The first trailer for this game was so amazing; I was so hyped. The cars, those fucking orange tracks; everything was beautiful. After seeing some gameplay, I began to feel that the environments that the tracks are built in are kind of boring and lack any sort of "liveliness". Now that I have played the game, that is exactly the problem.

I will reiterate, the Cars looks so so so so good. These are REAL Hotwheels driving around in my screen; meticulous work went into them. The track pieces look so good too. The problem, however, is that the game is just fundamentally boring to me. The racing itself feels fine, but I think the deadness of the world really sucks this game right down the chute. Stunt Track Driver is my favourite Hot Wheels experience, and that is because the levels are real. They are that fantasy of building cool tracks in your house, on objects that you live with; with real alive/moving things interacting as you race. On that first level when you hit the cat's tail, or the dog barks at the car. Jumping over stairs and fish bowls, ultimately crashing into that TV; that is a REAL environment.

The way these tracks are built just do not tap into that same feeling, adding on to the empty environments. The tracks are pretty much all nonsense logic defying floating in the air. I cannot tell what I am seeing around me most of the time, so the only visuals I have is the monotonous HotWheels tracks.

I played a little of the campaign, and it reuses the same tracks way too much. I pretty much HATE reused content in racing games. I race against easy AI for numerous reasons:
1.) I don't trust driving game AI's not to be bullshit some way or another
2.) I usually hate wasting my time losing in a lot of arcade type games, and that is even more stronger in racing games.
This style I have leads me to enjoy scenery and seeing whats next in tracks over the actually mechanics of driving better than opponents. So when I have no real scenery to look at PLUS that non-scenery is reused constantly, I go into a death state. I also don't like Laps for this same reason, and most of the races are laps. I only like laps in one games, Sonic All Star Racing Transformed, cause the maps actually fucking change each lap.

The Gacha system for new Hotwheels is kind of annoying and dumb.

Finally, the track creator is kind of cool. I tried making a more realistic track that might be created IRL (or at least Stunt Track Driver logic). However, when you pick what start you want, you can pick from Circuit or Point A-B race starters. You can edit individual pieces of the tracks once you have placed them down. You CANNOT swap between which type of race you picked without deleted all the way back to the beginning. This is extremely heinous and made me instantly hate building tracks.

The music is also fucking boring ass corporate E-sports EDM/Techno, whatever. BLand as hell.

SO yeah, this is the best HotWheels game at portraying the visuals of the cars, but kind of lacks in any personality.

(Gonna spew some shit from my mind; sorry if its kind of Doomer-y)

An Audio/Visual masterpiece. I want to get sucked into this realm; a forever realm of lost 90's vibes. Yeah, what the fuck ever I'm one of those "yearning for a time I never even experienced" knowing full damn and well it probably wasn't any better than My Now. This is my beautiful utopia escapism. I want to walk in nature to these beautiful music. I want to feel the childlike joy of Hot Wheel tracks filling my home. I want that imagined feeling of being a Mallrat.

I might be going boomer because I am rapidly thinking more and more that today is just getting worse. I am legit thinking corporations are just sucking the soul out of us all. I kind of refuse to believe that corp market research has found that the most boring minimalist UI and shit is what people want. Who wants fucking modern Xbox UI compared to the first Xbox or Blades? Websites keep updating to look worse AND be insanely worse at providing you the information you need.

Anyways theres my little rant about shit.

Yuffie Episode is pretty cool. It is a great introduction to Yuffie, who felt particularly lacking in the original game. They really played around with the combat with this and I like it. Yuffie a little more going on in her kit with the swapping from melee to ranged, elemental damage, and juggling.

Sonon is your 1 party member for this Episode, and he isn't playable. That made me sad since I wanted to wack shit with a stick, but they add a synergy mode where you two do attacks at the same time, and can add extra to some skills for more damage. Messing around with a party member you don't have to play as is a neat little experiment.

They fucking remade the Fort Condor minigame from the ground up in this thing, and god it is so much more enjoyable than FF7 Original. That version was just super fucking slow and felt like a waste of time, while this new version honestly feels like it could be downloaded on your mobile phone. I wouldn't say I love it, but it was fun enough to complete its little quest.

I think the final boss is extremely fucking bullshit though. I just kept getting got in Revive loops (a fucking staple of retro JRPG's!!). The boss has a move that will one shot whoever he targets, you can stop by beating a damage threshold fast enough. However, sometimes I'm just not fast enough to stop it, then he kills Yuffie or Sonon. If Yuffie goes down, Sonon sacrifices his life revive Yuffie; so either way I am forced to spend my ATB to revive him. It doesn't really matter because once it happens, I am caught in a spiral where I cannot prevent total loss. The thing about the damage threshold is I cannot beat it if Sonon is down, so if he starts that move before I can revive him, I am DEAD. I tried him like 3 times before I swapped to Easy mode and wiped his ass. No other boss was like this in the base game, so its honestly such a huge step up in difficulty.

It was worth it for that ending cutscene with Cloud/Barret/Aerith/Tifa/Reddit. I actually had a huge ass smile seeing them interact. So glad FF7R actually made me enjoy them so much.

ALSO SO GLAD THEY ADDED BUTT ROCK

I was expecting to like this more than original FF7, and I was right. The characters shine way more in this. My main problem in the original is that I felt like the characters didn't have enough dialogue to really get into them, and they weren't mechanically unique enough to develop a favourite that way. FF7R makes good on both of these by having SO much dialogue thats also voice acted; Barret is soooo much better and funny now. The characters are also wayy more mechanically unique now thanks to weapon abilities/weapon skill trees. I like the Materia system more now that it is paired with the systems in this game.

I really do think the gameplay is super fucking fun. The action combat with the command menu really clicked here for me. Makes me really want to get to later Kingdom Hearts and see if if they are close to this. Kind of wish it would let me play on harder difficulties without being the game first cause sometimes it felt really easy.

Midgar was my favourite part of of the original because it was tightly paced and dense with story moments, a real kick ass opener. Sometimes it kind of loses that original feeling since they made this like 30 hours longer than original Midgar (and longer than it took me to beat the original game). However the game is still engaging and great with all the new content added in.

The ending kind of lost me a little cause I didn't understand what was goin on (after the final boss with the cutscene with The Guy), but I am still very hyped for the next installment.