Just, yes. A little rough around the edges but this is the perfect blend between open world and linear shooter. Exploration is very rewarding to the point that it is almost required. Shooting feels ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome compared to the other games. When a gun jams because of dirt and you have to re chamber a bullet it feels great. Everything is just great.

Note: If you are not playing this game on Ranger Hardcore with Minimal HUD then you are not getting the True Metro experience. I am not trying to gatekeep here I am being totally objective. The game is just a bland standard FPS on normal difficulties and is far too easy to really stand out from the crowd.

This game is a "mid" RPG but somehow it stands head and shoulders above many RPG's in existance. It is also kind of a dumpsterfire. The game is just kind of soulless and fails to deliver in almost all areas outside of the dialogue and it really makes the experience just awful. There are no compelling themes in the game, enemies, loot, and levelling are trivial at best and downright boring at worst.

It really feels like the games industry has lost so many good writers that we are now at a point where even games that are made by people who literally created my favorite game of all time fail to pull anything worthy out of their work. It is genuinely depressing.

I finally beat this game on Survival 2. Overall I think if you like zombie shooters you will love it as I did but it is a game that is not without it's faults.

On the first playthrough you will find yourself enjoying the progression, open world, and story. But on a NG+ playthrough you will likely find yourself hating all 3 of those things.

The story is good and reminds me a lot of the first 3 seasons of the Walking Dead insofar as there are a lot of dumb scenes that makes no sense alongside some actually decent character arcs and writing. However, there is a lot of forced flashback scenes that could have easily been completed through a simple cutscene rather than making you spend 5-10 minutes slowly walking or riding thorugh an unengaging boring narrative dump. The game fails to integrate these in an interesting way unlike Star Wars Fallen Order where the flashbacks act as tutorials and storytelling moments. On a second playthrough almost every single aspect of the story just sucks. Much in the same way that you likely would never want to rewatch the first 3 seasons of the Walking Dead.

The Open World on a first playthrough is great. It is smartly designed and layed out and has all kinds of things to complete from repetetive puzzles to hordes you can hunt and kill. However at a certain point it just becomes a tedium to navigate. Between the constant marauder traps and the groups of zombies at night by the time you finish the game you will be begging for it to all end. On the second playthrough it has 0 pull. You just want to completely ignore it and blast through the interesting parts (killing hordes).

The progression is great but at a certain point on your first playthrough you will notice all difficulty has been removed from the game. Once you have a consistent gun in each slot for killing humans, hordes, and strong enemies the game just loses all difficulty. Especially if you have been stacking stamina upgrades like I did on my first playthrough. On a second playthrough the progression is nonexistant which would be fine if the game had any form of difficulty to throw at you. You really start to notice how much the gameplay was designed around controllers because on PC even killing the largest horde in the game becomes a cakewalk. M+KB makes killing humans and zombies so easy because everything in the game except for a select few mutations is killed in one headshot. So once you unlock the Rock Chuck you basically just get to mow everything down without missing a shot due to it's high accuracy and good mag capacity. My go to loadout is Rock Chuck, Eliminator, and MG-55. The sidearm handles strong enemies in 5-10 hits. The MG mows down hordes without effort. While the Rock Chuck is a jack of all trades silenced beast.

Final notes: It is worth a play if you like zombie games. I loved most of this game because I just love mowing down zombies. There is a level of catharsis that you get just taking out zombies that most other genres can't give you. However, much like State of Decay 2 this game really falls flat on too many fronts for it to be the ideal zombie experience.

This review is more for Hitman as a Trilogy rather than Hitman 3 as an individual game. I played the original Hitman 2016 way back in the day when I first got my first real gaming rig. It didn't really click with me then and I struggled to find the enjoyment in it past completing the mission objectives (with the quest markers turned on). So, despite being a huge fan of Immersive Sims like Dishonored I kinda ignored Hitman 2 and Hitman 3 past watching some youtubers do goofy stuff in the games.

This christmas I finally decided to pull the trigger and acquire Hitman 3 (and all the content that came before it) so I could do one big run through the main campaign. I fell in love pretty quick. My (currently 54) hours were split between the Steam Deck and my Gaming PC. I have enjoyed nearly all of them. Between finishing the Mission Stories, which are kind of like guided quests that act as tutorials, or experimenting with the best methods to get SASO (Silent Assassin Suit Only) this game is on par with other Immersive Sims in my book. IMO it offers one of the most accessible and easy to "get into" IMMSIM experiences. Not only do you as a player have nearly complete freedom in how you complete your objectives the devs actively encourage players to get creative with challenges, achievements, and bonus xp for "stealthy but creative" kills. This leads to incredibly satisfying moments like waiting in a box for a character to stand near a cliffside so you can use an explosive to ragdoll them off the cliff and kill them or lining up the perfect sniper shot on a target and just waiting for your target to walk into your crosshairs.

If you are personally a fan of modern day CIA/MI6 "spy" thrillers this game is as close as you can get without turning into a mindless 3rd person shooter. It can sure be a mindless 3rd person shooter if you want it to be as the difficulty on professional isn't really enough to prevent you from just killing every character on the map. But that is not the goal of the game nor should it be the goal of the player on their first play-through. This game is designed to emphasize creativity and on your feet thinking.

Unfortunately of course a few things hold it back. The story didn't click with me at all, some maps are far worse than others, sometimes the game has difficulty spikes that feel really sudden and can frustrate you if you aren't mindlessly following the mission objectives layed out for you. My personal biggest gripe is in the way the mission objectives are set up to work with the HUD turned off for them. I got about halfway through the first game on this playthrough before I couldn't handle having them turned off anymore. Many of them are lacking context or direction due to them obviously being designed with a quest marker in mind. Some of them are the opposite and those I cherish. But the rest of them just get frustrating and can easily become marathon sprints in circles around the map looking for one character/objective that was mentioned as "by the garden" or a similar broad description. In addition to this this game suffers from the same issue any game that has a "detective vision" does. It kind of encourages you to play the entire game through the lens of detective vision. Characters are near impossible to hear through walls, many quest objectives blend into the environment and require detective vision to highlight them, and the all seeing enforcers don't have their enforcer dot show up through walls unless you are using detective vision. It really hinders observing the environment and I wish that there was an easy way for devs to implement detective vision without it being this all seeing eye of sauron.

All in all though even with its flaws I genuinely love this game. I never thought I would after my first attempt to play it way back when. But IO Interactive really smashed the ball out of the park. Here is to many more hours enjoying the new "freelancer" mode where the systems of this game truly put you to the test.

If you are like me and want to pick this game up to relive some memories. Don't. It has not aged well at all and despite at the time being pretty groundbreaking in terms of the level of freedom of movement (even having more speed/freedom than existing spider man games) these days it just doesn't hold up.

The biggest issues
- Movement is actually incredibly slow in this game if you've played any more recent open world games. It is also incredibly janky because there is now "flow" to the game. You are either jogging, sprinting, jumping, or gliding. Each movement "mode" is very blocky feeling and awkward to move between and the glide doesn't last long enough to really be satisfying.
- Combat... Again incredibly slow. Because each movement mode is so seperated from eachother combat also has the same issues. You get different movesets based on if you are sprinting, jogging, or jumping. And the ONLY time you can use your special powers (claws, hammer hands, etc.) is if you are in the jogging mode. That means that your most powerful combat abilities can only be used while you are moving as slow as a crawl which really removes a lot of the fun.

The best parts
- The world is really well done for a game from 2009. The city feels lived in and the zombie zones are an absolute blast to run around in because they are just pure chaos.
- The wealth of different abilities. Although the combat is still awful due to reasons listed above the game still has a ton of variety to the combat through upgrades to make progression feel powerful.

Overall, not worth the purchase price these days. I played it entirely on steam deck because my windows PC wouldn't run it. I got about 2/3 of the way through the story (From my memory playing it as a child) before I threw the towel in... On to bigger and better things.

This is a great title for what it is with a fair asking price. While not being as deep as some might have expected or wanted the surface level mechanics of the game create a believable and fun Starship Troopers experience. The Voice Acting is perfectly cheesy and over the top as is expected and for the most part the game hits all the right highs that one would expect.
Unfortunately this experience is also hindered by a laundry list of bugs and features that seem half baked at best. The most notable of which being larger enemy types (Tank bugs mainly) have AI that struggles to navigate even open areas on the map. This leads to awkward scenarios where a Tank Bug is unable to attack your troops and just stands still waiting to be killed.