Nintendo's Halo CE

There are only a few games I've played that perfectly capture the feeling of loneliness, this is one of them. Similar to Halo CE, Prime just masters the atmosphere. For pretty much the whole playthrough I didn't know what the fuck was going on or why I was where I was but damn was it a mood. The gunplay is very simple as is the platforming but exploring every piece of the planet is what sold me. I never got tired of the backtracking and frequently would stop whatever I was doing to go back to certain areas whenever I'd get new equipment just to see what it provides.

I like the idea of different beams but switching between them is a bit clunky, it's not very smooth and so when you gotta do it in comabt you're pretty vulnerable to taking damage. I also wish there was some sort of checklist like Dread where you can see how many collectibles you have left for an area just to make it a bit easier. I don't look at this as a bad thing but some of the missile upgrade locations where completely mental, even if I re-played this a dozen times I would have never found them without a guide.

I now understand the pain of the Metroid Prime 4 people

A failed Until Dawn.

Majority of the characters you play as are reused, like exact carbon copies from UD, from the white jock to the blonde bimbo to the nerdy white girl, and so on. Only this time it's impossible to like any of them. I thought the actors did a wonderful job but goddamn the writing is some of the worst I've ever seen. It's very millennial coded with humor and clichés that died in 2008. On our planet of over 5 billion, no teenager acts the way these ones do.

A new addition I despised were the quick time combat events. These thankfully happened only a few times but that was with me doing everything in my power to avoid them. At times there would be a slow motion scene where I would have to align my gun to the enemy and press the trigger to shoot them, pretty simple if it was designed properly. I somehow made it through the whole game with no deaths and this stupid gimmick killed one of my characters literally right before the ending. I failed these time events multiple times and sure that could be a skill issue but there's no disagreeing that they're glitchy, I would have a pixel perfect alignment, shoot, and it would go right through the enemy, I'd try quickly exiting and reloading but the game saves every millisecond, so now I'd be forced down a story path I shouldn't have gotten.

Story was quite alright, again it's reminiscent of Until Dawn, but with more plot holes. I found music choices hilarious. There were many instances were some dogshit unfitting alt would blast after a terrifying scene which would take anyone out of the moment, the first time it happened, I seriously thought I accidentally activated Spotify or somehow got an ad but nope, this was the artistic vision.

Graphics are very good and in retrospect I could have enjoyed this a lot more if I played it couch co-op with someone.