(9-year-old's review, typed by his dad)

It's fun but hard. I like "bwomping", and most people call the square a cube even though it's not 3D! I like the game because it has a lot of customability, and you can do funny things. And my favorite part is playing the level Blast Processing (the bwomp level) because it has the best song in the game. My favorite custom song is called Endgame by Waterflame, and Waterflame makes good songs. And when will 2.2 come out? Robtop please. Please give us 2.2. Bye!

History time with wreith! One of the contestants was a 17 year old girl who was legally incapable of giving consent, meaning The Guy Game legitimately distributed child pornography! When she was rightfully granted an injunction to discontinue the games distribution after suing Topheavy Studios; their actual response on their website was "the Man has decided that our fun and hilarious presentation of spring break revelry just wasn't appropriate for the world of gaming. Maybe we should have blown some sh!@ up?". How pathetic!

During a month-long marathon of streaming bad games to my friends, Battlefield Hardline wormed its way out from a dark, dark, neglected corner of my memory. We'd all collectively forgotten about it, and when I mentioned that it was next up on the docket, everyone was giddy. We knew we were going to be in for a middling, designed-by-committee piece of copaganda garbage; a game about rough cops doing whatever it takes to get their man, tastefully developed and advertised at the same time as the murder of Eric Garner and the subsequent go-nowhere trial of the man who murdered him under the guise of justice. It was a terrible idea from the outset, and it was going to be hilarious. And it was.

Two-thirds of the way through the game, something changes.

The game goes off the rails. Retelling the plot doesn't do the sudden, massive swerve any justice; after going through milquetoast cop procedural cases where people are being extra-judicially executed by our brave heroes on the force, your character is framed, arrested, and shipped to prison for several years. One timeskip later, while being transported to another prison, a drug dealer you busted earlier pulls up to the side of the bus you're in and blows it up with a backpack full of C4. You immediately go rogue, gun your way through a Korean mafia car shop, get kidnapped by trailer park preppers and kill them in a tank showdown, and then storm a Scarface-tier mansion seated in the Miami swamps to kill your corrupt ex-captain. There's a part where you swing on a rope through a penthouse window, faced with several armed goons on police payroll, and order them to freeze before being dragged back out by the ankles to the streets below. You fight an alligator in a quick time event. After you put a bullet in the police captain's head, the player character opens his personal vault and is rewarded with a mountain of gold bars. I want a development documentary on this game more than any other, because I have no idea how or why it was decided to try to make all of these pieces fit together like this. It...works? Kind of? The first two-thirds is complete garbage, but the prison bus exploding is a marked shift towards the game actually being fun, and interesting, and reminding you that this game was made by Visceral, not DICE.

I have a pet theory that everyone at Visceral who worked on this hated it. I don't have any concrete proof to back it up, but there are more than a few circumstances that line up a bit too neatly to discredit it entirely. This was the last thing that Visceral was given to work on before they were shuttered by EA for "under-performing" in sales, infamously being instructed under threat of studio dissolution to sell more copies of Dead Space 3 on launch than the previous two games combined. Studio morale had to have been low in 2015 with EA dangling a sword over their heads. When a character in Battlefield Hardline throws a house party, some henchmen with Xbox controllers in the living room are playing Dead Space 2. The second Dead Space game was four years old at this point, and the third entry had just released. If this was meant to be promotional, why not the newest game? If it was mandated that an ad for a real game needed to be included by the publisher, why not something like FIFA 2016? Dead Space 2, as my theory goes, is the last game that Visceral as a whole was actually proud to have worked on. Stick with me, I've got more.

Pressing continue from the title screen leads into a recap of earlier story events, introduced with the line "Previously, on Hardline". Note the lack of "Battlefield". The game never once calls itself "Battlefield". It seems ashamed of the franchise. The dirty cop strongman garbage with the casually racist supporting cast (three racial jokes at the Cuban-American protagonist's expense in the first minute of gameplay!) gets completely dropped by the third act in favor of the ridiculous 80's B-movie action schlock that happens in the final third of story. The longer the game goes on, the further into development it goes, the closer to Visceral's dissolution it gets — it feels less and less like EA was breathing down their necks. It feels like the publisher gave up, knowing that the studio wouldn't exist a few months after release, and then decided they didn't care enough to monitor everyone who was about to be out of work. And Visceral went all-out with it! It's complete chaos! Why is any of this happening? Who gives a shit? It's so far beyond the garbage that came hours before that it feels like your head is breaching up from beneath dark, cold water and into open air. It's your final reminder of what Visceral was capable of pulling off, right before they got cannibalized by their publisher. It's the last thing they were allowed to make, and it sucks that their legacy gets tarnished by blatant studio meddling on their final two games before they were killed.

Battlefield Hardline is not a good game, but it becomes enough of an oddity to earn a recommendation. It's hardly deserving of scorn. It feels more pitiable than anything else. It's an impotent, flailing narrative with stock FPS gameplay that finds its footing just in time for it to end two hours later. I would have loved to play an independent Visceral's Hardline, before it could be shoved through the filter of DICE's Battlefield and EA's interference; ultimately, the game's narrative that we're left with can only mirror the studio's history and abrupt end. Visceral deserved a swan song. We all got Battlefield Hardline.

I had a best friend like Chloe growing up, a narcissistic rebel who's self-confidence and ability to truly not give a fuck I looked up to. But whenever i tried calling them out for their selfish asshole behaviour, they would gaslight me into thinking, me criticising them is actually worse and what they did is just what best friends do or not that big of a deal.

The game's casual normalisation of this kind of behaviour made me reflect on that constantly, but it never really questioned it. You can't not engage with chloe or really disagree with her actions if you want the story to progress. Trust me, I've tried getting caught, going back to max's room or what ever seemed like an alternative, but nothing is possible. If this inescapable dread of a guilt tripped toxic 'friendship' would be on purpose i think i could appreciate it, but it's not. The game views those scenes as Max having a fun night out with her besty.

I wanted to play this, because i was for a long time under the assumption that Life is strange is a pro LGBTQ+ game, but it utilises a mechanic known in the industry as 'gay button'. A bigoted homophone can play the entire game without ever being confronted with anything explicitly queer. It's all hidden behind optional button prompts and up to interpretation, like the boys or girls locker room decision or kissing chloe. The game just wears some of the aesthetics of being progressive nothing more.

It also kind of seemed from the very beginning to me like kate was a problem to solve for the player, before she was real character, which left a sour taste in my mouth up untill the point where i choose the wrong dialog a second time. I feel the game using her suicide as this shock factor knowlege-check climax to the episode, outways whatever they attempted to say about bullying or mental health and kind of game-ifys trauma.

When episode three strarted i had to think about the scene with kate, but before i could properly start reflecting max's voice actress said: "I really have to think about kate"
There is a constant discussion in film director circles about how much you should really think for the viewer. Beyond obvious stuff like 'show don't tell' there exists this inability in mainstream art to just let the receptor think and let them engage in their own thoughts about the art. I don't even mean having a different interpretation, i mean letting the receptor interpretate period.
Life is strange, constantly does this, it does the thinking for you. Max just tells you how or what to think. How to solve the puzzle. What to do. How to feel.
I really don't get why this is so normalized and even often appreciated in gaming.

For something more positive, i liked the artstyle and the general vibe of the town.

this is simultaneously a half-star and a five-star experience.

i don't trust people that can walk away from this and just say, "oh, it's just another bad telltale fad game" and move on with their life.

this features the most insane, psychopathic writing (both literal and structurally) i have ever witnessed. this game will change your fucking life. it is goddamn amazing. there are lines like "go fuck your selfie", "I WAS EATING THOSE BEANS", and "this is the only place where i can feel 'myselfie' ", what the fuck are you waiting for? please play this game. it's honestly inspiring. it taught me that as long as you nail your aesthetic to a demographic, you can make money.