soyka
2022
Pretty decent action game but with some annoying elements.
The camera is very ass sometimes and is too close to the character most of the time, camera distance adjustment would be great. Also, in a game like this where combat is 70% the focus, when the camera clips through a wall, the walls should ALWAYS go invisible. There have been way too many instances where you get pushed into a corner and the camera ends up behind a wall and you get killed cause you cant see shit.
This is not the only aspect where priorities seemed to be set aside however, there have been a few scenes where either the darkness or strong colored lighting stand in the way of motion clarity, particularly in level 3.
On a more technical level there were some noticeable issues with targetting. Having no lock on of some sort means you need to implement auto targetting and that stuff is usually never spotless and indeed it is often very annoying in sifu. You sometimes snap to a different enemy in the middle of a combo if you happened to do a move with some pushback in the middle. I also attribute issues with the Y+B finisher move not initiating while in range to the auto-targetting (could be wrong though they might be unrelated). Small nitpick but I also think default binds for back step and evade should be lb+back and lb+forward respectively, just seems more intuitive to me.
Other than that the combat design is a bit confused, im not sure why having both the parry and the evade was necessary, most of the time evading is simply the better and more consistent option. I think the defense in this game is comparable to God Hand, where you also get 3 defensive options with dodging, backroll and sidestep but in that game all of them serve a clearly defined role and dont confuse a player at the start by offering options which dont show any immediately discernible difference in end result.
Also I feel gating off moves behind a skill tree in this game was a bad move, since they reset on death. You often dont get the chance to get used to actually having the move and before you finally start using it more, you get reset. The focus attacks and situational moves are fine though.
Finally im not so sure about the overall structure of the game. It IS unique, but they deliberately chose something that will appeal to a very select few autists like me and is not all that beneficial to the overall experience. Most people will feel enough satisfaction getting beaten up once and finally passing a level, Sifu however strongly recommends replaying the levels many times to get a low amount of deaths so you dont "soft-lock" yourself in later levels. This will no doubt alienate a lot of players, and that would be fine if what was gained instead was worthwhile but I'm not conviced that trade off was worth it in this case.
Overall I think the game was fun and will satisfy any craving for a punishing action game experience. The mechanics are engaging and sound for the most part, the aesthetics have a strong identity, The animations have that all important snap and are extremely satisfying every time you perform them and the soundtrack is solid, albeit more subdued than it should be. I recommend 👍
The camera is very ass sometimes and is too close to the character most of the time, camera distance adjustment would be great. Also, in a game like this where combat is 70% the focus, when the camera clips through a wall, the walls should ALWAYS go invisible. There have been way too many instances where you get pushed into a corner and the camera ends up behind a wall and you get killed cause you cant see shit.
This is not the only aspect where priorities seemed to be set aside however, there have been a few scenes where either the darkness or strong colored lighting stand in the way of motion clarity, particularly in level 3.
On a more technical level there were some noticeable issues with targetting. Having no lock on of some sort means you need to implement auto targetting and that stuff is usually never spotless and indeed it is often very annoying in sifu. You sometimes snap to a different enemy in the middle of a combo if you happened to do a move with some pushback in the middle. I also attribute issues with the Y+B finisher move not initiating while in range to the auto-targetting (could be wrong though they might be unrelated). Small nitpick but I also think default binds for back step and evade should be lb+back and lb+forward respectively, just seems more intuitive to me.
Other than that the combat design is a bit confused, im not sure why having both the parry and the evade was necessary, most of the time evading is simply the better and more consistent option. I think the defense in this game is comparable to God Hand, where you also get 3 defensive options with dodging, backroll and sidestep but in that game all of them serve a clearly defined role and dont confuse a player at the start by offering options which dont show any immediately discernible difference in end result.
Also I feel gating off moves behind a skill tree in this game was a bad move, since they reset on death. You often dont get the chance to get used to actually having the move and before you finally start using it more, you get reset. The focus attacks and situational moves are fine though.
Finally im not so sure about the overall structure of the game. It IS unique, but they deliberately chose something that will appeal to a very select few autists like me and is not all that beneficial to the overall experience. Most people will feel enough satisfaction getting beaten up once and finally passing a level, Sifu however strongly recommends replaying the levels many times to get a low amount of deaths so you dont "soft-lock" yourself in later levels. This will no doubt alienate a lot of players, and that would be fine if what was gained instead was worthwhile but I'm not conviced that trade off was worth it in this case.
Overall I think the game was fun and will satisfy any craving for a punishing action game experience. The mechanics are engaging and sound for the most part, the aesthetics have a strong identity, The animations have that all important snap and are extremely satisfying every time you perform them and the soundtrack is solid, albeit more subdued than it should be. I recommend 👍
Yeah, i just got bored 3 hours in. This game doesnt offer anything the first 2 games didnt have and this series already started overstaying its welcome for me halfway into prime 2. Everything in these 3 hours pointed to me not enjoying the remainder of the game. The tedious prologue, the immediate giveaway that the level design will be the most linear in the series and the hypermode which is just boring to use. This entry desperately needed to introduce brand new and meaningful mechanics and a solid difficulty curve for me to have any interest to continue. At least its the prettiest prime game, even if it did cost some long load times when opening doors.
Pretty much inferior to the first game, which is what I feared. It took me a very long time to finish this game cause i would play a bit, enjoy myself until a certain point, and then get bored out of my mind and not touch the game for a few weeks.
Dark and light world gimmick is stupid and only adds to the egregious count of long loading screens without contributing anything worthwhile to the gameplay. The health depletion is dumb. The fact you get a suit to bypass this depletion only at the END of the game is even dumber, makes every visit to the dark world a chore. It doesnt help that the dark worlds are all made to look the same, it bores you really fast.
The annoying backtracking is back and there is STILL no teleportation possible, so you have to do the whole trek around the map. You'd think the level design would keep this in mind and give some unlockable shortcuts to make your life easier, but the few shortcuts you get don't shorten your travel time by any significant amount. If youre not gonna do the necessary work in level design, just give us a teleport ability. I can forgive the first game for having this issue, but having years to think it through for a sequel and still not fixing one of the major issues of the first game is just incompetence in my eyes.
I personally hated the new limited ammo on beams, restrictions like that just naturally make me more hesitant to experiment with weapons.
I feel I kinda overlooked the bosses in Prime one because combat was obviously not the focus. Having played both games back to back made me notice that the bosses really are a mixed bag of shit in these games, they range from forgettable to highly annoying with some very rare standouts. Maybe becoming more aware of this also made me lose a lot of interest.
For positives I could probably mention them deleting the dumb colorcoded enemies from the first game, although I'm not sure if that was a decision based on their gameplay design being shit, or them just not fitting with the new limited beam ammo system.
In terms of atmosphere it more or less matches Prime 1. Even though Temple Grounds and Agon Wastes are kinda bland, I think Torvus Bog and Sanctuary Fortress make up for them, the latter being most likely my favourite area in the prime series yet.
At this point im not having great expectations from prime 3, but Ill give it a chance I guess since many people seem to think its the best in the series.
Dark and light world gimmick is stupid and only adds to the egregious count of long loading screens without contributing anything worthwhile to the gameplay. The health depletion is dumb. The fact you get a suit to bypass this depletion only at the END of the game is even dumber, makes every visit to the dark world a chore. It doesnt help that the dark worlds are all made to look the same, it bores you really fast.
The annoying backtracking is back and there is STILL no teleportation possible, so you have to do the whole trek around the map. You'd think the level design would keep this in mind and give some unlockable shortcuts to make your life easier, but the few shortcuts you get don't shorten your travel time by any significant amount. If youre not gonna do the necessary work in level design, just give us a teleport ability. I can forgive the first game for having this issue, but having years to think it through for a sequel and still not fixing one of the major issues of the first game is just incompetence in my eyes.
I personally hated the new limited ammo on beams, restrictions like that just naturally make me more hesitant to experiment with weapons.
I feel I kinda overlooked the bosses in Prime one because combat was obviously not the focus. Having played both games back to back made me notice that the bosses really are a mixed bag of shit in these games, they range from forgettable to highly annoying with some very rare standouts. Maybe becoming more aware of this also made me lose a lot of interest.
For positives I could probably mention them deleting the dumb colorcoded enemies from the first game, although I'm not sure if that was a decision based on their gameplay design being shit, or them just not fitting with the new limited beam ammo system.
In terms of atmosphere it more or less matches Prime 1. Even though Temple Grounds and Agon Wastes are kinda bland, I think Torvus Bog and Sanctuary Fortress make up for them, the latter being most likely my favourite area in the prime series yet.
At this point im not having great expectations from prime 3, but Ill give it a chance I guess since many people seem to think its the best in the series.
This review contains spoilers
Well, there it is; the sequel to possibly my favourite game of all time! Im pretty happy to say that 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 it met my expectations.
Im glad they've experimented with the formula they set up in the base game. Some experiments are more successful than others of course, with one dud being big enough to sour my experience and make me audibly go "what in the fuck were they thinking", but yeah more on that later. Let's start with the positives, which make up the majority of the dlc, in my experience at least.
The soundtrack is great, it is on par if not at points better than the base game. I'm sure they noticed the overwhelming positive reaction the ost got in the base game, so they decided to weigh in on that aspect more. It's noticeable in how the music is implemented with the slide reels, that level of synergy between in-game events and soundtrack wasn't quite there in the base game. Andrew Prahlow of course delivered in his own composition as well, it's some of the finest in the game. This dlc has been confirmed to be the last of Outer Wilds we will see, so I really hope he doesn't drop this style. Hopefully he'll develop and build upon it in his future works, be it games or films. It would really be a shame if he dropped this unique style in favour of the indie game composer stereotype of either doing synthwave or chiptune.
As far as the new content goes, "The Stranger" is a really sick concept. A rotating space habitat/dyson sphere hidden in plain sight, only visible by way of observing the object from a series of dead angles. Getting to the Stranger for the first time was amazing, finding out there was this ancient civilization predating the nomai in this solar system all along is mindblowing. The way this was made clear was very clever as well, you really dont need much more than the first text you come across at the entrance to be untranslateable. This kills 2 birds with one stone; it lets you know you're not dealing with the nomai anymore, and sets up the manner in which you'll be receiving information from now on. That's right, from now on you wont be doing ANY reading anymore, everything is being visually conveyed! I have to admit that I missed reading the nomai messages with the banter and all, it made the big reveals more impactful to me personally, but I can't call this change anything but an improvement.
In terms of gameplay it is a mixed bag. Going into the Stranger ultimately means you have to abandon your ship, so that means no more funny space shenanigans with whacky crash landings, and no more mandatory self immolation by means of flying, totally intentionally, into the sun. What you get in return are the rafts, which are admittedly very fun to control, but the fact that the space ship is completely out of the picture is a giant bummer. The first 4 hours or so will mostly involve you exploring the vessel, swimming across the whole thing with your raft and finding out about the new aliens through the picture reels. I will unabashadely say that during the whole duration of these 4 hours there was nothing but childlike joy in my mind, it's more Outer Wilds for christ's sake! Not only that, it's arguably the sickest looking place in the solar sytem yet. It's the "exploration fuels progression" gameplay loop that you expect from the base game and it's simply good, nothing more to add.
And now comes the other 3 hours... you know, the "what the fuck" part. At a certain point you start running out of leads that point towards anything on the vessel, so you start going into the artifact worlds. This is the point where the game genuinely turns into an aimless mess for a while. The first red flag you notice is that your jetpack is being taken away, immediately making movement in the world a slog. What it boils down to is this; you have to walk through these many corridors that blend together and are so dark you can barely see shit, hoping to stumble upon something that will let you progress. The only tool you have is an alien lantern which has a stupidly small field of light. The only way to see well in front of you is to focus the lamp - but, get this; if you focus the lamp, your movement grinds to a snail's pace! Great, so not only dont you have a jetpack anymore, if you want more visibility than right in front of your feet, you'll need to walk around like you just took a deadly dose of painkillers.
I can confidently say that until you get the lead to search for the bottom of the tower in the second artifact world, your endeavors into these worlds are 100% aimless. You literally dont know what the fuck to do there. The logbook is uncharacteristically unhelpful as well, marking out the worlds as fully explored while youve literally gained nothing from visiting them. Finding out later that you were definitely not done with those places was just unbelievably annoying.
The purpose of these aimless visits becomes apparent later on. After you find the 3 secret reels which reveal secret passageways in the artifact worlds, you'll need to go back to the stupid artifact worlds. Now you finally find out why you were made to walk around aimlessly. The purpose was; to make the amnesia parody segments slightly less annoying... they dropped the ball hard.
When you illuminate the secret passages you were told about by the reels, the inhabitants of the world suddenly and inexplicably go out for your blood despite you already tresspassing on their domain before this happened. There is absolutely nothing engaging about these sneaking missions, you can even skip 2 of these if you have enough patience and time on your hands. Its like the anglerfish except there is absolutely nothing unique about this, its just a generic horror game walking in the dark segment. You better have the layout memorized because youre gonna lose a lot of time otherwise trying to juke the elks and finding out youre going into a dead end instead. I highly recommend turning on the the reduced frights mode for these parts, it just makes it less of a headache.
Thankfully, it gets better from here. Once youre done with the sneaking I'd say the payoff is reasonably worthwhile. What you get out of finishing each artifact world is solutions to the "main problem" so to speak. These solutions are quite interesting and definitely worth the trouble to go after, so dont get discouraged by the sneaking segments. The final "conversation" was quite a gut-punch for me personally, and the extra stuff in the ending of the base game was a nice little addition.
It's no surprise that the dlc doesn't have a particularly huge impact on the base game, but it certainly doesnt sour it. It does raise a question of how the Nomai, a highly advanced civilization that deals with black holes and shit, weren't able to notice this vessel, but heartians somehow did. Unless I missed something, this reeks a bit of retcon.
All in all this is an admirable final send-off for an exceptional base game. Despite a big dirty spot in the middle it is a very enjoyable experience as a whole. If you enjoyed the base game like I did, this surely is worth your time.
Im glad they've experimented with the formula they set up in the base game. Some experiments are more successful than others of course, with one dud being big enough to sour my experience and make me audibly go "what in the fuck were they thinking", but yeah more on that later. Let's start with the positives, which make up the majority of the dlc, in my experience at least.
The soundtrack is great, it is on par if not at points better than the base game. I'm sure they noticed the overwhelming positive reaction the ost got in the base game, so they decided to weigh in on that aspect more. It's noticeable in how the music is implemented with the slide reels, that level of synergy between in-game events and soundtrack wasn't quite there in the base game. Andrew Prahlow of course delivered in his own composition as well, it's some of the finest in the game. This dlc has been confirmed to be the last of Outer Wilds we will see, so I really hope he doesn't drop this style. Hopefully he'll develop and build upon it in his future works, be it games or films. It would really be a shame if he dropped this unique style in favour of the indie game composer stereotype of either doing synthwave or chiptune.
As far as the new content goes, "The Stranger" is a really sick concept. A rotating space habitat/dyson sphere hidden in plain sight, only visible by way of observing the object from a series of dead angles. Getting to the Stranger for the first time was amazing, finding out there was this ancient civilization predating the nomai in this solar system all along is mindblowing. The way this was made clear was very clever as well, you really dont need much more than the first text you come across at the entrance to be untranslateable. This kills 2 birds with one stone; it lets you know you're not dealing with the nomai anymore, and sets up the manner in which you'll be receiving information from now on. That's right, from now on you wont be doing ANY reading anymore, everything is being visually conveyed! I have to admit that I missed reading the nomai messages with the banter and all, it made the big reveals more impactful to me personally, but I can't call this change anything but an improvement.
In terms of gameplay it is a mixed bag. Going into the Stranger ultimately means you have to abandon your ship, so that means no more funny space shenanigans with whacky crash landings, and no more mandatory self immolation by means of flying, totally intentionally, into the sun. What you get in return are the rafts, which are admittedly very fun to control, but the fact that the space ship is completely out of the picture is a giant bummer. The first 4 hours or so will mostly involve you exploring the vessel, swimming across the whole thing with your raft and finding out about the new aliens through the picture reels. I will unabashadely say that during the whole duration of these 4 hours there was nothing but childlike joy in my mind, it's more Outer Wilds for christ's sake! Not only that, it's arguably the sickest looking place in the solar sytem yet. It's the "exploration fuels progression" gameplay loop that you expect from the base game and it's simply good, nothing more to add.
And now comes the other 3 hours... you know, the "what the fuck" part. At a certain point you start running out of leads that point towards anything on the vessel, so you start going into the artifact worlds. This is the point where the game genuinely turns into an aimless mess for a while. The first red flag you notice is that your jetpack is being taken away, immediately making movement in the world a slog. What it boils down to is this; you have to walk through these many corridors that blend together and are so dark you can barely see shit, hoping to stumble upon something that will let you progress. The only tool you have is an alien lantern which has a stupidly small field of light. The only way to see well in front of you is to focus the lamp - but, get this; if you focus the lamp, your movement grinds to a snail's pace! Great, so not only dont you have a jetpack anymore, if you want more visibility than right in front of your feet, you'll need to walk around like you just took a deadly dose of painkillers.
I can confidently say that until you get the lead to search for the bottom of the tower in the second artifact world, your endeavors into these worlds are 100% aimless. You literally dont know what the fuck to do there. The logbook is uncharacteristically unhelpful as well, marking out the worlds as fully explored while youve literally gained nothing from visiting them. Finding out later that you were definitely not done with those places was just unbelievably annoying.
The purpose of these aimless visits becomes apparent later on. After you find the 3 secret reels which reveal secret passageways in the artifact worlds, you'll need to go back to the stupid artifact worlds. Now you finally find out why you were made to walk around aimlessly. The purpose was; to make the amnesia parody segments slightly less annoying... they dropped the ball hard.
When you illuminate the secret passages you were told about by the reels, the inhabitants of the world suddenly and inexplicably go out for your blood despite you already tresspassing on their domain before this happened. There is absolutely nothing engaging about these sneaking missions, you can even skip 2 of these if you have enough patience and time on your hands. Its like the anglerfish except there is absolutely nothing unique about this, its just a generic horror game walking in the dark segment. You better have the layout memorized because youre gonna lose a lot of time otherwise trying to juke the elks and finding out youre going into a dead end instead. I highly recommend turning on the the reduced frights mode for these parts, it just makes it less of a headache.
Thankfully, it gets better from here. Once youre done with the sneaking I'd say the payoff is reasonably worthwhile. What you get out of finishing each artifact world is solutions to the "main problem" so to speak. These solutions are quite interesting and definitely worth the trouble to go after, so dont get discouraged by the sneaking segments. The final "conversation" was quite a gut-punch for me personally, and the extra stuff in the ending of the base game was a nice little addition.
It's no surprise that the dlc doesn't have a particularly huge impact on the base game, but it certainly doesnt sour it. It does raise a question of how the Nomai, a highly advanced civilization that deals with black holes and shit, weren't able to notice this vessel, but heartians somehow did. Unless I missed something, this reeks a bit of retcon.
All in all this is an admirable final send-off for an exceptional base game. Despite a big dirty spot in the middle it is a very enjoyable experience as a whole. If you enjoyed the base game like I did, this surely is worth your time.
2002
My favourite metroid game so far. Cool atmosphere, environments, exploration and I even found myself reading and enjoying the bits of lore you find. Of course its not flawless, while some previous irks of mine from SM and ZM are gone some new issues popped up to take their place.
This game could REALLY use a fast travel system, more so than the 2d metroids, despite being standard for the genre the amount of backtracking in MP is seriously asinine for no good reason.
Other than that I found the combat to be underexplored. The start of the game would lead you to believe that enemy design would lean towards weak points and weaknesses for certain weapons, and while that is present through the entire game to an extent, as you get further the game starts insisting more and more on these obnoxious color coded enemy encounters. These enemies are annoyingly bullet spongy and require a specific weapon to do any kind of damage to them. This isnt a weakness, its just straight up a limitation for the player. I have to admit these encounters definitely soured my experience of the game.
I really hope they learned from these mistakes in the subsequent games.
This game could REALLY use a fast travel system, more so than the 2d metroids, despite being standard for the genre the amount of backtracking in MP is seriously asinine for no good reason.
Other than that I found the combat to be underexplored. The start of the game would lead you to believe that enemy design would lean towards weak points and weaknesses for certain weapons, and while that is present through the entire game to an extent, as you get further the game starts insisting more and more on these obnoxious color coded enemy encounters. These enemies are annoyingly bullet spongy and require a specific weapon to do any kind of damage to them. This isnt a weakness, its just straight up a limitation for the player. I have to admit these encounters definitely soured my experience of the game.
I really hope they learned from these mistakes in the subsequent games.
2021
Honestly a bit disappointed, most departures this game took from the first ended up backfiring in my opinion
I found this more enjoyable than Super Metroid, mostly just due to the much smoother controls. However one of my main grievances from SM still remains the same; you get way too many missile packs. This makes the exploration quite unsatisfying compared to a lot of modern metroidvanias. While I do enjoy the process of exploration and puzzle solving on its own it does get tiresome when the reward for said exploration isnt very worthwhile.
The mission pointers did cheapen the experience for me a bit, part of the appeal of metroidvanias is figuring out where to go by yourself. I wouldnt mind it as much if the pointer was much vaguer. An example I can think of is Environmental Station Alpha, it had this kind of waypoint system but they were always placed in the middle of buttfuck nowhere so they only served as a vague direction to go.
Gonna go on to the prime games next, I'm interested to see how this franchise evolved.
The mission pointers did cheapen the experience for me a bit, part of the appeal of metroidvanias is figuring out where to go by yourself. I wouldnt mind it as much if the pointer was much vaguer. An example I can think of is Environmental Station Alpha, it had this kind of waypoint system but they were always placed in the middle of buttfuck nowhere so they only served as a vague direction to go.
Gonna go on to the prime games next, I'm interested to see how this franchise evolved.
2010
Seems even platinum games cant undo my dislike of third person shooters, although i will admit that this one I actually can get the appeal of. Not sure if this is a big indication to stay away from shinji mikami's other shooter projects like resident evil
its just not worth it dudes, maybe try emulating the game cause the pc version is unplayable. Aside from huge amounts fiddling to even get past the opening cinematic and fix the resolution and fps, in order to avoid instant crashes on chapter 9 you have to go into compatibility mode which results in memory leak for some reason. I was giving the game way too many passes already, chapter 9 was the last drop in the bucket.
Here's my main advice: If you want more twin peaks, just rewatch the show.
Here's my main advice: If you want more twin peaks, just rewatch the show.