Caul
It's a very solid adventure game, but the fact that it's set almost entirely in locations from the first game is pretty boring. And that ending was awful, I get it's a comedy game, but Gilbert has gone on and one about how people don't know the real secret as if there ever was one. And I don't care what people say, this art style is not good.
2022
Eh, it's ok. But I have no interest in playing any future episodes. Overly large maps, enemies that just spawn anywhere and have the simplest AI possible and are so pixelated and hidden behind each other I'm not even sure what the difference between them all is. Quite buggy in places too, I got stuck in several walls etc., But I guess it's not quite finished yet.
2022
This is as generic and monotonous as you can get it. Locked into an arena: Kill everything. Something that gets boring less than an hour in. With very few cannon fodder enemies, and mainly minibosses that just take forever to kill. And that in turn makes every single weapon feel underpowered. And in creating as much spectacle to the fights as possible they made everything fairly hard to identify. I don't think I could describe a single enemy from memory here, more just weird shapes and colors.
There are secrets, but with the way the game is structured, even they are annoying to find as you're as likely to find a noclip wall as you are a secret route. Also some parts that focus on acrobatics, but are little more than QTE's. I would guess they're there mostly to hide the general repetitiveness of the game as a whole.
There are secrets, but with the way the game is structured, even they are annoying to find as you're as likely to find a noclip wall as you are a secret route. Also some parts that focus on acrobatics, but are little more than QTE's. I would guess they're there mostly to hide the general repetitiveness of the game as a whole.
Much like this review, the game started out very positive. The game looks absolutely fantastic. And the way they integrated the enemies, areas etc. from the original is absolutely masterful. And all this at a constant 120fps (though there is clearly some sort of resolution scaling or other such things running in the background here to achieve this.) The art team really deserve all the praise in the world for this.
The game started out very fun, with the new battle system feeling very fitting for the first few chapters. But once you get a bit further in it gets downright infuriating. Teammates are absolutely useless if you're not controlling them, with their ATB bar barely moving if not controlled, and all enemies will attack you 90% of the time. Meaning that in boss fights especially, you are constantly plummeted with attacks. Constant aoe attacks, shot from off-screen, or spamming freeze toad or what have you to make it impossible to do much. I think the main issue is that once you progress a bit, you control 3 people and you just get overwhelmed with attacks. Which wouldn't necessarily be that big of a deal if your attacks couldn't be cancelled. Having your limit break lost because an enemy teleports or a spell miss because the target zooms across the room is infuriating. And not only will attacks be cancelled, you also lose the MP it costs and a chunk of the ATB bar. While I really liked the early combat, I absolutely hated it by the end. This would work much better if you simply just controlled one person or or it bas based on turn based to the extent where an attack couldn't miss because the animation gives the enemy time to do endless things. On top of this the game treats the lock on system as a suggestion, changing its target whenever it feels like. The battles also get endlessly convoluted as you progress. Everything seems to have some gimmick to beat it, but you fight each enemy so rarely I never saw the point of trying to figure it out. And even when I did it was so poorly explained and shown that I just gave up. Like some enemy that had to be hit with magic first, then physical. I never got it to work, I couldn't tell which one was procced and I just brute forced it to get past. And the boss battles just got increasingly long, to the point where: had I died, I couldn't have been bothered to try again and probably left the game unfinished. I don't know what it is with these anime tropes where everything is godlike and can never just die. It's just fight after fight after fight. The last boss taking about an hour or so with no deaths. I guess it's an attempt to make something seem epic, but really it's just tedious.
Another thing that stopped me from not finishing the game was the ability to skip cutscenes. It's just endless. Every single time you enter a room, there's a cutscene. Even outside of that there's constant slow walks with dialogue. Not even the fights are safe from cutscenes. With them I'd guess the game would have been twice as long. And that is most likely intentional as the game is filled to the brim with small things that makes the game that much longer. But none of it fun, be it the fetch quests or those ungodly rhythm minigames where they don't even let you know what to press or when. It's just there to make you retry and retry, so you spend more time. The same with hard mode that seems to expect you to have several master materia and be level 50. It's just a massive and tedious grind.
What worries me the most about this game though is how ok everyone seems to be with games being cut in to parts like this. The normal price for this game is the highest I've ever seen and they expect people to pay that maybe 4 times. plus DLC on top of that. How are people complaining about regular DLC, microtransactions etc. but this is right? I really hope this isn't where singleplayer games are heading, because that will be the death of them. Make a game, split it in 4, make everything a slow grind so it feels like you got your money's worth then sell the next installment at the same price.
The game started out very fun, with the new battle system feeling very fitting for the first few chapters. But once you get a bit further in it gets downright infuriating. Teammates are absolutely useless if you're not controlling them, with their ATB bar barely moving if not controlled, and all enemies will attack you 90% of the time. Meaning that in boss fights especially, you are constantly plummeted with attacks. Constant aoe attacks, shot from off-screen, or spamming freeze toad or what have you to make it impossible to do much. I think the main issue is that once you progress a bit, you control 3 people and you just get overwhelmed with attacks. Which wouldn't necessarily be that big of a deal if your attacks couldn't be cancelled. Having your limit break lost because an enemy teleports or a spell miss because the target zooms across the room is infuriating. And not only will attacks be cancelled, you also lose the MP it costs and a chunk of the ATB bar. While I really liked the early combat, I absolutely hated it by the end. This would work much better if you simply just controlled one person or or it bas based on turn based to the extent where an attack couldn't miss because the animation gives the enemy time to do endless things. On top of this the game treats the lock on system as a suggestion, changing its target whenever it feels like. The battles also get endlessly convoluted as you progress. Everything seems to have some gimmick to beat it, but you fight each enemy so rarely I never saw the point of trying to figure it out. And even when I did it was so poorly explained and shown that I just gave up. Like some enemy that had to be hit with magic first, then physical. I never got it to work, I couldn't tell which one was procced and I just brute forced it to get past. And the boss battles just got increasingly long, to the point where: had I died, I couldn't have been bothered to try again and probably left the game unfinished. I don't know what it is with these anime tropes where everything is godlike and can never just die. It's just fight after fight after fight. The last boss taking about an hour or so with no deaths. I guess it's an attempt to make something seem epic, but really it's just tedious.
Another thing that stopped me from not finishing the game was the ability to skip cutscenes. It's just endless. Every single time you enter a room, there's a cutscene. Even outside of that there's constant slow walks with dialogue. Not even the fights are safe from cutscenes. With them I'd guess the game would have been twice as long. And that is most likely intentional as the game is filled to the brim with small things that makes the game that much longer. But none of it fun, be it the fetch quests or those ungodly rhythm minigames where they don't even let you know what to press or when. It's just there to make you retry and retry, so you spend more time. The same with hard mode that seems to expect you to have several master materia and be level 50. It's just a massive and tedious grind.
What worries me the most about this game though is how ok everyone seems to be with games being cut in to parts like this. The normal price for this game is the highest I've ever seen and they expect people to pay that maybe 4 times. plus DLC on top of that. How are people complaining about regular DLC, microtransactions etc. but this is right? I really hope this isn't where singleplayer games are heading, because that will be the death of them. Make a game, split it in 4, make everything a slow grind so it feels like you got your money's worth then sell the next installment at the same price.
I absolutely hated the first 4 hours or so and was about to just call it a loss, but once everything clicked it was brilliant. I think Kojima is the only person that can make a fun open world game at this point. Even when most of it is empty and barren like here, it's still endlessly enjoyable once you learn the ins and outs.
Starting of with 1, I though the games had dated pretty badly, but apparently only the first game looks like this. 2 and 3 still look great. Individually I'd rank them 2<3<1: The first is pretty generic and with a level design that at times feel procedurally generated. 3 Takes away the upgrade system I liked from 2 and has a lot of fetch quests and a mission log system that holds very little information on them. Also a couple fights here on Insanity are kind of poorly designed for how awkward the cover system can be and how tanky enemies are. 2 is just a perfect middle ground that just seems to do everything right. And on Insanity it's still a challenge while not being infuriating because of grenade spam or enemies that move so fast you can never really stay in cover.
After playing as much as I could stomach of this, my only conclusion is that the reason this was so well liked was that those people didn't have access to a PC for first person shooters at the time. My list of issues with this is lengthy, but my main issues were the enormous weapon models that take up a third of the screen and the muzzle flare at the end of them blocks what little vision is left of your target. Enemies also had so much health that shooting them got tedious and the weapons feel incredibly underpowered. Though this could have to do with the difficulty I was playing on.
Literally the perfect game. Elevating the gameplay of the mindless and tedious labyrinthian FPS games that came before it in every possible aspect. Bringing countless things that are a standard still to this day. An arsenal where every weapon has its use, enemies that are varied and distinct and great music and soundtrack. But probably its biggest appeal today is that its source code was released by id, letting us still play this on modern computers with 100% combability in any way we want. And an endless catalogue of mods, wads and complete overhauls.
A beautiful world filled with nothing but chores. Petting horses, talking to people, picking flowers. Even the missions are 90% dialogue then 10% of "action" where you do exactly as the game tells you or it's game over.