Watch Dogs: Bad Blood:
Solid DLC just more of the main game while doing nothing new. The story is pretty decent stuff with Raymond and his bonding with Tobias. I didn't have many issues with the base game so this DLC being more of the same didn't bother me. It doesn't do enough different to warrant a full on review and I did like that one mission where you were defending Tobias and Raymond using automated turrets and it has just as much of the hacking, stealth, and shooting the base game had. Stealth can be pretty easy if you use the silenced pistol, auto aim headshot and focus mode combo but considering how AI notices you pretty fast it makes the stealth much more bearable even if the forced cover blows can be annoying at times. If you didn't even like the base game, I am not even sure why you would even play this DLC.
Metal Gear(1987):
This game feels like someone who is learning about game design for the first time and he's developing the game as he is learning. Metal Gear at first seems okay but once I got captured for the first time, all the problems start rushing at once. The fact that all the doors look the same and it's hard to tell which key will open which door, guards get alerted to my position every time I enter a stealth room, the awkward and clunky shooting with weak feedback to enemies getting shot, being unable to tell which sight lines will have me be noticed by the enemy or when they will ignore me, the cameras not even having a clearly visible sight line to avoid, the endless respawning enemies that will just eat away at my health and healing items. The straw that broke the cammel's back for me is when I had to use plastic explosives to blow up certain walls to get to a room and all the walls look the same making it hard to tell where I was supposed to place them in order to progress. Before that, you had to destroy a wall in a jail cell with your fists and it wasn't even shown which texture was weak's to Snake's punches.
Just the way this whole game is designed is just trial and error and not in an interesting way. It's just you looking around and guessing or watching a walkthrough to see how the uploader did it and then you following that. Everything about this game feels like it was designed by people started designing a game for the very first time and didn't have much skill or confidence in doing it.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake:
Metal Gear 2....does not feel very good to play and feels dated right when I start. I knock out a guard seconds after he spots me and the whole hivemind knows, alerts either stop or it goes on forever and I can hide in one location knock out multiple guards where their bodies despawn and they still know where I am. I don't even know how to reset the alert in this game, whole thing feels super arahiac and poorly explained. Haven't played a game that felt this bad to play seconds after playing it in a long while. Solid is a masterpiece compared to the first 2 MGs.
Games like this make me understand why Splinter Cell eventually added a last known position system. I get chased around in this game not even knowing where or where not the enemy will search for me. It was ambitious for it's time but screw MGS3 getting a remake, the first 2 MGs deserve it far more. They feel terrible and awkward to play even now. There's a reason why Solid is where everyone starts regarding the series.
Twisted Metal 2:
TM2 is a massive improvement over the first game one example is that the maps are much better and the pick ups are much more visually distinct and are much more useful during moment to moment gameplay. Getaways are much easier to pull off and cars don't take nearly as much damage as the first game.
The core gameplay is still fun but I can't help but find the difficulty too punishing for it's own good. You get two lives throughout the whole campaign of each character and lose one life and you lose it permanently, and it's easy to get overwhelmed and lose a life very quickly, and health pick ups get harder and harder to find the more you progress. The driving isn't the greatest and the animations can lead to weird collision detection. The game CAN be really fun but the awkward driving, collision detection and physics sucks much of the the fun out of the game. So much of TM2 is spent wrestling with the controls and trying to have it be as precise and do the thing I want it to do. Turns and any complicated maneveurs are just too complicated feel way too awkward. My hand geniunely started to hurt after extended play sessesions. Enemies also have a knack for spamming freeze a lot of the time, this can be mitigated thanks to the rewind feature but on the last level I was just starting to lose patience for how dated the vehicles handled and how awkward the driving physics were.
I prefer Head On and Black over this game despite me finding some enjoyment in TM2. TM Head On in general feels like TM2 but improved in almost if not every way.
Quake 2 64:
All though this is technically not an "expansion" in the traditional sense since this is the N64 port of Q2, I'm going to be reffering to this as such since it comes with the remaster.
I do prefer this expansion over the Reckoning, the former has better level design instead of being a worse rethread of the base game. There is a weird charm to how the levels are structured in this version of the game, it feels a bit similar to objective completion shooter like Goldeneye than the "open" levels of the base game and the Reckoning. If you didn't like the constant backtracking across zones in Q2, you might like this. Q2 64 basically has you complete objectives in one zone and you reach the exit and move on to the next one until you get to the final zone where the final boss is located. I found this to be pretty charming since it feels like a cross between Goldenye in what you are doing in the levels with the objectives and Doom 1993 and 2 were you are slowly making your way through segmented levels as you slowly journey to the end.
Outside of this and the noticeably shorter length with it taking probably 1 and a half to 3 hours, it's the same Q2.
It does unfortunately do what the Reckoning expansion does and amp up all the annoying aspects of the base game to eleven like how the sprinting Strogg's attack can happen out of nowhere, randomly getting attack from behind, the railgun Strogg's attack being poorly telegraphed, and just enemies moving all over the damn place and how ambushes with lots of enemies at once can be unpredictable. There's also some hitscan attacks by the infantry marines that you pretty much have to tank, I didn't mind it in the base game but it does get pretty grating not being able to reliable dodge or prevent the attack from happening.
The game also feels like save scum city at times with the aforementioned issues but thanks to the game being so short, I am not as annoyed by this stuff as I was with the Reckoning, this expansion wraps up the moment the issues really was starting to annoy me.
Overall, not on the level of something like Doom 64 but this was an interesting attempt at porting Q2 to the N64 even if now the game is basically an expansion.
Burnout Revenge:
I am going to be honest and say the following, I do enjoy Burnout Revenge and it mechanically it's even better than Burnout 3 and the latter game was already hard to top but playing this game reminds me that racing game even with great mechanics just wear me out after playing them for longer than 8 hours.
This transitions me to the next part, I am not even sure what even counts as a "completion" regarding this game and racing games with no traditional story mode or plot in general. You need to technically reach Rank 10 and complete all the Grand Prixes to count as a "beat" but I feel like if I played this game more than the 10 hours, it then I would start to strongly dislike BR. There is no story and there isn't even a final boss in the tradtional sense and apparently to get the credits you need to get Gold Medals on all the events and no way am I going to do that. There's so much crash mode, elimination, traditional races, takedown centered modes, time attacks, crashing into cars I can take before I call it quits. Do this for 20 hours and I would just start to get super annoyed and maybe even dislike the game.
With that out of the way, I'll talk about what the game does well, mechanically like I said before is even better than Burnout 3. You got the risk reward system from the latter system which is great, but now you got stuff like crashing into cars, avoiding on coming traffic, avoiding bigger vehicles, as well as takedowns being easier to perform, leading cars into on coming traffic as well as using the traffic to destroy other cars. AI is more dynamic too where they can even be taken out during races and thanks to all this the whole game has a fast paced over the top dynamic feel to it that not a lot of racing games and it's predessor can even match. Races in general feel more epic and dynamic in Revenge since getting boost is easier to pull off so if I crash and fail, it doesn't feel like the end of the world compared to 3. Burnout Revenge might not be a "reinvention" of the series but I feel this is an "expansion" sequel done right, at least in terms of mechanics and game feel.
If I have to choose between playing Burnout 3 or Revenge, I choose the latter, I even think the progression system is better but I wish there was an actual story mode in these games since rank progression can start to feel like a boring grind by the time I reached Rank 8.
I do like Burnout Revenge but I feel burned out every time I play it and B3. This might be the best racing game ever made in terms of mechanics but at the same time, without context for the races and a geniune sense of escalating stakes, even nothing but mechanical depth can start to bore me. If you don't mind this stuff then this game is a must play, it's just not 100% my kind of game.
No comments:
Post a Comment