on paper this is just a mediocre movie tie-in, but in execution... no yeah it's exactly that

biggest issue of all with id4 is that it's fucking boring. there's 13 stages and while they're mostly pretty visually appealing, objective variety wears thin after the third one. a dull drone permeates this whole game and it's only perpetuated by the total absence of music. you'd probably fall asleep pretty easily if not for being constantly engaged wrestling the flight controls, which i can charitably describe as some of the worst to grace the genre

instead of letting you manually tilt/roll/yaw, the dpad points your plane in desired directions while incomprehensible physics(?) do their best to snap the thing wherever the nearest layer on the z-axis happens to be. it's practically grid based despite existing in 3d space. maneuvering between buildings is like trying to navigate a magnetic ball through a maze of identically-charged walls; it feels like fucking shit

also the draw distance sucks and your radar is annoyingly touchy. game's shit. happy 4th of july. welcome to earth, etc.

maybe the first instance where i've completed a game and still felt so utterly unfinished with it that i wasn't even sure i'd be fit to write a review

i think this might be one of the best games ever but hold on - give me a few weeks to parse everything that just happened and probably also replay the whole trilogy

in the meantime here's a 9 alright cool thanks