this is a controversial game, but i think a lot of people dont give it credit where credit is due

first off, this is the most linear game in the entire Metroid franchise. however, it makes up for this by having rooms that feel like puzzles. you wont just enter and leave rooms immediately. you have to solve puzzles to get through, which makes it feel like a Metroid game, even if it isnt

the story is definitely as bad as people say. its confusing and poorly written and feels like a fanfic someone wrote about the Metroid games rather than a story written by a team of professionals

occasionally, you will go into a "detective mode" where you are forced into 1st person and told to find an object. this is like a Where's Waldo book, if no one told you what Waldo looked like. these are also not even slightly fun

with the bad stuff out of the way, the game does a lot of things right. the boss fights have this extreme intensity to them, and some of them are my personal favorites. Phantoon is my favorite boss in the entire franchise. having the game 3rd person, and being able to switch to 1st person by pointing the Wii remote at the screen is so fun as well. it gives the game a fast-pace feel to it when youre in the heat of combat

it saddens me to see this game get so much hate, but its not all undeserved. the game takes a ton of missteps, but it has strong parts that are overlooked. i personally enjoyed it, but you might not

As much as I'd like to hold my standards up as a sophist and tastemaker of the Garts (game arts), the fact of the matter is that a cheap trick and lack of price tag can get me through the door and into the trough pretty easily. Enter Splitgate, an open game beta whose design document and elevator pitch practically locked fingers and skipped off into the war-scorched skybox lining its horizon.

Though let's be real, if you are of the Halo generation and, like me, mysteriously developed the aptitude for this style of ambling arena shooter by simply being 13 at the correct time, "Halo mixed with Portal" hits with a certain immediacy. Those with eyes in the audience may glean just how vital is was to the devs of Splitgate to crib Bungie's particular brand of gunplay, down to the arsenal having a big laser that takes a second of charging to fire. Like I said: cheap tricks - if you just want to play Halo multiplayer without paying for it, this honestly isn't that bad of an option in that "flash game recreation of Worms" kinda way.

But hey, that's not what we're here for! We saw a random Twitter video of someone wiping a team by firing through a portal blindly, right? Unfortunately, it's not as brash as the elevator pitch has you think. Each of the maps have specific blue walls which accept your portals and like, I GET IT, it's "tactical" and "balanced" but it's also not the clownshow I was hoping for! However, one very specific mechanic of the portals ends up making them work for me: even if you see a tiny sliver of a blue wall, firing a portal there will stick, congruity be damned. What this means is that your aim and map awareness have to be perfect constantly - not just in combat, but even when navigating. Once you get the feel for it, you can be incredibly oppressive in your map presence in a way that almost completely erases that aforementioned Halo sluggishness (plus you can physics-problem your way through portals at lightning speed, too! If this game didn't have that, I would've refunded it).

All that said, I'm probably done playing this for now though? I managed to ignore it up to this point, but Splitgate may be the absolute nadir of F2P visual taste. They're trying to monetize the most basic bitch UE4 aesthetic, and folks: it is clear that someone on this team calls their computer a "rig". It is littered with markings of the genre, and I'm growing tired of shaking the ick off of me every time I exit this game, especially with the added layer of "Razer RGB keyboard" blinding me. That said, I see the appeal and don't blame anyone for taking to it. It may be exactly what it sets out to be, but hey, it's exactly what it sets out to be.