THPS4 stopped me cold back in the day, and every time I've tried to revisit it since, I've never actually beaten it. I did this time, but I really had to force myself.
This game marks the first big shift in the series' structure - instead of the familiar two-minute runs where you try to check goals off a list, you're now cut loose in the (big) levels with no time limit and get your individual challenges from NPCs dotted around. At first, this is pretty neat - leisurely exploring levels at your own pace with no pressure is immediately rewarding. The problem is that it instantly and fatally robs any sense of competition or urgency from the gameplay, and gives a whole new, really alien vibe to the game.
The NPC quests are all over the place in length, quality, and challenge, with some being silly little larks that are beatable on your first try in mere seconds, and others being unreasonably difficult and forcing you to retry over and over and over for an hour while you try not to break your controller. Despite the openness, the structure feels inorganic, and in no time at all you just feel like you doing homework, skipping through the silly dialogue and skits and either quickly checking them off, or running into a nightmare one that is more or less busted. This is much worse in some levels that are so bafflingly designed and un-fun that the game essentially turns into a terrible open-world platformer for a while.
There is probably more content in this game than in all three previous entries put together, but none of it reaches anywhere near the heights of any of them, so it ends up feeling wayyyyy too long in comparison. For the first time since THPS1 the gameplay is pretty darn loosey-goosey, with way more jank than ever before, probably thanks to the workload of all the content eating up dev time. Trick lines and goal placement seems much less considered than before. The doofy humor from THPS3 has been ramped up again and it's still an acquired taste. Oh, and the soundtrack is now absolute garbage. AC/DC? You're really gonna subject me to that song every time I load the game?
This seems like a fair direction for the series to go - I mean how many games in a row can you do where it's just a series of timed levels - but the shaky-at-best implementation and the fact that the new laid-back approach essentially jettisons a huge part of the series' identity make me feel like it was kind of a mistake. Now that I've finally laid this to rest after twenty years, maybe it's time for me to play the fifth one and find out where the series goes from here.
This game marks the first big shift in the series' structure - instead of the familiar two-minute runs where you try to check goals off a list, you're now cut loose in the (big) levels with no time limit and get your individual challenges from NPCs dotted around. At first, this is pretty neat - leisurely exploring levels at your own pace with no pressure is immediately rewarding. The problem is that it instantly and fatally robs any sense of competition or urgency from the gameplay, and gives a whole new, really alien vibe to the game.
The NPC quests are all over the place in length, quality, and challenge, with some being silly little larks that are beatable on your first try in mere seconds, and others being unreasonably difficult and forcing you to retry over and over and over for an hour while you try not to break your controller. Despite the openness, the structure feels inorganic, and in no time at all you just feel like you doing homework, skipping through the silly dialogue and skits and either quickly checking them off, or running into a nightmare one that is more or less busted. This is much worse in some levels that are so bafflingly designed and un-fun that the game essentially turns into a terrible open-world platformer for a while.
There is probably more content in this game than in all three previous entries put together, but none of it reaches anywhere near the heights of any of them, so it ends up feeling wayyyyy too long in comparison. For the first time since THPS1 the gameplay is pretty darn loosey-goosey, with way more jank than ever before, probably thanks to the workload of all the content eating up dev time. Trick lines and goal placement seems much less considered than before. The doofy humor from THPS3 has been ramped up again and it's still an acquired taste. Oh, and the soundtrack is now absolute garbage. AC/DC? You're really gonna subject me to that song every time I load the game?
This seems like a fair direction for the series to go - I mean how many games in a row can you do where it's just a series of timed levels - but the shaky-at-best implementation and the fact that the new laid-back approach essentially jettisons a huge part of the series' identity make me feel like it was kind of a mistake. Now that I've finally laid this to rest after twenty years, maybe it's time for me to play the fifth one and find out where the series goes from here.