Wow, I can't believe I never played this back in the day. A masterwork in level design and stealth mechanics. With this game being as short as it was with as few of levels as it had, the world building felt immense and much bigger than it actually was.

It's amazing how well the morality system is implemented in this game, and how you barely notice your actions affecting the game at first, but by the end you can very bluntly see the outcome of your actions. While I didn't do a no-kill run on this playthrough, I can see how many are motivated to do so since the game rewards you for being as peaceful as possible.

Going back to the level design, the levels are so well built that they are straightforward enough for any player to know how to traverse through them and get to their objective, but complex enough to give the player like 10 different ways to get to their objective.

Very glad I finally got the chance to play through this. While the story is only pretty good the gameplay is masterful and is what evens out any weaknesses in the story.

Man, I can honestly tell that there was genuine heart and effort put into this game, as well as an honest attention to the original source material that it is based off of.

However, this game is simply far too padded with bloaty levels, an exhausting amount of enemies (with little variation to them) and just gets to be far too repetitive. 31 levels in a hack and slash is just too many. And while the game itself is pretty short and most of the levels can be completed in about 10 mins each, by the time you get to level 24 or 25 you kind of get exhausted of the same mechanics over and over.

But, there are still brief flashes of greatness in this game. For one, the late game bosses are immensely better than the early game ones. Also, being given the ability to play as other characters in levels that have different playstyles was a breath of fresh air as well too. The CGI cutscenes are really well done, the soundtrack is really good, and this game DOES do a really good job at being a modern take of an edgy PS2 hack and slash.

Was this game worth $50 on release? No. But at common sale prices of $9.99 or less, I'd say go ahead and grab it and enjoy it for the mindless callback to PS2 era hack and slashes that it is.

All in all, this is a solid first attempt for being Studio IGGYMOB's first game.

An incredible game that is just so charming, well written and is a blast from start to finish.

The narration, dialogue and soundtrack are superb. The level design is fantastic overall (some levels may drag on a tiny bit too long) and incorporate the perfect amount of horizontal and vertical traversing in a 2D platformer.

Some mentioned they disliked it, but personally I loved the witty banter between the characters (especially the narrator, pikarina and the villains) and the 4th wall breaking moments were excellently done too.

While I'm sad that this game is stuck (and probably permanently so) on PS3, I do genuinely think that this was the perfect swan song that celebrated a console that put creativity at it's forefront (littlebigplanet, modnation racers, PS Home, etc)

I was really hooked throughout despite the rocky writing and storytelling. There were long stretches of the game that were absolutely amazing (convenience store, night club, car junkyard to name a few). Obviously your experience and satisfaction of the game largely depends on the type of story you go through, I was able to save almost every character, and despite having one of the "best" ends morally, it was really lackluster in the end (with honestly the "worse" endings having more exciting or powerful conclusions).

They really messed up by having almost all D-list Europeans voice stereotypically American characters, the inconsistent accents are wack and lead to some incredibly cringe delivery and wrong tones. Scott Shelby was a great performance though.

Ultimately, I enjoyed my time with this game even though I'm a little underwhelmed by the twist and the ending I got. This has me intrigued to go through some of the other quantic dreams games

This is clearly where the Guitar Hero franchise started to gain some incredible momentum. This is an improvement over GH1 in every single way. Better song selection, much better controller, better campaign, awesome bonus songs (big ups to Trogdor).

To me, the biggest area where this game falls short in compared to some of the future Guitar Heros is the fact that all of the songs are covers. Now, some of these covers are pretty good, and some of them are laughably bad. One could say this adds to the charm of the game, but honestly it makes me just want to play it to the original song.

As mentioned though, a great step in the right direction for the series, and it would to continue to go up from there for the next installment too

I can see why this was a big deal when it came out, but in retrospect there are just so many shooters from this era and before that are more enjoyable to play than this. You could make the argument of "oh but the story though", I find the story to be extremely simple and almost a bit boring.

I liked some of the weapons in this. But honestly, Unreal had better weapons than this game and came out earlier.

Also, God awful final boss battle.