I was out of Saints Row to play and wanted to give this one a fair chance, so I put more hours into it than I probably should've, but I eventually realised the game just wasn't respecting my time once I went into the same base structure and had the same fight repeatedly.

There's potential here, though the writing often misses the mark, and I find myself wondering if the three-character structure was originally intended as a three-player co-op experience, which was cut due to time constraints, which honestly would've made a lot of this game make more sense.

I feel like Volition were here really trying to find a way not to be the Saints Row studio for the rest of time, but couldn't stick the landing on this one. I'm hopeful they'll get another chance after the upcoming Saints Row reboot.

solid racing game which stops just shy of greatness because none of the tracks are in any way memorable - they’ve gone for a generated-from-prefab-blocks type of track system, which does mean you can generate your own custom ones (though you can’t manually edit individual segments, just influence the parameters of the generation algorithm) and they’re equally convincing versus the predefined ones, but there’s nothing to distinguish them

there’s a real deep state of focus you enter where you’re just focused on the road ahead and listening to your co-driver’s course notes, and that’s fun in and of itself, but there’s no track you’d ever go “damn, I want to improve my time on that one” because they’re all so completely indistinguishable

there have been games which did this kind of track generation before - I played hundreds of hours of V-Rally 2 as a kid - but I still remember those tracks; SS01 Australia is burned into my brain like it’s the route to the local shops and I’m hungry - something doesn’t quite stick to your brain with the ones in Dirt 4

excellent fun with a good wheel, but I wish it were more interested in the tracks as a place, rather than just an immediately-discardable result of an algorithm's execution

What an odd game. Definitely a bit rough around the edges to modern eyes, but really interesting. I sent a good forty minutes or so wandering around Forest 1 wondering when I would get told what to do, and only then did I discover how you actually obtain quests (hint: you have to go talk to the Hunters Guild on the ship, the game doesn’t make this especially obvious).

The rhythmic hack-and-slash combat wasn’t what I was expecting, and took a bit to get used to, but I got there and now I’ve completed a handful of the first couple of waves of quests. I appreciate the comic book style of the cutscene dialogue, and also that the Japanese version has full English support, which makes it a much cheaper game to try out; European and American copies are ridiculously expensive in comparison.

Excited to see more, and hoping to take it Online for real (the Sylverant server is active, and with a DreamPi, a real game key, and a boot disc depending on your copy, you can play pretty easily) when Dreamcast Live are running a game night sometime.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game work harder to remind you of a different, better game

It’s very clearly drawn a lot of inspiration from Half-Life. It’s got story scenes interleaved with combat sequences, most of which are first person and allow you to wander, and it tries to keep it all contiguous in space and time. It falls down a bit in that it has to contrive a lot of extracanonical conceits to justify a Star Trek first person shooter where you can actually defeat the big bads of Voyager. First up, you’re part of a “Hazard Team” (never seen or mentioned in the show) whose job is to be the militaristic first response to hostile situations both aboard Voyager and elsewhere. Secondly, because you come up against borg and species 8472, and you’re supposed to win, Seven of Nine has conveniently come up with the Infinity Modulator, a weapon the borg simply cannot counter. I guess every time they’ve rotated weapon frequencies it’s been literally rotating rather than random, and someone finally remembered entropy existed? This… does not occur in the show, ever, for obvious reasons.

And you do shoot a lot of these enemies. Encounter design can be summarised as large numbers of enemies spawning out of nowhere for a few minutes and not much else. A shame, because the levels certainly could be used in more interesting ways.

The Half-Life references are all over the game. There’s a “hazardous materials” level which has you leaping from broken catwalks over radioactive water, B’Elanna mentions needing to calibrate the resonance cascade couplings, they wear their inspiration not on their sleeve but as a tired graphic tee. And it’s really rather distracting.

You spend a decent amount of time wandering Voyager, and these sequences are probably my favourites, as exploring the ship is pretty fun. There are plenty of little touches, like a signed photo of your player character with Worf in her quarters, and a segment where you get summoned to the bridge. These parts just make me wish this game hadn’t had such a focus on the out of character combat, I’d have loved a game like this more interested in a story aboard Voyager, and less focused on being a Half-Life-like with a Quake style multiplayer mode.