Unbearable. Besides the memes, this game is the worst. Enemies block every single time, so it stops being a beat 'em up and becomes a teleports behind you 'em up. The 120+ side missions are just mind-bogglingly stupid, especially since you could condense them to like 40 missions as they all relate to each other. The hostesses side content is a much worse version of its 0 and Kiwami 2 predecessors. Despite that, I still can't understand the story; it feels like a Kojimbo fever dream. What does the CIA super-assassin have to do with anything? Why do I meet up with a powerful politician if I'm an ex-Yakuza? Why do I have to care about every kid if they'll just get sidelined by the third hour? Also, don't get me started on the clunkyness of the controls and minigames. It's hard to rate this game because if you are playing the story chronologically, the whiplash from Kiwami 2 to this will make you hate it more than it probably deserves. This game is in dire need of a remake because, as it stands, it blows huge dick, and I wouldn't wish it's completion on my worst enemy. 

"people shit on the library mission all the time, but they forget that the rest of the game is designed just as terribly"
~someone who didn't know shit about shit (2020)

i've been a halo fan for nearly my entire life, but the earliest memories i have of combat evolved are hazy at best. in reality, i am a halo 3 diehard and that game has been the benchmark i've used to judge the series by since 2007

such was the mentality i carried into CE's 2011 anniversary release, where i not only completely misunderstood its level design, but also willingly botched its incredible visuals via the god forsaken toggle for 343's flashlight-phobic and all-around heinously unfaithful overhaul

where halo 3 boasts a wide range of vibrant landscapes and fast-paced, mostly bite-sized levels, CE takes a slower, more methodical and surprisingly tactical approach to shooting (mostly because meleeing isn't as useful as it would later become). stages are designed less around their geometry and more their enemies - all of which are competent foes that pose reasonable threats, especially on legendary, which i feel is the best and only difficulty that demands a solid grasp of the game's mechanics and highlights how useful every weapon really is

the assault rifle particularly gets a lot of undeserved flak. it's a real piece of shit if you just spray and pray, but if you know how to manage your recoil (i.e. tapping the trigger in bursts) it becomes a nigh invaluable midrange tool that can effortlessly dispose of anything that isn't shielded. and when you can keep elites busy dodging grenades (which should be simple, because you usually have 8 of them stocked) it's pretty effective on them as well

and regarding the elephant in the room that is "the library": y'all are still babies. how can you be upset about the stage that finally allows you to use a shotgun nonstop?! the flood are some of the most fun to fight enemies in any shooter, the weapon selection they offer is infinite, and yet you're upset that the halls are same-y in a game where all of the halls are same-y?? are you fucking mad?!?!

that last remark isn't a slight towards the stages at large, either. in fact, i find myself commending levels i've previously bitched about vehemently - most notably "assault on the control room" and its counterpart "two betrayals". the fuck was i even thinking before? one variant is purely ground-based and the other spends half its duration in the air. that's not even mentioning the completely remixed enemy variety or how differently paced the two missions are altogether

oh yeah - cool narrative too. it's simple, but still very interesting especially after completing the marathon trilogy and knowing how similar the two franchises are; right down to details like the flood initially being a scrapped concept from marathon 2 and the forerunners being very similar to the jjaro in general

anyway, very good game. 3's still better though!

Took a little break from editing the Covenant video and have been in the mood for a Far Cry game so booted up Blood Dragon cause I've never played it and I've now owned it for years at this point.

I don't really see what others see in this to be completely honest. The jokes didn't really land for me at all, the aesthetic is cool but honestly this is just such a slog of an experience. I think if the writing wasn't dipped in such a boring 2013 era 80's "reverential" irony quoting 2008 memes and refusing to shut the fuck up to let the few kinda funny quips at least sit with you I think this could've maybe worked. But as is it's just annoying.

Michael Biehn's performance is kinda fun but it sounds like he's drunkedly sleepwalking through this entire thing which does at least lend itself as a little funny to some of the jokes/quips presented.

The fairly boring gameplay loop doesn't help at all with little enemy variety and guns that feel like shit due to the enemies all feeling like massive bullet sponges until you get the chain gun.

I couldn't even fully enjoy the final setpiece all that much, though it was the best part of the game, because the game was just smugly being ironic about how stupid it was being instead of just being stupid and endearing first and quitting the constant camera winking it couldn't stop itself from doing.

Instead of playing this I'd just recommend going and watching some actual goofy ass 80's films or something for 4 hours. You'll probably have a better time with that but people seem to love the shit out of this so who knows. If you're anything like me you'll probably have more fun watching the American Ninja films instead of wasting time on this.

Despite how recently it was released, God of War has not only been considered by many as one of the PlayStation 4's best exclusives, but also one of the best video game rebootquels in recent memory and even one of the best games of the 2010s. Since it beat Red Dead Redemption II for Game of the Year back in 2018, I was curious to see what apparently made this game better than one of my very favorite games of all time, and after beating the game, I'm still wondering that, because God of War felt like a complete chore to play. This game did get one thing right, though, and I'll go over it quickly before getting into why I found the overall experience to be so unfun and derivative. Although practically every new AAA release tries to look and feel "cinematic", God of War did just enough in that aspect for it to feel at least a little fresh, as the use of one continuous take meshed really well with the game's lifelike visuals, rugged art direction, and ancient Scandinavian setting.

For every step that the game's atmosphere takes, the writing, gameplay, and heavy dependence on tired mechanics and systems make the game take a thousand steps back before ensuring that it steps on a giant bear trap. Now, I've only been able to play God of War III due to the unavailability of the first two games on eighth generation consoles, but I still thought that this game's combat was a huge step down from the original trilogy, as Kratos felt clunky to control with how slow his attacks, dodges, and parries were to execute. Fighting several enemies at once made me feel like I was about to have an aneurysm, as the issues of attacks from both you and your spongy enemies suddenly deciding when to land and when to miss are suddenly quadrupled when you have to deal with all of these other similarly annoying enemies, along with how the camera is so close to Kratos at all times that you can't even see more than one enemy on screen. What I especially disliked about the game's enemy encounters was how almost every single boss in God of War was a troll with a giant rock, complete with the exact same attacks and death animations that you have to see over and over again.

The unintuitive and awkward combat of God of War ties in with another one of its bigger issues, as this game felt like a mishmash of every single unoriginal trend that is present in so many modern AAA releases, and the use of those tropes is worsened by how halfhearted their executions were. In addition to the repetitive combat, God of War is plagued with a skill tree and a crafting/upgrade system that we've seen a thousand times before, and the former system doesn't work because almost none of the abilities you unlock for your weapons are nearly as effective as just pressing R1 or R2, while the latter system doesn't work because everyone is going to play this game in the exact same way, which makes the idea of locking the resources needed to craft high-level armor pieces behind a treasure trove of predictable and boring side quests even more puzzling than it already is. Speaking of which, God of War can't decide whether it wants to be an open world game or something more linear, so it decides to combine worse versions of each by filling the game with asinine collectibles and tasks that you literally have no reason to go for, with the only ones that were of any real use being Iðunn's Apples and Horns of Blood Mead.

Pretty much all of the clichés that I had just mentioned were entirely related to the gameplay, but they unfortunately made their way to the story. Not only is God of War yet another story about a grizzled old man and a bratty younger sidekick going on a journey together, but it also features the video game storytelling equivalent to bureaucracy in the form of having the plot constantly grind itself to a halt so that you have to grab some item or talk to some person before having to do those exact things again. As bad and uninspired as all of those aspects of this game were, nothing about God of War got on my nerves nearly as much as its aggravating dialogue and unbearable inclusions of humor, and that especially goes for literally everything that came out of Atreus' mouth. Throughout all 20+ hours of this game, this useless little kid never stops running his mouth, which also means that he tells you the answer to every puzzle before you even get the chance to think, comments on every single thing that happens in the game with some variation of "Well, that happened!", and constantly screams phrases like "FIRE, INCOMING!" and "WATCH OUT!" over and over again in his infuriatingly screechy voice during every single enemy encounter. Atreus is definitely the worst offender when it came to keeping me infuriated throughout the game, but he wasn't the only one to do so, as Mímir did the exact same things while also constantly spouting exposition during boat trips, and Sindri's running gag about his aversion to anything gross or dirty started out annoying before getting more and more anger-inducing as the game went on. Pretty much everything about God of War felt so market-tested, risk-free, tedious, and dull that I wondered what it was that so many people even saw in this game, and since God of War Ragnarök looks like more of the same, I really don't want to play that game at all.

There is something deeply ridiculous about Gamers™ complaining endlessly about games that are not action-orientated ("walking simulators" etc etc), whilst a game like this gets away with pushing all the most exciting and intense moments of action into cutscenes whilst the fighting you get to actually engage in is largely the repetitive, in between grunt-work. The game thinks having a bunch of quick-time events included will make up for this but being forced to constantly be alert for button symbols appearing on the screen rather than getting to enjoy the show is somehow even less immersive.

This kind of style-over-substance approach echoes throughout the whole game. The myriad climbing sequences feel oddly emblematic for this; nothing can actually go wrong in them meaning that despite the perilous context for them (clinging to the side of mountains and buildings by just your hands, leaping great distances from one to the next) there's never any reason to feel any actual tension or danger, it's just meant to look flashy and plays out closer to an interactive cutscene than actual gameplay. The single-shot gimmick is another great example, there's no narrative or thematic reason for it, it leads to the camera feeling needlessly claustrophobic a large amount of the time, but it looks impressive and that's apparently all that matters.

The combat is largely tedious. The occasional moments of excitement from the first few hours largely dissipated as the game made me fight the same collection of enemies, and the same troll and ogre mini-bosses, over and over right up until the end of the game. This overuse of the same enemy designs starts to feel even more grating considering the game's habit of cramming in additional fights wherever it possibly can, even when it doesn't make narrative or tonal sense, out of fear that if you go more than five minutes without attacking something you might get bored. The two modes for most of your fighting, beyond special attacks that leave you invulnerable or near-invulnerable for their duration thus draining tension from what's happening, are either keeping your distance and using projectiles whilst your son Atreus keeps the enemies distracted (which is both painfully slow at times, whilst also just feeling bizarre because Atreus is with seldom exceptions actually invulnerable to damage in combat), or getting in close and mindlessly button mashing until the enemies roll over and die (which is just boring). There are lots of fancy additional close-combat moves you can use but the game never really gives you the motivation to learn them, so it largely ends up being just this for the entire playthrough, as you fight the exact same enemies fifteen hours deep that you were fighting at the start of the game.

There are many ways to make the combat not get quite so tedious by the end, but the simplest one is to just have the game be more compact and streamlined, yet all throughout the game instead pushes to be larger, more expansive, with as many features as it can fit in. People like rpg systems, so why not cram in gear crafting and upgrading and all sorts of different enchantment systems? Never mind that it never makes the combat feel like it plays any differently, or that the best approach to these needless sprawling menus is to just use the things that have the biggest numbers. People like open world games, so why not do that too? But God of War's notion of exploration is mostly just wandering around the lake in a circle, ticking off locations one by one. The game also just features countless collectables, all kept track of in the map screen, as if you can't include anything within a game without it making some resultant number go up.

God of War had a surprising amount of narrative focus, and there's some genuinely cool moments. I enjoyed a bunch of the early-game content surrounding Freya, Baldur is compelling right until the game just forgets he exists for the vast majority of its story, and there's some potentially really interesting stuff in here about familial trauma, abuse and neglect that the game doesn't come close to having anything impactful or coherent to say about in the end. This is its whole own problem as hinting at Kratos's abuse and neglect towards his son (and never even confronting that in any sort of meaningful fashion) clashes pretty harshly with framing him as someone whose every punch should be thrilling to us, in the same way that his talk towards the end of the game of stopping the cycles of violence clashes with the fact that all game long the finishing moves zoom in on every gorey detail, trying its best to make the tearing of flesh and sinew seem salacious. Even the framing for the story is off here, and downright enraging; every single time you're sent to one corner of the world to see a character who can supposedly help you on your quest you can bet they'll be ready to retort that sure they can help you but first you need some obscure item from some other corner of the world. The story is never allowed to flow, always nestled between countless fetch quests, and sometimes fetch quests within fetch quests.

By the half-way point I was extremely ready for this game to be over, but I kept persevering due to some combination of sunk-cost fallacy, a curiosity to see where the story would head, and irritation that the game seems near universally acclaimed. God of War is certainly very pretty, but there's so little of worth here beyond that.