the video game counterpart of The Avalanches - Since I Left You. Takes a bunch of inspiration from the most popular, generic shit that exists and creates something new with it. An actual postmodern game that ironically oozes with creativity, especially when compared to the masses of survival and cozy slop that pollutes the steam store.

This is BOTW but good, pokemon without the insufferable fanbase, and pretty much what any "cozy" game wants to be. And yes, it uses the unfunny "what if cute things edgy haha" joke as a marketing tactic, but this time it's actually based because it gets people mad about it for some reason.

So far, for the price tag and taking into account it's still an EA product, it's pretty solid. Basically an enhanced craftopia with a better direction and budget, with fairly good optimization and less jank (but just enough so that it's still as soul).

I'm probably gonna play more with my friends on my dedicated server and keep enjoying myself by making my pals army work on the "super hard working" setting. 🗿

i love the first ghostrunner, i spent dozen of hours replaying the same levels over and over again trying to get better times, learning all the speedrun tricks and all. It was the first game ever since mirror's edge to give me this really satisfying sensation of speed and mastery. It was a really straightforward game, you just ran around and beat arenas full of enemies before doing the same thing again, but it was well done and fun with an actual learning curve and high skill ceiling.

Now I still like the core gameplay of Ghostrunner II, most tricks still work and jumping back on GR while still being able to perform DSJs remain fun, but the issue lies in how the game is now structured. Between each mission, you'll have to interact with npcs in a sort of hub, that doesn't really serve any purpose except if you care about the lore or the characters (i don't and i assume most people who actually like this kind of game don't neither). Also the writing is terrible, borderline cringe most of the time. It's okay, I don't care about that in GR. But having to do deal with this shit every time I finish a mission became quickly frustrating. Also they removed the puzzle-thing to assign your perks and replaced it with a generic menu, which is fine, but why can't you change your perks on the fly now ? The game now requires you to be in the hub in order to change them. Like I said, this hub has zero purpose and is a time waster in a game that should be all about going FAST.

More than that, they tried to implement some open levels and it doesn't work at all. It goes hand in hand with the new bike feature, which now gives you more freedom in the levels. While I liked some of the bike's shorter segments when it got introduced -those that required quick reflexes and speed- I started to find it annoying after a while. Mainly because this new open level design now takes up half the game, and you will have to use the bike to go from a spot in the map to another, always losing the momentum that used to be the trademark of the first game. They also doubled down on the cybervoid levels which were arguably the worst levels in the first game.

I had high expectations for GR2, I loved GR so much I thought they could only make it better. Of course I'll say yes to more of that. But unfortunately, I don't think i'm gonna spend as much time I did on GR on this one. The constant slow sections with boring game design and long ass levels for no reason, constantly being interrupted by a useless hub, It really kills the whole cyber ninja going fast vibe to me.

just finished the game and had to beat the final boss twice(!) because i had a crash during the final cutscene

So yeah it's a TN game, this one has a very simple gameplay loop with a clear focus on parrying shit and punishing moves kinda like Sekiro in the way the combat works (with slightly more depth to it but from soft can't really compare to team ninja in that area). Bosses are kinda hit or miss, some had very interesting moveset while others felt bland in comparison, also the (new) game is really easy, maybe even easier than Sekiro. I think I'll have a lot more fun during the next playthrough, same as the nioh games really. The difference here is that it doesn't take long to understand how the game works, so we really didn't need a whole playthrough acting as a tutorial.

ofc it's far from nioh 2 greatness and complexity but it's pretty good in what it attempts to do. too bad the PC port is kinda bad and even tho it worked decently on my machine I still had some slowdown and random crashes from time to time.