit around for like 20s before returning to the giant group of people effectively failing the mission story.

Normally that isn't a problem, but I had accidentally landed it with some guy across the lake looking right at us, so I had to wait until he turned around, which just so happened to be right as she finished talking, Thankfully I still had the prompt to push her in the water, but now her guards that were nowhere near me are... hunting me down? And only her guards, I guess when she's not in that scene she's scripted to have her guards react to any kill event like a "push" so you can't cheese it by just having the guards look the other way, but it's way too greedy, she's flagged for this the MOMENT she finishes her scripted "stand by the edge of the water animation"
Thankfully I had a save, so I just timed it right before she finishes the animation and finished the mission easily.

Continuing from the AI though, my final criticism is that the AI just kind of has a lot of issues, a lot of the civilians are effectively props that sometimes react to gunfire (and even then not enough) but it's no big deal, it's really taxing to render in a hundred civilians.
My problem is more the weaknesses of the guard AI, my major complaints involve just how they handle distractions and pathing, it's really easy to cheese dealing with guards, as if you throw something, and they don't watch you throw it, whoever was closest to the object thrown will walk straight to it, no matter what.
I abused this on the final mission to snag a disguise from one of the Yakuza, the target was walking with her 2 bodyguards, I threw a shovel in the room on the left, all 3 were alerted, one guard walked in, I immediately knocked him out and stole his disguise and the other 2 just didn't care that he never returned.
Then when I kind of fucked up the "Mission Story" by pushing the target off a ledge in front of her security, I just hung off the ledge and they just couldn't figure out how to deal with that, they just pathed into the room and just stared at walls, didn't try to go shoot through the window to get me, or to stand next to the ledge and shoot down at me, just stared at a wall and at best just compromised my disguise, which I could easily replace.

And one last nitpick on the AI, the way the AI just stops and says "GET OUT OF MY FACE" if you stand close to them for too long, it's pointless and annoying, so often it'll happen just because you're waiting for them to go through dialogue, or waiting for an NPC to pass by, and it just wastes time because they stare right at you, spend 7 seconds saying "go away" and then turn back around, and it'll interrupt their dialogue and sets them back like, a sentence or two, it never really did anything major but my lord was it annoying every time it happened, which was a lot.

I really recommend Hitman: WoA with my experience so far of the first game's levels though, it's a comfortable in-between of old games like Thief, mixed with some sense of direction and levels that actually look like places of modern era, I enjoyed my time with it and it's one of the few games that makes me want to go back and replay the levels once I'm done going through them one at a time.

Utterly miserable, all the writing doubles down on everything that was shit from the first and any note of something interesting has been eradicated, the first game struggled with not talking about vapid bullshit metatext when what it had going for it regularly was quite interesting and thought-provoking, and now it's just been boiled down to obnoxious "HOLY FREAKIN COW EVERYTHING IS FREAKIN SCARRRYYY MY MOM IS LIKE A DEMOONNN"
Whereas the first one lead me on something interesting and then let me down, I could barely stomach 10 minutes with such a fucking horrible opening, just low-fi beats to study to bullshit for people who beat off to one or multiple of things like psychological horror, mental illness and "failgirls"

This is one of the few times I genuinely feel like I have had the reverse of what I usually expect to feel from art, I don't feel like I've grown, I feel like my perspective on the world has been reduced, I can only hope this was made to cash in on the people who went "OMG SO RELATABLE" to the first game.

Good writing of mental health, while still managing to be interesting, but my god the writing of the actual game is atrocious, leave the metatext stuff at the door, I really do not care about it.

It just comes off as super pretentious, I've interacted with a thousand different people who have this bad coping mechanism of acting like their mental illness makes them a quirky personality that everyone loves to interact with, and it's always so incredibly insufferable and this game pretty much personifies it, I can't get into the game's main character because I just see all those people I knew, It feels like if the game went on for any longer I'd be reading through the bi-daily vent post from them about how everything sucks but phrased in a way to be just pointlessly complex filled with absolutely obnoxious commentary on culture and society.