Important, a classic etc. that nonetheless vacillates wildly between being brilliant and infuriating - it’s a bit of a chore to actually play. The top-down perspective makes the actual 3D space irrelevant for large stretches as the radar does the heavy lifting, though there’s still a tendency to get shot from off-screen, and actually aiming at anything is a nightmare. The characters are all quite badly written, vomiting up their backstories and overexplaining every single moment of subtext ad naseum to Snake’s increasingly hilarious bewilderment, leading to exchanges like: “I’m feeling sad.” “Sad?” “Yes, sad. It’s when the endorphins in your brain don’t fire enough, leading to a lack of energy and motivation.” “I didn’t know your brain controlled your feelings...”

But something that still felt fresh was the Codec, where every one of your contacts says something different every time you walk into a different room, or do something notable - e.g. equipping the cigarettes to get scolded, or repeatedly ringing one until they ignore you. There’s a conscious effort to erase the barrier between gameplay and “story”, which is usually treated as a separate, isolated quality in video game criticism instead of inherent to game-feel. I was impressed with the torture sequence - not only is failure here an option, but it’s the more interesting one, undermining the pastiche of Hollywood action heroics and paying off with a suitably down climactic beat. And while I wasn’t always impressed with the boss fights (especially the gimmicky Psycho Mantis) there’s an admirable sense of experimentation in making them all different. The pacing and build-up to each works well, and there’s some effort to complicate our relationship to them as “enemies”, e.g. Grey Wolf embracing pain. (My favourite was Vulcan Raven and his mini gun, which plays to all the strengths of the stealth gameplay.)

Admirably anti-war in its sentiments, also pretentious, sexist, and with laughable stabs at pathos - though this is, as far as I can tell, Hideo Kojima’s whole deal. Auteurism sometimes demands you take the rough with the smooth.

One of the most paradoxical sequels I have ever played. Mechanically a huge improvement on the first game, which adds in features that make total sense for a sequel and refines what was there. It is also much worse than the original and made me raise my star rating for the original.

There is so much here that I love: the opening, first few levels, refined combat and the great sense of humor remain in tact, the fact that Clank isn't with Ratchet at first because he just wants to stay at home and kick back is incredibly funny, and I have to say that the first half of the game lives up to the hype and is where the game is at its absolute best. The combat can offer more unique challenges due to strafing, the platforming is as tight as ever, and the dialogue maintains that snappy wit that made the first game so enjoyable to get through.

The second half of the game, after the Thief's identity gets revealed, is a very dramatic nose dive to the finish line, leading to an interminable final level and shit boss fight before the game just runs out of steam.

A lot of it has to do with the game being over-designed. During development they found that players were favoring weapons, so weapons could only level up once, the hope being that it would make the player have to use more of the weaponry on hand. The problem here is that by the end of the game, EVERY WEAPON that isn't the Minirocket Tube or Plasma Coil is not worth using. Lancer, Blitz Gun, Mini Nuke, all become completely irrelevant in the end. So they essentially took different steps to get to the same problem.

The final level will just become the player picking enemies away with the plasma coil and minrocket, running back to the ammo vendor to refill, and going back to do it again. It becomes as unengaging as the final level of R&C1 being sitting in a corner using the visibomb to deal with every enemy. But at least every tool in R&C1 CAN be used! They don't just completely fall off at a certain point, the game allows you to try whatever method works, whereas Going Commando strong arms you into one playstyle.

I should note that this game was made in about 10 months, which is fucking crazy and irresponsible for a publisher to insist on something like that, and the fact that the game is this good and this packed with content is nothing short of miraculous. But its story being strung together haphazardly and levels becoming very uninspired makes it very apparent that at a certain point a game just had to get done. The story still has the great satire on capitalism and consumerism that defines this series, and is very biting and funny in regards to that, but the actual narrative thrust goes nowhere and the ending is a total flatline. It's like they just ran out of time to actually round things out, compared to the original having an actual for real ending that is the culmination of character arcs.

The biggest issue with the story is not only that Ratchet has been sanded down a little. Nowhere near as dramatically as he will be in 2016, and he still has definition here, but I can't help but find the more dynamic and changing character in the first game more compelling, as we see him become heroic and learn a lesson. Here the game strains to find something for him and Angela to do when they talk but is incapable to extract any character from it whatsoever. WASTED CHARACTER!!! AH!!!

I want to compliment the battle arena though. That is a great idea and is a ton of fun, implemented perfectly and is easily the highlight of the game and a great way to play with the weapon sandbox.

Back to my ANGER!! The hang-glider stinks, throw it in the trash. The tractor beam is so worthless they might as well have not even bothered. The snowbeast yetis are worse than anything in the first game, it's alien to me how no one realized what a stinker they had on their hands there.

That's the biggest issue, is that the shit here is stinkier than anything in R&C1! The bad bits of Going Commando are fucking horrible. Giant Clank might be the worst thing ever put into a game, whenever an enemy knocks you back the camera swings towards Clank, messing with the perspective to such a degree you have to readjust. Bad! The regular Clank sections are still as unnecessary as ever, slowing down the pace to a grinding halt. Stupid! Why do ammo boxes only ever give me visibomb ammo? I am in the middle of the final boss that takes a fucking hour to beat, I need ammo for the guns that actually work on him!!

Oh, and the charge boots. The fucking CHARGE BOOTS. In a game with some really punitive checkpoints, having a device that is basically designed to blast you right off the sides of cliffs is a Dick Move. There's no way to stop it once its started, and you will always do it by accident while throwing your wrench, it's like a troll gadget. You have to turn it off so you don't accidentally kill yourself while playing casually, but you have to turn it back on to zoom through the empty, flat levels when you need to refill on your Minirocket Tube ammo.

I have been nothing but incredibly negative here, and I think the game earns it with some truly nasty design choices, but it's just too well made to truly deserve less than 3 stars. I played through all of it, had fun generally, loved the world design and art direction just as much as the original. I still think it's leaps and bounds better than any of the Jak games, and most PS2 platformers for that matter. I think back to some of the minigames in the first Sly Cooper and am tempted to give this 5 stars just for not being that game, but given how good Ratchet & Clank was, it's hard to not find the ways this one takes a step back to be a massive leap backwards.

After getting stunlocked and losing almost all of my life by the final boss, multiple times on multiple tries, it was time to abandon this game and not look back.

Could I have dropped the difficulty to Easy and used accessibility options to beat it? Sure, but I wasn't that interested in the game, so I didn't bother.

For most of the levels, the game is laid back and it seems that however you spec your skills you won't have trouble with the enemies. There are some difficulty spikes, but they're reasonable.

The story is difficult to piece together without explicit effort from your part, which I didn't make. Even in Dark Souls, which is infamous for its difficult to understand story, you can learn more about it just from playing the game and reading the occasional item. Here, you'll only understand which is the main issue tackled (identity), but not how or why.

The art style is really good and unique, and it's the thing that brought my attention to this game in the first place. Looking back, it'll be the only thing I'll remember from it, too.

Let me tell you an interesting story. Some months after God of War (2018) was released, me and a bunch of friends decided to try it, since it was at the spotlight back then. At the same time, I found this game at a discount. I had heard good things about it, so we decided to buy both, but play GoW first. That night, I gave it a try to see how it's like.

Guess which game we played first in the end! And guess which game ended up being one of my favourite games of all time out of nowhere.

Nier Automata is not a perfect game, far from it actually. While being a huge improvement over the first Nier -mainly thanks to Platinum Games' gameplay- one could say that its graphics were still a bit outdated, its world design basic and empty, side quests had fetching with random drop rates again, repetition of some parts of the game in order to get the whole story could be tedious for some and its performance issues on launch (especially in the PC version) were not few. Thankfully, most of them have been fixed by now, thanks to updates and patches.

But, do these things really matter to me? Yes and no. One one hand, I'm all for constructive criticism. It gives genuine feedback to the developers and, in a way, helps them understand what players did or did not enjoy in a game. But on the other hand, if the issues mentioned did not ruin my personal experience at all, then I'm not going to pretend to be "objective" and try to supress my own feelings about it. And for all the issues this game had, the experience it gave me is one of a kind.

Albeit being more action than RPG, Nier Automata introduces a unique take on the action-RPG genre. Playable characters are androids and thus, build customisation is based on the memory chips you install at each of them. With that system, you can customise your characters to be more offensive, defensive, balanced etc. Combat is a fantastic hack 'n' slash action combined with 'shoot 'em up' elements, designed by action genre veterans, PlatinumGames. But, the game does not stop there. In many sections, it transforms into a bullet hell shooter, giving more variety to enemy fights.

So, is there something better than combining fun gameplay with a fascinating story and atmosphere? Nier Automata's story is one of my favourite stories in games and just like its predecessor, its presents it in a way that gives prominence to the medium. For example, you still need to replay some parts of the game, but from a different perspective. Though fetching in side quests is still present, the drop rates are far more common and the quests contain some memorable stories of NPCs, highlighting the worldbuilding. Once more, soundtrack is amazing, along with the voice actors' performances, in both English and Japanese. I will not go into story spoilers here, since I think that the story and the way it's presented, is worth experiencing in-game. The game's world might be a bit 'empty' with not that many details, but it fits so well with the rest, that it made me extremely invested in it.

What I also loved about it is that, not only it touches some philosophical themes about humanity etc, but it presents them subtly in the background as food for thought, instead of "throwing" them directly in your face. And let's not forget these many times that the game does not take itself seriously at all, cracking one joke afther another. In other words, Nier Automata may tell a wonderful story, but it is first and foremost a video game, where having fun is above everything else.

As a conclusion, I'd say that my experience with Nier Automata taught me that, a game doesn't have to be "perfect" in order to be your favourite. It just has to speak to your heart (no matter how cringey or cliche this sounds) in a way that no other does, be it due to gameplay, story or whatever.

Would definitely recommend it.