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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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