I wish I could count the amount of times I've played through this game since I was a kid, it's up there with Spyro 1 as one of the most replayable games to me. Super fluid gameplay, fantastic level design, well balanced difficulty, amazing soundtrack, quality and funny writing, all of it's wrapped up in a perfect little 5-10 hour package that is even better than the sum of its parts. I like the remake and all, but the OG release has more charm and less bugs making for a perfect platforming experience.

Mechanically, this game is a perfect evolution of the PS2 quadrilogy. Nearly every weapon feels really fun to use, movement is solid, shooting is the best it's ever been. However, this game falls flat for me when it comes to the story. The overarching plot never really grabbed me since Ratchet's family wasn't something that was ever really relevant to Ratchet ever before so it felt jarring for every game going on to focus on it. On top of that the robo-pirates, while silly, got a bit tiring by the end of their stay within the game and I was glad to have them gone. The interactions between Ratchet and Clank are still really solid but I miss other non-Qwark characters being present (which I understand why, whole new system and all). Overall I really enjoyed the game but it never hit the highs of the PS2 games for me.

Back when I was in middle school in 2013, I remember getting hyped with a friend after seeing this get announced. I feel like it's the only thing we talked about for months and we were both extremely excited to play it. Come 2022, my friend and I moved away from each other not even a year after the announcement. He ended up getting the game in late 2017 and seemed to enjoy it with his 111 hours but never finished the story. And as the 2022 Steam Summer Sale comes around, I finally got the chance to get my hands on it.

Playing this game co-op was a really fun and silly experience. At the start I was expecting to be annoyed by the survival mechanics as we (a different friend) couldn't find a great place to settle ourselves. It took a while but we got into the swing of things and slowly got into the flow of the game. Then, we discovered the caves. At that point we unintentionally started speedrunning the game, going from cave to cave to cave and grabbing every single useful piece of gear we could. Within a span of only a couple hours, we hadn't done anything for progressing with a base but we were completely decked out to the nines. One more game session later and we finally managed to knock the game out, clearing the final cave and area within an hour and a half. This playthrough was full of goofs and silly moments that were really memorable and despite the fact I didn't find the core gameplay that interesting, I really enjoyed my full experience with The Forest, nearly nine years after I wanted to.

Really fun and solid campaign, playing this and World at War back to back is an interesting experience since this game feels so varied in its gameplay on top of having an interesting story while WaW is essentially just six hours of shooting the same WW2 guns (not a knock at WaW too, I think it's fun to essentially just play the action scenes in a WW2 movie).

The only complaints I've got are with the AI; I'm used to playing most FPS campaigns on the difficulty above normal and they tend to be pretty consistent throughout the entire experience, but MW's AI is completely bipolar depending on how you're playing the game. If you take it really slow and at the pace the game wants you to be at, they're brain dead and struggle to hit you while going down in an easy headshot. If you accidentally push forward a millimeter more than the game wants, suddenly they have super mega fuck you death laser beams coming out of their guns that take you down in a second, on top of becoming super resilient to your shots (I swear I had moments where I would die to an enemy I just emptied an entire mag into or directly blew up with a nade). Besides that inconsistency, I really enjoyed this game and I can imagine audiences did as well when it came out since there had to be fatigue after 3 (four include BRO) WW2 games.