FleeFleet
51 reviews liked by FleeFleet
Style Savvy
2008
witness, the birth of cinema
Time Hollow
2008
This game is drowning in anime tropes but I found myself really enjoying it, which is a major accomplishment in my world. The alternate ending is the true ending and you cannot change my mind.
Clannad
2004
I think a term commonly associated with romance/sol animanga and games is “wish fulfillment.” Now, from my experience, it's a term usually met with some level of disdain or condescension. “Wow what a loser, they need this thing to feel good about themselves.” And, sure, I can understand where that attitude comes from, in fact I'm like that sometimes too. But I feel it's not that simple. People come from different backgrounds, places, and circumstances. Sometimes what we need is comfort from something, even if it isn't real.
Clannad, among many, many other beloved visual novels is boiled down to the common “your friends and family are important, your life is worth living” morals, but is it a bad thing to be so commonly communicated? I would assume that Maeda and the many other writers at Key are trying to convey this, and even if they were or not, intention does not always align with found purpose. Tomoya Okazaki, our protagonist, is a great stand in for players like me to some degree. He's still his own character, but I think him being a loner to align with the usual “wish fulfillment” protagonist role really works to its benefit. No matter your background or role, there is worth in finding friends and family, whether it be genetic or found. It finally gives us purpose to those who feel so aimless in life. Clannad is not simply “wish fulfillment” at play. It's inspiring us to fulfill those wishes ourselves, and fulfill the wishes of others.
I’ve seen complaints about Clannad’s core structure before, as for some people the routes are “not interconnected enough”. But is that a problem? In my opinion, anyway, Clannad is an anthology of the multiple “what if” scenarios surrounding Okazaki’s journey in life. While Nagisa’s route is what leads to the true ending of the story, it doesn’t make the other routes pointless. Regardless of what is the “true” outcome of the story, your experiences and how you see these characters develop will always live on with the player. You get to see Okazaki give these people true happiness in life, and by the true ending, he is repaid for everything he’s done. While in gameplay the route system is a little rough around the edges with much needed polish, I think playing with a guide allows for a very smooth experience.
Playing this after my most prior Key visual novel experience, that being AIR, really opened my eyes to how well thought out and executed much of Clannad is. While AIR suffers from an overly ambitious but ultimately meaningless structure, Clannad takes a safer approach and cuts out any filler. Jun Maeda and his team really wanted to make up for the mistakes of AIR, and you can really tell from how much more polish is applied to this game. Despite this being one of the longest games I’ve ever played, Clannad rarely falls victim to artificial padding. The game gives you and makes proper use of the “skip already read text” feature, which makes hopping into your next route a very quick and easy experience. It helps that the game is split into 10+ routes that all vary in length, meaning I don’t think the game can ever burn you out from a scenario. Each route (with two exceptions, one being entirely optional) is very different overall so nothing is samey either. I’d also like to make note of the amount of content on offer, Clannad is not only long from the main game but has TONS of little secrets and extra blurbs of dialogue to discover, it really feels like the team wanted to put as much as they could onto the disc.
And that’s the overall thing I love about Clannad: it’s very polished. Not perfect, but very damn close. Clannad may seem safe or tropey, but it uses those aspects and pushes them to a wonderful and engaging extent. The current top review tries to make fun of fans of this game and I’d have to say that this person probably has never experienced joy in their life. None of the huge visual novels I’ve played so far have been flops, and Clannad is no exception either. In fact, out of the three (Higurashi, Tsukihime, Clannad) I would say this is my new favorite, and knowing that Key still has some fantastic games in their catalog for me to still try out (Kanon, Little Busters!, and Rewrite) has me so immensely excited. But none of those games, or any visual novels in the future will take away what a special experience Clannad was for me. I had taken a long break from reviews and I needed to get out of that slump, and this game was what inspired me to write a little something again, especially seeing how none of the longer reviews about this game on this site are in good faith. I wanted to fix that. Thank you for reading, and if this review manages to get even one person to fully play through this game, I’ll be happy.
Clannad, among many, many other beloved visual novels is boiled down to the common “your friends and family are important, your life is worth living” morals, but is it a bad thing to be so commonly communicated? I would assume that Maeda and the many other writers at Key are trying to convey this, and even if they were or not, intention does not always align with found purpose. Tomoya Okazaki, our protagonist, is a great stand in for players like me to some degree. He's still his own character, but I think him being a loner to align with the usual “wish fulfillment” protagonist role really works to its benefit. No matter your background or role, there is worth in finding friends and family, whether it be genetic or found. It finally gives us purpose to those who feel so aimless in life. Clannad is not simply “wish fulfillment” at play. It's inspiring us to fulfill those wishes ourselves, and fulfill the wishes of others.
I’ve seen complaints about Clannad’s core structure before, as for some people the routes are “not interconnected enough”. But is that a problem? In my opinion, anyway, Clannad is an anthology of the multiple “what if” scenarios surrounding Okazaki’s journey in life. While Nagisa’s route is what leads to the true ending of the story, it doesn’t make the other routes pointless. Regardless of what is the “true” outcome of the story, your experiences and how you see these characters develop will always live on with the player. You get to see Okazaki give these people true happiness in life, and by the true ending, he is repaid for everything he’s done. While in gameplay the route system is a little rough around the edges with much needed polish, I think playing with a guide allows for a very smooth experience.
Playing this after my most prior Key visual novel experience, that being AIR, really opened my eyes to how well thought out and executed much of Clannad is. While AIR suffers from an overly ambitious but ultimately meaningless structure, Clannad takes a safer approach and cuts out any filler. Jun Maeda and his team really wanted to make up for the mistakes of AIR, and you can really tell from how much more polish is applied to this game. Despite this being one of the longest games I’ve ever played, Clannad rarely falls victim to artificial padding. The game gives you and makes proper use of the “skip already read text” feature, which makes hopping into your next route a very quick and easy experience. It helps that the game is split into 10+ routes that all vary in length, meaning I don’t think the game can ever burn you out from a scenario. Each route (with two exceptions, one being entirely optional) is very different overall so nothing is samey either. I’d also like to make note of the amount of content on offer, Clannad is not only long from the main game but has TONS of little secrets and extra blurbs of dialogue to discover, it really feels like the team wanted to put as much as they could onto the disc.
And that’s the overall thing I love about Clannad: it’s very polished. Not perfect, but very damn close. Clannad may seem safe or tropey, but it uses those aspects and pushes them to a wonderful and engaging extent. The current top review tries to make fun of fans of this game and I’d have to say that this person probably has never experienced joy in their life. None of the huge visual novels I’ve played so far have been flops, and Clannad is no exception either. In fact, out of the three (Higurashi, Tsukihime, Clannad) I would say this is my new favorite, and knowing that Key still has some fantastic games in their catalog for me to still try out (Kanon, Little Busters!, and Rewrite) has me so immensely excited. But none of those games, or any visual novels in the future will take away what a special experience Clannad was for me. I had taken a long break from reviews and I needed to get out of that slump, and this game was what inspired me to write a little something again, especially seeing how none of the longer reviews about this game on this site are in good faith. I wanted to fix that. Thank you for reading, and if this review manages to get even one person to fully play through this game, I’ll be happy.
Oh, to have my consciousness subsumed into the KATAMARI and be forcibly turned into star dust after a lackluster rollup...
A lot of fun, but I don't think it's as good as Seasons. I didn't really care for the story and I felt like the time-jumping mechanic was a little half-baked. Even still, it's a good time and one of the best games on the GBC.
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages is surprisingly great. With an asterisk but i'll get to that. The Oracle duology was always a missing piece of my history with this series and now that i've completed Ages, i gotta say, it kinda goes hard.
This is the Zelda game that puts it's biggest emphasis on it's puzzles. The puzzles here feel like a step above Zelda's usual puzzle selection, in fact, i don't think the games get this crazy again in that department until Breath of the Wild. As things stand right now, the game is probably the closest the series comes to the CrossCode level of puzzle quality (though i'd say there's still a big difference between this game's puzzles and CrossCode's).
Veran is an interesting villain if only because she's the only main villain who is female. Rather insane when you think about it. I also want to point out that she looks like an animated Disney villain. The way the time travel works allowed for an improved execution of the Dark World concept when compared to A Link to the Past (and tbh A Link Between Worlds) where both worlds matter instead of just only mattering half of the time. It is also pretty funny that this is the second Zelda game that handles the element of time way better than Ocarina of Time.
Also the soundtrack kinda goes hard. I mean the overworld themes and boss themes are reused from Link's Awakening but nobody told me Moonlit Grotto and Skull Dungeon had banger of a theme. And it was around this point i realized that Zelda dungeon music is usually just noise to me and the two dungeons i mentioned are two of five Zelda dungeons in the entire series where i've gone "oh yeah, this music slaps".
My main gripes with this game stem from the fact that it's a Game Boy game. The tiny 4x4 screen makes the navigation a massive pain in the ass, turning this game into a certified "walkthrough game" and although i had more fun with it than A Link to the Past, another "walkthrough game", at the same time i wonder how the flying hell anyone was supposed to get to Crescent Island without looking it up. Or the entire Rolling Ridges segment. Other Game Boy specific gripes include the constant menuing cause the game only lets you equip two items at a time and this includes stuff that would normally be passives in the other games and the fact that the map screens are useless.
The good news is that this game would benefit tremendously from a Link's Awakening HD treatment. When most of your issues are simply because the console limits your power, that's the mark of a really good game. As it is though, the Game Boy is pretty much the only thing keeping me from giving this game a higher score.
8/10, Switch Hook and Seed Shooter go hard.
This is the Zelda game that puts it's biggest emphasis on it's puzzles. The puzzles here feel like a step above Zelda's usual puzzle selection, in fact, i don't think the games get this crazy again in that department until Breath of the Wild. As things stand right now, the game is probably the closest the series comes to the CrossCode level of puzzle quality (though i'd say there's still a big difference between this game's puzzles and CrossCode's).
Veran is an interesting villain if only because she's the only main villain who is female. Rather insane when you think about it. I also want to point out that she looks like an animated Disney villain. The way the time travel works allowed for an improved execution of the Dark World concept when compared to A Link to the Past (and tbh A Link Between Worlds) where both worlds matter instead of just only mattering half of the time. It is also pretty funny that this is the second Zelda game that handles the element of time way better than Ocarina of Time.
Also the soundtrack kinda goes hard. I mean the overworld themes and boss themes are reused from Link's Awakening but nobody told me Moonlit Grotto and Skull Dungeon had banger of a theme. And it was around this point i realized that Zelda dungeon music is usually just noise to me and the two dungeons i mentioned are two of five Zelda dungeons in the entire series where i've gone "oh yeah, this music slaps".
My main gripes with this game stem from the fact that it's a Game Boy game. The tiny 4x4 screen makes the navigation a massive pain in the ass, turning this game into a certified "walkthrough game" and although i had more fun with it than A Link to the Past, another "walkthrough game", at the same time i wonder how the flying hell anyone was supposed to get to Crescent Island without looking it up. Or the entire Rolling Ridges segment. Other Game Boy specific gripes include the constant menuing cause the game only lets you equip two items at a time and this includes stuff that would normally be passives in the other games and the fact that the map screens are useless.
The good news is that this game would benefit tremendously from a Link's Awakening HD treatment. When most of your issues are simply because the console limits your power, that's the mark of a really good game. As it is though, the Game Boy is pretty much the only thing keeping me from giving this game a higher score.
8/10, Switch Hook and Seed Shooter go hard.
Glad to play one of my favorite games again and in a new format. Some of the higher framerate animations are a little wonky, and the loss of the lower screen obfuscates the usability of the swap power a little bit, but these issues aren't enough to turn me against one of the best games ever made.
As an added bonus, I finally learned how to do slide puzzles so that I could complete the last challenge.
As an added bonus, I finally learned how to do slide puzzles so that I could complete the last challenge.
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
they finally made a dogshit final fantasy. im in awe, so many bad decisions. awful gameplay loop awful quest structure shallow characters, its insane really, incredible job yoshi p, never touch a single player game ever again
So… Meta Ridley sure was a boss fight, huh?
In Metroid games, atmosphere is paramount. The fundamental ability to effortlessly immerse a player into the imaginative planets they embark upon is crucial to their success, and it’s arguably Metroid’s defining characteristic as a video game franchise. Much like its predecessors, Prime succeeds in crafting a captivating ambience that convincingly places the player in the boots of Samus through unmatched realism in both its audio and visual design. This much should be undisputed - the amount of detail encoded into the various lifeforms of Tallon IV should not be overlooked, with every room richly constructed with detailed lighting and natural sonorousness to make them feel like genuine articles. The implementation of a first-person perspective and by extension the scan visor further amplifies the scale of Prime’s scope, literally allowing players to view the world from Samus perspective and unravel the narrative surrounding the world at the same pace she does. As a nice additional bonus, the visor also takes into account minor changes in Samus’ POV - fog can cause Samus’ vision to become clouded, and bright flashes allow players a brief glimpse into her eyes. Overall, Metroid Prime is inarguably a masterclass in terms of how it pushes the technical boundaries of its audio-visual presentation, certainly one of the most beautiful looking games, even today. Given how rushed Prime’s development appeared to be, this is nothing short of a miracle.
What isn’t a miracle, however, is Metroid Prime’s unfortunate pacing problems that distills the illusion of immersion.
Metroid Prime takes a puzzle box-esque approach to its level design, much akin to the likes of Super Metroid before it, fashioning every area as their own self-contained environment which revolves around a particular puzzle or platforming challenge players must solve in order to progress to the next task. This isn’t an inherently poor concept, however most puzzles in Prime demand the acquisition of an item that you’re unlikely to have obtained at that point in the game, mandating backtracking to retrieve said item to bypass the gate only to then be immediately gatekept by another unretrieved item! This scenario is ever-present throughout an average playthrough of Prime, with items uncovered in the second half being conveniently scattered at great distances between each other following the otherwise butter smooth pacing of the game’s first half - this only serves to inflate the runtime beyond what was necessary. Generally, environmental traversal is further worsened by the sluggish movement speed Samus seems to travel at in this game (this is an exception if you know scan dashing - a technique most newcomers and casual gamers would be unaware of).
As aforementioned, Super Metroid did take a similar approach in how it designed its world layout, and does frequently require backtracking for certain items if played linearly. However, one thing that draws a major divide between Super and Prime is that Super is much more open-ended - speedrunners can defeat Phantoon even before obtaining the Gravity Suit, whereas in Prime Samus needs her entire arsenal to even access the Impact Crater without glitches. Super also does have the reduced drawbacks of being a 2D platformer with a run button, as well as less connecting tunnels between every area compared to Prime. Most crucially, however, is that most doors in Super only require regular shots to unlock them after using the required weapon on them the first time - this is not included in Prime, forcing players to constantly swap awkwardly between beams while backtracking for hidden items.
Another glancing difference between the progression flow of Metroid Prime and Super Metroid can be observed in terms of how they handle endgame enemies - in Super, players are rewarded for deep progression into the game with strong weapons such as the Plasma Beam and the Screw Attack, which instantly trivialise most common enemies that had previously troubled them throughout their travels on the planet. This is a trend that future games opt to emulate, and often the gratifying satisfaction of steamrollering past what once were annoying obstacles empowers the player as they near the climactic finale of their journey.
In a puzzling design choice, however, Prime opts to go in the opposite direction - enemies introduced later into the game are much more substantial in hit points, with most of them requiring several charged attacks to destroy, and with a number of these encounters being mandatory fight sequences. From a narrative perspective, this makes sense - keen observers of the scan logs in research facilities reveal the Space Pirates are learning to adapt to Samus’ numerous weaponry by enhancing their armor’s resistance towards most of her beams. The fact that they are capable of learning is frankly terrifying and adds to the abnormality of your presence in this hostile environment and leaves you feeling encased in a grueling, bitter fight. Unfortunately, in an ironic twist, their armor has a singular weakness - the beams which share the same colour as the pirates themselves. This results in a very clunky and arbitrary combat mechanism, where players have to once again clumsily flip-flop between different beam configurations to defeat these colour-coded pirates. Additionally, their absurd ability to tank hits, further hampered by the lock-on reticle feeling more like an incredibly rough approximation than a guaranteed hit, makes these fights unnecessarily tedious and much worse, boring. The same can unfortunately be said about the Chozo Ghosts, which despite being a stellar setpiece when first discovered, only serve as another fancy roadblock that’s fortunately rather easy to ghost past (haha).
These aforementioned issues seem much more bizarre when viewing the narrative of Prime’s story as a whole - upon landing in Tallon IV Samus is intentionally heavily nerfed following the tutorial, serving as an effective incentive to motivate players into regaining their lost abilities and storm through this foreign planet quicker. Plopping more challenging enemies runs contrary to the usual narrative Metroid games usually follow, and leaves a conflictive bottleneck in terms of player empowerment by leaving them just as helpless as they were at the beginning, despite being arguably more powerful than before they set foot on the planet!
All this culminates in an endgame scavenger hunt that while on paper is an intriguing premise - a trek throughout previously explored caverns and ruins in search of 12 missing artifacts sounds incredibly fun! Rooms that were previously written off as trivial are suddenly given renewed purpose, and it is up to the player to solve the puzzles enlisted at the Temple to find these cleverly hidden pieces. I’ll be the first to admit that I enjoyed the Chozo Artifact searching. What I very obviously didn’t enjoy, however, was the mind-numbingly tedium of backtracking through unchanged rooms just to reach these specific artifacts. The slowness of your movement, the frequency of long, empty hallways, the repetitive and frustrating enemies, combined with all the previous backtracking you already had to do unless you discovered the Artifact Temple early (which I fortunately avoided because I’m a curious bastard who opens every door I can possibly open first chance) and have to return to it to obtain the second half of the clues which, why, just why, results in the pacing of Metroid Prime coming to a screeching halt towards its climax, which is subsequently followed by an arduous, sluggish crawl inch-by-inch across the finish line. Obviously, this does not have great forebodings on my perception of Metroid Prime.
Nevertheless, it cannot be understated the positive outlook that this game provided, which revitalised public interest in the Metroid series - Metroid Prime, alongside the release of the (much better title) Fusion that same year, proved to be a watershed moment in its long history, resulting in two further sequels being released before an Other M brought the whole brigade down in an embarrassing heap of flames. It still remains a fantastic case study into how detailed visuals and appropriate sound mixing can enhance the atmosphere of a video game environment, and provide maximum immersion into the wondrous boundaries of Metroid’s nuanced environmental storytelling.
Despite this, it should also serve as a warning sign of how poor design implementations can likewise shatter that immersion and disrupt the pacing of an otherwise brilliant game.
Final score: 7/10
Focus: Metroid Prime’s second half and its pace-breaking issues.
In Metroid games, atmosphere is paramount. The fundamental ability to effortlessly immerse a player into the imaginative planets they embark upon is crucial to their success, and it’s arguably Metroid’s defining characteristic as a video game franchise. Much like its predecessors, Prime succeeds in crafting a captivating ambience that convincingly places the player in the boots of Samus through unmatched realism in both its audio and visual design. This much should be undisputed - the amount of detail encoded into the various lifeforms of Tallon IV should not be overlooked, with every room richly constructed with detailed lighting and natural sonorousness to make them feel like genuine articles. The implementation of a first-person perspective and by extension the scan visor further amplifies the scale of Prime’s scope, literally allowing players to view the world from Samus perspective and unravel the narrative surrounding the world at the same pace she does. As a nice additional bonus, the visor also takes into account minor changes in Samus’ POV - fog can cause Samus’ vision to become clouded, and bright flashes allow players a brief glimpse into her eyes. Overall, Metroid Prime is inarguably a masterclass in terms of how it pushes the technical boundaries of its audio-visual presentation, certainly one of the most beautiful looking games, even today. Given how rushed Prime’s development appeared to be, this is nothing short of a miracle.
What isn’t a miracle, however, is Metroid Prime’s unfortunate pacing problems that distills the illusion of immersion.
Metroid Prime takes a puzzle box-esque approach to its level design, much akin to the likes of Super Metroid before it, fashioning every area as their own self-contained environment which revolves around a particular puzzle or platforming challenge players must solve in order to progress to the next task. This isn’t an inherently poor concept, however most puzzles in Prime demand the acquisition of an item that you’re unlikely to have obtained at that point in the game, mandating backtracking to retrieve said item to bypass the gate only to then be immediately gatekept by another unretrieved item! This scenario is ever-present throughout an average playthrough of Prime, with items uncovered in the second half being conveniently scattered at great distances between each other following the otherwise butter smooth pacing of the game’s first half - this only serves to inflate the runtime beyond what was necessary. Generally, environmental traversal is further worsened by the sluggish movement speed Samus seems to travel at in this game (this is an exception if you know scan dashing - a technique most newcomers and casual gamers would be unaware of).
As aforementioned, Super Metroid did take a similar approach in how it designed its world layout, and does frequently require backtracking for certain items if played linearly. However, one thing that draws a major divide between Super and Prime is that Super is much more open-ended - speedrunners can defeat Phantoon even before obtaining the Gravity Suit, whereas in Prime Samus needs her entire arsenal to even access the Impact Crater without glitches. Super also does have the reduced drawbacks of being a 2D platformer with a run button, as well as less connecting tunnels between every area compared to Prime. Most crucially, however, is that most doors in Super only require regular shots to unlock them after using the required weapon on them the first time - this is not included in Prime, forcing players to constantly swap awkwardly between beams while backtracking for hidden items.
Another glancing difference between the progression flow of Metroid Prime and Super Metroid can be observed in terms of how they handle endgame enemies - in Super, players are rewarded for deep progression into the game with strong weapons such as the Plasma Beam and the Screw Attack, which instantly trivialise most common enemies that had previously troubled them throughout their travels on the planet. This is a trend that future games opt to emulate, and often the gratifying satisfaction of steamrollering past what once were annoying obstacles empowers the player as they near the climactic finale of their journey.
In a puzzling design choice, however, Prime opts to go in the opposite direction - enemies introduced later into the game are much more substantial in hit points, with most of them requiring several charged attacks to destroy, and with a number of these encounters being mandatory fight sequences. From a narrative perspective, this makes sense - keen observers of the scan logs in research facilities reveal the Space Pirates are learning to adapt to Samus’ numerous weaponry by enhancing their armor’s resistance towards most of her beams. The fact that they are capable of learning is frankly terrifying and adds to the abnormality of your presence in this hostile environment and leaves you feeling encased in a grueling, bitter fight. Unfortunately, in an ironic twist, their armor has a singular weakness - the beams which share the same colour as the pirates themselves. This results in a very clunky and arbitrary combat mechanism, where players have to once again clumsily flip-flop between different beam configurations to defeat these colour-coded pirates. Additionally, their absurd ability to tank hits, further hampered by the lock-on reticle feeling more like an incredibly rough approximation than a guaranteed hit, makes these fights unnecessarily tedious and much worse, boring. The same can unfortunately be said about the Chozo Ghosts, which despite being a stellar setpiece when first discovered, only serve as another fancy roadblock that’s fortunately rather easy to ghost past (haha).
These aforementioned issues seem much more bizarre when viewing the narrative of Prime’s story as a whole - upon landing in Tallon IV Samus is intentionally heavily nerfed following the tutorial, serving as an effective incentive to motivate players into regaining their lost abilities and storm through this foreign planet quicker. Plopping more challenging enemies runs contrary to the usual narrative Metroid games usually follow, and leaves a conflictive bottleneck in terms of player empowerment by leaving them just as helpless as they were at the beginning, despite being arguably more powerful than before they set foot on the planet!
All this culminates in an endgame scavenger hunt that while on paper is an intriguing premise - a trek throughout previously explored caverns and ruins in search of 12 missing artifacts sounds incredibly fun! Rooms that were previously written off as trivial are suddenly given renewed purpose, and it is up to the player to solve the puzzles enlisted at the Temple to find these cleverly hidden pieces. I’ll be the first to admit that I enjoyed the Chozo Artifact searching. What I very obviously didn’t enjoy, however, was the mind-numbingly tedium of backtracking through unchanged rooms just to reach these specific artifacts. The slowness of your movement, the frequency of long, empty hallways, the repetitive and frustrating enemies, combined with all the previous backtracking you already had to do unless you discovered the Artifact Temple early (which I fortunately avoided because I’m a curious bastard who opens every door I can possibly open first chance) and have to return to it to obtain the second half of the clues which, why, just why, results in the pacing of Metroid Prime coming to a screeching halt towards its climax, which is subsequently followed by an arduous, sluggish crawl inch-by-inch across the finish line. Obviously, this does not have great forebodings on my perception of Metroid Prime.
Nevertheless, it cannot be understated the positive outlook that this game provided, which revitalised public interest in the Metroid series - Metroid Prime, alongside the release of the (much better title) Fusion that same year, proved to be a watershed moment in its long history, resulting in two further sequels being released before an Other M brought the whole brigade down in an embarrassing heap of flames. It still remains a fantastic case study into how detailed visuals and appropriate sound mixing can enhance the atmosphere of a video game environment, and provide maximum immersion into the wondrous boundaries of Metroid’s nuanced environmental storytelling.
Despite this, it should also serve as a warning sign of how poor design implementations can likewise shatter that immersion and disrupt the pacing of an otherwise brilliant game.
Final score: 7/10
Focus: Metroid Prime’s second half and its pace-breaking issues.
You ever end up writing a 3000 word rant on your biggest ever gaming disappointment?
It's August 19th, 2019. My last summer break before I go to high school.
My 15th birthday.
It was an ok day. Some trouble arised and I wasn't able to go to my grandpa's house with some friends like we were planning to, and as such I just spent the day at home with some family members coming over after dinner, nothing special (to the point where some old messages might lead me to believe something bad might've made me think it was my worst birthday ever? Honestly I can't remember, and it doesn't matter).
That is, until around 11PM. While I wasn't aware, gamescom was also taking place at around the same time, and one of the projects announced there would go on to impact me in a way nothing else has since.
As I was wiping out my phone, a youtube notification popped in. "Kerbal Space Program 2 Cinematic Announcement Trailer". I was ecstatic, to say the least. Literally the best birthday gift that I, someone who has always been a bit of a space nerd, at the time thought I had and would ever have. A sequel to one of my little gaming obsessions. A sequel with all the features I could ever want! Colonies? Interstellar travel? MULTIPLAYER? All out of the box? Quite literally the game of my dreams, and it's releasing NEXT YEAR? Holy cow that is amazing!...
3 years, 6 months, and 6 days later. It's February 24th, 2023. I'm now 18 years old, and the second semester of college (and what would then be the lowest period of my entire life up until the moment I'm writing this) had just begun, and as I'm watching the game of 15 year old me's dreams release in real time in early access, what had seem inevitable to me since the system specs had been released is now actually happening.
If you've heard even a single thing about it, you probably know. It's a mess. Hell I'll even say that "mess" is downplaying it. It was awful, actually horrendous. Probably the worst release of an early access game I've ever seen. Content wise? Worse than KSP1 in its beta stage almost a decade earlier. Performance wise? You might as well just break into actual NASA to get one of their supercomputers and even THAT probably wouldn't be able to break 60 fps with a 1000+ part ship. Stability/bug wise? Literally hundreds of bugs found right at release. From locations done by mesh just spawning in completely random locations near the ship, to clipping through the ground constantly, to wings literally falling off planes when spawning into the most noodliest rockets known to man. To the maneuver creator barely working, from orbits just... decaying over time??? I don't think I need to keep spewing hyperbole here, it was truly a mess.
And even ignoring the issues that I just listed given that admittedly those can be solved, what was there was just, very underwhelming? Take the art direction for example, it is genuinely baffling. Everything is way too damn reflective. The parts look like they're made of plastic. The kerbals themselves look more Minionized than ever before. The UI looks hideous and near unreadable (I get it it's supposed to emulate how modern cockpits look, but I think they just took the aesthetic without actually knowing why it is that way? Like the text is all pixelated because it's just cheaper to have low pixel count displays on those, that shit is NOT meant to be on an actual video game UI, and this is just one aspect of it). I guess shit like the clouds and the atmospheric scatter look alright? But I reckon even they know KSP1 mods did it better because they literally hired a modder that was doing a volumetric clouds mod for KSP1. What a shock. And god don't even get me started on the Kurzgesagt-lite tutorial videos like god I'll have plenty to say about the tutorials later trust me.
Needless to say, it was all very disappointing. Especially for me, as up until the system specs were released I was literally IN THE FRONTLINES defending the team from every naysayer, and deflecting every red flag thrown at me left and right with what I can only describe now as excuses. "Oh the Take2 takeover was mostly the fault of Star Theory's management! Most of the dev team still went through to the new team!", "Oh the game getting delayed more and more is a good thing! It's just COVID that messed everything up! (Even though by this point most video game companies have already sorted their shit together)", "Oh the game will not actually run this awful at launch! It's just the Unity Debug Mode that runs worse!". All excuses that I remember spewing to this day. And even after the system specs were released, even after the mess of the launch, I was still willing to give the game a chance, albeit now with cautious optimism instead of blind defending, but even that didn't last very long.
9 months and 27 days later. It's December 20th, 2023. I'm now 19 years old, writing this paragraph in the college hall as I wait for the last class of this semester, as the impending deadline at the beginning of January for the main project and the following exams loom over. I'm a different man. I've played a lot of games. I've read some VNs that might've affected me emotionally in ways they had no right to do. Life could be better but... heh, it also could be worse. Even with all the new worries and things I have to think about, despite all the times I've told myself I would move on from this game, I just... cannot. It persists in my little noggin. I mean, it's no wonder I've decided to write this now, given that the For Science update just released, and like, am I supposed to think it's good?
Like, I haven't played it. Even with all the alleged performance improvements and the nice graphs their twitter account shared, I still doubt the game would break 60 at the lowest settings, so why even bother trying? And as I see ksp youtubers celebrating this update like the greatest thing to ever happen since sliced bread, I can't stop thinking to myself... is the bar that low?
Like, as far as I am aware the update is just... heating that as far as I am aware is worse than it was in KSP1 in certain key aspects (like visually for example, the heating effects look hideous), a "story mode" that is just the missions in the original career mode without the testing part missions and with """"""""""funny"""""""""" dialogue, and a progression system that is just... what the original's was 10 years ago (oh, but now some experiments take time! truly revolutionary and not at all a minor feature of many in the Kerbalism mod of the original, truly impressive Intercept).
And yes, there were a ton of bug fixes and optimization updates too, but there were also allegedly some regressions regarding other issues and... I'm gonna be for real, how much more can this game even BE further optimized?
One of the reasons I stopped defending this game at all is when I found out about something truly shocking, at least for me. One of the main appeals this game as a concept had was the fact that, well, it was an entirely new game! New game then, means new codebase, and if you know anything about the first KSP game, then you know a complete rewrite of the codebase was not only expected, but necessary for this game to run well, let alone handle multiplayer. HOWEVER, THAT WAS NOT THE CASE! As it turns out, data mining an Unity game is piss easy, and everyone quickly found out most of the codebase for the backend stuff was taken straight from a beta version of KSP1 (NOT EVEN THE MOST RECENT VERSION), so I guess this new game is at the end of the day just a glorified KSP1 mod, OOPS! A decision that was surely made at the time to cut cost on hiring actual engineers, has now backfired immensely given that now whoever poor bastard is working on this game over at Intercept has to worry about a decade of tech debt on a codebase made by a guy who wasn't even a programmer by trade at the time, fucking amazing! Amazing gambit sir Nate! Like are we seriously expecting the game that can barely handle a current late game save file at an acceptable frame rate (given a review from a KSP youtuber that I watched that got the new update early) will be able to handle shit that will be expected in a late game save of the game in its planned final state like:
- A lot of colonies running at the same time with multiple logistics paths of resources being transported left and right.
- A ton of interstellar mother ships which will probably have THOUSANDS OF PARTS EACH, WITH EACH PART BEING SIMULATED INDIVIDUALLY ALL THE TIME because yea thats a thing that totally should've been carried over from the first game (and not even mentioning that at the moment every single ship is being fully simulated at the same time regardless of what you're focusing on)
- And on top of all that, MULTIPLAYER, because yea THIS GAME, THAT IS BUILT ON TOP OF A CODEBASE THAT IS INCAPABLE TO HANDLE SUCH THING WITHOUT DOING A REALLY HACKY JOB, IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE MULTIPLAYER REMEMBER???
God what a fucking mess. And like I keep coming back to how they kept the old code base from the og game because... that's just a mentality that permeates throughout the entire game! Remember the noodly rockets bug I mentioned earlier? Well I LIED because it wasn't a bug actually it WAS A FEATURE. Local genius Nate Simpson apparently thought that the noodly rockets of the original game were... part of its identity!! So they kept that! And made it even worse! Together with a bunch of other flaws that really shouldn't have been in this brand new shiny game!! INCREDIBLE!!!
It's like these people are so scared of doing an actual sequel that they instead just default to doing everything the way the old game did, although maybe that's more due to laziness and lack of actual direction and not them just loving the og game that much. And the stuff they change/add... isn't that good either!!! Like the UI, forget how it looks, it's just so clunky and cluttered. Like what was wrong with the part info window? Why does everything need to be locked in a fucking list now that I have to scroll through instead of being able to organize everything the way I want across the screen? Why is the navball in a corner??? Isn't one of the big principles of UI/UX design that the most important elements always need to be at the center of the screen? If you wanted to make space to make it easier to see the rocket you could've just put it slightly to the side but still at the center! Why is the SAS assist command this ugly ass circle with a 3d model representation of your ship's orientation??? I already know what these symbols mean! Put these on a list that takes up less space like in the original! And if someone doesn't know what those symbols mean, then find a better way to do so because honestly i don't see how the way they've done it helps either. It's a goddamn mess.
And the priorities are just so all over the place. Even disregarding the fact that this game was very clearly not meant to be released in Early Access given that they've been working on every feature at the same time until close to launch instead of just building a good foundation first??? There's just so many... baffling decisions. Why are there so many simple QOL features missing? Why did we have to wait so long for a TWR reader in the VAB even though, as far as I am aware, that's literally something you can do in a spreadsheet in like 5 minutes. Or god the tutorials... why are there even tutorials in this early access release??? You know, the period where anything can change at any moment's notice??? Why not do those close to the full launch when everything is already set in stone?? Why waste resources on animations you might not even use by the time the game is feature complete??? And regarding the tutorials themselves they just suck. Disregarding the annoying ass YT Kids sounding narrator they are literally just .mp4's followed by the KSP1 tutorials again. No innovation, might as well just watch a Scott Manley video and learn the game that way instead (which some dudes from the PR team have LITERALLY SAID TO DO WHEN PEOPLE WERE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE TUTORIALS like god have I already mentioned how bad their PR team was throughout this entire ordeal? Genuinely such a lack of professionalism that I rather not get into it). You literally have the opportunity to do... idk?? Cool interactive lectures on physics concepts? You know?? Taking advantage of the fact that this is a VIDEO GAME?? But nah youtube videos have worked up until now let's just do that inste- GOD THIS GAME SUCKS THIS GAME REALLY SUCKS SO MUC
...ok I guess I could talk about stuff I like?? Uhhhh the sound design in general is excellent, props for that. Uhhhh the planets look nice? Not as good looking as some mods I've seen of the original but you know, they still look alright. And I guess being able to build multiple ships in the same workspace regardless of orientation is a good QOL concept? Wish it worked better tho...
... Look, I don't like to be negative, just look at my rating graph in my profile. Like god I literally gave UDG a 6/10 despite the fact that that game by all accounts sucks really fucking bad. Whenever I hate, I'm most likely just being deeply ironic at the main discord server I talk in, it's just not my thing to do unironically most of the time.
So... Why am I even giving more energy towards this game than seemingly its entire management team did? Why am I even bothering writing this 3000 word review about a game in a series that only I care about in all the friend circles I frequent? How many likes is this even gonna get? Five? If that?...
I guess it just comes down to what I said in the beginning. Even after this long, the space nerd kid still inside of me still wants... well not this game but the idea of this game to come to fruition. I want to be able to build giant complexes in distant moons. Building giant motherships which part towards far away stars, as I awe at both the immensity of the cosmos, and the beauty of the small specks floating through its milky vastness of nothing. For some people space might be frightening, but for me it's not. For me this setting itches that primordial instinct of mine that urges me to go out, find things, explore the unseen, and that makes me both afraid, and utterly attracted by the unknown. It's something I really wished to have but, this game ain't it. And I know about games like Outer Wilds and No Man's Sky that are kinda like that (if anyone uses NMS as a counter argument towards my sentiment that KSP2 has no future I'm crushing your skull with my bare hands btw), but... I guess there is simply nothing quite like Kerbal Space Program... I do still need to play those games at some point tho lmao.
Well, I guess there's that, if any aspiring dev teams want to make a name for themselves, maybe make the coop aerospace sim everyone wants! If you start now, maybe you'll be able to announce it in the same week as the inevitable apology from Nate about how multiplayer just "aint possible" and how they're instead just releasing the game as is (aka, soft canceling it and moving on to another fandom to grift).
And to any low level Intercept Games developer that just read through this, I really am sorry. I am sorry that you probably have to tolerate a bunch of passionless, directionless managers as you try to salvage whatever you can of this mess. In a way this is really what's wrong with the current industry. Not predatory microtransactions or buggy early access releases. Nah those are just symptoms. What is truly wrong is how much of this industry is led by people that just do not care for this medium, and only care about filling their pockets while the low level developers pull 24 hour shifts in order to pull yet another broken mess through the finish line. But while I could continue to wax poetic about the systematic problems of capitalism, I guess that's a bit out of the scope of this review.
I think that's everything I have to say about what is undoubtedly my least favorite game of all time, and I really hope I don't need to talk about it ever again (unless they somehow manage to turn this ship over, which as I elaborated, I don't think they will). May y'all have a pleasant day, and to end this review, and I mean this completely sincerely...
Fuck off Nate Simpson
It's August 19th, 2019. My last summer break before I go to high school.
My 15th birthday.
It was an ok day. Some trouble arised and I wasn't able to go to my grandpa's house with some friends like we were planning to, and as such I just spent the day at home with some family members coming over after dinner, nothing special (to the point where some old messages might lead me to believe something bad might've made me think it was my worst birthday ever? Honestly I can't remember, and it doesn't matter).
That is, until around 11PM. While I wasn't aware, gamescom was also taking place at around the same time, and one of the projects announced there would go on to impact me in a way nothing else has since.
As I was wiping out my phone, a youtube notification popped in. "Kerbal Space Program 2 Cinematic Announcement Trailer". I was ecstatic, to say the least. Literally the best birthday gift that I, someone who has always been a bit of a space nerd, at the time thought I had and would ever have. A sequel to one of my little gaming obsessions. A sequel with all the features I could ever want! Colonies? Interstellar travel? MULTIPLAYER? All out of the box? Quite literally the game of my dreams, and it's releasing NEXT YEAR? Holy cow that is amazing!...
3 years, 6 months, and 6 days later. It's February 24th, 2023. I'm now 18 years old, and the second semester of college (and what would then be the lowest period of my entire life up until the moment I'm writing this) had just begun, and as I'm watching the game of 15 year old me's dreams release in real time in early access, what had seem inevitable to me since the system specs had been released is now actually happening.
If you've heard even a single thing about it, you probably know. It's a mess. Hell I'll even say that "mess" is downplaying it. It was awful, actually horrendous. Probably the worst release of an early access game I've ever seen. Content wise? Worse than KSP1 in its beta stage almost a decade earlier. Performance wise? You might as well just break into actual NASA to get one of their supercomputers and even THAT probably wouldn't be able to break 60 fps with a 1000+ part ship. Stability/bug wise? Literally hundreds of bugs found right at release. From locations done by mesh just spawning in completely random locations near the ship, to clipping through the ground constantly, to wings literally falling off planes when spawning into the most noodliest rockets known to man. To the maneuver creator barely working, from orbits just... decaying over time??? I don't think I need to keep spewing hyperbole here, it was truly a mess.
And even ignoring the issues that I just listed given that admittedly those can be solved, what was there was just, very underwhelming? Take the art direction for example, it is genuinely baffling. Everything is way too damn reflective. The parts look like they're made of plastic. The kerbals themselves look more Minionized than ever before. The UI looks hideous and near unreadable (I get it it's supposed to emulate how modern cockpits look, but I think they just took the aesthetic without actually knowing why it is that way? Like the text is all pixelated because it's just cheaper to have low pixel count displays on those, that shit is NOT meant to be on an actual video game UI, and this is just one aspect of it). I guess shit like the clouds and the atmospheric scatter look alright? But I reckon even they know KSP1 mods did it better because they literally hired a modder that was doing a volumetric clouds mod for KSP1. What a shock. And god don't even get me started on the Kurzgesagt-lite tutorial videos like god I'll have plenty to say about the tutorials later trust me.
Needless to say, it was all very disappointing. Especially for me, as up until the system specs were released I was literally IN THE FRONTLINES defending the team from every naysayer, and deflecting every red flag thrown at me left and right with what I can only describe now as excuses. "Oh the Take2 takeover was mostly the fault of Star Theory's management! Most of the dev team still went through to the new team!", "Oh the game getting delayed more and more is a good thing! It's just COVID that messed everything up! (Even though by this point most video game companies have already sorted their shit together)", "Oh the game will not actually run this awful at launch! It's just the Unity Debug Mode that runs worse!". All excuses that I remember spewing to this day. And even after the system specs were released, even after the mess of the launch, I was still willing to give the game a chance, albeit now with cautious optimism instead of blind defending, but even that didn't last very long.
9 months and 27 days later. It's December 20th, 2023. I'm now 19 years old, writing this paragraph in the college hall as I wait for the last class of this semester, as the impending deadline at the beginning of January for the main project and the following exams loom over. I'm a different man. I've played a lot of games. I've read some VNs that might've affected me emotionally in ways they had no right to do. Life could be better but... heh, it also could be worse. Even with all the new worries and things I have to think about, despite all the times I've told myself I would move on from this game, I just... cannot. It persists in my little noggin. I mean, it's no wonder I've decided to write this now, given that the For Science update just released, and like, am I supposed to think it's good?
Like, I haven't played it. Even with all the alleged performance improvements and the nice graphs their twitter account shared, I still doubt the game would break 60 at the lowest settings, so why even bother trying? And as I see ksp youtubers celebrating this update like the greatest thing to ever happen since sliced bread, I can't stop thinking to myself... is the bar that low?
Like, as far as I am aware the update is just... heating that as far as I am aware is worse than it was in KSP1 in certain key aspects (like visually for example, the heating effects look hideous), a "story mode" that is just the missions in the original career mode without the testing part missions and with """"""""""funny"""""""""" dialogue, and a progression system that is just... what the original's was 10 years ago (oh, but now some experiments take time! truly revolutionary and not at all a minor feature of many in the Kerbalism mod of the original, truly impressive Intercept).
And yes, there were a ton of bug fixes and optimization updates too, but there were also allegedly some regressions regarding other issues and... I'm gonna be for real, how much more can this game even BE further optimized?
One of the reasons I stopped defending this game at all is when I found out about something truly shocking, at least for me. One of the main appeals this game as a concept had was the fact that, well, it was an entirely new game! New game then, means new codebase, and if you know anything about the first KSP game, then you know a complete rewrite of the codebase was not only expected, but necessary for this game to run well, let alone handle multiplayer. HOWEVER, THAT WAS NOT THE CASE! As it turns out, data mining an Unity game is piss easy, and everyone quickly found out most of the codebase for the backend stuff was taken straight from a beta version of KSP1 (NOT EVEN THE MOST RECENT VERSION), so I guess this new game is at the end of the day just a glorified KSP1 mod, OOPS! A decision that was surely made at the time to cut cost on hiring actual engineers, has now backfired immensely given that now whoever poor bastard is working on this game over at Intercept has to worry about a decade of tech debt on a codebase made by a guy who wasn't even a programmer by trade at the time, fucking amazing! Amazing gambit sir Nate! Like are we seriously expecting the game that can barely handle a current late game save file at an acceptable frame rate (given a review from a KSP youtuber that I watched that got the new update early) will be able to handle shit that will be expected in a late game save of the game in its planned final state like:
- A lot of colonies running at the same time with multiple logistics paths of resources being transported left and right.
- A ton of interstellar mother ships which will probably have THOUSANDS OF PARTS EACH, WITH EACH PART BEING SIMULATED INDIVIDUALLY ALL THE TIME because yea thats a thing that totally should've been carried over from the first game (and not even mentioning that at the moment every single ship is being fully simulated at the same time regardless of what you're focusing on)
- And on top of all that, MULTIPLAYER, because yea THIS GAME, THAT IS BUILT ON TOP OF A CODEBASE THAT IS INCAPABLE TO HANDLE SUCH THING WITHOUT DOING A REALLY HACKY JOB, IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE MULTIPLAYER REMEMBER???
God what a fucking mess. And like I keep coming back to how they kept the old code base from the og game because... that's just a mentality that permeates throughout the entire game! Remember the noodly rockets bug I mentioned earlier? Well I LIED because it wasn't a bug actually it WAS A FEATURE. Local genius Nate Simpson apparently thought that the noodly rockets of the original game were... part of its identity!! So they kept that! And made it even worse! Together with a bunch of other flaws that really shouldn't have been in this brand new shiny game!! INCREDIBLE!!!
It's like these people are so scared of doing an actual sequel that they instead just default to doing everything the way the old game did, although maybe that's more due to laziness and lack of actual direction and not them just loving the og game that much. And the stuff they change/add... isn't that good either!!! Like the UI, forget how it looks, it's just so clunky and cluttered. Like what was wrong with the part info window? Why does everything need to be locked in a fucking list now that I have to scroll through instead of being able to organize everything the way I want across the screen? Why is the navball in a corner??? Isn't one of the big principles of UI/UX design that the most important elements always need to be at the center of the screen? If you wanted to make space to make it easier to see the rocket you could've just put it slightly to the side but still at the center! Why is the SAS assist command this ugly ass circle with a 3d model representation of your ship's orientation??? I already know what these symbols mean! Put these on a list that takes up less space like in the original! And if someone doesn't know what those symbols mean, then find a better way to do so because honestly i don't see how the way they've done it helps either. It's a goddamn mess.
And the priorities are just so all over the place. Even disregarding the fact that this game was very clearly not meant to be released in Early Access given that they've been working on every feature at the same time until close to launch instead of just building a good foundation first??? There's just so many... baffling decisions. Why are there so many simple QOL features missing? Why did we have to wait so long for a TWR reader in the VAB even though, as far as I am aware, that's literally something you can do in a spreadsheet in like 5 minutes. Or god the tutorials... why are there even tutorials in this early access release??? You know, the period where anything can change at any moment's notice??? Why not do those close to the full launch when everything is already set in stone?? Why waste resources on animations you might not even use by the time the game is feature complete??? And regarding the tutorials themselves they just suck. Disregarding the annoying ass YT Kids sounding narrator they are literally just .mp4's followed by the KSP1 tutorials again. No innovation, might as well just watch a Scott Manley video and learn the game that way instead (which some dudes from the PR team have LITERALLY SAID TO DO WHEN PEOPLE WERE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE TUTORIALS like god have I already mentioned how bad their PR team was throughout this entire ordeal? Genuinely such a lack of professionalism that I rather not get into it). You literally have the opportunity to do... idk?? Cool interactive lectures on physics concepts? You know?? Taking advantage of the fact that this is a VIDEO GAME?? But nah youtube videos have worked up until now let's just do that inste- GOD THIS GAME SUCKS THIS GAME REALLY SUCKS SO MUC
...ok I guess I could talk about stuff I like?? Uhhhh the sound design in general is excellent, props for that. Uhhhh the planets look nice? Not as good looking as some mods I've seen of the original but you know, they still look alright. And I guess being able to build multiple ships in the same workspace regardless of orientation is a good QOL concept? Wish it worked better tho...
... Look, I don't like to be negative, just look at my rating graph in my profile. Like god I literally gave UDG a 6/10 despite the fact that that game by all accounts sucks really fucking bad. Whenever I hate, I'm most likely just being deeply ironic at the main discord server I talk in, it's just not my thing to do unironically most of the time.
So... Why am I even giving more energy towards this game than seemingly its entire management team did? Why am I even bothering writing this 3000 word review about a game in a series that only I care about in all the friend circles I frequent? How many likes is this even gonna get? Five? If that?...
I guess it just comes down to what I said in the beginning. Even after this long, the space nerd kid still inside of me still wants... well not this game but the idea of this game to come to fruition. I want to be able to build giant complexes in distant moons. Building giant motherships which part towards far away stars, as I awe at both the immensity of the cosmos, and the beauty of the small specks floating through its milky vastness of nothing. For some people space might be frightening, but for me it's not. For me this setting itches that primordial instinct of mine that urges me to go out, find things, explore the unseen, and that makes me both afraid, and utterly attracted by the unknown. It's something I really wished to have but, this game ain't it. And I know about games like Outer Wilds and No Man's Sky that are kinda like that (if anyone uses NMS as a counter argument towards my sentiment that KSP2 has no future I'm crushing your skull with my bare hands btw), but... I guess there is simply nothing quite like Kerbal Space Program... I do still need to play those games at some point tho lmao.
Well, I guess there's that, if any aspiring dev teams want to make a name for themselves, maybe make the coop aerospace sim everyone wants! If you start now, maybe you'll be able to announce it in the same week as the inevitable apology from Nate about how multiplayer just "aint possible" and how they're instead just releasing the game as is (aka, soft canceling it and moving on to another fandom to grift).
And to any low level Intercept Games developer that just read through this, I really am sorry. I am sorry that you probably have to tolerate a bunch of passionless, directionless managers as you try to salvage whatever you can of this mess. In a way this is really what's wrong with the current industry. Not predatory microtransactions or buggy early access releases. Nah those are just symptoms. What is truly wrong is how much of this industry is led by people that just do not care for this medium, and only care about filling their pockets while the low level developers pull 24 hour shifts in order to pull yet another broken mess through the finish line. But while I could continue to wax poetic about the systematic problems of capitalism, I guess that's a bit out of the scope of this review.
I think that's everything I have to say about what is undoubtedly my least favorite game of all time, and I really hope I don't need to talk about it ever again (unless they somehow manage to turn this ship over, which as I elaborated, I don't think they will). May y'all have a pleasant day, and to end this review, and I mean this completely sincerely...
Fuck off Nate Simpson
