The Last of Us: Part 1 Review

The Last of Us, it's a game I do enjoy and it's a game that does a good job at having a solid story and solid gameplay even though neither are enhanced by each other in anyway. However, this remake is a weird one that I have complicated thoughts on. TLOU is a game I like but this "remake" just feels souless outside of the fact that Sony needed an easily avalible and accessible version of the game to play when the HBO show dropped. 

At first, when looking at all the accessiblity and quality of life features added to this "remake", I thought, "man this wouldn't be too out of place in the PS2 era". With games like Metal Gear Solid 3 Subsistence, Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition and Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix except those games came out back in a time where consoles had limited internet connectivity and you couldn't install patches and updates as easily as you can now. You could easily patch in all these features in the PS4 Remastered Edition of the game and you would bypass this remake entirely. I thought it also shared elements with Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition with how that version introduced easier aiming through Wii Pointer aim, and TLOU Part 1 has this through gyro aiming except there is just one major issue: gyro aiming isn't as good as Wii Pointer aim. 

I tried to make this 3rd playthrough of TLOU as different as I could with me adding things like detection arrows and gyro aim being two of the major gameplay differences since I thought they were major selling points of this "remake" but they were superficial changes at best and with gyro aiming, it's easily the biggest missed potential.

While you could argue that if gyro aiming was better, it could potentially break the game with headshots being much easier to land and being able to aim so fast that enemies won't be able to hit you very quickly, but if you are going to add motion control aiming at all, don't you want to make it as worthwhile of a feature as possible? This could also be due to the PS5's gyro aiming not being that great but while I was playing the game with gyro aiming, it didn't feel that reliable or not as reliable as it could be. Every time I would line up a shot with gyro aiming even with the sensitivity maxed out, I could track and line up my shots fast enough to avoid getting hit and get the headshots I wanted, it felt like I was getting hit due to the gyro aiming being too slow rather than because of my inablity to aim shots in time in quick succession. This shouldn't be an issue since I am using motion rather than stick aiming, then I just started to use analog stick aiming and had more of an enjoyable time that way, so one of it's potentially big game changing features is no rendered rendundant. 

Next up is the detection arrows, one of my biggest gripes with the original game's stealth is the lack of detection arrows and the lack of any geniune feedback during stealth outside of a vague sound cue when you are in an enemy's line of sight and I am going to segway into one of the biggest misconceptions I hear about TLOU. 

TLOU is not a stealth game. It never was one and that isn't a bad thing, it's perfectly fine but when I play with these detection arrows, it reminds me that TLOU as a stealth adventure is rather basic and dull. Stealth in this game feels like a red herring at times. When I beat the game back in 2013, I tried to play the game as a stealthily as possible and had a miserable time but when I realized stealth is meant to be used in conjunction with the cover system and shooting, I enjoyed the game a lot more. Playing with the arrows made me realize why Naughty Dog never added them in the game to begin with, stealth is basically a game of, "how long can I remain undetected and take guys out from behind until my cover is blown and then you go guns blazing". 

With these detection arrows, at times it's easier to avoid enemies entirely but at other times, the game boxes you in and you will probably get caught and at other times, avoidance is easy. What really makes complete stealth a red herring is the fact that certain sections requires you to get caught in order or kill enemies for the game's story to progress. For example, multiple "encounters" in the game requires you to kill enemies in order to move to the next sequence. 

To name some examples, the subway level requires you to kill a stationary clicker nearby in order to give Ellie and Tess a boast, in Bill's Town backyard level there is another stationary clicker you need to kill in order to open the door to progress, in the hotel complex level you need to kill all the guys in that small area in order to use the ladder since it will make too much noise and to trigger a scripted sequence where Ellie shoots a hunter in the head, and in the finianical district level, you can stealth kill as many enemies as you can and as long as Ellie does not fire the shot from the hunting rifle, the enemies will keep respawning untill she fires. 

This also isn't including the amount of mandatory "cover blows" where you will be alerted in a cutscene and then you have to engage in shootouts with no option for stealth at all. 

If you try to play this game completely stealthy, don't, you are going to have a miserable time, and there were better "action games" where you get to play it stealthily that released before, at the time of and after TLOU's release like Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, Splinter Cell Blacklist and Metal Gear Solid 5. Those games gives you more options for stealth than TLOU does and not all your options in those games are offensive options. 

Now after all that, I might as well describe the game itself and like I said before it's a pretty good game. I am not a big fan of Naughty Dog after the first Jak and Daxter game with this game and Jak X being the exceptions. 

I make it clear I am not a big fan of Uncharted and with TLOU, ND realized they had to make compelling gameplay along with a solid story. The difference here is that TLOU's level design allows for more exploration during the walk and talk sections and the game in general gives you more options in combat than Uncharted ever did. TLOU also requires you to look at body language and expressions more key example being the scene where Henri is seperated from Sam and he is breathing very heavily over the fact that he is seperated from his brother. 

That and guns actually have geniunely good feedback and damage animations unlike Uncharted. The game does in fact have actual gameplay, don't let the naysayers fool you. There's plenty of shootouts along with walky talky bits throughout the game. I am wondering how people who say TLOU is barely a game came to the conclusion that they did or if they even played it. 

Navacanoo goes in more detail here than I can regarding the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzgSzbMryFY&t=867s

TLOU's story while typical is told well and has very good characters and individual interactions them to be endearing, and unlike the HBO show, the game uses it's gameplay scenarios to give the downtime with characters as a reward for going through so much hell. When you survive a battle in TLOU and hear the characters speak to each other feels like you earned all that where in the show, it's just endless amounts of talking in an empty apocalypse rather than a zombie infested one. Plus TLOU's story just benefits more with following Joel and Ellie at all times like a "seemless take" with occasional cuts as opposed to the show's endless and dull "filler" scenes to pad out episode lengths and explain things that didn't need explaining or fleshing out. 

Now even though the story is praised to death and I like it and all, there is just one major issue I wish the game actually covered in some way whether it'd be through DLC or having a prequel game being made instead of this remake: Joel and Tommy during the timeskip. 

I am not a big fan of long timeskips in fiction since it goes over major character development and all the changes characters go through happen off screen. With Joel and Tommy's case, I find their interactions so compelling and their conflicts so well acted that I geniunely wanted to know what actually caused the rift between those two. It's compelling backstory and drama that is never actually played and it's hard to understand it since it's never shown. 

I am a firm believer that you shouldn't show everything in a story and only things that are important but I argue the backstory with Joel and Tommy is important to the overall story since it establishes the "ruthless" side of Joel that is never shown until the Firefly lab. If Joel and Tommy's backstory was shown, this would make it an easier pill to swallow and show all that compelling drama. 

Overall, this review was all over the place, I do like TLOU and if you want to experience the story for the first time, this remake isn't a bad place to start, but I still question if this remake would even get made if it weren't for the HBO show and how souless it feels overall. Much like that infamous remake of Psycho since TLOU never needed a visual overall and already looked back then and even now, it's a great looking game. If you played the game, and want to play it again due to rusty memory, get at an extremely discounted price. 

Do Platform Exclusive Games really matter?

With this write up I want to discuss two things: first the idea of consoles having "no games" and do platform exclusive games do more harm than good when it comes to games preservation and games being attainable and easy to port. 

I'll discuss the first point, the idea of a console having "no games" is pretty silly to me. Just the saying of it makes no sense. If a console has "no games" then by saying that it means a console shouldn't even be able to play video games at all. 

It began back in the 7th gen when PS3 released at a super high price which was a mistake on Sony's part but I'll avoid discussing that. A bunch of gamers in the console wars supporting the 360 was attacking the PS3's lack of worthwhile exclusives that is worth spending $600 on. The insult is only there because there was nothing worth spending $600 for a games console for, all though I argue there is no game or selection of games that is worth spending $600 on a console on but that is besides the point. Plus most early model PS3s can play PS2 games so by that logic doesn't it mean that the PS2 "has no games?" 

Also, by this logic, the Xbox 360 has no games since now most of it's major releases can be played on the Xbox One. On top of that, the PS3 had more exclusive titles than the 360 that gen, yet it's the 360 that is remembered very fondly. On top of that, all the 360 exclusives at the time back in 2007 like Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Halo 3 can be played mostly everywhere now and those games benefit more for it. 

Now history seems to be repeating itself with the PS5, you see many bashing for it's lack of "proper" exclusive titles since now they are either on PS4 and PC but if we go by this logic, doesn't that mean that the PS4 "has no games" since every major PS4 release can be played on PS5? And also, don't you need a high end PC just to play games like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart since it can't run on PS4? So the PS5 still has it's use. It's also easier just to play multiplats on consoles since you don't need installers and AAA multiplatform games to this day comes with the "made for consoles first" mentality.  If the broken PC launches of Last of Us Part 1, Forspoken, and the Callisto Protocal are anything to go by. That and consoles in general have a quick and easy to access feel to it that PCs don't really have. You plug in a console and it's just made to play games where with PC there are so many different uses for it that it's hard to remove your internet use for game playing. I'd rather play games in a way where I don't have access to Twitter for one thing.

Now on to my next point, I make the argument that despite exclusives being good in the short term since it gets you to buy the console while it's still new, it is disastrous long term for playing older games. 

While companies like Microsoft have done a decent enough job at keeping their legacy titles easy to access. Sony and especially Nintendo have done a rather poor job. Nintendo especially being ergregious about it since they take down emulation sites like emuparadise just to barely offer a worthwhile alternative of their own if Nintendo Switch Online is anything to go by and their closure of the Wii U and 3DS Eshop. Sony is a bit better by comparison despite the fact that the head of Sony, Jim Ryan has infamously stated he's not a fan of older games. They have definitive versions of some of their older games like the Syphon Filter series and Killzone Liberation coming with Chapter 5 the moment you buy the game rather than being a seperate download, making that version of the definitive version. Also even making their more obscure titles like Pursuit Force and Intelligent Cube can reach a new audience just by putting the game on the Premium at all and as seperate purchases to boot something Nintendo doesn't even have with Switch Online. 

With all that said, even Sony's preservation methods aren't perfect. Some of their games like Ape Escape use the PAL versions rather than the NTSC, not all the games can be purchased seperately like Resident Evil Director's Cut, Tekken 2, Ridge Racer 2 and Super Stardust Portable, they have not put on PS2 titles since the Premium began and all their PS3 titles are stream only. The sheer number of PS3 games they are kind of impressive all though some I doubt should be on there since some of these games aren't really classics, ie. Eat Lead the Return of Matt Hazard, Quantum Theory and Rogue Warrior. 

After saying all this, I argue exclusives being stuck on one console forever is far from an ideal way to have these games being played by those who are curious about it. I still own my PS3 to this day. Just to play so many of it's exclusives I enjoy like Killzone 2 and 3, Resistance Trilogy, Ratchet and Clank Future games, Starhawk, Sly 4, Puppeteer, Infamous 1 and 2, Twisted Metal 2012 and the Greek God of Wars besides 3(I am not a big fan of streaming) and even games that are delisted that are no longer avaliable on digital storefronts like Tranformers Cybertron games and High Moon's Deadpool game or games with no Steam versions like Dead to Rights Retribution. I know for a fact that older systems, and games are decaying and will eventually reach a point where I will resort to emulation but I doubt my PC is powerful enough to run one. I am not even sure how long my PS3 will last and I want to ask, is this really ideal? Keeping a bunch of aging discs and consoles that won't last forever just to replay games that I recall liking from years back? And if my PS3 does eventually run out of life. How do I know other similar aging PS3s will have longer life expectancies? If you ask me, an ideal version of this scenario is that all these games should be avaliable to play on the latest hardware. One because it keeps a developer's previous work, games they poured hours of their soul into already avaliable for future generations to try out and to satiate that curosity regarding those older games for the cult following who wants to play them. Plus especially on PS2, you can get bad discs from sellers making it hard to get past certain sections in games thus making these older games even bigger hassle to play and that is also not including that some games aren't the easiest to emulate due to being made with the console in mind, more on that later. 

This is what I mean, having platform exclusives and demanding them just isn't the right thing to do since these things are never beneficial in the long term, only beneficial in the short term. 

Say if Sony pulls a Nintendo and pulls the PS3 and Vita stores down? Since games like Tokyo Jungle, Siren Bloodcurse, Ratchet and Clank Quest for Booty, and Rain are digital only in North America and are exclusive to the PS3 Store, they will be much, much, much harder to obtain later on. I hope you have a PC powerful enough to run a PS3 emulator because boy in a couple of years that might be the future way to play these games. This can also apply to the PS2 as well. I will admit, I do get a kick out of seeing how many PS3 games I can play before the PS3 decides that it is aging but that is because I am a masochist who is willing to try out all kinds of random stuff. I don't think everyone even cult following game collectors are willing to try out and play all kinds of random stuff but I am getting off topic. 

Now my next point, console exclusives also make the games hard to port to newer hardware, some games were made with the game systems and their limitations in mind. The Ratchet and Sly ports on PS3 can be questionable since they were made with the PS2 in mind. All though I still didn't mind the Ratchet HD collection. The Sly Collection crashed numerous times on me. Another example is how come the PS2 SOCOM games never got a port to PS3, 4 and 5 to this day? It's due to one reason, it's because of the PS2's pressure sensitive buttons which modern Sony controllers do not have. If you want to play them through emulator, you need to tinker with the controls just and remove some control options just to be able to crouch. Another example is MGS3, in that game when you grab someone in a chokehold, you can use the PS2's pressure sensitive button to not kill them but play it on PS3, and if you grab someone in a chokehold, guarentee that you instantly throat slit them which I doubt was the way the game was meant to be played and limits options. This is what I mean, by platform exclusives aren't ideal since you get quirks like this. 

Another issue is that platform exclusive games just limits the potential audience of a game, this is rather obvious but it's true. When the Last of Us was a PS3 exclusive, it did have a sizeable following, and critical acclaim but when it came to PS4, it was even more popular and got the following it has today. It wouldn't be possible if it was locked to the PS3. Then there is the Halo series. Many people really wanted the series past Halo 2 to be avalible on PC and now that the MCC is on PC more people who don't own an Xbox now get to experience the series or at least most of it outside of Halo 5. Now there is more people who get to potentially try out Halo and especially get to see how the series temporarily end on PC without buying a 360 or Xbox One. This only helped expand Halo's audience, not retract. Now there is one game in a popular series people are begging to come to other consoles and that game is Metal Gear Solid 4. Sure at the time, when MGS4 was a PS3 exclusive, in the short term, it helped the PS3's bad reputation, but now, it's the ending of the MGS franchise and it's locked behind platform exclusivity and with the release of the MGS Master Collection even more people want MGS4 to be out of PS3 exclusivity. Did MGS4 being a PS3 benefit it in the long run? Not really, all it did was make potential new players to the series need to buy an old console just to play it, or rely on PS3 emulation which neither of are better than just buying the game on a modern console or on a digital storefront. 

Now my final point, PC backwards compatiblity outside of emulation isn't that great. Playing older PC exclusives without the Nightdive Studios treatment is a pain since their remasters make these older games easier to access and play then patches of older versions of games ever will. But even ignoring that playing PC versions of older games is a bigger pain than hooking up an old console. For example, I recently played Splinter Cell Conviction, and it took me 3-4 hours if not longer just to play it. First I had to install the Ubisoft installer, then I had to set compatiblity mode to Windows 7, then I had to set up my Uplay account and I still wasn't done, I had to make sure the game recognized my PS4 controller since there were custom controller bindings and the bindings without Steam Big Picture mode and hiding my DS4 tool would just screw up the controls. I eventually got it to work but all this for a game I beat in 2 days and a game I hardly liked all that much to boot. If I had a 360, this game would've been easier to start up and play but the PC version start up took way more time than needed. Another example is how when I played Crysis Warhead years back, I needed to install a bunch of Gamespy DRM stuff just to play it and it was an annoying hassle that I needed to install a seperate program just to get rid of. Was all this worth just to play one game? Not really.

In conclusion, I feel like platform exclusivity and the demand for them to buy consoles in the short term is a rather misguided attempt at boosting platform sales in the sort term but very, very very detrimental in the long term. If I was running the gaming industry, almost if not every game would be multiplatform and there'd barely be any platform exclusive games. 

Clive 'N' Wrench Review

Clive N Wrench was a hard to game to get into at first, it has a very unpolished feel to it and the platforming in general is not as smooth as it could be. The first level was also not that great and felt very small and compact, partner that with the game not being very clear how progression works and the opening few minutes of Clive N Wrench was miserable for me. I was left confused and bewildered on what I was supposed to do and what I was supposed to collect in order to progress through the level. The tutorial wasn't very good and it doesn't do the greatest of jobs explaining how your moveset works. I was almost considering dropping the game during the first few minutes. Add the fact that you need to see multiple loading screen and skip a number of logos and cutscenes just to start up the game and to say I wasn't enjoying the game at all would be an understatement.

Then the more I played the game, the more I slowly started to like it. First, I discovered that gems unlocked levels and ancient coins unlocked bosses for you to fight in order to get to the next level, you need to 88 anicent coins for you to get to the final boss. I also slowly learned the controls are no different than something like Jak and Daxter. You get a double jump, a high jump, a ground pound, a spin attack, and rolling jump. There are also differences like being able to stay in the air with much longer with your spin move and a sprint button. The former is robust to use and gives you a surprising amount of freedom during exploration.

The level design in outside of the first level and the Egypt levels are solid and enjoyable to explore. The movement system is flexible enough to make the act of exploration enjoyable. You will be gliding around, double jumping, long jumping and ledge grabbing throughout the game to find ancient coins, if the movement system was awkward and cumbersome, the act of exploring and jumping around would be a chore but luckily this game is more like Jak and Daxter and less like Banjo Kazzooie. Unfortunately, the game doesn't have the seemless world design and lack of loading screen that the first Jak game has but the loading screens outside of loading individual from levels from the hub world is fine so it doesn't get in the way too much.

Now on to the bad, the platforming can be really stitled when during levels with extra chellenge, the Egypt and pirate boss guanlet levels being the worst since it requires you to be precise and has timed platforming and the camera isn't great makes it awkward to traverse. They have pseudo 2D levels something like Crash Bandicot, but the controls are meant for free form movement rather than precision so when the game requires accurate platforming, it's hard to make jumps that won't accidentally lead to your death since I am worried about accidentally running outside of the psuedo 2D plane. Partner that with the lack of invinciblity frames when you get hit and it can lead to frustration pretty quickly since you can get hit, and then get hit again when trying to run away and avoid cannon ball and spikes. I was only able to beat the platforming gaunlet for the pirate "boss" due to me relying on speedrunning tactics to get past the game's more annoying platforming challenges due to the above mentioned issues. If I didn't do these tactics, I probably wouldn't be able to beat the game. That and the game having a very forgiving checkpoint system. 

Combat also ranges from tolerable to terrible. With fights that involve normal enemies, it's fine. Since it requires a quick tap of the melee attack button to kill most if not all enemies all though enemies have a knack for running into you even when mashing the melee attack button constantly so while combat with normal enemies is tolerable it's not always reliable due to the game's lack of polish and before mentioned lack of invinciblity frames.

Now the final issue with the game: the bosses. Most of them range from okay to really bad. Some of the bosses feel like the devs didn't have enough time to program in any bosses so instead they are tough platforming challenging where Clive and Wrench beat the boss in a cutscene, this happens a lot and despite the game having multiple bosses, only some of them will be direct boss fights where you actually fight them where you fight them head on. The one on one fights also aren't great since they will be accompanied by other enemies and the before mentioned enemies can make the bosses very grating to fight. They are beatable but it's guarenteed you will get annoyed by them while fighting them on repeated attempts.

Overall, despite the issues I have with Clive N Wrench, it's an enjoyable 3D collectathon platformer, I was able to tolerate it's lack of polish, I don't think everyone will and I understand that but the game gave me a solid movement system and level design that I was able to look past it's issues. If you never liked collectathon platformers to begin with, skip this since this game does nothing new and has very iterative design. If you do like this kind of game, it's worth at least one playthrough. 

Warhammer 40K: Boltgun Review

Pretty solid "boomer shooter". Boltgun doesn't reinvent the wheel but it does a good job at being a solid entry into an ever so growing list of throwback 90s fps games. The gun sounds and weapon feedback are all great and does a great job at making the combat feel viseral and satisfying.

The level design is solid and handles the maze like key hunts pretty well. I have seen people complaing about the game lacking a map but I feel if you ever played a 90s fps game before, level design like this is expected and if you are familar with the genre, they are easy to follow. Basically, find colored keys and each door will have a specific color key to find, once you find the first colored key for the level the rest is basically just an a simple process of elimination. For example, find the red key, then the door the red key is behind will have the purple key and then purple key door will have the yellow key and the yellow key door has the level exit. I find this level design to be timeless and fuffilling since it actively makes the player look around and be observant with the enviroment plus I always love how this kind of level design will have the level loop back at the start and it feels so satisfying playing the levels without ever needing a guide since it felt like I solved the exploration puzzle on my own. My only issue with the level design are the levels that don't involve keys and can have weird gimmicks, well actually I mainly just dislike the level with the chaos gate at around the end of chapter 1 since I find the layout really confusing on where the gates will teleport you and which order you have to go into each gate. And also, like other 90s fps, when the levels do weird stuff like in the "No Truth in Flesh" level where activating a switch and I kill a boss to progress the switch I activated the door to was on the right left rather than where I was directly looking at when I activated the switch. The elevator level was also kind of like this but was more tolerable by comparison since the landmarks are more clear. The platforming also does a decent job at making the levels feel bigger and more vertical since you will be moving up and jumping more compared to something like classic Doom. It's very inspired by the newer Doom games with colored ledges indicating the player where to go.

Level design aside, what was some other gripes with the game? The plasma gun is really awkward to use since it can cause splash damage when it hurts you when in close proxmity.

The health system while deriative of the kind of game it is, can annoy me with how health doesn't partially regenerate or let me carry medkits since there will be moments where I want a health pack and I look everywhere in a level and I can't find it, I think everyone has this issue at least once when playing a game with finite health. To this game's credit however and something not games of this type has, you get health refills in between levels which is a big point to the game's favor all though any addition health and armor pick ups in the previous level won't carry over, which is kind of a bummer, but I get why the devs did it since they didn't want the player to be too "overpowered" at the start of a level.

Some enemies can be a bit too damage sponger for my tastes, which isn't too bad, and the game does a good job at making the player prioritize which foe to kill, but I also feel the shotgun takes a few too many blasts to kill enemies and an fps shotgun just needs to have that "oomfph".

The ressurected chaos knights can be annoying since I thought I killed them just for me to get jumped from behind and lose a lot of my health, they also hit way too hard in general and can tear your health bar in half in a few hits if you aren't careful.

I do like how this game does have that enemy from Shadow Warrior 1997 where you need to blow their bodies to bits in order to prevent another enemy from spawning which is an aspect I did like, and it made me gues the heavier weapons to blow up their bodies to bits and pieces.

Melee I also found to be useless since I would often use health whenever I would try to take down an enemy with it and then die. Grenades however are great and I actively used them to takedown hordes of enemies or just really tough enemies in general, out of all the Halo mechanics that made into this game grenades easily fared better.

It's also quite nice that most if not all the enemies in the game use projecticle attacks and I don't recall their being a single hitscan enemy all though some of the level design can box you in and have it be hard to avoid enemies especially when those acid spewing monsters are involved.

Overall, a solid boomer shooter and a good Warhammer game, I don't much about the franchise outside of the games, but this is up there with Space Marine, Necromunda Hired Gun and Blood, Shootas and Teef. Warhammer games tend to be derivative but the ones I have played and liked are solid imitations.

Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon Review

This is one of the weirdest games I played in a while. The game is solid and enjoyable, at the same time, I question this game's existence and if it was better off not being a Bayonetta game at all and just being a different IP entirely.

First I'll describe the story, Bayonetta never had a good story and I was never a big fan of Bayonetta's character, this game however does kind of have a decent enough story at least when you view it on it's own. The story between Bayonetta and her "pet" demon Chesire is told well enough and their friendship felt solid and beliveable. They don't like each other that much at first but they slowly start to warm up to each other and become friends, it's stuff you have seen before and it won't really light your world on fire, but the execution of this story is good to the point where I don't cringe at it every 10 seconds like a lot of the games in the series. 

The titular character isn't as cocky and flamboyant like she usually is and she is actually quite scared and timid for much of the game. This could piss off a certain group of people like those who dislike Metroid Other M and Tomb Raider Survivor Trilogy but if you give the writing a chance you might enjoy it, as long as you view it as own thing. The story isn't all great, the narration can be a bit excessive and sometimes the narrator can just say things that the viewer himself can infer like when she explains how the characters feeling after certain big and emotional moments and there is a heel turn later in the game involving a certain character that comes out of nowhere and is poorly foreshadowed. Morganna's turn heel turn is so poorly handled since she barely had any screen time and Cereza was barely with her so when she "turns" to the dark side, it didn't feel very beliveable to me, it comes too out of left field to even work. It's a decent story carried primarily carried by Bayonnetta and Chesire. 

Now this is where the whole thing is questionable, why is it a prequel to Bayonetta and have any connection to it at all? This may sound like a contradiction but I am not a big fan of prequels, most of them I am not big on, and when this one explains how Bayonetta got her Witch Time, I am like, "does this need to be explained at all?" With Bayo 3's retcons, which Cereza is this game a prequel to? The series doesn't even have it's "Earth 616" or mainstream continuity at all, so I am even more confused. The whole thing also feels more confused in that even though it is a prequel, what is even the point? There is no Jeanne or Rodin and they show up in all the mainline games. Jeanne shows up at the start but never pops up again and then the creature of Chesire never really shows up in the mainline games from what I remember so it has that annoying prequel quirk I dislike so much, which is characters that show up in the prequel only and then never gets mentioned in the mainline continuity. Story, I'd still say is decent, but and me being not so big on prequels is just has me questioning it.

The gameplay is solid. The best way of describing this game is that if a Lego game, Brothers a Tale of Two Sons, the Last Guardian and Zelda all had a baby you get this. If you are one of those people that were getting sick of the way Platinum of making games and their gameplay style then this game might be the game for you. It's one of the more unique games you can find on the Switch and which Nintendo is also charging full price for that doesn't go on sale that you can't find elsewhere. It feels like AAA indie game with much of it's design. 

The game has Brothers' controls scheme but it has more challenging and involving gameplay then the latter since you have to work together even more so to get past the game's obsticles, you have to avoid more complex obsticles like avoiding laser beams, moving Cereza and Chesire at the same time while avoiding traps and solving puzzles to get them both across and so on. You also have to move them Chesire and Cereza with at least some form of precision to get past the game's challenges at all so in a sense, you could play Brothers a Tale of Two Sons as a way of getting "prepared" for this game, if not you can use the game help options, but I'd say Brothers is worth checking out since it's a short game and it can help you familarize yourself with the controls of the Lost Demon, I wouldn't know if I'd be good at the game if I didn't play Brothers. 

You got the Lego games' system of solving puzzles where all your characters have to across in order to progress through the level but this game has more involving and enjoyable combat, while combat in the Lost Demon isn't as involving as mainline games, it's solid, you get different elemental powers and each one has it's own uses. You need to use different powers on enemies to break their shields and do damage to them as well as solve a number of puzzles to continue progress. You also need to make sure Cereza doesn't take damage and you can use her powers to trap enemies while Chesire attacks in order to make past many of the combat encounters, make sure to use the elemental powers and break shields since you need to do that defeat enemies. You will also need them for enviroment traversal as well, plant for grapple points, stone to block and break things, water to have Cheshire swim and move lillpads and fire to break ice. You will be switching through these abilities a lot which helps makes gameplay more involving since you don't gain a new ablitity and the rest become useless. 

You got the Last Guardian where you have to work together with a creature but you can control Chesire rather than relying on an AI, which is great since I recall not liking Trico's AI. 

Despite the game having a number of inspirations, it clearly does a number of things better than those games to make it feel fresh on it's own.

So what didn't I like about the gameplay? The game is a bit too long, and by the time I was getting to Chapter 11, I was starting to get tired of the puzzles and combat since it was starting to feel more and more one note without enough new to break up the pace. It was just more combat where you fight longer enemy waves and more puzzles which both while varied just feels too simplistic for how long the game is. By the time I was fighting Lukaon, I just wanted the game to wrap up and the game's combat is too one note and dull by that point that I just wanted the game to end. Lukaon felt like the culmination of everything and when the kept going, I was starting to get really bored. The skill tree also feels tacked on and pointless since I was getting through much of the game without using most of the skills and some ablities like Chesire's finishing move should've been in his moveset at the start of the game. I also dislike the lack of jumping but considering how the game controlled I can see why Platinum made at that way since trying to keep track of Chesire and Cereza would be too much if both can jump which can lead to a lot of the player accidentally falling. The game also having blue wolf tracks for guiding could arguably be a cop out for people who don't like being told where to go but at the same time, the game can have too many off the beaten path side activities so I want to know where to go next, so it didn't bug me too much. 

Overall, Bayonetta Origins is a solid game but just don't think of the mainline games or it being a prequel all too much. Think of it as Platinum games making an experimental indie game with a AAA budget and polish. 

6 Secs 

Dragon Ball Z: Infinite World Review

Hearing about this game for so many years after playing Budokai 3 avidly for so long and also hearing how the game is a "hidden gem" and how some prefer it over Budokai 3 really got me curious in checking the game out. There are also people who think B3 is better. While I can't say the game is just awful, I can't help but admit that the game that game feels like a missed opportunity.

On paper, IW should be the best game in the Budokai series, it feels like a Budokai "greatest hits" of sorts. It has the cutscenes of Budokai 1, the board game and "world map" with the Goku model of it from Budokai 2, the dashing and more refined controls of Shin Budokai, of course it has the visuals, stages, and general content from Budokai 3. This should "feel" like the Ultimate Budokai game but I feel the game makes too many questionable design decisions that actively hinder moment to moment gameplay for me. To put it simpily, this game takes two steps forward while also taking two steps back.

Some good things is that the mini games in the story mode are decent and do a decent job at breaking up the pace of constant fights, and you don't have to do most of them to roll credits which is weird but I welcome it, I just wish these mini games were on the beaten path instead of me looking around on the world map and having them be optional. I am mixed on this. The 3D platformer style going through checkpoints is a DBZ 3D platformer I didn't even know I wanted, I have seen people criticize this but I argue the time is generous enough and the mini game goes by quick enough that it never gets overly grating. Dragon Rush is gone which was the weakest aspect of Budokai 3's fighting, since much of Budokai 3's fighting can boil down into rock, paper scissors matches. I'd say the story mode overall is more satisfying than Budokai 3's since this game's story mode is more of a structured campaign and less of a visual novel with fights.

With all that said, what ruined the game for me?

The "tutorial" or lack there of one really soured the experience for me. Budokai 3 I recall having an actual mode where it teaches newer players the mechanics and rules of the game, and IW does not have this. It does have one on the story mode in the world map but I find it too vague and confusing to feel like I am learning anything since tutorial almost implies you need to learn the mechanics beforehand. I also am not a big fan of "aura burning" and prefered hyper mode. I don't like Dragon Rush, but Hyper Mode in Budokai 3 felt balanced since your health drained really fast and you could risk getting fatigued, now that the fatigue meter and the ki meter in IW are seperate it means I have to keep track of two meters, and it just doesn't feel as intuitive as looking at one meter and this could be me playing Budokai 3 so much but having high ki and getting fatigued just feels weird to me since I am not even sure how you can avoid being fatigued in this game, it just seemed like something that happened randomly and at inconvienent times. "Aura burning" felt useless to me, it might be less so to people who know this game really well, but all it did was drain ki really fast and since the opponent AI is really aggressive, I would lose a ton of health while in this state instead of doing a lot of damage.

I also don't like how in story mode, you won't always have two ki attacks or ultimate moves unless you buy it at the shop, which makes it hard to major damge to enemies. And as a guy who played Budokai a lot, it's just weird that I can't chain combos into energy attacks. It feels strange how for a game that had Budokai 3's visuals, feels and combat system that I can't do this anymore. The lack of beam struggles only adds insult to injury, it may sound trivial, however it takes away how dynamic combat can be since you can turn the tide of battles if you win or lose one. It feels like a step back.

Two big issues that also ruin the game for that work in tandem is how ultimate moves are handled and the aggressive opponent AI. To do ultimate attacks in B3, you need to be hyper mode and risk getting a quick fatigue if you miss the attack, in IW especially when you fight characters with more than 4 regenerating ki bars, they can spam ultimate attacks without the risk of getting fatigued, and when you partner that with how hard the AI is even on easy and the game is just too dull to play since I find it too challenging and the tutorial doing a poor job at preparing me, and I was more frustrated with the game than having any fun.

As somewhat who is really familar with the Budokai games even decades after I actively played them, this whole game feels confused, the differences actively hinder my enjoyment of the game and the similaries made me wish I was playing Budokai 3.

Overall, I should like this game more but the changes and the way teaches it's mechanics and the rules to new players just makes it hard to approach and get consistent enjoyment out of.

Short Game Reviews and Thoughts: June 2023

Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel:

Decent enough cover based shooter, I am not a big fan of the genre but the genre can be fun to play on easy and I like how straight foward the level design these games can have plus it being a coop game where I am playing solo just gives me all the more reason to play on easy.

The good aspects about the game is the weapon customization and feedback are solid and even though the combat is the same one note hitscan combat where you fight human enemies, the weapon customization does help add a bit more spice where you can personalize your loadout and add different attachments to the weapons you get to use on missions, sure they are the same assault rifles, smgs, shotguns and pistols you have seen in so many games but I like how I can have stuff like 3 shot burst assault rifle with an ACOG and laser sight, it makes the gun feels like it is your own "personalized" weapon and you can either stick with the same guns or you could unlock new ones and get upgrades for them and help you get a slight edge in combat. The weapons also sound decent enough and the feedback you get for enemies get the job done. You also get new abilites like bullet time and your guns being powerful for a short period which also does a good job at spicing up the moment to moment combat since you are given more options than just hiding behind cover and waiting for health to regen. Grenades also being used by a quick tap of the grenade button also does a good job at thining out 2-3 enemies that are close together and considering the high enemy count in the game I am glad this was in it. The game also has it's coop gameplay moments which are bearable enough in solo mode like flanking machine gunners or rocket launcher users while providing cover fire from a chopper or sinping enemies from afar.

I like the occasional gimmicks thrown in the break up the cover shot like using a pistol that has a light source to illumate through a dark tunnel and following electrical wires to know where to go, using melee only to avoid blowing up barrels, and the final boss is pretty wacky for the kind of game this is.

The enemy roster is okay, nothing you haven't seen before stuff you seen in realistic hitscan cover shooters before like heavy enemies, normal infantry and melee guys which the game does a decent job at mixing them up to keep you on your toes during the cover shootouts.

Overall, outside of some annoying difficulty spikes that scripted chase with the truck being a lowlight where you take damage from enemy vechicles while trying to take down a moving armoured vehicle and it can lead to a lot of trial and error deaths since you need to optimize the best way to minimize damage, the game is perfectly fine and an enjoyable enough shooter, just don't play for the story.

The only big negative I can say is that the story is terrible, bad enough to make have a blurb on it. It's like watching a bad TV show with it being a terrible passing the torch story featuring two replacement leads who are okay when talking to each other but barely go through any meaningful arc that stands out. But that's the thing, I get that this is a game and all but so much of the "character development" is nonexistent or rushed. Fiona become a badass soldier off screen, Elliot Salem during "heel" or Tyson Rios wanting to keep Salem alive, I get there were games before this one, but you need to establish context within this entry to make me care, I haven't played the 40th Day in a while. I wouldn't be so hard on the story but it takes itself really seriously, I get the the subject matter here but there is barely enough nuance and context to make me care about what is happening.

Overall, Devil's Cartel is a solid time if you like cover shooters with slightly more involving gameplay, just do not play it for the story, I don't like it, but it's not enough to ruin the game for me since I was never an Army of Two super fan.

Spawn Armageddon:

I really wanted to like this game, I really did, playing this game on Normal difficulty might've been a mistake but at the same time as a guy who mainly enjoys Spawn through the animated series and as a fan of Kevin Micheal Richardson, this game just isn't really that great or even good.

I'll start with some aspects I liked, the music is solid and fits the action of the game pretty well, and the "Spawn's Turf" theme is pretty damn great. Kevin Micheal Richardson is solid as Spawn even though the game has so little cutscenes or story, the opening cutscene also does an okay enough job at getting you familar with the Spawn mythos so it has that going for it so if you aren't familar with the character, you might have SOME clue about him. The platforming is also kind of decent and nothing too awful while not being great, it's more tolerable than much of the platforming in something like the Devil May Cry games even the contextual grappling hook works well most if not all the time. And finally, the cheats are pretty well handled and I was only able to "beat" the game at all was due to the infinite health and level skip cheats, so thanks to the devs for putting them in. This is where my praise ends.

The game makes a decent enough first impression, you got an axe for melee, nectoplasm special attacks and a wide array of firearms to choose from and the game at first seems balanced in that your guns have limited ammo and enemies will drop them constantly after killing them, however after playing more of the game, the flaws and the issues I have become more and more apparent.

The game gives you a lock on system which is good since you want to take out enemies one at a time and prioritize the ones you want to defeat, but you can't cycle through targets and even worse you can't perform your 3 hit combo while locked on, if you do that Spawn, will do his lunge attack which isn't really ideal since this attack can be interrupted and doesn't do nearly as much damage as mashing the melee attack button and doing the 3 hit combo. With that said, your melee attacks do very little damage to tougher enemies, you be mashing attack button on enemies a lot with Spawn's axe and their health bars will go down inch by inch. You could do Spawn's double jump axe attack, very remisicent of Ryu Hyabusa's air attack with the Lunar staff, but the area of effect is small and even when locked on, there is a good chance you won't even hit the enemy and while it does slightly more damage than the 3 hit combo, enemies can immediately hit you after the attack is done making it an extremely unreliable move. Spawn doesn't even get any new melee weapons, the axe is terrible weapon in terms of feel and use and you don't even get any new combos. As much as I think something like the Van Helsing tie in game isn't the greatest that game at least gave you new melee weapons, which as a result it makes the melee combat in Spawn Aramageddon even more monotonous.

You think firearms and nectoplasm is supposed to even things out for the lack of axe damage and the lack of combos with the axe but that is also not the case, firearms don't do a whole lot of damage maybe slightly more than the axe when using concentrated fire, but ammo for them drains out very quickly and later in the game, enemies will rarely if ever drop ammo for your guns. This can also apply to health and nectoplasm. You can upgrade your guns but you will also need to upgrade your health too, and you are better off upgrading your health bar since you will get hit a lot due to the unreliable dodge move and you need to start tanking hits. Your fallback chains weapon isn't that great and it feels way too underpowered since enemy health will be draining at a slow rate if you constantly mash square. 

Enemies take lots of damage to be defeated, your melee attacks do little damage with very little variation to the attacks. Then add to the fact that enemy waves are very long and levels can feel like they go on longer than what a Youtube walkthrough can tell you and to add even more insult to injury the game stops throwing in new enemies types and you fight the same old damage sponge enemies that aren't even fun to fight since they can break out of your combo easily. As much as I don't like the DMC system of dodging attacks even in that series, when you do evade, it's usually a roll, in Spawn Aramgeddon when you evade, it's not a roll it's a jump and this may sound trivial but this is a major nuisance since you want to stay as close to enemies as much as possible but there is a good chance that you will dodge one enemy attack and then you land from the jump and then another enemy will run into you and hit you right after. It really feels like you need to be tank in this game since trying to evade attacks is unreliable, your attacks do very little damage, and nectoplasm and guns are limited and get used up fast.

The camera is also really terrible and giving you bad angles constantly on where the action is happening partner this was my issues with the dodging and this is why I can't playing this game when you get to the half way point. I will try to dodge and the camera will track me, and I will lose alignment of where I am and then either get his or have no idea where I am on the arena. 

The level design isn't that great either since one minute backtracking is required and then another minute you need to wipe out waves of enemies to progress and the backtracking levels are really bad in that there are rarely if ever any landmarks to help you get your bearings and a lot of the levels just look the same. By the time I got to hell, I gave up completely and used chaeats because the issues I have with the level design has come to fruition and I just wasn't enjoying the game anymore, I got to the end and I glad I did use those codes because man, the ending to this game is completely anticlimatic and garbage and it would've made me even more angry at myself for beating this game the "proper" way since I wasn't even given anything close to a riveting conclusion. 

As a guy, who doesn't have a strong negative or positive attachment towards the character of Spawn, I went into this game for a decent brawler experience and I did not get that at all. There's better superhero brawlers to play like X-Men Origins Wolverine, Spider-Man 2, Hulk 2003 game and Ultimate Destruction, Marvel Ultimate Alliance games, and even stuff like the before mentioned Van Helsing movie game and the Climax Ghost Rider game. 

Omega Boost:

This was a decently entertaining and at times challenging on rails shooter. I am not super big on the genre but this was a decent time, I played with cheats codes which is probably why I was able to beat this, I am not patient enough to master the levels and if I didn't play with them, I probably would've been frustrated. The penultimate boss in particular is some next level garbage in terms of design, you are on a timer and the boss regens his health and that's not all if you are left with 5 seconds and you haven't killed the 2nd phase of the boss well you got to do it all over and that's not even including the limited continue system in the game. Stuff like this is why I enjoyed playing this game with Duckstation emulator's infinite health cheat. I would probably a lot more negative on the game if I didn't use it. At the same time, I also played games like Future Cop LAPD with similar cheats and I still didn't like that game at all.

The game does have some positives for it. The feedback from firing your weapons is solid and there lots of explosions and carnage on screen, the "Omega boost" ability does a good job at thining out the health of bosses that can be hard even with the cheat on. Mainly the boss I mentioned earlier. The game also oozes 90s charm like the live action FMV sequnces and awkward voice acting along with a catchy soundtrack. The opening FMV song is fantastic. It also a wacky and strange story which was hard piece out but was interesting to see play out.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game, it's about as solid as a game I heard was a "hidden gem" from years ago can get. I never knew the developers of Gran Turismo could make a solid and entertaining action game.

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores:

Decent DLC overall, it's more Horizon Forbidden West, and I do think the game is decent but stuff that annoyed me about the base game and the Horizon franchise in general stilll annoys me like the open world, climbing and RPG systems. I wasn't expecting it to reinvent the wheel and I got just that. People who liked the base game probably already bought and played this DLC.

I did like the spectacle of the HORUS boss even though the awkward and finicky climbing mechanics ruined it somwhat when it briefly went all Shadow of the Collossus, however it didn't last overly long which is good.

With all that said, I am not sure if this is exclusive to the DLC or just the Horizon franchise in general but I felt attacks were kind of hard to reliably avoid with machine enemies' attacks, I was getting pummled left and right and it never felt like my timing that I did a good job at moving out of the way. A machine would attack, I dodge, get hit, machine would attack, dodge, get hit. This could be due to dodging not having inviniciblity frames and partner that with so many of the machines having area of effect stomp moves, leap attacks and fast moving projecticles and the game can get frustrating. This could also be tied to the fact that I spent so much time zooming in and in slo mo that I screw up the timing to effectively dodge, I lowered the difficulty to story mode, and it's weird is this an issue exclusive to this DLC because I was at least able to beat Forbidden West on easy. This could all be a skill issue and me not playing the base game for so long, it's hard to tell.

Story is decent enough and does an okay job at segwaying into the 3rd Horizon game, the villain Londra was okay and it does do a good job at making me dislike him to see his defeated. I am going to miss Lance Reddick as Sylens since he was my favorite character in Horizon.

Overall, worth checking out, but only if you liked the base game at all.

Grand Theft Auto 3:

Grand Theft Auto, it's a series I could never get into even as a kid and playing this game for the first time, I can see why.

I will admit, first impressions were positive, I loved the jazzy tune that starts up when you load up the game, and the early missions do a decent job at feeling open while also feeling fair in terms of difficulty especially with it's lack of checkpoints. Any mission involving car chases tend to be thrilling and the most enjoyable since you are given wide open roads and can attack from a lot of angles. Just trying to keep track of enemy vehicles while avoiding traffic is thrilling and a solid challenge since you are managing multiple obsticles at once.

At the same time, the car chases being the best part just makes me wonder? Why is there even on foot gameplay at all? And this is where I get more negative and why I couldn't beat the game, the on foot gameplay feels clunky and awkard and straight up bad. Claude's sprint doesn't even register no matter how many times I pressed the sprint button, on top of that, he is very incompetent and inconsistent at jumping over waist high walls.

This is also me not mentioning that gunplay and aiming controls feel awful. The weapon sounds and damage animations are bad and do a terrible job at encouraging me into being in combat. Pistols let you move while shooting while two handed weapons you can't. I am wondering what is the reason for this? Why can't Claude, a guy who knows how to wield firearms know how to move and shoot two handed weapons?

Every time I play this game, I wish I am playing Driver San Franciso instead since that is just GTA minus all the tedious aspects of it's gameplay. Driver basically is just the driving, and it all the other tedious gameplay elements removed. I used to give Jak 2 and 3 a lot of crap for borrowing so much from a series I never liked, and I got to admit that while I am not a fan of those games, Jak's movement and the overall aiming and feedback feels a lot better than it does here. Jak can at the very least climb over chest high walls with ease.

Then there are just other aspects of the game I don't like while I didn't mind the lack of actual checkpoints early on, I was getting more and more annoyed with the lack of them whenever the challenge was ramping up since the game's challenge never feels geniune but artifical and the "freedom" the game kind of had at the start starts to go away. For example, the 8 Ball boat sniping mission has me shoot goons while 8 Ball is running and planting the bomb but if I shoot the guards before 8 Ball runs, I will get a game over even though it was never a stealth mission to begin with. Or how there is a boat chase where I could snipe a dude in the boat before the chase starts but every time I shoot him, the headshots won't register. Later on there is a mission where I have to shoot someone in an ambulence and I fire multiple rockets and the thing and his body is just stuck there, he is crippled, yet he can take multiple rockets and car explosions. Stuff like this slowly took me out of the game.

I would forgive all this if the story was good and it isn't. The game is basically an errand boy simulator with loose and I mean very loose plot "connecting" everything. For example, a mob boss betrays you later in the game, and you just kill him a few missions later with barely any build up or anticipation and his betrayal just comes out of nowhere to be anything close to impactful, and that's it, errand after errand after errand even Jak 2 and 3 had more plot than this. And what's worse is that this game came out the same year as MGS2, Silent Hill 2, Soul Reaver 2, Max Payne and Twisted Metal Black, which makes this game's boring story stand out even more for how dull it is. TM Black did more with cutscenes that last less an hour and loading screen monologues than this game does with multiple cutscenes.

Overall, I wanted to finally be positive on GTA and say I like the series but I can't. Playing this game just makes me want to play more focused and refine games instead.

Pursuit Force:

This game started out so well, or at least began decently but the more I played the more cracks started to show and it started to get more and more tedious when the game ramped up the challenge.

What I liked about the game was that it's basically a crime game without a sandbox setting which I liked, I much prefer linear and level based games over open world games where the "worlds" are basically level select menus. Low and behold, this game just has all of it's missions be in a level select menu. Shooting feels solid and driving feels okay. I like how the game had an emphasis on driving over on foot combat since many crime sandbox games outside of Saints Row tend to have weak on foot gun combat, and while there are a couple on foot sections, they are few and far between and are over fast. The missions at first had a decent amount of variety to them and had a pretty good sense of sepecticle to them watching the main character jump from vehicle to vehicle like if it's an over the top Hollywood action movie can feel pretty novel and entertaining, plus the slo mo dive on to vehicles and shoot them when your justice meter is maxed out. Everything seems all fine and good. I also like the decision making involved in the "Justice Meter". If you enemy ram into cars and avoid civilians you can fill up the justice meter and in turn you can either get a health refill, do slo mo when stealing other cars to get easier kills and do more damage. It's a constant choice between, "should I steal a car or get a health refill with my Justice Meter maxed out?" It can make for intense moment to moment decisions during gameplay since it can be very challenging even on the PS5 with save states and rewind.

Then I play the game and it's basically just so much of the same objectives being repeated over and over and what was once novel and fun to watch starts to diminish in returns especially when the difficulty starts ramping up and so much of it is just shoving in lots of enemies and having so many enemies shoot and ram you that your car will explode or you will die by bullets. The game is basically the same objectives over and over again with just even more enemies that can clear your health bar in seconds. The part where you have to avoid enemies shooting at you while mounted on to their cars feels like you need luck to get past, you could get killed in seconds even though I often waiting and hid before the enemies finished reloading their guns. The auto aim is also very unreliable, I am not sure if I am hitting the right target when the yellow cursor is locked on and I can't cycle through targets. You can drive in front and too fast and the auto aim will stop tracking the target and this can be very annoying during boss fights. There is a camera for looking back but it's useless in a game where I need to look through oncoming traffic.

The bosses are obtuse, poorly designed and unfair. Not even rewinding and save states could improve them and make them bearable. My issue with them is that you have to beat them while on a timer, the problem is that you will lose lots of time getting attacked by enemies and then the boss' health bar will appear again and then you can damage them. Killing enemies takes a lot of time since they can tank a lot of bullets, jumping on to their car and stealing them wastes time since the enemy can make it to ever so closer to the "finish line" while high on health as you take a while to catch up back to where they are on the map. You might as well not even bother stealing the cars of innocent people since they take even longer than stealing enemy cars. That's also not including the amount of cars you will need to switch to which could take away more time, or if you accidentally crash into innocent people losing Justice points making the boss' health bar even harder to go down if you don't have it maxed out. I am surprised some people were able to beat on the base PSP hardware, everything about these bosses are poorly design and feel like you need to be lucky in order to beat them.

Overall, this game was a decent and very challenging time and it's a enjoyable time for a game I never heard of which was on the PS Premium. Be warned you will get frustrated and rage quit along the way especially on the bosses.

Silent Bomber:

This very much feels like it has both the first game in a series and developer new to making video game issues.

The game at first seems solid. It controls well enough, you get on the fly weapon or "bomb" switching, the explosions and effects look great, and the overall feedback you get from fighting and defeating enemies are great, there is a good game here but it's held back by a number of issues that hold it back from being consistently enjoyable.

The first issue is the lack of attack telegraphing by enemies. Enemies will have attacks like regen shields, charges and other moves that aren't very well telegraphed and I get a lot because I can't figure out when it the right time to avoid enemy attacks, their attacks feel random and hard to predict. I will bomb enemies and try to get up close and then they will hit attack me because there was no sound or bark signalling me to get the hell out of the way.

The second and third issue I have and they work in tandem with each other to sour my enjoyment of the game is that dodging is unreliable and enemies don't give you enough health pickups. I find dodging to not be very intuitive, since I can't dodge to the side or around the enemy so when I can dodge I have to move randomly in the air hoping that I don't get hit. It never feels precise when I try to avoid enemy attacks. Some enemies can also be very damage spongey and don't give health pick ups upon death so combine this with the lack of precise dodging and it makes for combat system while decent enough and visually appealing can feel like it could be better. You could argue this makes the game more challenging but I argue the challenge comes from awkward design than feeling like a geniune challenge.

Final issue I have is that the manual aiming for the bombs is not very accurate or not as accurate as I would like, trying to hit enemies above or below you always feels like guess work and hoping the bombs' area of effect will touch the enemies. The best method was to use the bombs on finite resources like the electric bombs and it did a better job at hitting off far away enemies above and below you with it's wider area of effect that covers more ground.

With all these issues, I played the game with cheats on and enjoyed the game a lot more, it was still challenging even with them, the elevator level being super hard considering how damage spongey the enemies were.

With all that said, I do want to mention some of the things I liked, the cheesey voice acting and cutscenes felt charming to me since it felt like I was watching one of those weird and obscure sci fi anime movies. It kind of adds to the game's charm for due to the time it came out in and it's easy to see CC2's flare for specticle and visuals can be found here. I also think the game's short length also helped made me not as annoyed with the game as I could've been.

Overall, I do like this game to some degree and it very much feels like a game that would come out in as a late PS1 game as well being a first game in a series that never got made into a one. I would've loved for this to have been a franchise with all the developement hindsight the devs could've learned to make an even better sequel.

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze:

At first, I didn't really like this game when I played as Donkey Kong I found the platforming to be way too trial and error for my tastes and the vine grabbing being hold the trigger button than press really, really threw me off and I couldn't get used to it for the life of me. I was almost going to drop the game. When I was playing Donkey Kong, I didn't lack the lack of accuracy with my jumps and my HP just felt way too small to get past the stages, and it annoyed me how you need a campanion Kong just to glide in the air or get more air time at all. I have seen some people compare this game to the recent 2D Rayman games and it was driving me crazy how people preffered this game over Rayman Origins and Legends.

Then I played as Funky Kong and everything started to change. I liked playing as Funky Kong simpily put because he controlled a lot more like Rayman and I preffered playing the game a lot more for it. I can take more damage and I get more time and control over my jumps, I was starting to have fun with the game. Don't confuse this for being a brainless easy character to play as, the game is still very challenging and you will die a lot during the more chellenging stages especially during the mine kart and rocket sections. My only gripe with funky mode is that it lets you skip stages which I found to be fairly patronzing, pointless and tempting to just skip levels entirely and get to the bosses but I did do every main stage in the game except for the hidden ones. The lives system is okay, since you can always farm for more for coins in the first level and buy some more so it's a flexible system. You will be burning through them on regular stages and bosses especially so it's best to stock up.

My final issue is that the bosses can be a bit tedious and take too long to take down, this might be a non issue for some but I argue they take way too long to finish off, they are decent fights on their own, but they tend to be damage sponges for my tastes. I'd prefer to hit the bosses once and then have 3 phases rather than hit them multiple times for the next phase to begin since it felt like I got the point when damaged them once.

Now the biggest positive and the biggest reason why I really like this game: the level design. To put it simpily, this might be some of the best level design I have ever played in a 2D or just any platformer in general. Every stage, I mean every stage brings in new gimmicks and challenges and if ideas aren't being introduced, they are being remixed and having been put in 2s or 3s. You will have vines, then vines that are electrical, platforms that fall out when you jump, then platforms that are being cut, platforms that are rotating. Then there are underwater levels where you have to activate switches, then avoiding spikes and then the two are being used in tandem. Then you got rhino, rocket barrels, and mine kart levels. You got to activate switches, throw barrels and cut grass just to progress.

To put it simpily, the game throws in so many new gimmicks as well as having multiple on top of each other and remixed and the game while challenging, feels unfair and never gets boring.

Overall, this game is a must play for those who love platformers or just anyone who likes to see how level design can be done in a game. Just don't be ashamed to play as Funky Kong and don't skip levels in Funky Mode because the game is still challenging but fair if you don't let temptation get the better of you. I am glad this mode was in the game.