A decently-fun entry in the franchise that has all the series' tropes you've come to expect- including ninja zombies, fat zombie dudes with chainsaws, little slug monsters, and some truly awful voice acting. My friend alleged that the reason these games have such bad voice acting is because you're not intended to hear them clearly in an arcade environment? I dunno, the sound mixing is weird too but if you've enjoyed these games up to this point it's a fun but fleeting way to spend an hour in Round 1 or Dave & Buster's. My only major criticism would be the lack of blood & gore compared to earlier HotD games, and if it had gotten a console port it'd likely be the first game in the series to end-up with a T rating.

Oh yeah- there's no console port is there? Well- if you can figure out how to set up TeknoParrot and don't mind playing with a mouse or you're savvy enough to set up a Sinden light gun or use Lichtknarre to set up a Wii remote, it actually is possible to play this game on PC since it runs on Sega's ALLS arcade board which is basically just a gaming PC running on an i5 6500 and a GTX 1070. I ran it on an i7 8700k with an RTX 2070 Super and had an arcade-accurate experience more or less so it's something to consider if you don't have easy access to an arcade with one of these machines. Though I don't condone piracy so spend a few bucks playing through a level or two in the arcade if you ever get the opportunity.

I could see the argument that this is more of a glorified DMC-type action game than an RPG that's a bit on the easy side, and its tone and characters are decidedly unFinal Fantasy in a lot of ways, but XVI still manages to wear the heart of the franchise on its sleeve through its amazing atmosphere, strong worldbuilding, and excellent soundtrack. And overall I still find the combat to be more engaging than XV, the characters and story more compelling than XIII, and it feels like the first non-MMO mainline game in a while to feel like a cohesive, uncompromised vision as-opposed to a messy product of development Hell and contrasting perspectives.

It truly is a shame how quickly this once-promising reboot series has been driven into the ground and its playerbase's goodwill tarnished by Activision's greedy business practices, Infinity Ward's tonedeaf writing (the members of Task Force 141 are iconic and they deserve better than to be treated like the cast of a low-budget capeshit TV series), and consistently-asinine design choices complete with yet-another obnoxious UI. Hopefully this shit finally comes to an end soon with Bobby Kotick no-longer at the helm but I wouldn't count on it.

The only redeeming quality about this entry is that the vast majority of its maps are lifted directly from the seminal 2009 version of Modern Warfare 2, but I'm really annoyed that the previous game's maps don't carry-over given that they now share the same client and gobble-up an insane amount of storage space.

Maybe in this instance Starfield was merely a victim of feature creep over the course of a protracted development cycle, but I personally think the space setting should be avoided for this genre going forward until the devs/engines find a way to lift exploration elements wholesale from games like No Man's Sky or Outer Wilds. Otherwise there's just not much way to make it feel like more than a third-rate clone of Mass Effect 1 from 16 years ago aside from having better writing, better lore, and a better atmosphere than this and The Outer Worlds anyway. I will give it credit for having a relatively polished launch and nice gunplay by Bethesda game standards though, it's just too bad all the things surrounding it feel like aimless busywork even moreso than Fallout 4's settlement building.