I genuinely don't see the hate for this game. Outside of the voice acting and music, this remake is an improvement over the original in every way. Controls, framerate, weapons, utility, visibility, and everything great about MGS2 has been put into the original. It feels like one of those remakes where people hate it because all the MGS boomers told them to hate it. Yet everyone I know who's completely finished the game in its entirety liked it a lot or loved it. Give it an honest shot. You'd be surprised by how fun the gameplay is.

As a Saints Row fan, this game is the only GTA game I've actually finished. People always told insisted to me that GTA was better so I wanted to see what was up. Sadly, there are a lot of problems with this game that kept me from enjoying the game.

I played this on PC and man. They were not kidding when they said this is one of the worst PC ports ever. Even when forcing the game to run in Vulkan instead of DirectX 9, the game had constant framerate problems. Sure I'd get a nice smooth 240 FPS inside an apartment or safehouse, but as soon as I step outside, I'll get at most like MAYBE 70 FPS. Rockstar was bothered enough to take Games for Windows Live out of the game and add Steam Achievements, but couldn't be bothered to fix performance or bugs. SPEAKING OF BUGS, this game, at least on PC, is full of them. Constantly getting stuck on walls, cars getting clipped on sidewalks, missions getting soft locked infinitely loading, and the final mission having a game breaking bug where it's impossible to finish without weird Windows work arounds.

As for the game itself, there were some problems I had with it too. I hated driving in this game and you're gonna be doing it a LOT. I also found it hard to track what was a main mission and what was considered a side mission. Also, for some reason, the game lets you fail SOME missions yet progress through the story? And not only that, there's no instant "retry mission" option as soon as you fail like in Saints Row. The amount of hours I've wasted reloading a save file, driving ALL THE WAY BACK to the mission spawn is unreal. The cover system is a fucking joke. It's so god damn clunky and feels extremely unintuitive causing me to rely on blind firing most of the time.

Yeah, the music on the radio is fantastic, the characters are really likable, the city is dope to explore (I have a bias since I love New York), and the story was surprisingly interested with a good ending. But man... Unfortunately the cons really outweigh the pros. I'm really kinda scared to even try the expansions since I'm worried nothing will be different. But if this is how the entire rest of the GTA franchise is, I don't wanna bother with it.