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Easily my favorite Mega Man X game and maybe my favorite game ever, Mega Man X4 oozes entertaining gameplay and replay value.

For the first time in the franchise, you can pick a different character at the beginning of a mainline platformer game (I'm specifying because Power Battle also had character selection, but that was a spin-off and wasn't a platformer). Mega Man X and Zero have widely different playstyles: X represents classic Mega Man gameplay with running and shooting, while Zero is a short-range fighter focused on sword combos and extra skills (which replace the special weapons X gets from the bosses). Playing through the game as each of them makes for a completely different experience, which of course doubles this game's replay value.

Level design is on point. Each stage has its own identity and gimmicks that fit their theme. Some can be challenging on your first playthrough, depending on your skill level, but once you learn to make your way through the game they can become easy (in fact one of the criticisms I see sometimes of this game is that it can be too easy - I find that understandable, but it doesn't take away my enjoyment of the game). The late game stages, however, are noticeably very short, and I can't tell if this was a conscious decision to focus more on the drama regarding the last boss fights or a result of rushed production.

Another thing that enhances this game's replay value for me is X's armors. In every Mega Man X game there are capsules hidden in the main stages that give you parts of an armor that gives X additional powers. Among Mega Man players it's a popular challenge to beat the X series games with settings such as no armor, full armor, 100% completion, no heart upgrades, only a select few armor pieces etc. X4 changes that up with the Ultimate Armor, which you can activate by inputting a code in the character select screen at the beginning of the game (the game tells you the code if you wait some time after the credits). It's basically an "easy mode" for playing as X, as it gives you a very powerful armor at any collectible armor capsule (you get the whole armor at once instead of one part per capsule), but it's nevertheless a gameplay change that can spice up a playthrough. And on a more minor side note, this installment also has two arm pieces instead of the usual one - you can choose between a capsule that gives you a big powerful charged shot or one that gives you four shots that you can store up and fire at any time.

Due to the collectible upgrades and the requirements for reaching them, Mega Man X games often involve a lot of backtracking for 100% completion, because sometimes you need specific boss weapons or armor parts to reach an item and those can lead to loops (i.e. you need boss A's weapon to reach an item in boss B's stage, but there's an item in boss A's stage that you need something from boss B's stage to reach too). This has been heavily minimized in X4, and backtracking can be almost completely averted if you choose a more strategic order to beat the stages (you'll have to revisit either Web Spider or Magma Dragoon's stages at one point to get 100%, but that's the only necessary backtracking if you order your stages well). This addresses a notable complaint from Mega Man X3, which had a heavy abundance of collectible upgrades and you HAD to revisit stages even in the most optimal order.

The story isn't anything special, it's a decent background to the main action although it does make you think most of the characters are stupid (there is an explanation for one of them but it's only seen in game manuals and never mentioned in-game). The real main villain is the same as every mainline Mega Man X game, and the cutscenes don't really make any effort to hide it, so it's not a big surprise twist when he's revealed in the end. Zero's side of the story has a bit more weight to it, which is interesting. Parts of the story are shown through anime cutscenes, which is pretty cool, and nice to watch - however, the English dub for said cutscenes is notoriously bad, which hurts the presentation a lot. It's noticeably better in Japanese even though I don't speak the language.

Music in Mega Man games is always a highlight and this game is no exception, featuring many catchy tunes in CD-quality (while this wasn't a first for the series considering X3 was remastered with a re-arranged soundtrack on PS1, it is better executed here). Some themes, however, lean more towards the repetitive, but thankfully this does not apply for the majority nor are said repetitive tunes used for particularly long sequences. Sound effect design is on-point, although I've mentioned the atrocious English dub earlier - Mega Man X himself is infamously voiced by a woman doing a high-pitched kid voice.

All in all, Mega Man X is a magnificent platformer adventure that gives you many gameplay options and is accessible to players of any level of skill. Certainly recommended for anyone who likes the genre.

I got the "Legendary Edition" of this game with a very generous discount on a sale, coming with all DLC content except for the "God" and "Demon" shaders for character customization (a weird omission). Honestly, I'm very glad I didn't pay full price (getting the game and every DLC becomes insanely expensive).

At first glance this is an awesome game. It plays well, has a nice roster, great graphics, and even what seems like a really cool character customization system. The game plays much more fluidly than the first one, and looks gorgeous and colorful (which Gods Among Us most certainly wasn't), so for the first few minutes it's a pretty good experience. But the hole goes deeper...

My problems actually started at the tutorial. Yes, the tutorial. For some reason, this game's tutorial is insanely, ridiculously hard. There's a section on "block pressure" that I still haven't finished and probably never will. Who playtested this? I've never had difficulty with any other NRS tutorial (including Mortal Kombat 11, which I've also seen its tutorial get criticized but I could finish it just fine).

The roster is interesting, even if you take only the base characters into account. The abundance of Batman representatives is often criticized, but the likes of Firestorm, Blue Beetle and Gorilla Grodd are certainly inspired picks, for example, although the absence of iconic characters like Shazam and Lex Luthor (for story reasons - attesting that story modes in fighting games were a mistake) is felt. Arena selection is very scarce, leading to a bit of repetitiveness, with only 12 stages (8 of them have transitions raising the actual total to 20) - compare with the first Injustice, which had 15 stages, all but two having transitions making for a total of 29 arenas to fight. Only places visited in the story mode are present in the Injustice 2 stage selection (unlike the first game where some areas were there purely for versus mode enjoyment), and due to circumstances in the story, iconic locations like the Justice League Watchtower, Themyscira and the Hall of Justice are absent, further showing how story mode hampers this game.

And what about the gameplay itself? Well, as I mentioned, at first glance it seems alright. Fighting works well. Then you notice how bad the issue with move balancing is - it's more notable with zoning (this game has a huge zoning problem), but there's overall A LOT of very spammable moves that you see often not only in online, but the AI gets in on the action too! It makes fights very boring unless you're on versus mode with either a good, fair player or AI in very specific difficulties. In fact, the opponent AI in this game borders on bullshit. A big chunk of this game's grinding (more on that later on) is done in the Multiverse mode, which is basically a differentiated arcade mode that changes every few hours. The AI in Multiverse is ridiculous, making the experience very frustrating. There are also modifiers with baffling effects, like spinning the screen around or randomly turning the game upside down - these two were notable for me because they made me legitimately nauseous. You can put your own friendly AI (which is adjustable) to go through Multiverse for you, which makes things way easier, but what's the point of playing a video game if you have to sit through an AI doing things for you?

Customization is a big selling point of this game that NRS emphasized and it's what the grinding is directed at. You can customize each character's body parts as well as one special item that's specific to each character. Boy, is it a grind. You get gear from lootboxes (called Mother Boxes in this game - nothing in common with the actual Mother Box items from the comics except for the name) or after some matches, and it is all completely randomized. You can get repeated gear, you can fill up your inventory if you're not careful, you can spend years grinding without finding a piece you want. Gear is divided into common, rare, "epic" and "legendary", but aside from the legendary gear, it doesn't matter much in practice - I spent months grinding for a single "common" head piece for Black Adam. Legendary gear is another problem altogether: there's only one for each character, and you unlock them in the Legendary Multiverses, which as a concept is fine, but each stage of these multiverses has ABSURD requirements like playing 3000 minutes with the character, finishing 200 multiverse events with them, finishing 100 matches with a certain combo etc. It's another tedious grind that reeks of artificial longevity, but works more as a turn-off for the game because of how tedious it is. There are also shaders, which are color palettes you can equip on your loadout. One shader for each character is obtained by playing through arcade mode (a "simulator" in the Multiverse mode), and another one is either a story mode reward or, for characters who don't have a story chapter, a random reward. The rest of them are either random rewards or you can buy them with source crystals. Source crystals are a kind of currency in the game that you can get either by leveling up your profile (which takes longer the more you play the game), playing through story mode for the first time, finishing the tutorial and in Guild mode (a mode where you join a group to finish special Multiverse events together). Oh, and you can also buy source crystals with real money if you don't want to grind - hooray for microtransactions in fully-priced games, right? Needless to say it's another grind, moreso because shaders can be VERY rare drops.

But gear isn't only cosmetic! They actually affect stats. This fighting game has these RPG-like elements with stat-changing gear and character levels (more grinding). This means not only that you can't just equip what you think looks cooler on your character without risking getting terrible stats, but whether you'll have difficulty or not fighting an opponent because they have better attack or defense boils down to whether you're lucky enough to get good gear in this game's busted RNG. In versus mode you can turn "competitive mode" on to disable stat changes, making your gear purely cosmetic and prevent it from upsetting balance, but that will also disable any custom abilities you might have equipped on your character, such as Robin's "Staff of Grayson" which gives him Nightwing's moveset from the previous game. So no matter what, you're bound to get screwed over!

Story mode is decent, all things considered. There's some really good parts, some really bad ones and some okay moments. I might not like some of the paths taken for the story (I particularly despise "evil Superman" depictions, but I actually give this one a pass since this game takes place in the aftermath of the "bad universe" from the previous one) and find the ending (both of them) ridiculous, but I can't deny NRS made a good job on selling the story. The voice acting (both in the original and Brazilian dubs) is on point and so are the visuals. It really feels like you're watching a big Justice League story unfold. Doesn't keep me from thinking the resources, time, effort and budget spent on cutscenes should go towards more substantial base game content, but I won't have the audacity to say the story mode is actually bad.

All in all, despite me going hard on it, Injustice 2 is a good game, and I can even say I like it - I just think it makes you suffer too much through baffling mechanics so you can even begin to have fun with it. But if you only care about pure fighting and nothing else, and have nice people to play with, Injustice 2 won't disappoint. Just make sure to get the Legendary Edition on a sale, because a gigantic amount of the game's full content is DLC that will weigh on your wallet if you try to get all of it at full price.

When first setting up my backloggd I had given this game 5 stars. Upon replaying I felt it deserved to be brought down to 4, then while writing this went back on my rating yet again and now I'm set on a nice 4.5. Numbered ratings are complicated! Anyway... (jump to the last paragraph if you want a TL;DR)

The gameplay in this is very much a culmination of every 3D Spider-Man game since the PS1 era. The swinging and combat are obviously heavily influenced by the Spider-Man 2 movie game. Even the huge chargeable jumps make a return! And after the games based on the "Amazing" movie series had a very Batman Arkham pastiche style of combat, this game takes it back to its SM2004 roots (which, of course, had inspired Arkham after all) with more controllable and upgradeable moves. And then you have air combat and web moves taking cues from the often forgotten Friend or Foe! The possibility of stealth during missions is a natural evolution from the stealth features in the 2002 movie game, although of course draws more Arkham comparisons from less knowledgeable/experienced players.

The story is perfectly enjoyable and complements the game's features. Mr. Negative in particular is actually much better represented in this game than in the comics, where I always found him a pretty boring and generic "overpowered" villain. The build-up to the real main villain is very well executed. Performances from the voice cast are excellent and sell every emotion (though not in the Brazilian dub - more on this later). There are moments during the story where you control Mary Jane and Miles Morales - these are purely stealth sections with no superpowers involved. Many criticize these sections, and while I never found them a problem, it is true that some go on for too long and get boring (I found one Miles section featuring the Rhino especially grating).

Side-missions are a thing - some are good and fun, some feel like filler. They're also very sporadic so it ends up feeling pretty weird, and a lot of them are repetitive. In fact, this is a big thing that drags down the game from being a "perfect" experience - repetitiveness. In each "act" (there's 3 of them) there's a group of side missions, and a big chunk of them are crimes you have to stop and enemy bases. For the first two acts this is fairly manageable, but on the third there are TWO groups of crimes in EVERY district of the city, and not only do they lack variety, they're ridiculously broken, becoming a chore to do. There are also two groups of enemy bases, although they're more fairly distributed. Not only that, but enemies are scattered all over the city during this part of the game, not counting towards any side mission counter, making the third arc very tiring and tedious.

Another type of side mission is the Taskmaster challenges - you unlock them at a certain point of the story and they're scattered through the city. There's two types: combat, drone, bomb and stealth (combat and drone challenges are just like challenges you'd find in Ultimate Spider-Man, so there's another throwback for you). They're not all that hard to do - as long as you're not aiming for the highest score. This wouldn't be an issue if challenge tokens (which you use to unlock costumes) weren't tied to the score - and you can't unlock all costumes just by doing challenges over and over again. Again, not much of an issue, but the drone challenges can be insanely difficult to get a perfect score on and might make you scream at the small imperfections of this game's web-swinging mechanics.

Now, since I mentioned costumes... the costumes mechanic in this game is cool because you don't just unlock a new outfit, you unlock an equippable upgrade/power for each costume that was included in the game's launch (so, not for DLC or patch costumes like the Raimi suit or Bag-Man). The equippable powers can be used with any costume, drawing comparisons to the Create-A-Spider mode in the second PS1 game, which is cool. You can also upgrade Spider-Man's web-shooters and other equipment. The gadgets add some nice variety to combat - a lot of people just gloss over them but I recommend trying out some different gadget combinations, it makes things pretty fun.

Design-wise, while I don't have any major complaints towards the game's selection of alternate costumes, some picks are mind-boggling. The Fear Itself suit, while a neat visual in dark areas, wouldn't really be missed if it wasn't included at all, and some of the costumes created for the game are very ugly. Suits from the comics that should look cool ended up VERY over-designed with a lot of additional unnecessary and visually-polluting details like random lines scribbled throughout (I'm looking at you Kaine and Bag-Man) and, in the case of the Dark Suit, a DIFFERENTIATED SOFT CLOTH CROTCH AREA. I get that in the game's story it was made by the Black Cat (who has the hots for Spidey), but what the heck?

Another minor complaint I have is the lack of a quality-of-life option that should be a no-brainer, but during the two years of updates, patches and a remaster, apparently no one in the whole design team for the game thought of: language options. I mentioned the Brazilian dub earlier and now I'll elaborate on it: I find it terrible, with stilted "acting", wonky translations, some actually untranslated lines, and wrong character names for the Brazilian market (this was actually mandated by Marvel, but it's in the game and weighs in how I feel about the dub). I'm Brazilian, so of course my PS4 console is set to be in Brazilian Portuguese. But if I want to change the game dub to the original, I have to change my console language, which is a very inconvenient thing to do for just one game. There's absolutely no in-game language options whatsoever, so I can't even leave subtitles in Portuguese in case a family member or friend who doesn't speak English wants to keep up with the story while taking a look at what I'm playing. This game has actually very thorough quality of life options like turning off quick-time events, customizable difficulty and thorough graphical settings, so how is it that in all the years the game was in development and then all the years it was being patched and remastered NO ONE in the dev team thought about a simple language option? It boggles the mind.

So, all in all, Marvel's Spider-Man for the PlayStation 4 is a GREAT game, managing to bring together every good thing from previous Spider-Man games (and some not-so-good that were improved into good things) but brought down by some very repetitive missions and baffling design choices.