Ape Escape: On the Loose Review

Before there was stuff like Last of Us Part 1 and Shadow of the Collossus 2018, there was Ape Escape On the Loose. I make this comparison because this game falls into the remake "trap" of being too similar to the original to the point where it's existence gets questioned since outside of new players experiencing the game for the first time, people who already played the original game have nothing to be surprised about. 

While On the Loose plays well for an AE game without a 2nd analog stick, it's existence is ultimately underminded by the fact that this is a mostly similar and play it safe remake of the original game on the PS1.

I'll start with what I liked, I thought Ape Escape without a 2nd analog stick was going to be a complete disaster since the original was a flagship title for the Dualshock controller, and how so much of that game is reliant on the 2nd stick mainly when it came to the use of gadgets but to my surprise, On the Loose controls pretty well without a 2nd stick and feels just as intuitive as it did on the PS1.

It may take a little getting used to with tapping the gadget button multiple times in order to activate but on a PS5 controller in which I played this version on it felt good enough. It never got in the way and generally, and rarely if ever was I wishing to have the 2nd analog stick back which is a good sign especially considering the PSP only had one stick. I got to wonder how much of playing the PS5 controller enhanced my experience since from what I remember of the PSP analog numb, I don't recall it ever feeling super amazing with games that have heavy amounts of platforming, but since I am not, I can say at the very least it feels good to play on a controller since some portable games do not feel so good on that.

Using the x button to jump rather than the R1 was a welcome if strange change from the original PS1 game and the PS2 sequels since now arguably it controls more like a traditional platformer, the double jump can be pretty finicky at times since there were times where I would press the x button twice and Spike would not do the double jump and then there are times where he would do it 90% of the time. Still it generally works well and apart of me finds the idea of an AE game using x to jump to be rather charming since to do this day, pressing R1 to jump in the mainline series still needs me to get used to it.

Another aspect I like and this can apply to Ape Escape as a whole is how unique it is for how the structure works as a 3D platformer. The games are technically level based, but has elements of a collectathon platformer where you the aim of the game is to collect as many monkeys as the level can allow you to in order to progress.

It doesn't just end there either, where collectathons have you collect a certain amount "macguffins" to progress through a level, in AE the collectibles are an actual obsticle you need to "collect" in order to progress.

Different monkeys have a different style of aproach to them in order to capture, some can be captured with through stealth, some are more aggressive, others have weapons, you have to solve a puzzle or get to furthur parts of the level to capture, and there is a nice enough variety of monkeys to capture here that it never gets overly dull especially if you are playing for the first time or never played the original game.

It's a very unique 3D platformer to the way it controls, to it's structure, all the way to what the level objectives are and what you need to complete them. The final level in particular can be a pretty intense "test" of all the platforming skills you learned up until that point. You will be using the first person mode, and all your gadgets quite a bit to get past such a lengthy platforming gaunlet. 

Some gripes is that the combat while generally getting the job done has occasionally annoying parts like how some enemies can grab you without much warning when the grab will happen, a tank level later in the game that can be on the grating since you can't move side to side, the aforementioned double jump problem and some of the hitboxes being a tad bit off. The RC car controls and the camera controls can create a bit of disorientation and can be an inconvience when repositioning yourself after the use of the gadget. But these aren't too big, just annoying little quirks.

The new voices are nothing special even if I prefer the more sillier dub of the original game. This is okay since this is not a story driven game.

However what is a big issue is that well...I played this all before. The original game on PS1 is 95% the same game as this and the fact that this on the PS Premium is fascinating since the original game is also on there.

Which makes me question this game's existence. If you played AE1, you played this and if you want to play the original and both are avaliable on the same service which can be confusing.

I mainly got this out of curosity and it was a solid time since I hadn't played the original PS1 game in years but I am not sure if were to play it again if my memory starts to degrade.

River City Girls 2 Review

I played the first game years ago and outside of the amazing soundtrack, the terrible ending, and good the voice acting, I have a hard time recalling the game. It wasn't bad but I don't recall it being great either, it was somewhere in the middle and playing the sequel which is more of the same my thoughts remain the same except now I can recall aspects of what made consider this game middle of the road compared to the last game.

I'll start with the good, the soundtrack is fantastic and even if a number of tracks in the game are reused from the first one, that game has a great and memorable soundtrack so I don't mind too much even if it adds to the whole "copy and paste" feel this sequel has in general. The new tracks are great and the opening FMV song is so catchy that I watched it every time I booted up the game, and I don't do that with a lot of opening FMV sequences in games, the brevity of it is also a big reason as to why. The synth score just gives the game an impeccable atmosphere of going through the city and it's a good thing it does since you will be backtracking and going through these zones very often.

The voice acting is also well down and as well directed as the first game, the writing doesn't always land but the voice actors do a good job at selling me on the material and makes me want to listen to the cutscenes and dialogue interactions the characters has, some of the humor can be tryhard but it wasn't enough to bother me and considering how monotonous and one note the game can get, the well acted and directed cutscenes can feel like a decent change of pace.

The ending is also a much big improvement over the first game and felt much more satisfying compared to the first game where you beat up an entire town worth of people just for a "fake out" ending that made the game felt like a waste of time. Here when you beat up the final boss, it actually feels like a more satisfying ending instead of the, "ha ha, the main characters' boyfriends were never kidnapped at all" and the main characters landing a blow so hard that the final boss crashed through a helicoptor with a 4th wall breaking end credits song was one of the more amusing parts of the game.

The bosses are also pretty decent stuff, they can be pretty challenging if you don't have healing items and outside of Tsuiko, the bosses do a good job at breaking up the repetition group fights, fetch quests and the padding this game has. They do an okay job at balancing between when to hit them and when to go on dodging on blockable patterns mode.

Now the stuff I didn't like which esstentially involves the combat and the game's structure. The moment to moment combat is "fine" even if playing 2D beat em ups remind me why I prefer the 3D kind where with them it's easier to be in control of the action since you don't have to align your punches constantly and it's about hoping you aligned yourself to hit enemies before they align yourself to hit you. I can enjoy this kind of game but the lack of a dedicated dodge command reminds how tedious moment to moment combat in a game like this can be. Blocking I also found to be useless, since I found the timing to be too strict. 

The actual dodge command in the game is too cumbersome to pull off since tapping up on the stick twice isn't as fast as simpily pressing a button dedicated to evading. 

Enemy variety can also be one note since you have seen most of them by the time you reach the halfway point and the final few areas just reskin them.

Now, the biggest issue that prevents me from finding this game to be consistently enjoyable is the padding. This is basically, Padding: the Game. You need to go somewhere? Do a fetch quest and do 3 of something to progress. The game will keep doing this for it's entire run time and it gets irritating fast. You want to get to the boss? Do a fetch quest, and run through multiple zones of the map to get something for a questgiver and then you can progress, it's what you will do for 95% of the game. Some of the fetch quests and padding are borderline contrived. 

To one example, late in the game, you have to follow Sabuko's instructions of going to the docks to ask Hibari to make masks for you to sneak into Primo's restaurant, but when you meet her, she sends in her goons on you for no geniune reason, and since Hibari and Miasko and Kyoko were on the same side and were working with Sabuko, it made no sense for Hibari to send in goons. This is all balantly done so the player can go on yet another fetch quest to pad out the length of the level even more. 

Another example is when you have to go to the school to fight Ken again and there is a "fire wall" where you have to go to the boiler room to raise down. You could've just got to the 2nd fight with Ken after all of those enemies you had just beaten to get to that point but the game needs to drag itself furthur by adding an obsticle that the player never thought would pop up due to how much time was spent getting to the school rooftop. 

This is what I mean by how padded the game can feel. You don't get from point a to b, you get to point a go on a detour and then get to point b.  

Overall, I didn't completely dislike the game but almost everything I liked about the game didn't have much to do with actively playing it. If I didn't buy this game physically at a convention vendor and getting casual enjoyment from the first one, I would've dropped it after the first few hours. If the make a 3rd game, they better change up the forumla. 

Alpha Protocol Review

This game was a surprise, I was expecting the game to be terrible and one of those random convention vendor game buys that I would regret considering I impulse buy a lot at them. The fact that the game also has a cult following and it isn't because of the gameplay and more so because of the writing didn't help. I also don't consider Knights of the Old Republic 2 to be the epic masterpiece that some Obsidian fans do and that is the only game from that I played before this one.

With all said, I liked this game more than I thought I did going in, however, while I do like the concept of the game on paper, the game clearly needed more polish and time in the oven before it got released since you can see this in every part of the game.

I'll start with what I liked with the game. Well that is basically the moment to moment writing and choices the player makes throughout the game.

The story overall is very much your typical fast paced pure thrills quick and at the same time convoluted presented spy story. The dialogue between Micheal Thorton and the people he talks to is entertaining and fun to listen to. Micheal despite being a character where you choose his responses does have a certain witty way of talking that kind of reminded of JC Denton from the first Deus Ex, in fact that is something I like about the game is that while the setting is more grounded and takes place in the real world, it has far more in common with the first Deus Ex than the sequels do. Like how you need you need to spend skill points to be proficient with certain weapons even how the story while leading to the same destination can widely play out different before getting to that destination even the awkward and poorly designed stealth mechanics which ripped off other games at the time is present here. With the first Deus Ex, it was a poor man's Thief while with Alpha Protocol, it's a poor man's Splinter Cell. I'll describe the stealth more later.

I also think the choices the player has to make very interesting. There is one choice in near the end of the Rome mission that actually even got me to kind of think of what I wanted to do next and this is coming from someone who doesn't give a shit about choices in games. A lot of the choices, I tried to spare the NPCs or make sure many of them lived so they could help me later, and with these kinds of games I just go with whatever happens. It's also cool how you don't get a "good or bad" choices in the game and instead you get multiple personality types to choose from, I chose to remain professional at all times like me roleplaying as a spy version of Mr. Pink from Reservoir Dogs. Some elements of the story still feels half baked like the character of Westridge and Parker to name some examples. Westridge shows up at the start and at the end of the game, and Parker hardly has any screen time for the late game twist with him to be impactful.

With all that said, this is where my praise ends. The game is still as awkward to play and unpolished as many of the WRPGs that I have touched.

Combat is terrible and below the standard of even the cover shooters at the time. I am not even a big fan of Uncharted but I can say that even Uncharted's combat felt more satisfying than AP's does. Guns in AP are inaccurate even with the pistols tree maxed out, you can aim a gun at an enemy's head and fire the shot 3 times, and you will still miss.

Cover doesn't even work very well since you need to be crouched to get into cover or press the cover button multiple times and it's a 50-50 chance he will get into cover.

Stealth is also terrible and this is where the game enters into the realm of, "so bad it's good". I tried to play the game stealth, and the guards would either spot me from behind cover, spot me from far away, or would just randomly see me. The game didn't have a stealth indicator which doesn't help. The only way I could effectively stealth is when every enemy's back was convienently turned for me to a takedown on them. However this where the, "so bad it's good part" I previously mentioned comes in. 

On easy mode at least, I got caught and then played as a drunk John Wick and beat up everyone up through fist fighting and fired guns only on occasion, the fact that melee was more effective than shooting and the AI was so dumb made it so easy to punch my way out of most situations except bosses. The game also checkpoints well and has lots of healing stations making this style of gameplay even more reliable.

Bosses are terrible but that is to be expected with a game that takes place in a grounded setting with human enemies. You can eventually brute force them by taking advantage of how dumb their AI is and later in the game, you can use the quick shot ability to kill them even faster. It was annoying at first that I couldn't beat them through martial arts considering some of the bosses in the game should theroretically be weaker than Throrton but I am willing to let this slide. 

Hacking mini games are annoying since the game uses a checkpoint system and you can't reload from the point before you failed the hacking mini game but I eventually got used to them and stealth in the game was already badly designed to begin with so I didn't really care about maintaining stealth. 

Overall, this game surpassed my super low expectations, and I will give the game credit for that, I do think a remake or a sequel with more polish could help the potential this game had to be realized. As it stands outside of being a spy themed RPG, there are better cover shooters at the time and there are better stealth games. Deus Ex Human Revolution would later do "shooting and stealth" being connected to a cover system better than this game does.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War Review

Shadow of War does what almost every sequel does and goes for a "bigger is better" approach. Everything is larger, the stakes, the open world, and the Nemesis System. While I do enjoy the game I do feel like it is bigger but doesn't always make enough mechanical improvments to the formula as I would like and it can feel way too bloated at times. 

I'll start with what I liked everything that is good about Shadow of War like the Nemesis System and the amazing kill animations is still there all though one thing that bugged me about the latter is the ablility to blow up an orc's head after completing a stun combo is gone which is kind of disappointing for me since that animation is one of the most satisfying death animations in gaming and it felt odd that it was removed since I never got tired of it, plus depending on where you went in the upgrade tree, it could be a late game a ability, other than that the animations are as great as ever and still provides great feedback whenever you finish off any orc whether it'd be in combat or stealth. 

Stealth and combat are both basic but work solid enough as "pillars" that they get the job done, both are too basic for my liking but with the improved Nemesis System, weakness exploiting with the orcs is still as satisfying as ever and speaking of that. 

The Nemesis System is still well done and provides just as much entertainment as it did in the original game now much more expanded upon like how orcs are able to betray you, have blood brothers, resist your mind control attempts, have them save you from time to when nearly dead, or defy death and so on. I do love the additions to the Nemesis System and it feels more fleshed out and dynamic than it did in Mordor since you never know when an orc will betray you, a blood blood brother will pop up or they cheat death. It makes the whole system give a layer of unpredictablity not seen in Mordor especially in the 2nd half of the game where outside of the branding ability, you have seen everything the system has to offer. 

Another addition I enjoy to varying degrees is the sieges. I like how it gives the regions something to work towards instead of doing the whole branding thing in Mordor and then the game wraps up. The battles do a good job at capturing the large scale fights you'd find in the Lord of the Rings moves and it's a solid enough way to include those kinds of fights since Talion isn't fighting with the warriors of Gondor. 

I also like the addition of the double jump while the parkour system with the whole "press x to climb everything" is as flawed as ever, I do like that the double jump gives me slightly more control over how Talion moves and it feels slightly less automated. For example, if I jump high off a ledge, I could potentially grab on to a nearby hand hold or those building roof connectors before I land to the ground, which can be handy when in stealth when I want to jump but don't want to land on to the ground and potentially get seen by a nearby orc. Plus I just like having some degree of control in a game as heavily automated as this one. 

Elven speed is also something I like since I do enjoy it when games attempt super speed but at the same time, you could also argue that it makes escaping from orcs even easier. Considering how much bigger the open worlds are to Mordor, I am glad it's here at all. You can also climb a lot faster compared to Mordor and considering how much larger structures are, I am also glad it's there. 

Now, on to my compliants, and while I do enjoy the game and I don't dislike it, I do feel like I have a number of complaints with it that actively hinder my enjoyment of it. 

First, the automated parkour system where x is dodgerolling, sprint, climb and jump is still as problematic as ever before. I still had issues with telling Talion doing exactly what I wanted when situations got tense, when I would get close to a wall and wanted Talion to climb up, he would either dodge roll endlessly or do it twice and then climb up. I wanted to climb up a wall while orcs were attacking me and I would vault over them instead. It was an issue in Mordor and it's still a problem here too and Monolith Productions has done very little to iron it out. If this infuriated you when playing the first game, then War will do little to change your mind. Considering how much longer and bigger War is to Mordor, this issue certainly started to annoy me to insane degrees at times. I never like major game mechanics that feel unreliable and the Middle Earth games tend to test my patience for this stuff to crazy degrees. 

Second, is the game structure since I have mentioned Shadow of War has a bigger is better approach, this also means the number of story missions have doubled too while I didn't outright dislike them in the last game since I argue they do an okay job at breaking up the pace and there weren't an overwhelming amount of them, in War there is even more of them. This leads me to the problem I have, in Act 1, the game is nothing but your typical linear story missions where the Nemesis System doesn't even matter. The game touts a bigger and more expanded Nemesis System and is the thing that defined the series yet, for at least 2-3 hours of the game, it doesn't matter. When you get to Act 2, the Nemesis System finally plays a part but by that point there have been so many story missions that now recruiting orcs can feel like a weird change of pace and can arguably feel like padding. Since now that the story missions are more numerous, this means you can do nothing but story missions for hours and then randomly the game is like, "no find some orcs for your army now". Shadow of War really has a rather disconnected feel in general. You got the dynamic Nemesis System, you got the more scripted story missions, you also have a bigger and more expanded plot which mostly feels episodic at best. As a result, it starts to make me question what if you had a game with just the Nemesis System and no story missions. The game could arguably feel less disconnected and would allow for the systems Monolith has greated to stand out even more. The story missions in War aren't even very good to begin with. So many of the questlines have similar mission types and tropes happening over and over. 

For example, Elterial's missions involve a Nazgul fight, the Gondor missions involve resucing Gondorian soldiers, Bruz's missions involve rescusing kidnapped orc captains, Carnan's missions involve fighting a necromancer orc or giant monsters. The story missions are so one note and involve the same ideas being reused. This might've been a problem with Mordor, but with that game the story missions were few and far between to really matter, where with War there are so much more of them and the lack of inventive ideas in them stick out a lot more. This will now lead to the next issue I have.

With the story missions being as bad as they are, what's worse is that some of the aspects that bothered some people in Mordor bother me now and that is that there are unskippable character monologues in story missions. This never bothered me in Mordor since the monologues were only reserved for the open world and when the Nemesis System was in play, now with story missions being more plentiful, this means you have to hear unskippable monologues in missions where you have traditional fail states. So if you die, you have to hear them all again, which is one major reason why I didn't up the difficulty this time around since I didn't want to die and hear constant unskippable monologues. This also means when I hear the monologues outside of story missions, I want the orcs to shut the hell up which is a shame since they were the thing that made the Nemesis System stand out to begin with. It would've been nice if during some of the monologues, the player is given a prompt to throw a dagger at their face interrupting them which could've helped break up the pace from the endless boasting the enemies do. 

Another big issue with story missions is that the boss fights are terrible. While I get it, free flow combat has never worked well with one on one encounters which is something the Batman Arkham series has struggled with, however Middle Earth Shadow of War has done very little to rectify this and there is more boss fights in SoW than there are in Batman Arkham which makes the situation worse. The boss fights mainly involve taking out the fodder enemies until the boss is alone, working with the finicky dodge command since there is no dedicated button to do it and struggling with the camera where it will be position in a way where Talion is facing them and the boss will be too out of camera to see the prompts to reliably dodge. Plus, the Nazgul and Necromancer fights revolve around the same objectives, the former is just killing orcs or other enemies and then fighting him, or the latter involves undead totems, it gets one note super fast. 

An issue with the Nemesis System I have is the "shaming system" and this is connected to the story missions issue I have. Early in Act 2, you will be too low levelled to recruit orcs into your army, and many them of them you have to make them your level to recruit, however story missions will have your level be considerably higher upon completetion and reward you with a lot of XP, so the fact that story missions are numerous and heavily reward the player only add insult to injury to how weak they are. You need to do them just effciently make the certain aspects of the Nemesis System less tedious.  

Now that I have discussed the structure, I want to talk about another aspect of the game I am not big on and that is the story. I am not a diehard Tolkien fan and I don't care for "lore violations" that these games make since I am familar with the LOTR movies and they are movies I am just now learning to appreciate. So you won't see me complaining about Shelob being an attractive woman or Isildur being a ring wraith. However with that said, I consdier the game's story to be wasted potential more than anything. 

Act 1 has some pretty solid writing and is already a step up from Mordor with Talion and Celebrimbor getting into disagreements and having their own viewpoints on how to handle situations, the former is an idealist while the latter is a realist. The voice acting and direction carried Mordor's story and it's nice that the actors have geniunely decent material to work with...at first. Act 1 does a good job at establishing that the situation is hopeless and it's only a matter of time that Minas Ithil will fall, some of the writing with Idril and Kastamir is okay too. 

Then Act 2 happens and the plot derails hard, while the game is technically about building an army sure, the story quests you partake is basically a bunch of episodic stories that don't contribute much to the overarching plot of building an army. The only questlines that matter are Eltariel and Bruz and the latter is debatable since he is basically just a Shadow Wars tutorial at best. Gondor subplot gets anticlimatically resolved and the true ending is through DLC along with the fate of Eltariel, Carnan subplot doesn't do amount to much outside of some enviromentalism themes. 

With Act 2 being a bunch episodic stories, then Act 3 is where the main plot of stopping Sauron comes back and it comes back to feeling like the anime filler story that all interquels have and it ultimatly has Celebrimbor and Sauron combining with the former never getting mentioned again later and Talion having somewhat of a "read the manga" style ending where you need to watch the LOTR movies to learn how the epilogue plays out the way it did. 

The story on paper could've been better on paper but everything is too lose and lacks focus for it to be impactful. 

Now the final thing I want to talk about and that is the Shadow Wars, when I first played the game, I turned off the game right away since I heard the whole mode was basically pay to win, and years later it got "nerfed" and became beatable without microtransactions. Honestly, at first when I did the Shadow Wars, I wanted to give up and look the true ending up on Youtube, at the same time, I wanted to give it a chance since it got "fixed". 

The biggest issue right away with the Shadow Wars is that it is delibrately designed to have the player lose right away since your orcs are way too low levelled to successfully defend the fortresses, and you won't have enough fund to raise your defense points higher. I managed to get past the early stages of the Shadow Wars by recruiting the high level orcs during the sieges to fight for me but then it eventually reached a point where I would have to "shame" them to have makeshift orcs to fight on my side. 

On Stage 3, it was basically a game of, "lose the fortress, have higher level orcs spawn in the open world, recruit them and then take back the fortress". If the game had to make me take back a fortress, and then do another defense afterwards, I would've quit the Shadow Wars and looked up the ending on Youtube but the fact that you taking back the fortress means you complete the defense for that region played a big part in me even able to beat the Shadow Wars at all. 

Overall, while I like Middle Earth Shadow of War and I like some of the aspects of it's, "bigger is better" approach like the expanded upon Nemesis System, there is too many issues I have with the game to make me prefer it over Shadow of Mordor. The structure of the game, the lack of mechanical improvements, the lack of geniune focus with the story and how the Shadow Wars is designed to have the player fail and spend a lengthy amount of time getting an ending that lasts less than 5 minutes makes it a game while worth checking out just isn't going to win over people who never liked Shadow of Mordor. It's more of that game for better and for worse. 

Shantae: Half Genie Hero Review

I really wanted to like this game, I really did and while the game isn't terrible by any means, I found it to be a mostly tedious experience. I really do love the music and art in the game. The music fits the gameplay and action really well and the ambient music is quite good. The art style looks very bright and colorful.

This is where I my praise ends, everything that involves playing Shantae Half Genie Hero, I found to be a chore.

I never played a Shantae game before and over the years I have heard it was a metroidvania and then I heard later that it isn't. Thing is, Shantae Half Genie Hero isn't so much a metroidvania as it an awkward combination of metroidvania and traditional 2D platformer, best way of describing this game is that it's an amalgamation of Metroid, SOTN styled Castlevania games, 2D Mario and other similar 2D platformers like Donkey Kong Country and Rayman Origins and Legends.

It has Metroid's health system where you need to find extra health containers scattered throughout the world, Castlevania SOTN's item use like potions and other healing items, magic attacks and seeing damage numbers when hitting things while having the backtracking of both and the fast paced precision platforming where you need to avoid falling into death pits and you go through individual stages like the aforementioned 2D platformers I mentioned. This all sounds kind of interesting on paper but in practice, this game makes me wish I was playing all the above mentioned games instead since they all feel like they are combing all the aspects of other 2D games and they have their own identity compared to this game.

One big problem with the game and I know this might sound weird considering the game is infamous for being way too easy but I felt the difficulty of the game is an awkward middle ground of being way too easy and then randomly getting scream inducing hard. I will admit, the early levels of the game can be sort of barely scrapping by challenging untill you unlock Scimatar and then combat becomes trivial.

Then there are levels that have no death pits at all and then there are levels that do and when the latter pops up it can feel super jarring. Say if you were playing a 2D Metroid game and the platforming in that game is forgiving and doesn't feature much in the way of too much precision and there are no death pits, but then you get to the 3rd or 4th level and the platforming requires you to be precise and avoid death pits and becomes a 2D Mario game, the change in the style of platforming can really ruin your mood and expectations especially for first time players like me. One minute you are playing a forgiving platformer and then another minute you actually have to try during the platforming sections. It can feel confused as a result.

If the game didn't let me cheese many of the harder platforming sections with the bat form, I honestly wouldn't have been able to beat the game at all. Would've dropped around Tassel Town honestly.

This leads me to my second issue, and that is the health and continue system, remember when I said the game is an amalgamation? The health system is also that, it's basically 1 part Metroid, 1 part Castlevania SOTN and while it may sound weird but a pseudo lives system found in other platformers. You get health containers like Metroid and you get potion and healing items like Castlevania, but the thing is your potions is not only used for health revival during combat but also to recover your health during platforming when you fall into death pits and spikes. So basically, the healing items is a pseudo lives system and it can be really irriating since I want to use the potions and healing items for combat and bosses but if I die too much to the occasionally challenging platforming I might have to use up all my healing items anyway since I don't want to restart an entire platforming section from the last save point.

If it wasn't for the OP Scimatar ability that made me cheese much of the combat and bosses, I wouldn't be able to beat the game at all. It's just weird how the game has so many weird and questionable design and the game also has cheesing methods for them. I like the game for having them since I can see it through to the end but it also makes moment to moment gameplay a chore.

And speaking of chores, the backtracking where you have to revisit levels was the final nail in the coffin as to why I am so lukewarm on the game. The hint system is super vague, and games with them like some of the Zelda games never feel good to use since they are too vague and I might as well look up a walkthrough to get a better direction on where to go. The return levels is where the metroidvania aspects come in and guess what? It's just too a bunch of boring fetch quests with the animal forms to progress furthur into the story, no interesting or meaningful exploration with an interconnected world like a traditional metroidvania game.

Overall, didn't hate it but also not a fan. Maybe I would enjoy Shantae more as an animated series than a game despite Shantae clearly being a gameplay driven game. 

Quake 2 Review

Quake 2 was a game I recall really liking in 2018 when especially back before this remaster existed and you had to patch the game to get it running properly. Now that Nightdive has remastered both the first game and this one and how much I am not a big fan of the former after replaying it in 2021, I am wondering if this game fared any better and for the most part it does.

All start with the good, the weapons all sound powerful and have great feedback to them. Blasting enemies whether it's be with the super shotgun, chaingun, railgun, technoblaster, rocket launcher or grenade launcher have all feel very gratifying to do unlike the first game where all the weapons outside of the nail gun felt terrible to use. Seeing enemies getting blown up into chunks never gets old and I just love seeing them explode with the various weapons you get throughout the game. A good FPS game needs weapons that feels powerful to fire and great to tear enemies with and this game delivers on just that.

Another positive is the level design, while the level design in the first Quake was one of the better aspects about the game, the level design in Quake 2 is just as if not even better mainly when it comes to progressing through the levels. In Quake 2, you have different objectives you will be doing to get through each individual level. In Quake 1, there was a lot of keycard hunting and switch pulling and while I like that style of design, it can get a bit tedious doing those style of objectives over and over through long periods of play since you know how level progression plays out after a couple levels.

In Quake 2, they added much more variety in the objectives you are doing. It may kind of seem like the objective system found in Rare games and games inspired by them but what makes Quake 2 stand out is that most "missions" you will explore kind of has an interconnected feel to them. For example early in the game, you will find a power switch that you need 4 cubes to activate, go to one of the zones and the with some switch pulling, enemy killing and light platforming, the level in that zone will slowly show you through the 4 cubes you need to get and then you back track to an earlier zone to power up a later part of the level to progress. You will also be doing other objectives, like finding keys, finding objectives to progress later on, blowing up small generators to progress, shutting off laser grids, powering on certain zones or deactiving certain enviroment hazards, all these objectives get reused or mixed up, making it a game while one could argue has some reptetitive scenry never gets dull with how you are supposed to make your way through the level and slowly get to the exit. It isn't switch pulling and key finding and then exit button, here it is bactracking through multiple zones, doing different objectives and then you get to the exit. This level design really does help stand out from the likes of Doom 1993, Doom 2, Goldenye, Medal of Honor and doesn't feel as obtuse as something like Turok 2 does. What I love about the level design in this game that while you can't 100% explore the Strogg homeworld and it's not as seemless as something like Metroid Prime when that would get released later, it is however a game that predates Half Life and Unreal where the levels while segmented gives the player the feeling they are going through a journey.

After all the positives what do I dislike about the game? The enemy AI is really dumb, the move around erratically with no sense of any self preservation, the smartest the every get is occasionally ducking to your projectile weapons, most of the time they move around like headless chickens.

A small issue I have and it tends to bug me since Doom 2 managed to avoid it but the game really should've only had the super shotgun be the default shotgun you get since it kills enemies much faster and enemies are more prone to react when getting shot by it. I say Doom 2 avoids it since the regular shotgun is meant to take down enemies from furthur away and takedown weaker enemies while super shotgun takes down stronger enemies and is meant to be used up close, Quake 2 doesn't do this and it's quite a shame since Quake 2 already has a number of good long range weapons that renders regular shotgun useless like the Railgun for example.

Another issue is and this can really annoy me about the game is that while the guns feel powerful when being fired and when enemies die, the moment to moment combat with the weapons can be really inconsistent, what I mean is that enemies react to getting shot but it tends to happen 50-60% of the time. You can hit an enemy and one minute, they will react and another minute they will shrug it off, this can especially be frustrating when fighting Strogg that sprint at you and they have a leap attack that can surprise you out of nowhere and super shotgun blasts might have a 50-50 chance of slowing them down or pushing them back. In Doom 1993 and Doom 2 for example, pinky and cacodemons reacted and to every time a shotgun blast or rocket launcher was fired at point blank range where Quake 2, you could fire lots of rockets and shotgun shells at enemies and especially when really outnumbered since the enemies inconsistently reach to getting shot means that they can get some really annoying cheap hits in. Enemies with expolsive weapons enemies can tear your health in half very quickly and them inconsistently reacting to getting shot can lead some grating moments. I can ignore this for the most part but it can sour my enjoyment at times. 

Final issue and this has to do with the remaster version but the waypoint system is a rather questionable edition to the game. The game's level design 90% of the time is good enough that you don't need an optional waypoint system to know where to go when lost and even when you do use it, the system is not 100% reliable since their is a part in the Strogg holding cells where you have to blow a hole in one of the jails that leads to the beaten path and the waypoint system did not tell me about it leading me to look up a walkthrough anyway. It's a questionable if harmless edition. 

Overall, unlike the first Quake, this game still holds up and is worth playing now, and Nightdive Studios as usual did an outstanding job remastering it. If only more game companies followed their example. 

Twisted Metal(2012) Review

Twisted Metal 2012 or PS3, this game is a weird one. I played the game 9 years ago back in 2014 on PS Now and I didn't like it very much then I played it again 2022 and still couldn't beat it but after the release of the show and since Sony didn't provide a modern and updated new entry in the series, I decided to play TM 2012 yet again, and shockingly, I was able to beat it and get to the end credits, and even more shockingly, I think this is one of the best games in the series and is one of my favorite PS3 exclusives, I will admit the game has some issues particularly with some of the difficulty spikes in the campaign but overall, this game was mostly a joy for me to play.

I'll start with the good and by addressing the elephant in the room, the single player campaign in particular the way it's structured. In TM 2012, you don't play as a wide array of drivers with their own vehicle and endings like in the previous games instead you play as three drivers and you get to choose a wide variety of vechicles for most of the missions. This may sound like questionable design but what I like this campaign structure is that trying to get to the end and roll credits takes a lot longer than doing one driver route in the previous games. On top of that, I love that this game had mid campaign cutscenes like Black and the there is more of an overarching plot by comparison to the previous games where each driver went the fighting game arcade mode route where every character had their own ending which are all isolated incidents rather than having a larger interconnected story while I get why games like this are designed this way, it's hard to really make myself beat all the characters routes and be exposed to the same enviroments and bosses over and over really starting to slowly make me dislike the repetition of the asset reuse. Plus the live action cutscenes in TM 2012 have a decent production value to them and it beats the original PS1 TM's text crawl endings.

This new structure allows to at least make it feel like I am slowly going through a fully fledged campaign rather than forcing myself to get all the character endings and hope I don't get burned out by the before mentioned heavy asset reuse and going through an hour or two of gameplay to get an ending that lasts less than 5 minutes.

Another thing that helps the campaign feel more fleshed out and this is also a big point of contention for TM 2012 is the attempt at variety from the usual free for all deathmatch fares. In TM 2012, there is different game types outside of that like endurance, fighting "Juggernauts" where they keep spawning more contestants until you take out the former, fighting in a constantly moving arena or you will take damage, racing, and different takes on free for all like traps or changes in the map. For a guy who likes it when games try to use their base mechanics but change up the situation and context in which the mechanics are used, TM 2012's campaign felt like it was made for me.

Most of these are hits and the only ones especially the moving arenas, and the endurance matches since they all involve the core gameplay of attacking other vehicles by getting pick ups and using special but adds a different spin on things than just trying to simiply destroy the other enemy. I am not a big fan of is the races and the later "Juggernaut" battles. Most of the attempts at situational depth does a good job of not having every objective be the same deathmatch which works since the campaign overall is much longer to get to the "end".

I also like about this campaign that is also more "accessible" to newcomers and while it can be offputting that the AI has a knack for coming after the player alot, the game also balances this out by having most levels giving you a garage to switch vehicles, health pickups being showing on rader and during gameplay, driver kills, and letting your switch between most vehicles during gameplay or before you get into a level.

The game has an amazing soundtrack that fits the game extremely well both licensed and original music both do a great job at fitting the game and enhancing the action. The licensed metal music and the original metal and techno tracks all sound great and does a good job at immersing the player in the action rather than just have battles be nothing but awkward SFX the whole time. The annoucer voice sounds great and is up there with the Halo multiplayer one when it comes to listening to them saying their lines. He does have a knack for telling you the obvious like "find health" even though you could already tell by looking at your health bar, but it's not a super big issue. I do like that he tells you that your special is refilled which is a nice way of reminding the player that you can use them instead of cycling through everything and then seeing your special just so happens to refill. 

Final positive is that the gamefeel, polish and feedback is the best the series has ever been, every hit, the vehicle handling during the battles, and the explosions and "driver kills" all feel awesome. The blood splatter when running over a driver does a good job at provining a satisfying stimulation as well as serving a gameplay purpose by rewarding the player with health. 

Now the bad, the difficulty spikes particularly with bosses, races and Juggernaut battles can be pretty bad. The races can be cheesed with Crimson Fury and his forgiving handling in fact, I can even say his handling regarding how well he can drift is more forgiving than many racing games. The final race with the Sweet Bot all though you might need to do a couple of restarts and memorize the track as well as learn the controls of the Sweet Bot in order for you to get past this. The big issue with the final race in Dollface's campaign is the the vehicle physics are just too unforgiving with how you need to do super precise jumps since you make the jump and then move so fast that you will fall off and then be in last place and missing a jump or falling off might as well be a restart from the begginning.  

Juggernaut in Dollface's campaign can be with helicoptor known as "Talon". It can be a good vehicle to cheese the later parts of the game in general since he can fly and every other vehicle are strictly land based but don't let that fool you Ghost Town Gulch is a hard level since the map is very small and the Juggernauts can rip your health in half very quickly and they can be quite the damage sponges, just remember to use the Special and try to avoid getting into it's path way too much and pick up the mega guns and with enough patience, it's beatable. 

The bosses are pretty decent for this kind of game but can be frustrating since they poorly explain themselves. The Brothers Grim is easy enough. Iron Maiden however can be bad regarding this. There is multiple steps in the first few phase to damaging and it never tells you to destroy the red limo and then launch the hostage and then fire a nuke at the Dollface mech, figuring this out can be quite difficult since barely hints at this when fighting her.

The final boss in particular is solid and has enough going on to have it be more than just spam pickups and specials while doing hit and run tactics. The first phase is that but later on you fight in a pinball machine of sorts and you have more than enough opportunities to recover health and you can summon explosive clowns to help you destroy the Sweetooth face mask, and the timing window to launch yourself at him is forgiving enough too. Then you go through a death trap gaunlet that will admittedly take a few tries to get past and the final battle is pretty good and a solid challenge without being super challenging provided if you knew how to use the Talon vehicle before reaching this point. The magnet can also be very finicky but that's my only major gripe outside of that. 

Luckily there are mid boss checkpoints and what could be very rage inducing moments is allievated. Once you figure them out, they are decently entertaining fights and have far more going for them than say a lot of FPS bosses do.

Overall, TM 2012 is a very good game, but there are difficulty spikes along the way, and their might be frustrating moments that might make you want to rage quit but just remember to look up some walkthroughs and tips from time to time like every game with difficulty spikes. It's easily one of my favorite games in the series. 

Twisted Metal(1995) Review

Not a bad game and can be enjoyable but I can't help but find it to be rough around the edges in a lot of aspects. The handling of the vehicles is decent enough and there is a good feedback to the action. My big issue with the game overall is the difficulty in that it's easy to for you to get to low health while trying to widdle down the health of one or two cars and your only means of recovering health is using healing pads which have a limited use even with save states and rewind, the game was starting to become tedious to play with the amount of times I would rewind to lower the amount of damage I was taking and trying my hardest to finally lower the health of the other cars so I can eliminate them.

Fighting one or three cars is fine but anything beyond three is where the tedium sets in since it's basically a battle of hit and run tactics and hoping your pickups and specials land so you can lower the enemy's health fast enough and also hope you take as little damage as possible and minimize the use of the healing pads as much as you can. I really did wish there was more ways to recover health outside of the healing pads in the game since that could've helped make the battles less of monotonous hit and run and spamming pick ups and specials and pleading that you land direct hits while not taking much damage yourself. On top of this while the vehicle handling works and aiming works well for one or three opponents trying to be precise with driving and using your pick ups and specials while hitting enemies and making sure to make quick getaways to avoid damage was very cumbersome. Black is also designed this way when not using cheats but the vehicle handling and the more forgiving aiming made that game feel beatable by comparison.

I eventually gave up and started to use cheats since the cars had so much health, healing yourself is incredibly limited and the game seems to require you to fail multiple times just to finally beat the levels and I just didn't have the patience for that. The endings for the character is a big reason why I never played with more of the characters outside of Sweetooth since all the endings are basically text crawls making it even harder to get invested in me getting more of the endings since all them are designed in the exact same way and I would rather just Youtube search them.

Not a bad game and there is some fun to be had, but I can see why I was never really into this game when I first played, and I only played because I got it for free from downloading the PS3 version of the game years ago. There is a solid foundation here, but later games improved on the formula big time.

Resident Evil Death Island Review

The movie surpassed my super low expectations I had for it, the movie isn't geniunely good at all but it's not the garbage I was expecting it to be either. It's middle of the road and I am surprised it accomplished that much.

It establishes itself that it's a dumb action movie from the first 10 minutes with how Leon finds the truck holding a vital character minutes after being told about his relevance to the plot and getting into a dumb motorcycle chase and highway fist fight later, if you can't accept the first 10 minutes of the movie and then you might as well shut it off. I can go on about the dumb crap in the movie, and some of it that bugged me was how they established a virus that acts like FOXDIE from MGS and how it's basically kryptonite for RE characters, which is a funny way of creating stakes and tension for the movie since it needs to seperate the team and make sure Rebecca and Jill play their roles in the story somehow.

A big issue however is the that villain is basically Obito Uchiha garbage levels of writing where he wants to destroy the world because he was forced to kill his friend. Give me a fucking break, and so much of his character is expressed through endless amounts of excessive monologuing most of it is during the middle point of the movie. His backstory is just too much of a boring sob story to even make me care and his characterization being expressed through monologuing doesn't help.

Some nitpicks as a "fan" of the games is that it's rather silly to see characters struggle against typical zombies when they have beaten them over 9000 times by now and it's also rather amusing to see Lickers get killed by one shot to the head with no use of a shotgun or high powered weapons considering in REmake 2 they take over 3 shotgun rounds to kill and the REmake games were the ones being refrenced in earlier in the movie.

Good things about the movie is that Jill is handled decently and is the best character in the movie. Her character is decently foreshadowed as being the "underdog" lone wolf of the team is decently contextualized within the first 20 minutes. I also like some of the nods to the games like RE5 and 6 which kind of does a good job at creating some degree of a continuity in a franchise as messy as RE's. Rebecca's role I also kind of liked since it does a good at making her establish her role as the medic of the team and the action was decent and wasn't wannabe John Wick like Vendetta was.

The ending climax with the super sayian hulk wannabe boss fight was hilariously over the top. It's basically an over the top climax boss fight you'd find in an RE game particularly the third person over the shoulder games.

Overall, for an RE movie it wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be especially considering how much RE content has been produced as of late. Still, not "good" but at the very least tolerable.

Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara Review

For a game I randomly found out was coming out soon and a game that I got because it was on a discount on PS Plus at that, it turned out to be a solid and enjoyable "blind buy".

The game isn't going to reinvent the wheel and if you played a 3D platformer especially something like Super Mario 3D World or Sackboy a Big Adventure, you will probably be familar with many of the platforming challenges and gimmicks the game throws at you.

To this game's credit unlike the above mentioned games, you don't need to secret hunt and get them while playing the main levels to unlock more of the main story. The game is pretty short if you don't try to 100% it and find and all the content and do all the platforming levels in the sole purpose of just getting to the end of the stage. I feel like the game's relatively cheap price and how short it is makes a game that is worth checking out if you want a quick and relaxing game to play. Map pieces are easy to come across after beating all the levels and the boss on that island, you may need to "backtrack" to unlock more of the "main" island but I only had to do this twice.

The game comes with a "relaxed" mode but if you played a platformer of any kind before, this mode is unnesscary since the game is pretty easy to anyone who has some experience with the genre, well any that requires you to actually position, and successful land jumps as opposed to playing games with automated platforming like Uncharted and Assassin's Creed or many AAA games released in the 7th and 8th gen.

While many of the ideas and gimmicks the game features you have seen before like ground pounding switches, speed challenges while the camera is moving in one direction, chase sequences, slight puzzle solving involving orbs, underwater 2D levels, disappearing platforms, platforms that disapperar and reappear depending on when you jump, spike traps and falling platforms. As well as level themes like ice, fire and water levels. Everything that the game has you've seen before, to the game's credit it executes these ideas with a solid amount of polish and the controls are mostly fine to the point where jumping around and avoiding traps and doing all the above mentioned things feels has a solid enough challenge to the point where it doesn't seem like the game is playing itself and it's too brainlessly easy.

This might turn some people away I do like how checkpoints restore your health upon them being activated which is can be both reliving and confusing at the same time, reliving in that it gives you more of a fighting chance when doing the levels and confusing because since I am accustumed to platformers of any kind giving me the same amount of health when activating a checkpoint, I always assumed I have 1 hp after taking 1 or 2 out the 3 total hp I have rather than having my health restored upon activation. I welcome this but it can be confusing another difficulty "tweak" I like compared to other platformers is when you do a puzzle or get keys in to progress it remembers what you did after you died, this may be considered too easy but considering how impatient I am now and how I especially dislike doing the same puzzles after dying I do like that you can just continue on with the level upon completing it once since now you aren't doing a tedious rethread of old ground by solving a puzzle you already know how to do.

Jumping around, avoiding a death and getting one of the game's level tokens for getting one of the time milestones does a have a decent amount of satisfaction to it. The levels have a lot going on due to above mentioned gameplay gimmicks so even though the levels are short, the levels themselves have a lot happening in them and they all get remixed, or reused enough to the point where the game never gets one note for the 4 hours it lasts.

My only big gripe with the game is that your base "run" speed is way too slow and your sprint speed when you hold sqaure should've been the default movement speed when you move the left anlog stick. Your default movement speed is just way too slow for my tastes and especially when the game requires you to be much faster and precise during it's "harder" platforming challenges. It's easy to get used to but it can get annoying sometimes.

Another issue is that the "final boss" is basically a chase and not an actual fight and the squid you fight before him felt more like a final boss compared to him.

For those who want a hardcore challenge out their platformers will have to look elsewhere since the game is generally easy, if you don't mind easy but satisfying platformers to play then this is worth checking out.

High on Life Review

For a guy who knows nothing about Rick and Morty and it's creator, I found this to be a decent and enjoyable time, was it worth paying full price especially considering I bought it on PS5 and got it because I liked how the game looked? Probably not, is it a good game to get on a sale or "free" on Games Pass, definately. I mainly got the game because somehow a single player AAA FPS title with no open world or online elements actually got made in today's day and age, and that was enough to make me check it out.

On to the game itself, best way of describing it is that what if Oddworld a Stranger's Wrath, Halo, New Doom were blended together? You basically get this game. You have the the elements of your weapons being "alive" and the bounty system of Stranger's Wrath, the regen health, enemy line up and reloading of Halo and the fast movement, hold all your weapons and "glory kills" of New Doom.

Moment to moment combat is solid and enjoyable with decent weapon feedback for firing your gun and decent damage animations when you kill your enemies, even though the combat itself lacks depth due to reasons I will go more into later, the act of causing carnage was handled well enough to make me see the game through to the end but at the same time the game just has one major issue that prevents combat from anything more than "decent fun" and that is the enemy roster. The game basically uses the Halo enemy roster where so many of the enemies use guns and they strafe side to side while occasionally shooting projecticles at you and you also have the series' trademark regen health, where enemies come in different sizes like small, medium and large, the issue is that unlike Halo where you have a two weapon limit and ammo had to either be collected or swapped entirely, in High on Life, all the guns have unlimited ammo where the only drawback is that you have to reload. Partner that with New Doom glory kill system and many of the battles consist of me using Gus upclose and then getting a scripted melee kill.

Also unlike Halo, certain guns don't have a high damage to flesh and shields, and since High on Life doesn't have this and let's you carry all your guns, this means nothing stops you from spamming Gus' shotgun blasts and you can take more damage than you can in Halo so basically combat is just fire, fire, reload, melee kill, get shot, occascionally take damage, and then wait for health to regen. Since so many of the enemies are like this, I had no reason to use no other gun than Gus.

A Doom Eternal style system where enemies are weaker to certain guns could've greatly have enhanced the basic combat the game has since it complements the fact that guns have unlimited ammo and you can hold all of them.

To this game's credit, the game does break up the pace with platforming and some occasional puzzle solving which does help break up combat and prevents the game from being way too monotonous. The game could've used some of the gun abilities a lot more like Sweezy's alt fire and the magnet boots.

Also, the game also felt like it was running out of money when the Blim City invasion happened because then you are going back to old levels that are barely any different from each other.

Another credit to the game that the bosses while easy are more creative and have better geniune challenge than a lot of FPS bosses especially before the days of Doom 2016, you got to at the very least dodge attacks and recognize patterns instead of spamming your strongest weapon and tank hits and then win.

The story and writing is okay, it was the game's selling point but I found the story decent but I did wish the guns and enemies would shut up since the talk way too much. The game does try too hard to be funny at times but the overall story is okay I did like characters like Gene and the main story moments between all the guns and their banter. It's nothing special but it is engaging enough for an FPS story.

Overall, High on Life was a decent time even if I feel like a couple of change and refinements could make a game I highly reccomend as a standalone game rather than a solid Game Pass "freebie".