Technical limitations aside, a lot of the later missions seems to be more designed solely for the sake of being hard rather than being fun, this, along with the lack of checkpoints makes some parts of the game really annoying. A lot of times I felt it was more fun to search for hidden packages and mess around than doing the missions themselves.

But on the good side, I think Claude is great. And the whole edgy aesthetic plus having a cool drum'n'bass radio makes this game still worth experiencing, at least a bit. There is very little story, but I like how the game wraps up everything and every cutscene is incredibly well directed considering its a 2001 game.

Good thing Pogo has a Banana Cannon. Those nasty scientists deserve to die!

Pretty fun 3d platformer imo. The level design manages to have both that tight feeling of more linear 3d plats and have a decent amount of exploration as the levels are designed in a way you must collect objects to unlock doors in order to explore further. You play as one of these little kids of the art, they feel somewhat weak and have a very limited moveset as the game revolves around getting timed power ups that both expand your moveset allowing you to reach other places and also utterly destroy the enemies with one-hit kill magic, its simple, but it feels really fun.

A few annoyances are the extremely hidden placement of a few late dream keys (which are obligatory to progress), a few boss battles are janky and I really wished they had kept that Tim Burton aesthetic for the whole game instead of stuff like a prehistoric and space worlds, but those are minor problems.

My all time favorite RPG. True, Fallout 1 is a tighter experience and has better story, but there is just so much to do in Fallout 2, not just in the sense of the amount of locations, but also in the many ways you can interact with the world. Quests are more interesting and developed and almost every interaction has multiple outcomes, and I couldn't resist but keep reloading to see what the other options offer.

The comedic tone of the game seems to bother a lot of people, but personally I really enjoyed it, the game never takes itself too seriously, but yet manages to make a consistent world of interconnected cities with their own problems and interests. And the game is really hilarious, the voiced NPCs are extremely memorable in a very unapologetic 90s way. Bethesda attempts at humor are look like made by corporate suits compared to it. Also most pop culture references that everyone complains about did fly over my head (they felt like enigmatic dead ends), only San Fran really bothered me with that Scientologist stuff and not necessarily because is random, but more because it is boring. But that is only one area and very late in the game, in a huge game, that can be made even bigger with the restoration patch (as a fan of 90s pre-rendered graphics, I personally really like the cut submarine area, the extremely old and rusty submarine looks amazing).

The best thing I can think about it is that the open world has a great sense of scale, both vertical and horizontal and traversing it feels nice. Sure, its empty, but it still manages to look better than something like Serious Sam 4. Everything else is really uninspired though, the missions are extremely repetitive: destroy the generators, protect stuff or deliver npc. Even the main missions didn't feel much better and are too few and locked behind the generic stuff anyway. Couldn't bother finishing it.

I actually really like it despite its flaws, love its nice Conan-esque style(principally beautiful in the arcade version) with stages that never drag too much, its enemies have an aggressive AI that likes to rush at you(instead of hiding behind the screen like in many beat em ups) or surround you(and some enemies will even Vegeta-style watch its underlings fight you before battling), there are cool dragon mounts and the overall characters moves, while simple, don't feel as stiff as other early beat em ups like SoR1.

The Mega Drive version also has an extra stage, that is quite fun as there is plenty of opportunity to push the enemies off the cliff, but the new final boss is extremely unfair.