I feel really, really bad by doing this. Look, I love the first game, it's probably my favorite indie game of all time, but this? What the hell, Dennaton?

I find Hotline Miami 2 to be a very unenjoyable experience, and the main reason for that has to be the level design. This game basically consists of ridiculously open football field sized buildings made entirely out of glass that are packed with dogs, fat dudes, and gun-wielding enemies that react to you in a nanosecond and kill you off-screen. This game is fucking hard, but not in a good, fun way like the first game. It's hard in a frustrating, bullshitty way.

In Hotline Miami 1, when you died, 90% of the time it was totally your fault. This time around though, 90% of your deaths are due to the god awful level design or to some cheap glitch. Hope you like doing nothing but using guns to try and snipe off-screen enemies two miles away while constantly holding shift for the entirety of the game, something that contrasts greatly with how you could almost exclusively use melee weapons to complete most levels in Hotline Miami 1 (with the exception of quickly picking up a gun to kill fat guys or enemies in inaccessible areas). The fact is, there are less ways to get through each level compared to HM1 since the level design often forces you to play in a specific way only. The game barely ever allows for creative strategies. The first game encouraged you to be reckless, it told you it was okay to fail, but this game forces you to be slow and methodical, which just feels like the antithesis to what Hotline Miami should be about. Something else that contributes to the levels being poorly designed is readability, which can often be abysmal. Sometimes it's very hard to differentiate between what you can be shot through and what is proper cover. Honestly, most stages feel like they were ripped out of some hardmode fangame: they're poorly designed and unfairly hard.

On the technical side of things, this game is an absolute mess. Hotline Miami 1 wasn't exactly polished but, in my experience, I've encountered far more glitches with this game that often got me killed, and the fact that a single floor in HM2 can take several minutes to get through just makes dying to a cheap glitch MUCH more frustrating than when it happened in the first game. The enemies react more like robots than ever, like how common it is for them to witness dozens of their buddies dying right in front of them and not react at all, as well as hearing gunshots going off right beside them and not get alerted. There are some "special" enemies like the dogs and the prisoners that run at a supersonic speed to try to strangle you that can just materialize through doors, and if you are even near a door when one of them is chasing you have absolutely zero chances of surviving. Also, HM2 has a lot of input lag by default because turning VSync off in-game doesn't work, you're gonna have to do it manually through your graphics card's control panel. Wish I knew this earlier, because I played through the entire game (INCLUDING HARD MODE) with that horrible input lag at first.

The game carries something that was a minor annoyance in the first game and turns it into a major one: there's no way to know what weapon you'll get from a pile of guns. Since the best strategy to kill enemies in this fucking game is to show yourself for a second to lure them to a corner, you'll just end up with dozens of weapons stacked on top of each other, and then you'll try to pick up one of them to kill that fat guy that is running towards you and you'll just die horribly because you picked up a gun with no bullets or a melee weapon.

Another thing that heavily frustrates me is how you are now unable to get points by knocking enemies down, unlike the first game. It's absolutely infuriating to accidentally knock over a large group of enemies now, since HM2 has excruciatingly long animations for executions and no way to cancel them, so knocking enemies over can easily make you lose you combo or even get you killed. Thanks to this mechanic I never even try to go for highscores here, which is something I loved doing in HM1.

And then there's hard mode. I'm willing to believe this is just a sick practical joke implemented by Dennaton to laugh at our faces. It's pretty much impossible to finish the game on it without cheaply dying at least a couple hundred times. Forcing myself to beat Hotline Miami 2 on hard mode was one of the worst experiences of my life, not even joking. I got no gratification or feeling of accomplishment from it, just a feeling of "thank god that's over."

Now, some people might appeal to the braindead """argument""" of "you're just bad at the game" while ignoring all of my points entirely. My dude, just check my Steam stats for both this game and the first. I got all the achievements, which means I finished the game on hard mode, and I'm able to get an S ranking on most stages with relative ease, so these opinions are coming from someone who's very experienced with both Hotline Miami games and probably much better than you are. I don't wanna come off as being arrogant here, but some people are just unbelievably dense and can't provide a single counter-point to refute me outside of that.

One thing I feel like could have been done to improve the game quite a bit would be the implementation of a system where, after you beat the level for the first time using the character that's supposed to be there for the story, you could choose any other character when you play that level again, like in the LEGO games. Maybe let you play as Jacket (with all the original masks) and maybe even Biker. From a story perspective that wouldn't make sense of course, but why should that matter? Fun/replayability/variety should be the priority here.

Now, for some actual positives. The soundtrack is absolutely incredible, as expected. Go and listen to Roller Mobster, The Way Home, Le Perv, In The Face of Evil, Bloodline... Hell, just listen to the entire damn thing. Graphics also look fantastic. Very stylized like the first game while managing to look much smoother and being able to pack much more detail into every level. Only problem is, that detail can sometimes make enemies harder to see, and there were times when I died to an enemy that was behind foliage or something like that, but again, that's more of a problem with the level design than anything else. Animations are also pretty good and generally smoother than the first game. And finally, I actually think they did a pretty good job with writing an interesting story, deepening the lore, and tying everything together with the first game, but (without spoiling anything) the ending just felt like a lazy cop-out.

So, in conclusion, if you're a HUGE fan of Hotline Miami 1 you might want to grab this for the story, but if you're just looking for some reckless, fast-paced and fun gameplay you're better off playing through the first game again.

"Life isn’t just about passing on your genes. We can leave behind much more than just DNA. Through speech, music, literature and movies... what we’ve seen, heard, felt anger, joy and sorrow, these are the things I will pass on. That’s what I live for. We need to pass the torch, and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light. We have the magic of the digital age to do that with. The human race will probably come to an end some time, and new species may rule over this planet. Earth may not be forever, but we still have the responsibility to leave what trace of life we can. Building the future and keeping the past alive are one in the same thing."

As interesting as the vile eponymous characters are, little can save Kane & Lynch: Dead Men from the mediocrity, if not outright terribleness, of its entire package. Gameplay is banal and tedious, even on the easiest difficulty; the narrative twists Max Payne, Trainspotting, and Tarantino into baffling nonsense to justify Kane's search and later rampages (although the cooperative mechanics driving Lynch are intriguing in a way Kane's never is); technical aspects are wholly deplorable with AI and graphics seeming antiquated for 2007; and, in comparison to its sequel, there's just no style to this game to warrant a playthrough to segue into Dog Days. There's worse games out there for sure, but Dead Men isn't really trying enough to not be deemed amongst them.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dogs Days is an exemplary title in the mainstream which represents the refutation of transgression in play and graphics by the majority of players. Its digital camcorder aesthetics, intentionally ruining clarity for the sake of its protagonists' disorientation in Shanghai, provokes the player into knee-jerk responses with disruptive gameplay and outlandishly cruel torture (figurative and literal). Much disdain for the game exists to compare it to other third person shooters or controversial releases without questioning if its narrative disjunction or mechanically simple shooting are entirely the point. The game is no masterpiece nor does it want to be, for coming from a terrible prequel no expectations of success should exist; yet, with such radical design inconsistent with normative functions in this genre, Dog Days persists with a select few because it defines itself in a mode of disorder, provocation, and hyperbolic violence to encapsulate a mood and experience few manage—none of which exist in the mainstream.

Abysmal writing, terrible gameplay, black and white morality, and severe lack of depth makes this into one of the weakest entries in the Fallout franchise. The story is awful and has almost no involvement from the player himself, since your dad is the actual protagonist of the game making all the decisions. Almost all characters are extremely one-dimensional and forgettable. Factions are also very one-dimensional, the BoS is presented as the Hollywood good guys trying to help everyone out while the Enclave are the generic bad guys. There's no nuance whatsoever.

Something that frustrates me about this game is the worldbuilding, or lack thereof. It's absolute garbage. Even basic things like how there are no farms, no trade routes, no explanations to how people get electricity, nothing. Why would they build a town around a fucking nuke? I can understand religious fanatics doing that, but why are normal people going along with it despite perfectly understanding how utterly retarded that is? Two-century old food scavenged from a pre-war supermarket is still edible, and seems to be the main source of sustenance for people. The game feels like it takes place 20 years after the war, not 200. Why is the east coast so undeveloped after all this time? Fallout 1 is set about 84 years after the war and its world was leaps and bounds more developed than what we can see in Fallout 3, and then you look at Fallout 2 with places like Vault City and you can't help but be entirely confused at how everyone in FO3 is a scavenger living in absolute misery. Are the residents of D.C. just imbeciles? Where the hell is civilization?

Still on the topic of worldbuilding, it's extremely disappointing to see just how creatively bankrupt Bethesda was when developing their take on the universe. Moving the setting to the east coast could have been one of the most interesting things about this game, but of course, it ended up being completely wasted potential. Bethesda does almost nothing to expand or advance the lore of the universe, and everything just feels stale, recycled, and uninspired as a result. This video explains what I mean pretty well.

The game also holds your hand as much as it can, assuring that none of your actions can have any long-lasting consequences, which is one of the many things that make this game lack depth. I absolutely hate the concept of essential NPCs and quest markers. I'm not sure if Bethesda did this in an effort to appeal to its bottom-feeder fanbase or if it was because of sheer incompetence to develop an RPG. Probably a mixture of both. And holy fuck, don't get me started on the wretched hellspawn that is the Gamebryo engine and Bethesda's ineptitude to optimize and work with it.

Credit where credit is due, though: the game has a pretty decent atmosphere. It's not hard to get lost in its world, since it has somewhat of a stark beauty to it (well, at least if you use mods to remove the disgusting puke-green filter). The sound design is also pretty nice for the most part (minus the guns, which sound like garbage), and I really like both the ambient tracks and the music selections on the radio. And, as much as I hate how the game holds the player's hand by leveling everything alongside them (ensuring that there is a very weak sense of progression throughout), I have to admit I really like the overall game world and design, and the game definitely rewards exploration. Also, and this is the best thing about Fallout 3 by far: New Vegas wouldn't exist without it. Of course, it's a double-edged sword since Obsidian was forced to use its god-awful engine to develop NV, but it's better to have a great game on a crappy engine than to not have that game at all. That's pretty much it, though.

Fallout 3 isn't the worst game ever made, nor is it the worst entry in the mainline franchise (that title would probably go to Fallout 4). I think it has some redeemable qualities like the game world and atmosphere, but I don't think those are nearly enough to make up for the great number of faults the game has. Overall, I think it fails as a shooter, as an RPG, and as a Fallout game.

This is one of those games I can straight-up admit I didn't "get it." Not in the sense of cognitive understanding of what the game is about or what it's trying to achieve, but rather in an "I don't understand why people like this" way. While I can certainly criticize it for being cliche, boring, lackluster, occasionally pretentious, heavily reliant on RPG Maker Yume Nikki-esque vibes, almost entirely consisting of surface-level fetch quests, and attempting to tap into the genre of meta-fiction while also having absolutely nothing new or interesting to add about it narratively or thematically, it probably wouldn't matter to anyone this did work for. Other people were truly immersed and were able to see value in this, and I'm proud of them for it -- but for me, I honestly just do not get it.

Night in the Woods is a game by all rights I should have liked, I wanted to like, even. 2 Months ago when I was utterly fixated on Pentiment I watched every interview and talk Josh Sawyer has ever given, kind of obsessively. It was from these talks that I got the recommendation to play Night In The Woods, cited as the main game inspiration for Pentiment, as well as Mutazione and Oxenfree. After Playing the game I can definitely see what he was talking about, the minigames, dialogue structure and format of the setting, even the subjects broached are all pretty similar.

And yet I find myself wondering why does Pentiment work for me so well and NITW really doesnt? The protagonist, Mae Borowski is in theory the most relatable character in fiction to my life circumstances in pretty much every way except for our gender. I also had a complete breakdown when I moved out and utterly crashed spectacularly at uni and came back to try and go back to the stability of home. I also struggle with becoming a "proper adult" and finding meaning in existential questions. I also dread seeing a lot of people here back home cause of embarassing shit I did and feel kind of stuck at times. I also wonder if Im holding back my friends who seem to be making something of their lives unlike me. I am also Bi. I am an atheist, and yet somehow with all of this said and done I found myself relating to Andreas Maler, a deeply religious german renaissance painter 100 times more than Mae.

That's not to say that relatability is the be all and end all of storytelling, but I felt as if in the case of NITW I was SUPPOSED to be relating to her somewhat. Shes just really kind of unlikeable for most of the runtime and of course being a videogame you have to actively aid her in being shitty and doing shitty things at times. I was ready to abandon this game at the 2 hour mark although apparently that wasnt enough of a fair shake so I kept pushing through hoping maybe something would happen beyond the standard coming of age stuff and angst. I can say now that I finished it that something did eventually sort of occur.

Im not slapping this game with a 0.5 cause even though I disliked it, and it takes way, way, WAY too long for it, some good moments eventually do happen in the second/third act. Like 4 hours in this game actually starts (I could have watched Lawrence of Arabia in that time) and we get some kind of intrigue. Some character moments get some actual fucking payoff and one or two lines finally managed to get a light chuckle out of me. I like the gay bear dude, and I also like Angus. And look, I like Wayward Strand, which is a game in which bugger all happens, but that game was full of sympathetic (and unsympathetic too) and interesting characters with lovely dialogue. Being narrative focused with little mechanics focus is FINE, but you are riding on that narrative to hold up everything else and man this dialogue. I really dislike this dialogue, nobody talks like real people; which is fair enough I suppose given they are anthropomorphic animals but this Webcomic from the 2010s type dialogue just poisoned everything else especially for the first couple of hours.

There is some light platforming but its kind of a waste of space. Especially the dream sequences that scream filler to me. At the end of it all, all the existential stuff is the payoff for the game but Ive honestly seen it all before tackled better elsewhere (well, in Pentiment for one thing but I guess thats cheating given the timeline). Nothing is really tackled with much depth and it just makes me scratch my head when I see reviews being like "this is the first time I had played a videogame that explored these subjects" and like theres no way to say this without sounding like an asshole but what? You need to play more videogames then. I love EEAAO but if this is how that movie looks to people who dislike it then I'm sorry for recommending it to people. I think I'm just done with media about positive Nihilism (and yeah I get it, the Null Symbol, you are very clever Mr/Mrs writer), its unfair to rag on NITW for this reason, cause its from 6 years ago now but I have to be honest with how I feel. The art style and sound design/soundtrack are good though.

If you've gotten this far into this horribly written, mess of a review I ask you consider the fact that my life is a mess, which is coincidentally why its weird that I didnt like this game.

FUCK PARK AND PART 3
I
DO
NOT
GIVE A SINGLE FUCK ABOUT PARK
FUCK PARK
FUCKED AROUND AND FOUND OUT
HAVE NO FUCKING REMORSE FOR PARK
FUCK