LeahThe3th
2023
This game is really a sleeper hit. one of the best 3D platformers I've ever played, elegantly combining the Metroidvania style with Super Mario 64-esque movement and level design, it's a really well put togehter and a must play for any fan of the genre.
However, there are a good few snags that keep my overall score for the game low, to start, the current version of the game lacks a map, and while it's easy to figure out where you're going without it, it's a convenience that would have gone a long way, it really makes it feel like you're just totally stuck but it was just a matter of not having explored a specific room.
The combat sucks, just straight up sucks, but after you've gotten a few abilities you're able to avoid it or just dance around your opposition, but due to this the very beginning of the game is a total drag (especially the tutorial boss, a lot of shitty hits you'll be receiving) and the final boss, the only real boss battle of the game, ends up feeling boring and tiring.
Some of the abilities as well are a bit awkward to control, particularly the wall run and the wall kick.
The wall run just performs very awkwardly, not going forward if you're facing the wall too much, but not making up for this by having a larger range from which you can start wall-riding from, on this one section where you had to wall-ride a long distance, I had more consistency doing a sequence break jump over the intended route.
The wall kick is just annoying, you're intended to use it for a bit of extra air-time, but if you use it and you connect with a wall at any point during the animation, you'll kick off of it, instead of only kicking off the wall if you click while/right before you hit the wall, it's easy enough to learn how to deal with this but it makes comboing wall kicks into wall-rides nearly impossible.
But back to the praises, the level design is just phenomenal, it's really fun to jump across all the areas, and the level design has a (potentially) unintended ability to allow you to sequence break quite often, but not soft-locking your game due to either feasible jumps or carefully placed save-points, and it adds a lot to the movement of the game.
The art-style is gorgeous, really making everything feel hazy and dream-like, whilst not feeling like a mess thematically, with my biggest criticism being that the protagonist not wearing any leggings just looks... weird (Which you thankfully can change in the settings, looks great!)
And on-top of all that, the soundtrack is great, a very, again "dream-like" feel for a lot of the tracks, but still catchy and unique enough to give each area it's own "feel"
There's not much story to speak of and what does exist is a
[SPOILER WARNING]
very VERY abrupt ending with no fanfare, just being kind of a hand-wavy "the final boss was the personification of the dreamer creating this world and your victory was merely just letting them know they need to wake up and move on from whatever is holding them back from their real life"
[SPOILER WARNING END]
but it's not a big deal as the story isn't really the hook for this type of game, but rather is just a dressing to give it all a nice theme.
Not sure what the mix with art-deco and medieval castles is about though, probably just something stitched together because it looked cool or whatever.
Anyways, I recommend this game big time, and I'll probably be upping my score on this if I get back around to the game after they add a map to it (and maybe some QoL changes)
However, there are a good few snags that keep my overall score for the game low, to start, the current version of the game lacks a map, and while it's easy to figure out where you're going without it, it's a convenience that would have gone a long way, it really makes it feel like you're just totally stuck but it was just a matter of not having explored a specific room.
The combat sucks, just straight up sucks, but after you've gotten a few abilities you're able to avoid it or just dance around your opposition, but due to this the very beginning of the game is a total drag (especially the tutorial boss, a lot of shitty hits you'll be receiving) and the final boss, the only real boss battle of the game, ends up feeling boring and tiring.
Some of the abilities as well are a bit awkward to control, particularly the wall run and the wall kick.
The wall run just performs very awkwardly, not going forward if you're facing the wall too much, but not making up for this by having a larger range from which you can start wall-riding from, on this one section where you had to wall-ride a long distance, I had more consistency doing a sequence break jump over the intended route.
The wall kick is just annoying, you're intended to use it for a bit of extra air-time, but if you use it and you connect with a wall at any point during the animation, you'll kick off of it, instead of only kicking off the wall if you click while/right before you hit the wall, it's easy enough to learn how to deal with this but it makes comboing wall kicks into wall-rides nearly impossible.
But back to the praises, the level design is just phenomenal, it's really fun to jump across all the areas, and the level design has a (potentially) unintended ability to allow you to sequence break quite often, but not soft-locking your game due to either feasible jumps or carefully placed save-points, and it adds a lot to the movement of the game.
The art-style is gorgeous, really making everything feel hazy and dream-like, whilst not feeling like a mess thematically, with my biggest criticism being that the protagonist not wearing any leggings just looks... weird (Which you thankfully can change in the settings, looks great!)
And on-top of all that, the soundtrack is great, a very, again "dream-like" feel for a lot of the tracks, but still catchy and unique enough to give each area it's own "feel"
There's not much story to speak of and what does exist is a
[SPOILER WARNING]
very VERY abrupt ending with no fanfare, just being kind of a hand-wavy "the final boss was the personification of the dreamer creating this world and your victory was merely just letting them know they need to wake up and move on from whatever is holding them back from their real life"
[SPOILER WARNING END]
but it's not a big deal as the story isn't really the hook for this type of game, but rather is just a dressing to give it all a nice theme.
Not sure what the mix with art-deco and medieval castles is about though, probably just something stitched together because it looked cool or whatever.
Anyways, I recommend this game big time, and I'll probably be upping my score on this if I get back around to the game after they add a map to it (and maybe some QoL changes)
2021
Maybe it's just me, but some "cozy/wholesome" games can feel quite exhausting, It just feels patronizing having stuff that not only is pretty simple and filled with friendliness, but just bends over backwards to make sure everyone is having a comfortable time, everybody loves you and also gives you their preferred pronouns and nobody ever gets mad at you, I get it, some people really get into this stuff but stuff like this always reminds me of being a kid and feeling like my intelligence was insulted because people will spend far too long treating like you can't walk 5 ft without falling on your face, so this ends up just feeling like an exploration game where if you ever sprain your ankle, you'll get a band-aid and a juicebox.
It's not a bad game though, the art is cute and the characters are a bit interesting, even if all of the ones that are clearly in their teens to 30s are the same design but with a different style of clothes that could be interchangeable between all of them, and all of the kids are like, kids show shallow, where their only goals in life are to say hi to friends and ask someone to get their ball for them.
The game is a nice time-sink if you don't mind these kinds of atmospheres, but it just drains me.
It's not a bad game though, the art is cute and the characters are a bit interesting, even if all of the ones that are clearly in their teens to 30s are the same design but with a different style of clothes that could be interchangeable between all of them, and all of the kids are like, kids show shallow, where their only goals in life are to say hi to friends and ask someone to get their ball for them.
The game is a nice time-sink if you don't mind these kinds of atmospheres, but it just drains me.
2023
It is absolutely depressing how much lower Valve gets in my personal view year after year, I spent most of my childhood being a diehard Valve fan and they do nothing but repay their customers with NOTHING.
We're talking milking a game with cosmetic drops made by community members for months, taking a majority profit off of those, and not producing any actual meaningful content updates, they did this somewhat for CS:GO during its many long hiatus periods, and they do this incredibly for TF2, It is genuinely insane that this is okay, these games generate massive amounts of profit, any other dev would be bending over backwards to support it, at the very least hiring a crew just to support it, but they do nothing, but they'll gladly continue screwing community content creators with bad cuts, and pushing people into gambling, causing high tier items to become stupidly rare, going to hundreds and sometimes even thousands of dollars.
Why? Because Valve's management, are the dumbest fucks on the planet, rivalling some of the worst in any other industry, Coyote VS ACME cancellation level, they've got some of the best talent in the industry but they're so mismanaged due to their shitty corporate structure that all they're ever incentivized to do is work on new projects, new projects you'll never see, outside of the blue moon chances, like a VR Half-Life game that barely made it past the finish line and was totally reworked from the bottom up a year before release, and an update to Valve's second biggest cash cow, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Onto that disgrace, we have Counter-Strike 2, the Counter-Strike you knew, but now everything is worse.
To start the game, you have this gross sleek competitive style they're trying to go for, that looks like complete and total dogshit, 2011 called, they want their art designers back, and it's piled on with the shitty menu design that prioritizes you seeing your shitty ugly agent skins and gloves before anything else, great!
You fire up a game, but oh no, what's this? They've removed short and long matches, now you can only play this middle of the road medium length match that appeals to nobody, Yay!
Oh well, at least the gameplay isn't that much different, all they did was add the smokes, and to start off the gameplay just feels like shit now, something changed and everything feels floaty and imprecise, it's gotten a lot better than what it launched at, but the fact that this was a replacement for one of the biggest competitive games in the world, and it launched like this, after months of beta, is nothing short of a colossal embarrassment.
And what's this? The buy menu, it's shit now!
You have to pick a small selection of weapons in this Valorant styled menu list, effectively dooming most off-meta weapons to be never picked again, and thanks for just reinventing the wheel to blur together with your vastly superior competition.
And to top it all off, there's been a gigantic cheater problem, bigger than I've ever seen when I was playing CS:GO, Multiple times when I infrequently play in friends in low rank lobbies, you will run into blatant wallhackers, the ones you can check in replay and see them staring at people through walls, fucking fantastic, and the matchmaking isn't much better either, did I mention that there were multiple bugs of innocent users getting VAC banned for extreme things like using a console command to look like you're spinbotting, or simple things like, using certain AMD software?
And guess what? Several fucking things from the original were just completely dropped in the transition, Arms Race was removed, only to be reintroduced months and months later and advertised as a content update, thanks for bringing back the thing you took away, dipshits!
Danger Zone was removed, though I doubt anyone will miss it.
Wingman lost like most of its map pool.
Riot Shield was removed from Casual hostage playlists, no fun allowed I suppose.
Multiple console commands stopped working, like net_graph, left-handed viewmodels, and the anti view bob commands.
Achievements were removed for no reason.
And to top it all off, now all the maps use the same default operators, incase you were worried that they weren't shoving the awful agent skins down your throat enough.
I'm pretty sure it didn't launch with community server support, so thanks for pissing in the face of what your companies games were built on, douchebags.
But here's the good part of the game, they update3d the graphics.
That's it.
That's all there is to this.
There's the interactive smokes I guess, but they're a pretty minor thing and it's nothing that couldn't have been done on the old engine.
Onto those graphics, it just looks... bad.
Sure, CS:GO's graphics weren't great either, ranging from oversaturated to too dirty and gritty, one looking like a fashion show model and the latter looking like a Call of Duty NPC.
But this? This is fucking awful, Half-Life Alyx is one of the prettiest games I've seen in my entire life, and this just looks like complete and total dogshit, like the models were just sloppily ported from source 1 to 2, and then hiding any imperfections with their new shading.
Sure, the shading is pretty, but it makes the aesthetics of the game wildly inconsistent, realistic guns, colorful shiny pseudo-cartoonish characters, oversaturated world, realistic blood, disgustingly ugly bloom coated fire, etc.
It just makes the whole thing look like a visual mess, and a sloppy attempt at converting the game to a clean visual ala Valorant.
Sorry Valve, as much as I love you, your art team is no match for Riot in terms of aesthetics mixed with readability, they're placing your teeth on the curb and jumping on your head from a second story window, and the viscera left from the aftermath is in the shape of a shiny Phoenix Terrorist Model.
All there is to know about Valve at this point is that you just should not interact with their live service games after like 3-5 years of release, that's around the time they just totally give up and stop giving a fuck and start screwing their customers.
And all there is to know about their upcoming products is that their upcoming game that is basically a total blur at this point, Neon Prime is rumored to be dropping the sci-fi aesthetic because some idiot at Valve got spooked by sci-fi games not doing so hot lately, mainly in context to Starfield, which is a game that sold well and only bombed due to being a shitty Bethesda game.
To all of the people fucking their customers day in day out on the live-service areas of Valve, Fuck you. Except Eric on what's left of the TF2 team, love you man.
To all the Valve devs slaving away at new single-player titles? Bless your heart, as your monetization pisses your customers respect for your company away, thank you for constantly reminding them what Valve was built for, making quality games that don't ask for anything more than the entry ticket price, Half-Life Alyx is one of the best games Valve ever made, and Counter-Strike 2 is going to live in the pits of hell next to Ricochet.
We're talking milking a game with cosmetic drops made by community members for months, taking a majority profit off of those, and not producing any actual meaningful content updates, they did this somewhat for CS:GO during its many long hiatus periods, and they do this incredibly for TF2, It is genuinely insane that this is okay, these games generate massive amounts of profit, any other dev would be bending over backwards to support it, at the very least hiring a crew just to support it, but they do nothing, but they'll gladly continue screwing community content creators with bad cuts, and pushing people into gambling, causing high tier items to become stupidly rare, going to hundreds and sometimes even thousands of dollars.
Why? Because Valve's management, are the dumbest fucks on the planet, rivalling some of the worst in any other industry, Coyote VS ACME cancellation level, they've got some of the best talent in the industry but they're so mismanaged due to their shitty corporate structure that all they're ever incentivized to do is work on new projects, new projects you'll never see, outside of the blue moon chances, like a VR Half-Life game that barely made it past the finish line and was totally reworked from the bottom up a year before release, and an update to Valve's second biggest cash cow, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Onto that disgrace, we have Counter-Strike 2, the Counter-Strike you knew, but now everything is worse.
To start the game, you have this gross sleek competitive style they're trying to go for, that looks like complete and total dogshit, 2011 called, they want their art designers back, and it's piled on with the shitty menu design that prioritizes you seeing your shitty ugly agent skins and gloves before anything else, great!
You fire up a game, but oh no, what's this? They've removed short and long matches, now you can only play this middle of the road medium length match that appeals to nobody, Yay!
Oh well, at least the gameplay isn't that much different, all they did was add the smokes, and to start off the gameplay just feels like shit now, something changed and everything feels floaty and imprecise, it's gotten a lot better than what it launched at, but the fact that this was a replacement for one of the biggest competitive games in the world, and it launched like this, after months of beta, is nothing short of a colossal embarrassment.
And what's this? The buy menu, it's shit now!
You have to pick a small selection of weapons in this Valorant styled menu list, effectively dooming most off-meta weapons to be never picked again, and thanks for just reinventing the wheel to blur together with your vastly superior competition.
And to top it all off, there's been a gigantic cheater problem, bigger than I've ever seen when I was playing CS:GO, Multiple times when I infrequently play in friends in low rank lobbies, you will run into blatant wallhackers, the ones you can check in replay and see them staring at people through walls, fucking fantastic, and the matchmaking isn't much better either, did I mention that there were multiple bugs of innocent users getting VAC banned for extreme things like using a console command to look like you're spinbotting, or simple things like, using certain AMD software?
And guess what? Several fucking things from the original were just completely dropped in the transition, Arms Race was removed, only to be reintroduced months and months later and advertised as a content update, thanks for bringing back the thing you took away, dipshits!
Danger Zone was removed, though I doubt anyone will miss it.
Wingman lost like most of its map pool.
Riot Shield was removed from Casual hostage playlists, no fun allowed I suppose.
Multiple console commands stopped working, like net_graph, left-handed viewmodels, and the anti view bob commands.
Achievements were removed for no reason.
And to top it all off, now all the maps use the same default operators, incase you were worried that they weren't shoving the awful agent skins down your throat enough.
I'm pretty sure it didn't launch with community server support, so thanks for pissing in the face of what your companies games were built on, douchebags.
But here's the good part of the game, they update3d the graphics.
That's it.
That's all there is to this.
There's the interactive smokes I guess, but they're a pretty minor thing and it's nothing that couldn't have been done on the old engine.
Onto those graphics, it just looks... bad.
Sure, CS:GO's graphics weren't great either, ranging from oversaturated to too dirty and gritty, one looking like a fashion show model and the latter looking like a Call of Duty NPC.
But this? This is fucking awful, Half-Life Alyx is one of the prettiest games I've seen in my entire life, and this just looks like complete and total dogshit, like the models were just sloppily ported from source 1 to 2, and then hiding any imperfections with their new shading.
Sure, the shading is pretty, but it makes the aesthetics of the game wildly inconsistent, realistic guns, colorful shiny pseudo-cartoonish characters, oversaturated world, realistic blood, disgustingly ugly bloom coated fire, etc.
It just makes the whole thing look like a visual mess, and a sloppy attempt at converting the game to a clean visual ala Valorant.
Sorry Valve, as much as I love you, your art team is no match for Riot in terms of aesthetics mixed with readability, they're placing your teeth on the curb and jumping on your head from a second story window, and the viscera left from the aftermath is in the shape of a shiny Phoenix Terrorist Model.
All there is to know about Valve at this point is that you just should not interact with their live service games after like 3-5 years of release, that's around the time they just totally give up and stop giving a fuck and start screwing their customers.
And all there is to know about their upcoming products is that their upcoming game that is basically a total blur at this point, Neon Prime is rumored to be dropping the sci-fi aesthetic because some idiot at Valve got spooked by sci-fi games not doing so hot lately, mainly in context to Starfield, which is a game that sold well and only bombed due to being a shitty Bethesda game.
To all of the people fucking their customers day in day out on the live-service areas of Valve, Fuck you. Except Eric on what's left of the TF2 team, love you man.
To all the Valve devs slaving away at new single-player titles? Bless your heart, as your monetization pisses your customers respect for your company away, thank you for constantly reminding them what Valve was built for, making quality games that don't ask for anything more than the entry ticket price, Half-Life Alyx is one of the best games Valve ever made, and Counter-Strike 2 is going to live in the pits of hell next to Ricochet.
2023
Remember when later Guitar Hero games had songs that can't do anything but have boring easy-mode charts? Yeah, that's this.
Pair it with a really shitty rotation model where if you want to play a song for any other period than when it shows up for a few days, you have to pay 5 whole dollars for it and only when it's in the item shop, and you've got Fortnite Festival.
Pair it with incredibly boring visuals, as you've got a very ugly giant stage with band animations going below even GH2 quality, but hey, during those long breaks certain instruments will get in songs due to a bad track-list, you can use your emotes!
There's really no huge flair either, there's nothing like the audio getting filtered when using Overdrive, the particles while you're using it are very small and tied almost entirely to just your player, and most of them are battle pass/shop purchases anyways.
Generally it just is very clunky as well, you can't quick restart a song or practice it, instead you can just jump into the song from the start and if you fuck up you have to back out to the main-stage with on some songs this being a downtime of like 40s.
You've also got to deal with the fact that all the notes share the same color so on harder tracks (if you can actually FIND one) it's a bit annoying to deal with as it's harder to read for no other reason than it has to be the Fortnite purple color.
Lastly there's just a lot of instabilities, It's on the second season now and there's still major issues with just random hitching in the middle of songs (far better than it used to be at-least) and crashes happen randomly as well.
AAA Licensed Rhythm games are pretty much dead, and this is the best you'll get out of it in the modern industry, just move on and go download like Clone Hero or YARG or something.
Epic, Stop trying to make metaverse Fortnite happen, It's not going to happen, nobody plays the shitty racing mode, Festival is mediocre, Lego Fortnite has been nothing but boring and the Creative mode's expansion has pretty much exclusively been used to make things that you could already play, like arenas or boxfights etc. but now they have a random theme of Streamer/Country/IP, or just are something I could have played in ROBLOX back in 2009, it's not working and players are just going to jump to the one where they already have all the different things they want to make.
Pair it with a really shitty rotation model where if you want to play a song for any other period than when it shows up for a few days, you have to pay 5 whole dollars for it and only when it's in the item shop, and you've got Fortnite Festival.
Pair it with incredibly boring visuals, as you've got a very ugly giant stage with band animations going below even GH2 quality, but hey, during those long breaks certain instruments will get in songs due to a bad track-list, you can use your emotes!
There's really no huge flair either, there's nothing like the audio getting filtered when using Overdrive, the particles while you're using it are very small and tied almost entirely to just your player, and most of them are battle pass/shop purchases anyways.
Generally it just is very clunky as well, you can't quick restart a song or practice it, instead you can just jump into the song from the start and if you fuck up you have to back out to the main-stage with on some songs this being a downtime of like 40s.
You've also got to deal with the fact that all the notes share the same color so on harder tracks (if you can actually FIND one) it's a bit annoying to deal with as it's harder to read for no other reason than it has to be the Fortnite purple color.
Lastly there's just a lot of instabilities, It's on the second season now and there's still major issues with just random hitching in the middle of songs (far better than it used to be at-least) and crashes happen randomly as well.
AAA Licensed Rhythm games are pretty much dead, and this is the best you'll get out of it in the modern industry, just move on and go download like Clone Hero or YARG or something.
Epic, Stop trying to make metaverse Fortnite happen, It's not going to happen, nobody plays the shitty racing mode, Festival is mediocre, Lego Fortnite has been nothing but boring and the Creative mode's expansion has pretty much exclusively been used to make things that you could already play, like arenas or boxfights etc. but now they have a random theme of Streamer/Country/IP, or just are something I could have played in ROBLOX back in 2009, it's not working and players are just going to jump to the one where they already have all the different things they want to make.
2007
A genuine masterpiece in puzzle gameplay, managing to make something incredibly basic force you to think outside of the box to overcome all kinds of puzzles, all while balancing Valve's master class "show don't tell" writing while making sure there's still a story to speak of.
2011
A masterpiece sequel adding wonderful setpieces, art design and voicr acting onto one of the best puzzle games ever, This is the kind of game that goes down in history immediately.
2016
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.
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.
2023
This review contains spoilers
A sequel 13 years in the making, or rather like, 8-10 years in wishing it could happen and 3-5 in the making, Alan Wake 2 is the long awaited sequel to Remedy's cult classic, Alan Wake.
I'm not going to go into the history of why the game couldn't happen, or the first game's struggles, but I will mention that it's beautiful to finally see this game come out, and be not only the best game Remedy has released ever, but probably my favorite game that released last year.
I was writing a synopsis that leads into the review, but it's a bit lengthy and wordy, and this is a spoiler tagged review anyhow, so I'll just jump into this, contextless spoilers may be ahead, and I'm going to be more negative than positive just because I can note the negative things a lot better.
I loved the story for the game, I loved all the twists, and how predictable they were if you paid attention to everything that goes on in all of their games.
Where Alan Wake 1 was a loveable B-movie horror experience, (even if I'm not sure they intended it to be) Alan Wake 2 is the real blockbuster deal, with writing and gameplay actually taking notes from horror media, with such creative ideas like, tension and setpieces, instead of walking through empty forests for 12 hours.
Starting off with Saga's campaign, from the get go she's an interesting perspective, and a good one to start with, it puts you in the shoes of someone unfamiliar with the town and lets you ease into the world of the game, and she makes a great partner with her buddy cop Max Pa-I mean, Alex Casey.
Writing wise she's interesting, a bit down to earth (surprising, for an FBI agent) and generally quite likeable, there's not really much to say about her as she's not much of a dynamic character in premise, the most interesting thing you can say about her is said to you directly by an NPC in one of the final chapters, that she's a statement for the difficulty of a work life balance or something like that.
I do have a fair few criticisms for how her character was handled though.
One, she's a fucking terrible detective, I get that the story acknowledges this at the end in a way, but it just makes parts of the story feel like a sluggish idiot plot as Saga refuses to entertain the thought of "hey maybe this isn't Wake out of the dark place and its just Scratch" or "if the cult failed a ritual on Nightingale, and he became a Taken anyways, maybe they want to stop the Taken and not create them, which would clear up all the confusing evidence"
Sure, the Scratch thing isn't true, but the story sets Saga up in a position to be doubtful, but the only reason she DOESN'T give Alan the clicker is because he gets possessed by Scratch and kicks up a fit right before she can hand it to him, all she said was "make sure logan is ok :)"
Two, the whole distressed mother thing started to get a bit grating, she's an FBI agent, and for fucks sake, she's clearly dealing with forces of unknown magnitude, and she's the most held up about her daughter maybe or maybe not being okay, I get it, a parent would be hurt and it's a strong story point, but they push too hard on it and it doesn't reflect the stakes properly.
Three, Why is she supposed to be this protagonist who doesn't know much about the area she's in, and has her story written around not knowing how the Taken work (the cultists powered by darkness raving about shit are Taken, not cultists, this is obvious to anyone who played AW1!) when the game in general not only expects you to have played AW1, but also to have played Control, she doesn't even have any questions when the FBC rolls up, nothing like "Who the fuck are you guys?" or "I thought the FBI were the higher authority?" She just rolls up like she's just a local town cop, and they're the FBI, it's as if the FBC to them was just used as an excuse to do a "FBI, we'll take it for here" on a FBI agent.
You could make the claim that "oh well in this world the FBC is a known thing" when even if that was true, it's never deeply explained WHAT they do, and instead is just left in the air, the only question she ever asks the FBC is "wtf is a parautilitarian?"
Four, For her major twist of the story, the Cult not being bad, it's done badly because unlike the other major twists, even though the game gives you plenty of resources to figure it out, it just enforces an idiot plot to make it unclear to the protagonist until it happens, with the most egregious example being right before Scratch attacks Saga for the first time, where you have the Koskela brothers in jail wasting their time saying "Grr fuck u police bitch" instead of "HEY WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS YOU MADE A MISTAKE DO NOT GIVE SCRATCH THE CLICKER"
Writing for Alan is a lot better, you're dealing with the twisted areas of the Dark Place, and you get to deal with Mr. Door, a mysterious fellow, Thomas Zane who while answering a bunch of things, still leaves you with more questions than answers (is he a filmmaker or a poet?) and generally indulges you heavily in Alan's place in the story, as well as referencing the first game a TON.
Gameplay in general is a blessing, Remedy has finally done it, for the first time since Max Payne 2, Remedy has made a game that is fun to play, there's still a few snags like guns being a little bit less precise than they should be, or the dodge not being as responsive when it comes to dodging projectiles or the very stabby Shadows/Taken, but the issues have gone from miserable to ignorable, If it wasn't for the fact that the puzzles were almost nonexistent or really easy, this would go toe to toe with some of the modern Resident Evil games.
For the one thing that's totally unique to the game compared to most other survival horror games though, the Flashlight, it's still not much better than it was in AW1, it's just a weird sidegrade, flashlight boosts are a weird system that just adds another resource to manage, while being a buggy system that's imprecise, requires you to use 1 whole charge at a time when an enemy only gets stunned if you use 100% of a charge, constantly making you waste a second, and for some reason you can cancel using a charge? This would be fixed heavily if aiming in with the flashlight did some small damage to shields overtime, kind of like in the first game.
That and the boss fights all suck, like they're really bad, I don't know why Remedy is so bad at making boss fights any fun at all, also shotguns, I don't know why the shotguns in this game are all bad, it shouldn't take 2 shots to the face to kill a guy when 3 revolver shots does the same thing.
Oh yeah, and the jump-scares are terrible, they don't add any tension they're just a sudden loud noise covering your screen and it's annoying as hell, it's good that you can turn them down but you should honestly be able to turn them off entirely, they add nothing of value even when they're just sudden -POP- transitions for things or characters appearing or disappearing.
Gameplay wise Saga is by far the worse out of the two, she has a terrible pistol, taking twice as many shots to the head to kill as Alan's revolver, but with a similar ammo economy and reload time, and also instead of having a flare gun, she has the shitty rocket flares, and she generally has more enemies, and more enemy types (particularly the annoying and/or tank-y ones)
Also she's the one that has ALL boss battles, so.
Mind palace is whatever, the case board kind of doesn't do anything useful outside of the final chapter, so the place is kind of just a cop-out stuffed with exposition so that Alan wasn't the only one with the impressive SSD utilizing swap feature.
Dark Ocean Summoning was neat, but not as cool as We Sing, it's more of a Anderson Farm type affair from AW1, where We Sing is more of an Ashtray Maze.
Alan's gameplay on the other hand, is pretty fun, and by fun I mean tense, you're constantly moving past Shadows that may or may not turn out to be real Shadows that will beat the fuck out of you, using his revolver and flare gun feel even better than they did in the first game, and while the plot swapping thing and light bulb thing is a bit of a shallow gimmick for linear progression, it is admittedly really cool seeing all the different areas and things just -POP-ing in and out of existence.
We Sing was fun as hell too, what a great one of a kind experience.
This game is a love-letter to both Alan Wake, the game that while being a bit of a cult classic, just wasn't meant to be for the longest time, and Remedy games in general, indulging heavily in Control, a bit of Quantum Break, Alan Wake 1, and even Max Payne (R.I.P James, the night opened to let you in.)
It's a blessing to survival horror, and a work of art for the video game medium, managing to be cinematic but not sacrificing gameplay, their use of FMVs and special effects to set these scenes and transitions and all the effects of the enemies and all of their incredibly beautiful sets are just master class, and I'm so excited to see what the future holds for the developers, I will 100% be pre-ordering Control 2, and I really hope this time around they can even figure out a way to make Control fun to play that time around.
Play this damn game, Play all of Remedy's games, experience the biggest boon for video game storytelling in the AAA space in years, their entire studio bleeds with passion from their developers, to their directors, to their actors.
I'm not going to go into the history of why the game couldn't happen, or the first game's struggles, but I will mention that it's beautiful to finally see this game come out, and be not only the best game Remedy has released ever, but probably my favorite game that released last year.
I was writing a synopsis that leads into the review, but it's a bit lengthy and wordy, and this is a spoiler tagged review anyhow, so I'll just jump into this, contextless spoilers may be ahead, and I'm going to be more negative than positive just because I can note the negative things a lot better.
I loved the story for the game, I loved all the twists, and how predictable they were if you paid attention to everything that goes on in all of their games.
Where Alan Wake 1 was a loveable B-movie horror experience, (even if I'm not sure they intended it to be) Alan Wake 2 is the real blockbuster deal, with writing and gameplay actually taking notes from horror media, with such creative ideas like, tension and setpieces, instead of walking through empty forests for 12 hours.
Starting off with Saga's campaign, from the get go she's an interesting perspective, and a good one to start with, it puts you in the shoes of someone unfamiliar with the town and lets you ease into the world of the game, and she makes a great partner with her buddy cop Max Pa-I mean, Alex Casey.
Writing wise she's interesting, a bit down to earth (surprising, for an FBI agent) and generally quite likeable, there's not really much to say about her as she's not much of a dynamic character in premise, the most interesting thing you can say about her is said to you directly by an NPC in one of the final chapters, that she's a statement for the difficulty of a work life balance or something like that.
I do have a fair few criticisms for how her character was handled though.
One, she's a fucking terrible detective, I get that the story acknowledges this at the end in a way, but it just makes parts of the story feel like a sluggish idiot plot as Saga refuses to entertain the thought of "hey maybe this isn't Wake out of the dark place and its just Scratch" or "if the cult failed a ritual on Nightingale, and he became a Taken anyways, maybe they want to stop the Taken and not create them, which would clear up all the confusing evidence"
Sure, the Scratch thing isn't true, but the story sets Saga up in a position to be doubtful, but the only reason she DOESN'T give Alan the clicker is because he gets possessed by Scratch and kicks up a fit right before she can hand it to him, all she said was "make sure logan is ok :)"
Two, the whole distressed mother thing started to get a bit grating, she's an FBI agent, and for fucks sake, she's clearly dealing with forces of unknown magnitude, and she's the most held up about her daughter maybe or maybe not being okay, I get it, a parent would be hurt and it's a strong story point, but they push too hard on it and it doesn't reflect the stakes properly.
Three, Why is she supposed to be this protagonist who doesn't know much about the area she's in, and has her story written around not knowing how the Taken work (the cultists powered by darkness raving about shit are Taken, not cultists, this is obvious to anyone who played AW1!) when the game in general not only expects you to have played AW1, but also to have played Control, she doesn't even have any questions when the FBC rolls up, nothing like "Who the fuck are you guys?" or "I thought the FBI were the higher authority?" She just rolls up like she's just a local town cop, and they're the FBI, it's as if the FBC to them was just used as an excuse to do a "FBI, we'll take it for here" on a FBI agent.
You could make the claim that "oh well in this world the FBC is a known thing" when even if that was true, it's never deeply explained WHAT they do, and instead is just left in the air, the only question she ever asks the FBC is "wtf is a parautilitarian?"
Four, For her major twist of the story, the Cult not being bad, it's done badly because unlike the other major twists, even though the game gives you plenty of resources to figure it out, it just enforces an idiot plot to make it unclear to the protagonist until it happens, with the most egregious example being right before Scratch attacks Saga for the first time, where you have the Koskela brothers in jail wasting their time saying "Grr fuck u police bitch" instead of "HEY WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS YOU MADE A MISTAKE DO NOT GIVE SCRATCH THE CLICKER"
Writing for Alan is a lot better, you're dealing with the twisted areas of the Dark Place, and you get to deal with Mr. Door, a mysterious fellow, Thomas Zane who while answering a bunch of things, still leaves you with more questions than answers (is he a filmmaker or a poet?) and generally indulges you heavily in Alan's place in the story, as well as referencing the first game a TON.
Gameplay in general is a blessing, Remedy has finally done it, for the first time since Max Payne 2, Remedy has made a game that is fun to play, there's still a few snags like guns being a little bit less precise than they should be, or the dodge not being as responsive when it comes to dodging projectiles or the very stabby Shadows/Taken, but the issues have gone from miserable to ignorable, If it wasn't for the fact that the puzzles were almost nonexistent or really easy, this would go toe to toe with some of the modern Resident Evil games.
For the one thing that's totally unique to the game compared to most other survival horror games though, the Flashlight, it's still not much better than it was in AW1, it's just a weird sidegrade, flashlight boosts are a weird system that just adds another resource to manage, while being a buggy system that's imprecise, requires you to use 1 whole charge at a time when an enemy only gets stunned if you use 100% of a charge, constantly making you waste a second, and for some reason you can cancel using a charge? This would be fixed heavily if aiming in with the flashlight did some small damage to shields overtime, kind of like in the first game.
That and the boss fights all suck, like they're really bad, I don't know why Remedy is so bad at making boss fights any fun at all, also shotguns, I don't know why the shotguns in this game are all bad, it shouldn't take 2 shots to the face to kill a guy when 3 revolver shots does the same thing.
Oh yeah, and the jump-scares are terrible, they don't add any tension they're just a sudden loud noise covering your screen and it's annoying as hell, it's good that you can turn them down but you should honestly be able to turn them off entirely, they add nothing of value even when they're just sudden -POP- transitions for things or characters appearing or disappearing.
Gameplay wise Saga is by far the worse out of the two, she has a terrible pistol, taking twice as many shots to the head to kill as Alan's revolver, but with a similar ammo economy and reload time, and also instead of having a flare gun, she has the shitty rocket flares, and she generally has more enemies, and more enemy types (particularly the annoying and/or tank-y ones)
Also she's the one that has ALL boss battles, so.
Mind palace is whatever, the case board kind of doesn't do anything useful outside of the final chapter, so the place is kind of just a cop-out stuffed with exposition so that Alan wasn't the only one with the impressive SSD utilizing swap feature.
Dark Ocean Summoning was neat, but not as cool as We Sing, it's more of a Anderson Farm type affair from AW1, where We Sing is more of an Ashtray Maze.
Alan's gameplay on the other hand, is pretty fun, and by fun I mean tense, you're constantly moving past Shadows that may or may not turn out to be real Shadows that will beat the fuck out of you, using his revolver and flare gun feel even better than they did in the first game, and while the plot swapping thing and light bulb thing is a bit of a shallow gimmick for linear progression, it is admittedly really cool seeing all the different areas and things just -POP-ing in and out of existence.
We Sing was fun as hell too, what a great one of a kind experience.
This game is a love-letter to both Alan Wake, the game that while being a bit of a cult classic, just wasn't meant to be for the longest time, and Remedy games in general, indulging heavily in Control, a bit of Quantum Break, Alan Wake 1, and even Max Payne (R.I.P James, the night opened to let you in.)
It's a blessing to survival horror, and a work of art for the video game medium, managing to be cinematic but not sacrificing gameplay, their use of FMVs and special effects to set these scenes and transitions and all the effects of the enemies and all of their incredibly beautiful sets are just master class, and I'm so excited to see what the future holds for the developers, I will 100% be pre-ordering Control 2, and I really hope this time around they can even figure out a way to make Control fun to play that time around.
Play this damn game, Play all of Remedy's games, experience the biggest boon for video game storytelling in the AAA space in years, their entire studio bleeds with passion from their developers, to their directors, to their actors.
A beautiful remaster to one of the best point and click series ever, if you like your black comedy light and your antics zany, there's no better series than this.
An almost there sequel to one of the best games of all time, 2 fails at level design but succeeds in not only fleshing out the world of Hotline Miami even more but by also asking the question of what it means to be a sequel, and sending it off with, well, a boom.
2018
A surprisingly enjoyable run through a setting not touched often in games, "Rural America" Far Cry 5 sets a high standard that future entries will fail to meet for quality and just fun in open-world gameplay, if you can stomach other Far Cry games even remotely, I recommend at least a few hours with this.
A bit of a sluggish yet charming experience spanning a story about smuggling, but coming out of it the only thing you'll probably end up remembering is an INSANELY slow end over a debate about extraterritorial rights, but as with all entries in this series I do recommend playing it.
My personal favorite in the amazing series that is the first 4 Ace Attorney games, What it lacks in, well, Phoenix Wright is made up for with lovable characters, amazing artwork and incredible soundtracks, and some amazing writing.
Please, play this series!
Please, play this series!
2009
An overhated hidden gem in the franchise, this game is a must play if you and a friend love the series, building off of the back of Resident Evil 4's gameplay this game struggles in comparison due to removing elements such as inventory management, and making enemy and level designs more in the style of the final act of 4, still offers an incredibly fun experience and is absolutely carried by the boss fights and over-the top action.
2019
Control is a very wonderful, very well written game, any fan of Alan Wake would probably love this game's writing and all the setpieces and scenes Remedy sets up brilliantly.
I don't think most people should play it.
EDIT: I've thought on it for a few weeks, I recommend playing this game solely because it's an amazing experience writing wise by Remedy, it plays boring as shit, but it's so worth it for the acting, the narrative, the writing, all of that, they're just so good at everything they do EXCEPT gameplay.
Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful thing to experience with all the beautifully done modelling for the brutalist bureaucratic office spaces of Control, as well as all the FMVs, set dressings and incredible graphical fidelity for performance that has become standard with Remedy's titles, but just, watch someone else play this game.
I'll start with the pros and cons of everything other than the gameplay, and get to the slew of gameplay complaints near the end.
To start, the game is beautiful as mentioned above, but the PC port is not going so great, I had a consistent input lag problem that was only slightly reduced by turning vsync off, and it made aiming difficult, also any time I died I was getting a loading screen of at least a whole minute.
Some minor NPC faces just look, weird, but for optimization and budget sake, I get it.
The facial animations on the other hand, typically are really bad, they look stiff and weird and just look very uncanny, I don't know why the cutscenes focus on the faces so much knowing this.
The tech to make all the debris is great, it looks amazing seeing all the stuff fly everywhere in combat and it makes it super cinematic, and the fog when killing enemies is amazingly cool.
As good as the writing is the dialogue isn't the best, conversations between characters always feel very stiff and awkward, and Jesse's inner monologues are just weird and usually unhelpful comments like pointing out that something is odd
Pacing is just kind of all over the place, things just kind of suddenly happen after a long duration of nothing during the gameplay segments, but I guess this is because I didn't stop to do side-quests.
The audio logs/hotlines were filled with some of the far more interesting stuff in the game, but I ended up not listening to a lot of them around halfway through because they didn't have transcripts and waiting for Trench to slowly say something vague over the span of a minute and a half for the fifteenth time started to get draining, but the Dr. Darling stuff is great, amazing job with the FMVs as usual for Remedy.
But onto the gameplay, opening with the pros, the weapon options are really fun to mess around with (Shatter and Pierce were my favorites by far) and really let the gameplay flow in different ways, same with the powers (though I did probably miss a ton, I didn't go for side quests)
Puzzles in the hotel in particular are really interesting and fun, but really short and only like 3 exist
Ashtray maze is a really fun segment, though sadly very short.
Entire ending sequence is great, the highlight of the game by far and if not for it I would have been coming out of the game quite sour, but they're less gameplay and more setpieces.
The gameplay loop is REALLY bad, the shooting is imprecise with a misleading small crosshair and the third person camera angle can make you accidentally shoot a wall which can get very frustrating fast, the reloading feels far too slow and....
The game feels like it was designed by the people who made Destiny, the enemies are bullet sponges, there's like 2-3 particular enemy types that are drastically more threatening than all the rest out of what seems like an oversight (FUCK the rocket enemies, getting hit 2 times is near guaranteed death from them) mixed with some just plain boring annoying ones (suicide enemies, yay!)
Drawn out encounters that make exploring the areas and seeing all the sights and taking note of the scale in the beautifully crafted world just too much to focus on, as you deal with the fourth set of bullet sponge enemies in the wave that'll come back if you ever come back to that room again anyways and to top it all off, useless weapon mods that give you shitty modifiers like +4.3% dmg to armored enemies only on Thursdays, and MATERIAL GRINDS TO UNLOCK ITEMS.
Prop throwing power feels really bad, should have been designed more in line with Half-life 2, where it just SNAPS right directly infront of you and doesn't try and smoothly fly over to you as that will get it caught onto things easily, and the damage is universal with whatever you throw so anything you throw lacks weight or impact as it just feels like a damage ball and not an actual object.
There's a bunch of really boring "puzzles" that feel like they're lifted straight from Half-Life 2 where you pick up a battery, and put it in the battery slot, it's super boring, Physics manipulation was cool when it was new in 2004, now it feels like I'm putting the square in the square hole, move on with game design, please.
Navigating through some areas particularly in the early-game when you haven't unlocked a lot of the convenient fast-travels feels awful as the areas are confusingly laid out and the map does more harm than it helps outside of the most basic A -> B areas, AKA only the first area.
The Dark Souls Bonfire esque checkpoints, while a neat idea, in practice just mean that if you die suddenly you have to go through the death loading screen, and then walk all the way back, and part of the combat encounter you just did has been restarted, I spent a LOT of time walking back from where I died, almost as much time as I spent recovering from the loading durations.
Weapons would be more fun to play with if you could hold more than 2 at a time, I guess this was a limitation for console controls though.
Levitate controls are just bad, you can easily accidentally tap the button again to drop, and now you can't gain any more height, and you've probably sank far enough that you can't reach another platform, you die and have to walk all the way back (happened TWICE on one of the final segments)
Enemy spawn behavior can be just bad sometimes, on one of the final segments, where you have to take out radio towers, the very last one spawns a bunch of enemies that will destroy you if you don't get into cover to block their attacks, and there's too many of them to just dodge them.
They spawn these in an area with no cover, and don't spawn until you walk into it, and after you kill them, they spawn 2 more, Irritating as hell, killed me 3 times, 1 minute loading screen per death, another minute to walk back, and one more minute to climb back up.
Over-all it feels like the game would have played way better if it was first person, it would have made things a little less cinematic, but it could be worked around with having third person for the non combat segments.
The gravity gun power would work better as it could be designed more in line like the gravity gun and not having a different angle than your character would make your throws less awkward and imprecise, the gunplay would be able to be designed to be more reliable, and it would make the environments a lot cooler, giving you a better sense of scale and able to really kind of get immersed in the office environment, feel like you're part of the action.
That, and the third person movement feels oddly weighted, it just feels awkward to move until you get the dash power which just goes instantly.
I can't say I had a terrible time with Control though, but I'm still holding out that one of these days Remedy will have a game design team even half as good as their writing and narrative teams some day, I know you have it in you Remedy, Max Payne did it, I know you can too.
I don't think most people should play it.
EDIT: I've thought on it for a few weeks, I recommend playing this game solely because it's an amazing experience writing wise by Remedy, it plays boring as shit, but it's so worth it for the acting, the narrative, the writing, all of that, they're just so good at everything they do EXCEPT gameplay.
Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful thing to experience with all the beautifully done modelling for the brutalist bureaucratic office spaces of Control, as well as all the FMVs, set dressings and incredible graphical fidelity for performance that has become standard with Remedy's titles, but just, watch someone else play this game.
I'll start with the pros and cons of everything other than the gameplay, and get to the slew of gameplay complaints near the end.
To start, the game is beautiful as mentioned above, but the PC port is not going so great, I had a consistent input lag problem that was only slightly reduced by turning vsync off, and it made aiming difficult, also any time I died I was getting a loading screen of at least a whole minute.
Some minor NPC faces just look, weird, but for optimization and budget sake, I get it.
The facial animations on the other hand, typically are really bad, they look stiff and weird and just look very uncanny, I don't know why the cutscenes focus on the faces so much knowing this.
The tech to make all the debris is great, it looks amazing seeing all the stuff fly everywhere in combat and it makes it super cinematic, and the fog when killing enemies is amazingly cool.
As good as the writing is the dialogue isn't the best, conversations between characters always feel very stiff and awkward, and Jesse's inner monologues are just weird and usually unhelpful comments like pointing out that something is odd
Pacing is just kind of all over the place, things just kind of suddenly happen after a long duration of nothing during the gameplay segments, but I guess this is because I didn't stop to do side-quests.
The audio logs/hotlines were filled with some of the far more interesting stuff in the game, but I ended up not listening to a lot of them around halfway through because they didn't have transcripts and waiting for Trench to slowly say something vague over the span of a minute and a half for the fifteenth time started to get draining, but the Dr. Darling stuff is great, amazing job with the FMVs as usual for Remedy.
But onto the gameplay, opening with the pros, the weapon options are really fun to mess around with (Shatter and Pierce were my favorites by far) and really let the gameplay flow in different ways, same with the powers (though I did probably miss a ton, I didn't go for side quests)
Puzzles in the hotel in particular are really interesting and fun, but really short and only like 3 exist
Ashtray maze is a really fun segment, though sadly very short.
Entire ending sequence is great, the highlight of the game by far and if not for it I would have been coming out of the game quite sour, but they're less gameplay and more setpieces.
The gameplay loop is REALLY bad, the shooting is imprecise with a misleading small crosshair and the third person camera angle can make you accidentally shoot a wall which can get very frustrating fast, the reloading feels far too slow and....
The game feels like it was designed by the people who made Destiny, the enemies are bullet sponges, there's like 2-3 particular enemy types that are drastically more threatening than all the rest out of what seems like an oversight (FUCK the rocket enemies, getting hit 2 times is near guaranteed death from them) mixed with some just plain boring annoying ones (suicide enemies, yay!)
Drawn out encounters that make exploring the areas and seeing all the sights and taking note of the scale in the beautifully crafted world just too much to focus on, as you deal with the fourth set of bullet sponge enemies in the wave that'll come back if you ever come back to that room again anyways and to top it all off, useless weapon mods that give you shitty modifiers like +4.3% dmg to armored enemies only on Thursdays, and MATERIAL GRINDS TO UNLOCK ITEMS.
Prop throwing power feels really bad, should have been designed more in line with Half-life 2, where it just SNAPS right directly infront of you and doesn't try and smoothly fly over to you as that will get it caught onto things easily, and the damage is universal with whatever you throw so anything you throw lacks weight or impact as it just feels like a damage ball and not an actual object.
There's a bunch of really boring "puzzles" that feel like they're lifted straight from Half-Life 2 where you pick up a battery, and put it in the battery slot, it's super boring, Physics manipulation was cool when it was new in 2004, now it feels like I'm putting the square in the square hole, move on with game design, please.
Navigating through some areas particularly in the early-game when you haven't unlocked a lot of the convenient fast-travels feels awful as the areas are confusingly laid out and the map does more harm than it helps outside of the most basic A -> B areas, AKA only the first area.
The Dark Souls Bonfire esque checkpoints, while a neat idea, in practice just mean that if you die suddenly you have to go through the death loading screen, and then walk all the way back, and part of the combat encounter you just did has been restarted, I spent a LOT of time walking back from where I died, almost as much time as I spent recovering from the loading durations.
Weapons would be more fun to play with if you could hold more than 2 at a time, I guess this was a limitation for console controls though.
Levitate controls are just bad, you can easily accidentally tap the button again to drop, and now you can't gain any more height, and you've probably sank far enough that you can't reach another platform, you die and have to walk all the way back (happened TWICE on one of the final segments)
Enemy spawn behavior can be just bad sometimes, on one of the final segments, where you have to take out radio towers, the very last one spawns a bunch of enemies that will destroy you if you don't get into cover to block their attacks, and there's too many of them to just dodge them.
They spawn these in an area with no cover, and don't spawn until you walk into it, and after you kill them, they spawn 2 more, Irritating as hell, killed me 3 times, 1 minute loading screen per death, another minute to walk back, and one more minute to climb back up.
Over-all it feels like the game would have played way better if it was first person, it would have made things a little less cinematic, but it could be worked around with having third person for the non combat segments.
The gravity gun power would work better as it could be designed more in line like the gravity gun and not having a different angle than your character would make your throws less awkward and imprecise, the gunplay would be able to be designed to be more reliable, and it would make the environments a lot cooler, giving you a better sense of scale and able to really kind of get immersed in the office environment, feel like you're part of the action.
That, and the third person movement feels oddly weighted, it just feels awkward to move until you get the dash power which just goes instantly.
I can't say I had a terrible time with Control though, but I'm still holding out that one of these days Remedy will have a game design team even half as good as their writing and narrative teams some day, I know you have it in you Remedy, Max Payne did it, I know you can too.