This is one of the most hilarious games I've played in quite a while. It was only $1 and it was damn worth it.

It really does show that indie developers and random nobodies are able to whip up something far more enjoyable and with little to no budget than a multi-billion dollar AAA corporation with hundreds of developers behind the studio.

I have played this game for a good 5-10 hours and I honestly can't get enough of it.

This is obviously a parody of Battlefield 2042 except that unlike Battlefield 2042, it's actually fun to play.

The best comparison I can make with this game is Phantom Forces from Roblox, just not as functional as that.

Unlike 2042, you can actually run this game. I play games with a low range graphics card, but despite this, I can still run the game relatively well.

It's actually well optimized which is pretty surprising to me regardless of the overly simplistic graphics.

This is a game that was made under the Unity engine, which might sound like a red alarm since engines like Unity and Unreal Engine 4 are quite infamous for many college intern bathroom projects with asset flips being sold on Steam when they should be free to play, but, this game feels like it was made by people who actually gives a shit about making a good game, or at the very least try.

Unlike Battlefield 2042, this game actually has

-No microtransactions

-ALL text chat

-Named teams like USA and Russia

-Functional gunplay mechanics

-No profanity filters

-A scoreboard with stats for every player in the lobby

-A region changer and fully working server browser

-Hell, you can even add your friends to an in-game friend list and join on them (though you have to make sure you have the same region selected as them)

The game also has voice chat, and again, this makes the experience even funnier.

You are also able to customize loadouts before you jump into a match as well. You get a total of 5 loadouts.

There are a total of 3 assault rifles
(M4A1, AK-47, FN SCAR)

One shotgun
(M3)

5 SMGs
(Vector, MX9, Uzi, P90, MP5)

3 sniper rifles
(M40A1, M107, SVD)

An RPG-7

And 4 Pistols
(Glock 17, M9, M1911, P250)


All of this adds up to a total of 17 weapons.

That's almost as many as BF2042 (the game has 22 weapons).

DICE… Seriously? Already it's a bad sign when a $1 indie game has just as many weapons as a AAA game that must have cost $100M or $200M to make.

So about the weapons, they all feel good to use. The recoil for some of the weapons are a bit high, but there is practically no bullet spread, and the hit detection, while it is wonky, is still functional.

The animations are quite well done. I especially like the reload animation for the M3 shotgun and the sound it makes when loading each shot into the chamber

Speaking of sounds, there are hitmarkers, but the sound effect is just the one ripped straight out of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2.

You thought I wouldn't notice? I know the sound of an old Modern Warfare hitmarker when I hear one. Lmao

Also the loading screens in this game are just great. Some of them made me burst out laughing. They're just meant to make fun of EA and DICE which is always appreciated.

There's also a cheeky feature that is meant to take a jab at Battlefield 2042 where you can purposely lower the frame rate and play the game at 20 FPS. That's just fucking brilliant lmfao

And there's even a mode where you can freely get into a hovercraft and fly it around like a fuckin' airplane which is meant to take yet another jab at the absolute joke of a state that 2042 is in at the moment.

It very well encapsulates the thought process behind releasing a game in a broken unfinished state, charging players full price for it, and then you have to wait 6-12 months for the patches and DLC to roll in before the game is actually in a state that is worth playing.

I like to call this the OYL Effect, or One Year Later Effect. Just like with Cyberpunk 2077.

Although, lord knows how much longer until that piece of shit is worth playing a second time.

As much as I have praised this game, there are issues I have with the game. Some minor, some major. The game is in Beta and it's only been out for less than a week so hopefully with enough support then the game will be way better.

Let's start with the weapon customization

[ 𝘼𝙏𝙏𝘼𝘾𝙃𝙈𝙀𝙉𝙏𝙎 ]

You are able to customize your guns with attachments. There are 5 different sights to put on your guns. Sights like the Red Dot Sight, Holographic Sight, Coyote Reflex Sight, and the 2x Scope.

However, the only other attachment that you can put on your guns are suppressors. However, I don't see the point of a suppressor because the game doesn't actually have a system implemented into the mini-map or in the gunplay where suppressors would actually have a purpose to be used.

Typically in Battlefield games, when you put a suppressor on your gun, you are sacrificing a certain amount of bullet velocity, effective damage range, and even bullet spread for the sake of keeping yourself hidden on the mini-map while firing your weapon.

However with this game, putting a suppressor on your gun doesn't really affect it in any way, the only difference is that gunshots are slightly quieter, which I guess is a bonus.

But this game also has a mini-map, however you can't actually see enemy positions on it when they fire their weapons.

So what's the point in using a suppressor?

Hell, what's the point in even having a mini-map if you can't see enemies on it? I'll get into that more in the next segment but since the only other attachment that you can equip is a suppressor, it makes me hope that we get more in the future.

Barrel attachments, extended magazines, a foregrip to reduce recoil, hell, give us the ability to change the scope on the sniper rifles.

Yeah, you can't actually change the scopes on the snipers. I hope this also changes.

Also I should mention this now but good God the M3 shotgun needs to be nerfed. It's the only one in the game but it's stupidly overpowered. The one shot kill range is flat out ridiculous. It ain't a shotgun, it's a goddamn sniper rifle. And it's spammed a lot. It can be genuinely really annoying to play against, especially since many of the full auto guns have high recoil and the character models have awkward hit boxes.


[ 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙈𝙄𝙉𝙄-𝙈𝘼𝙋 ]

Mini-maps in some games are pretty important. In Battlefield games, it's a very critical and vital tool for big picture situational awareness and allows for more complex decision making in the game. It also allows players to learn the layout of every map. It just makes navigation easier.

It can genuinely increase the skill gap and strategy to the gameplay and make the difference between a skilled or noob player.

However like I said earlier, you can't see enemy positions on the mini-map, and this is a problem because

1. It makes using a suppressor almost pointless

2. You can just get shot from out of nowhere but not know where you took the fire from, especially since the TTK (Time to Kill) is very fast and the kill-cam is broken at the moment.

Half the time I get shot I'm just like "Who is shooting me?? Where is it coming from?"

You could also use the mini-map to learn the layout of each map however it's not even zoomed out enough so you can actually see where exactly you are. You can't zoom it out, you can't make it bigger, etc.

One last thing, there are three modes, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Domination.

In Domination, you can see every capture point on the mini-map, however if you move too far away, the flag icons will disappear from the mini-map's field of view.

But you can still see the capture points on your screen anyway regardless of how far away you are. So then why would you look at the mini-map?? It's a waste of time and it could even get you killed.

All of this just makes the addition of a mini-map borderline pointless, especially since you can also see your teammate icons on screen as well regardless of distance.

[ 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙎𝙋𝘼𝙒𝙉𝙎 ]

The spawns need definitive work, since as of right now, some of these spawns are flat out fuckin' appalling. Sometimes enemies spawn right in back of me, other times they spawn right in front of me so I end up killing them the moment they spawn, so at times it actually makes me feel bad, even though I shouldn't really take it seriously.

The one shopping mall map is just an absolute clusterfuck, same with City 2042. Everyone just spawns all over the goddamn place, either in front or in back of each other. Those maps needs to have a serious rework with the spawns, because everyone just spawns on top of each other a lot and it can get pretty annoying at times.

And the flashbangs, oh my Lord, the flashbangs. The flashbang spam is enough to give me fuckin' tinnitus. Every time people spawn they just chuck all of their flashes and sometimes all I hear is the sound of a flashbang explosion, you know, that horrible ear raping sound that'll make your asshole bleed.

I hear it a lot. Yes it did make me laugh my ass off for 10 minutes straight because everyone lost their shit about it, but it just shows that both the flashes and the spawns need a rework. The effective range of the flashbang is just too high.

Also, the sound of the flashbang is just too loud, it's actually gonna make me go deaf.

Again, hopefully there are improvements to this.

[ 𝙎𝙏𝘼𝙏𝙎 ]

There are no stat displays for any of the weapons, so this does make it difficult to know which guns are better than another (cause there are some differences between each weapon).

[ 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝘽𝙐𝙂𝙎 ]

I haven't mentioned it up until now but damn this game is fucking buggy. I already talked about the awful spawns but in just my second match of playing, I fell through the map on City 2042 and died numerous times.

It got to a point where I was in a 1v1 with another player and I actually died many more times from falling through the map. He wouldn't stop falling through the map and dying either.

I mentioned earlier that the kill-cam is broken. When I get shot, the kill-cam actually pans in the opposite direction from where I got shot from. So I would get killed and the camera would just point at nothing.

There's also a bug where the text in the chat box when you're typing not only clips out of the box, but it even goes off screen if your message is too long.

I'm not sure if this is also a bug or not, but if you go into the loadouts, there are categories for melee, grenades, and player models, however when you click to change any of them, nothing appears.

This is either two things: a bug, or content that hasn't been released yet. Only time will tell.

I've also had a problem where sometimes when I sprint but then I stop, my character gets stuck in the sprinting animation and I can't aim down sights, unless I either shoot my weapon or I swap to my sidearm.

And then there is a bug where the game won't let me pick a team so I can actually spawn, but then I was able to fix this by just selecting to spectate teammates, and then the game will let me choose my team.

And lastly, choosing your loadout is jank as fuck. The only way to know what loadout you're gonna spawn with is to go into the loadout screen, click the loadout to customize it, then you back out of every menu until you get to the spawn button, then you can spawn with said specific loadout.

Why not have a loadout selection screen before you spawn?

[ 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 ]

I actually wasn't expecting to go so in depth into a game that is literally worth a goddamn dollar on Steam, but underneath all the issues that I have with the game and the glitches and bad spawns, is a game that has potential.

It's actually way more fun than any other EA game that I have played in a long time. This game genuinely made me smile and laugh my ass off multiple times.

Though by listing all the criticisms that I or anyone else has with the game will help support it so that it becomes better than what it is at the moment. Again, the game is less than a week old and it's still in beta, so only time will tell if big changes are made to it.

The game already has quite a cult following and pretty much every Steam review I read says that even this shit is better than BF 2042. So you know you done fucked up somewhere when even indie games kick your ass in many ways.

This is actually a game where I want to gift it to all of my friends just so that we could all play it together. And you should do that as well. Cause the game is actually worth it. You'll surely get way more value.

7/10

2021, which is 20 entire years since this game has come out. Are you feeling old yet? Cause I sure do. I was only 5 years old when this game came out so I ended up missing out on it since I was much too young to play games like this at the time.

Silent Hill 3 is approaching that ripe ol' age as well. I plan on writing a review for that game too since I did get a physical PS2 copy as a Christmas gift a couple years ago. After beating it a couple times and finding every secret and all the content the game has to offer, I consider it one of the greatest survival horror games I have ever played.

I played Silent Hill 1 many years ago and I enjoyed that game a lot as well.

In 2011, Konami announced to the public's excitement that Silent Hill 2 and 3 would be returning in an HD Collection for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

However the first red flag was how the collection was missing Silent Hill 1 and 4 entirely, due to the fact that Tom Hullett, the guy in charge of the franchise at the time, said Silent Hill 1 wasn't included in the collection because it's a PS1 game, and that porting PS1 games to current generation hardware was "difficult."

But then he would go on and say that Silent Hill 4 wasn't included because of "how polarizing it was to the fanbase."

Right off the bat something was wrong here. Then screenshots were leaked of Silent Hill 2 HD on Twitter, around one month before the collection came out, in which Masahiro Ito, the level and monster designer of the first three Silent Hill games, responded in complete shock.

The game looked like total shit compared to the original. Then the game came out, and it all went downhill from there.

Silent Hill HD Collection is one of the most broken and disappointing releases in gaming history that not only completely disrespects both the legacy of Silent Hill 2 and 3, but also the people who worked their collective asses off creating them to make them the absolute best they can be.

I actually made an in-depth review about both Silent Hill 2 and 3 HD if you are interested. I will post a link. I go in-depth about all of the bugs, glitches, graphical errors, the awful tweaks done to the voice acting and script in Silent Hill 3, and then I go into how this collection came to be and who is responsible. It's actually become my most Hearted review on this site.

https://www.backloggd.com/u/Katiopeia/review/106209/

The reason why I am bringing all of this up is because we are in the year 2021, and the HD Collection is still the most accessible way to get your hands on Silent Hill 2 and 3, but to this day, the HD versions are buggy, broken, and unoptimized.

To this day Konami has completely abandoned the IP for many years in favor of their Silent Hill, Metal Gear, and Castlevania Pachinko machines, which are basically their Japanese slot machines. They're basically the fuckin' EA of Japan. Greed is more important than the well-being of your most beloved franchises it seems.

Many people call Silent Hill 2 the best game in the franchise, and I was desperate as shit to play it. At the time of making that HD Collection review it was literally impossible for me to get the game because I didn't have a PC, and if I wanted an original PS2 copy, I'd have to trade an arm and a leg for one.

I refused to play the HD Collection. I saw the screenshots, I read articles online, and I watched reviews and gameplay footage on YouTube but without spoiling myself from story details. I did not want my first experience to be through the HD Collection.

But, I eventually did save up money and I just decided to buy my own gaming PC this generation for reasons such as exclusives and emulation.

So after this inflated intro, after finally playing through Silent Hill 2 for the first time, when I watched those credits roll, I felt very emotional, the likes of which I hadn't felt in a long time from playing games.

I sat there at my desk in total silence, in complete amazement. I felt terrible inside that I missed out on a game like this all those years ago, and at the same time I felt a serious anger because of the fact that there are people out there who first experienced these games through the HD Collection, and to this day, Konami has never fixed this gap because of their greedy anti-consumer business practices that still persist to this very day.

I imagine the people who played HD Collection for the first time wondered what in the hell all the fuss was about all those years ago and just thought of people like me as like a bunch of idiots, and this is something that Masahiro Ito expressed on Twitter to his disappointment.

So with that being said, I will do the standard critique of the story, gameplay, presentation, etc. I won't spoil anything major if you haven't played it yet. Though I would like to talk about how insane the narrative structure to this game is.

[ 𝙎𝙏𝙊𝙍𝙔 (𝙈𝙞𝙣𝙤𝙧 𝙎𝙥𝙤𝙞𝙡𝙚𝙧𝙨) ]

Instead of Harry Mason from the first game, the protagonist of this game is James Sunderland, who arrives in Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his missing wife Mary that she is alive, waiting for him at their "special place."

Three years before this she passed away from a fatal disease, so James wonders how in the hell she could still be alive. He knows the journey is insane but goes through with it anyway, seeking answers.

At a first glance he doesn't really stand out as a very charismatic character, in fact he is very stilted, especially when compared to other video game protagonists at the time.

However, from the way that he awkwardly conversates with others, his mannerisms, his disregard for his own personal safety, even the way that he's dressed, are all signs of a damaged man that has lost pretty much everything he cared about, a person who never really came to terms with his grief and hasn't moved on.

But deep down there is a glimmer of hope, that Mary is still alive, and that alone is enough to keep James pushing on. So I as a player not only relate to James' inner struggle, but I get invested because I not only want to see the truth as well, but I want to see James succeed.

Because James is actually quite a likeable character. He is not your typical one note passive aggressive douchebag like you see with other video game characters, but his mental state does come into question.

Because at first it's difficult to tell whether or not everything that James is seeing is real; the horrifying monsters, the empty fog covered town, the characters that he meets who are just as confused and lost as he is, and memos found in the world containing very questionable descriptions.

The reason that I say this is because at one point in the game James meets a little girl named Laura, and she doesn't seem to physically see any of the monsters that he does.

And at another point he meets Maria who strikingly has the same face as Mary. The difference being that Maria has a different style of clothing, and her personality is not the same. Despite this, James actually sees his wife inside of Maria.

It's even made more apparent due to the fact that Maria shows indications that she knows more about James and Mary's relationship than what she should, and this makes her a very intriguing character.

And this brings James into question as to how sane he really is.

Which made me come to the conclusion that Silent Hill is the physical embodiment of a person's mental state. What the characters see in Silent Hill is representative of what they feel in their minds.

It's similar to the first game with Alessa, in which the Silent Hill that Mason travels through is the culmination of the everyday pain and trauma of a poor girl who has been used by an evil cult to create a god to take over the world.

Silent Hill 2 expands upon this, and I believe it's absolutely fuckin' brilliant.

Every character in this game is reflective of James in one way or another, but each of them have their own inner demons, thus they all see their own fucked up versions of Silent Hill. All of them are on their own journeys through Silent Hill. And this is what makes the characters more memorable and relatable.

This is exacerbated by the voice acting. It is very schlocky, hell it's a bit terrible in some areas. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of awkward line deliveries. This game's voice acting just reeks of a game that came out in the early 2000s or 1990s.

But, the voice acting is intentional, and that's the key word right there. Everyone speaks in a lost, terrified, or even confused manner, but that's the point.

Everyone in this game is either sad, lost, or broken in their own ways. Everyone has a depressing backstory behind them, they're just complete strangers to each other, and most of them don't even know why they're here in Silent Hill to begin with, unlike James.

This is what makes James stand out above the rest. He knows why he is in Silent Hill, it's just the question of why he sees what he does. He keeps the details about his relationship to himself. But he keeps going forward even though he knows that he could end his life.

And he does still have humanity inside of him, because you can see that he wants to help all of these hurt people.

So with all of this being said, it brings into question what the true nature of Silent Hill really is. And this is an ingenious philosophical concept from a narrative standpoint, because it makes the town itself feel like an actual character, exacerbated by the horrific atmosphere, like it has a self aware twisted consciousness, like it's alive.

And that's a scary thing to think about. Because like I said earlier, and this is what my beliefs are, is that whatever trauma or mental strain the characters have felt is what they see in Silent Hill.

When you think about it, when you take a step back and think about the when, the why, and the how, it becomes so much more grandiose than just a story about stopping an evil cult from summoning a world destroying god, or a story about finding your missing wife.

These are simple setups. But they go much farther than that, and that's what I love about these games. You play through this game and you ask yourself at least once "What in the hell is going on?"

And that's the magic question that pretty much describes this whole franchise. The intrigue, the mystery, the character development, the tragic backstories of these characters, it all comes together like that perfectly written novel by someone like Stephen King, John Saul, or Dean Koontz.

This is a story that was designed to be questioned, to be discussed, to provoke the player's mindset. It's a game meant to challenge you, and I haven't even talked about the gameplay yet. This is how you make a game's narrative interesting, stand out, and make it the center of discussion for a long time.

Because everything that I have stated so far are just my own personal opinions. This narrative is subjective among the players. You may have a completely different opinion from me about the characters and the town and the sequence of events.

You could write a book dissecting the human nature behind this game's themes, but there will always be someone who will say "yes, but what about this, this, and this?"

But that's why I like this story so much. This is why it's still talked about to this very day. It is masterfully put together.

I started off questioning the world, but as I played and I unraveled these mysteries, by the end, it was insanely satisfying, and it made me want even more context.

And the multiple endings only just add the cherry on the top of the sundae.

The story alone makes this game one of the best games ever made. This storytelling is what sets these games apart from the competition, Silent Hill 2 just stands above the rest, it just blows the Resident Evil games out of the water in that aspect.

[ 𝙂𝘼𝙈𝙀𝙋𝙇𝘼𝙔 ]

The gameplay on the other hand, while the game plays fine, the mechanics do work for what they are, they are very clunky, but that is to be expected from a 2001 survival horror game.

This is a third person survival shooter with fixed camera angles, although the camera does move around with the player like in Code Veronica. The game has tank controls, however you are able to turn the camera around to face James' back by just holding down the L2 button, if you want to see what's in front of you.

Also with the push of either L1 or R1, you can strafe left and right. I don't really use this because it can be awkward using this because of the tank controls and claustrophobic areas. You can't strafe shoot in this game either.

But, pushing L1 and R1 at the same time makes you do an instant 180 degree turn like in Resident Evil. Now this was very useful. I'm very glad this mechanic is also in these games.

It works perfectly for a game like this. Pushing up makes you go forward no matter which direction you are facing. Pushing down makes you go backwards, pushing left or right makes you rotate left or right. Which means that every time the camera angle changes, you don't have to reorient your movement on the control pad or thumbstick.

There are games that have this issue where the camera changes perspective but there are no tank controls, meaning now you are pushing the direction the opposite way, and it can get disorienting. You have to reconfigure your movement with each camera change. But you don't have to worry about that in any of the old Resident Evil or Silent Hill games.

Since this is a Survival Horror game, the goal is about making it out alive rather than fighting everything head on, because ammo and healing items are limited. Once you run out of resources, you're screwed. This is where the survival part comes in.

This means that every enemy encounter means that your brain has to make quick decision making. Do you waste ammo and shoot the enemy down so that you don't have to worry about them anymore? Or do you risk taking damage and running past them so you can save your ammo? But if you take too much damage you need to use healing items which are also limited.

This is a central theme in Resident Evil. However unlike in RE, Silent Hill has a much bigger emphasis on melee combat. Melee is actually a viable strategy in this game if you want to save ammo. But you should be careful since using melee is more risky than using guns. Or you could just do what I do and just run past enemies.

Avoiding enemies actually isn't that difficult in this game though don't get too comfortable cause there will be times where you have to fight to avoid taking damage, especially in the hospital with those goddamn nurses.

Speaking of enemies, man, the enemy variety in this game is goddamn astounding. They not only look terrifying but the sounds that they make actually gave me some shivers.

The acid spitting enemies are the basic enemy type but that acid does hurt. Most of the time I run past them to save ammo

I hate those goddamn cockroaches since the sounds they make just make me seriously uncomfortable

The nurses can be threatening since some of them can wield guns, fucking guns

But the best enemy in the game is the Pyramid Head. He is basically the Nemesis of Silent Hill 2 though he doesn't appear as often. Still, he stalks and attacks you throughout the whole game in some parts. He wields a gigantic axe and it doesn't have a face besides his head being a weird pyramid shape.

This guy is fucking amazing. He not only looks threatening, but the fact that he is prevalent throughout the whole game just shows how much of a great force it is.

There are a handful of different melee weapons. You first start off with a wooden plank, then you can obtain a steel pipe, a great knife, and when you beat the game you can obtain a chainsaw and a can of infinite aerosol spray in a second playthrough.

Basically, the more damage the weapon does, the more awkward it is to use. It takes James a while to swing melee weapons, you have to wait for a slight wind up animation before he swings, but it's even worse than using heavier weaponry.

The damage for the melee weapons is categorized from weakest to strongest

Wooden Plank > Steel Pipe > Great Knife > Chainsaw

So about the weapons, you only get three of them: a pistol, a shotgun, and a hunting rifle.

They all feel great to use. The sound design of the weapons is just deliciously good. The pistol is good for weaker enemies and the shotgun as you would expect is a powerhouse at close range.

The hunting rifle also has high damage and can be used at longer ranges.

Also, I find the aerosol spray to be pointless because while it can immobilize enemies for a brief amount of time, it can damage James if you use it too much.

When you use the shotgun or the rifle, you have to wait for the animation of James pulling the loading mechanism before you can move around again. This creates a gameplay strategy where you have to time your shots and get into a good position so that you don't risk yourself taking damage while you're in the middle of loading your gun.

Because unlike in other games where you seem to play as a super soldier who is deadeye accurate and reloads a gun like if they had a Call of Duty Sleight of Hand perk, Silent Hill games aren't like that.

James is not a soldier, not a police officer, or even a gun nut. James is just a regular civilian who has never had any combat experience. He has never been in a situation where he has to use a firearm or a goddamn chainsaw to defend himself.

Yes, James can miss shots, he moves around sluggishly while using a firearm, he takes a while to reload a gun. But this is all intentional.

The movement and combat mechanics are awkward and clunky.. because it's supposed to be.

That just fits James' character more.

Not to mention, James is a bit frail. It can be easy to lose a good chunk of your health in a short time if you're not careful.

For example, those basic enemies that spit acid at you, I think it only takes 2 or 3 hits from that to go from Green to Red health.

Also, the flashlight is a central mechanic since the majority of the game is set in the dark.

Although there's pretty insane attention to detail where if you have the flashlight off, James will miss even more shots, however it will be harder for enemies to see you.

I don't see why you would play with the flashlight off other than for a challenge run, but I love that this detail is in the game.

Some of the areas that you will be exploring are tight hallways in which avoiding enemy attacks can be tricky. I like to read enemy patterns and I just run as much as I can. I only fight and use up ammo if I really, really have to.

In Silent Hill 1, 2, and 3, you get infinite inventory space. You are able to pick up as many healing items, bullets, and other key items as much as you want. You may think this may break the challenge of a survival horror game, but it doesn't because there is a perfect balance of item drops, so that it doesn't feel like you can just carry 1000 rounds of ammo and 50 healing items.

This also reduces the amount of backtracking you would have to do if you had limited inventory space, so this keeps the pace of the game going.

Although there is a setting in the options menu where you can multiply the amount of ammo you can obtain, why would you do that other than for power trips?

Yeah, power trips can be fun, but I like to actually be challenged when I play a survival horror game. I mean, it's in the name, survival.

When you don't have that setting on, ammo is rare. Healing items are a bit more plentiful, but since James can take a lot of damage even on Normal difficulty, you still have to use your items wisely and conserve what you can.

So now about the difficulty, there are actually two different types of difficulty: combat and puzzle difficulty.

Puzzle difficulty is one of the greatest things to ever have graced gaming. See, I like puzzles in some games, although there can be times where a specific puzzle can be such a ball breaker that I get forced to look up guides on the internet.

And I try to look up guides as least as I can. I can't stand difficult puzzles. It's actually why I have had a hard time getting into the old Tomb Raider games, the Uncharted games, Resident Evil 1, and even Silent Hill 1. The puzzles in SH1 are legendarily difficult, requiring you to know fuckin' Shakespeare and all that nonsense in order to solve them.

And that game didn't have puzzle difficulty. Silent Hill 2 introduces this. You can select Easy, Normal, or Hard puzzles, so you can make them as easy or as hard as you want, either because you hate difficult puzzles like I do, or you're a glutton for masochism.

This is an ingenious system. More games need to have this.

In fact the customization in general is just excellent. You can choose both combat and puzzle difficulty, you can tweak how much ammo you obtain, and with the flashlight mechanic, you can basically make the game as easy or as hard as you want.

If you play any of the later editions of Silent Hill 2 you can play the Maria side story. But it's recommended that you beat James' story first as the Maria scenario contains spoilers.

Maria's story is shorter than James' however it gives more context and backstory into her character and the events that follow James' journey, which means that like I said earlier, she is an important character, with depth and weight to her personality. The fact that she gets her own scenario just shows how much the developers wanted to flesh out this character.

Maria's arsenal only consists of a powerful snub nose revolver and a butcher knife. Also, she doesn't ever get a flashlight. You would think this would be a pain in the ass because of the game being 80-90% dark, but the game does a good job at making everything bright enough that you can actually see where you're going.

Although fighting enemies without a flashlight can either make the encounter more intense or more of a pain to deal with depending on how you look at it.

[ 𝙋𝙍𝙀𝙎𝙀𝙉𝙏𝘼𝙏𝙄𝙊𝙉 ]

This game reeks of an early 2000s game. Graphics wise, it has aged alright. The character models look good for 2001, though the lip syncing leaves much to be desired. And the voice acting as I mentioned earlier, it can range from pretty good to just plain terrible, but like I said, I think that was the point.

The FMV cutscenes however look really damn good, beautiful if I may say. All of the locations are just horrifying.

If I was to give a video game award for best horror atmosphere it would be these games. All the story elements that I talked about earlier really elevate the dread in these locations. Exploring some of these areas can be soul crushing because of the amazing sound design, horrific enemy design, and the darkness.

But the best part about this presentation has to be the soundtrack. Holy mother of shit, this game has one of the greatest soundtracks I have ever heard in a video game. The music evelates both the narrative and the gameplay so goddamn much.

The intro music, the cutscenes, the road to Silent Hill music, the Angela theme, the Maria theme, the bowling alley music, the hospital music, Silent Hill itself, the ending music, I love ALL of the tracks in this game.

This is Final Fantasy VI levels of goddamn brilliant in terms of music. This is one of the only times where I want to buy the official soundtrack for a game and put it up on a shelf as a collector's item, it's that good.

Akira Yamaoka, you're a damn genius composing this OST. The graphics, the voice acting, and the character models may have aged like milk stains, but this soundtrack never did.

[ 𝙃𝙊𝙒 𝙏𝙊 𝙋𝙇𝘼𝙔? ]

Like I have said a handful of times throughout this review, avoid the HD Collection like the Black Death, that is the absolute worst way to play the game.

The only way you can play this game is to either spend $65-150 on a physical PS2 copy, emulate it on PC with a PS2 emulator, or download the PC version online.

You can safely download the PC version from this link if you're interested.

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/silent-hill-2-restless-dreams-bgd

However, the PC port of Silent Hill 2 is really buggy and unoptimized similarly to the HD Collection. Some examples would be a stretched out aspect ratio, weak fog effects, crashing issues, the FMV cutscenes being broken, the music getting stuck in a quarter second loop, and the key bindings are BEYOND appalling.

And that is where the Enhanced Edition mod comes in. Over the past 3 years or so a team of coders have created fan mods for Silent Hill 2 that both fixes and enhances the game in order to make it the definitive way to play the game. And to this day it's still being updated.

Enhances such as HD textures and backgrounds, a maximum resolution of 1440p, a fixed frame rate, modern PC key binding support, Xbox controller support, etc. These people are basically doing what Konami don't.

If you want to install this mod then here is a link.

http://www.enhanced.townofsilenthill.com/SH2/install.htm

Installing the mod is simple enough. You just download and unzip each file and then drag them into your Silent Hill 2 main folder, replacing any files in the process. Each file is displayed in order so you can keep track.

But if need be, you can check out this comprehensive guide I found on YouTube. It gets straight to the point and doesn't waste time, it even highlights just how bad the original PC port of Silent Hill 2 is.

https://youtu.be/PF1D6_shKIQ

[ 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 ]

Playing this game felt like an epiphany, that gaming is just nothing like what it was back then, and it made me miss this generation of gaming. But, with the rise of indie developers, there have been games being released that attempt to replicate these old games.

Some of them good, some of them bad, but you know it's bad when the community has to step up and create something because AAA developer studios like Konami are unwilling to either because they know they're gonna fuck it up or they just don't care.

To this day the HD Collection still haunts the company, I still consider it the worst thing they have ever done, which is further elevated once you actually play these games and you realize why so many people fell in love with them back then.

Because this game should be experienced at least a couple times. This game is a masterpiece, it was far ahead of its time. If I enjoyed Silent Hill 3 so much I wasn't expecting any less from this game, but damn, this game blows Silent Hill 3 out of the water in some aspects.

Maybe, just maybe, we will get a Steam version of Silent Hill 2 and 3, since Silent Hill 4 was added to GOG. Or maybe just a better console port of these games.

But to be honest, I am not holding my breath, because I am not convinced in the slightest that Konami is capable of doing that. Think about when the HD Collection came out. It's been 10 years now and the HD Collection is still being paraded around on digital stores like a corpse, just begging to be buried in peace in a proper coffin, and then reincarnated as a newfounded being.

It's even worse when you consider that now we have emulation and fan mods for both Silent Hill 2 and 3 like Enhanced Edition, made by people who put in the legwork that Konami have neglected for so many years now, and for free might I add.

I give this game 10 Pyramid Heads out of 10.

Oh ho ho my god. We meet again. My arch Nemesis (see what I did there?)

From the moment I started playing this game as a kid after playing RE4, Code Veronica, etc. I knew that something was wrong here. I never finished this game when it was still new on GameCube, so then I returned to it many years later.. and I can definitely see why I never finished it that first time going through.

This is one of the most underwhelming, repetitive, and frustrating slogs I’ve ever experienced in this franchise. Resident Evil 5 and 6, I’d play in an instant over this shit. What I can only imagine why this game is just so half assed, so rushed, and lacks what made the series popular to begin with, it’s survival horror roots, is due to rushed development and a lack of direction trying to connect it to the lore of the universe, but then again, you could also say that about many of the later RE games.

Up until now I have not spoiled any important pilot details in any other one of my RE reviews but for this game I have to make an exception, because the overall narrative is just a disappointing and confusing mess.

Trying to explain the sequences of events that happen in this game is actually difficult, which should give you a good indication of just how fuckin' jumbled this plot is.

[ 𝙎𝙏𝙊𝙍𝙔 ]

So this game is a prequel to RE1 and it takes place just before the Spenser Mansion infiltration. From the get go, the game is set up as an origin story that teases the question of what happened before the Spenser Mansion incident, where the T and G Viruses came from, and who created them.

After reports of those grizzly murders that took place on the outskirts of Raccoon City, the S.T.A.R.S Bravo Team are dispatched and I guess because of plot convenience, the helicopter decides to suddenly malfunction and crash, leaving the team stranded in the middle of the Arklay Forest.

Upon searching the area they find a crashed car with dead bodies lying there, and pick up a prison sentence file for an escaped criminal named Billy Cohen. He is an ex-military armed soldier who was sentenced to death for supposedly murdering over 20 innocent civilians in Africa.

So they not only find that, but they also find an abandoned train just sitting in the middle of the forest. And in typical Resident Evil fashion, it's infested with zombies. The protagonist of this game is Rebecca Chambers from Resident Evil 1.

After examining the body of one of the inhabitants, Rebecca just coincidentally encounters Billy, but Billy doesn't harm her. Once Rebecca reaches the back of the train, she gets attacked by a man made out of leeches, but is saved by Billy. That's when the main antagonist of the game is revealed, a.. very corny looking opera singer named Dr. Marcus.

It turns out he is the one who unleashed all the leeches on the train to infect all the passengers. He also for some reason manages to get the train moving again.

Despite Rebecca's distrust in Billy, the two still have to work together if they wanna make it out alive, considering the rest of Rebecca's team are pretty much fucking gone by this point. Once they manage to stop the train, it crashes into Dr. Marcus's training facility.

And here is where you learn about the creation of the T-Virus and the G-Virus. 20 years before the events of this game, Dr. Marcus creates the T-Virus, and throughout the next ten years he would continue to whip up creature after creature, one of these known as the Queen Leech. Shortly after this he gets assassinated by Umbrella under the orders of Oswell Spenser because he was using too many trainees as test subjects.

Albert Wesker and William Birkin were also party to the assassination plan. This was also due to the fact that these three people were in an arms race to discover the secrets of the Progenitor Virus, believing that whoever got to it first would be able to have full control over Umbrella.

After this, Dr. Marcus's body was disposed of along with the Queen Leech, and the credit for all of his work is given to William Birkin, and then William would go on to create the G-Virus. Over the next ten years the Queen Leech would then feed on Marcus's body and this actually gave him the ability to shape shift back into a newfound form and with his memories still intact. Now with a newfound hatred for Umbrella, he seeks vengeance. This is also how he has the ability to control the leeches.

So the main issues I have with this narrative are that, well, Dr. Marcus is one of the most forgettable villains in the entire mainline series next to Nicolai from Resident Evil 3. What you have to give credit for in Resident Evil is that almost every game has a main antagonist that you either love or love to hate.

Albert Wesker, William Birkin, the Alfred Twins, Salazar and Saddler, the Baker Family, all of these guys are legendary antagonists, whether because they have awesome line deliveries, they have iconic character designs, and have a lot of bombastic personality behind them.

But Dr. Marcus's motivations are very generic, and they don't have anything to do with the player, so I as a player don't see why I should care about Dr. Marcus succeeding. He also has a shitload of awkward line deliveries, even more so than the older games, so it's very difficult for him to develop as a character.

Instead he just comes off as a laughable joker of a villain like Cipher from Metal Gear Solid 5 because well, just look at him. I mean for God sake, he infects a train full of passengers for no reason whatsoever just to get back at Wesker and William by singing opera music. Oh and he puts a giant scorpion on there as well for some reason.

I mean, how can you say that out loud without chuckling? Marcus just isn't intimidating. I care a lot more about Wesker and William, and I think that's another problem. By having Wesker and William in the same game as Marcus, he immediately loses importance because Wesker and William are just the better villains.

I end up wanting to see more screen time with those two than him.

Rebecca and Billy on the other hand, while they do develop and grow to trust each other more, Billy is also just extremely forgettable. I mean he isn't balls to the wall annoying like Steve from Code Veronica, but he suffers from what I like to call Shadow the Hedgehog syndrome: a one note stereotypical edgy hardass who doesn't take shit from anyone.

I mean, I get that he was just convicted of a crime he didn't commit, but even during the flashback sequences he has that really deep, depressing, and edgy tone in his voice like he's about to snap a guy's cock in half if that person just looked at him the wrong way.

Also, it's very hard to care about Billy's inner struggle along with Marcus's because of a very important reason. It's because the game doesn't do a good enough job explaining it. Seriously, during your first playthrough, you might be confused on what's going on, and that's because the cutscenes are spread out very far between stretches of gameplay.

If you wanted to understand the story in full context you would have to either play through the game multiple times or go on the internet and do the research.

And even then, a lot of these scenes dump exposition that doesn't have much to do with the lore of the universe.

Also, this is the only game that we ever see Billy in. So again, why should you care about him? It's not like we ever see him again unlike Rebecca.

At least Carlos in RE3 was likeable because of his upbeat and caring personality who risks his life to protect Jill and the citizens of Raccoon City. You can see his inner struggle of watching all of his teammates around him die and being betrayed by his commanding officer who just sees the whole ordeal as another game or as an opportunity to obtain research to get rich.

Not to mention, you're gonna be so frustrated with the insanely repetitive gameplay loop that you're probably gonna forget about what's happening anyway but I'll get into that later.

There's also a pretty big problem with the narrative structure with Rebecca which has created a debate whether or not Rebecca's actions in this game are canon or not.

Right off the bat there is a problem with the continuity here. Because if you’ve played RE1 and then this game, you would know that Rebecca stumbles in the Spencer Mansion and bumps into Chris Redfield. But not once in the game does Rebecca ever mention Billy, the infected train, the Umbrella facilities she ran into, her comrades that have either died or have gone missing, or even Dr. Marcus, which I will get into.

And it's not like Rebecca gets amnesia, she heads straight for the Spenser Mansion right after she says goodbye to Billy. And again, we never see Billy again after that point.

Which I can understand because the original RE1 came out in 1996, and RE0 is a game from 2002, but even in the 2002 RE1 GameCube Remake, Rebecca never talks about all the fucked up shit she just went through, nor does she show any signs of trauma or PTSD after being in near death situations countless times. Maybe one time during the Hunter scene but.. ehhhhhh… that's subjective.

At times she tries to act tough but you can see just how frail of a character she is, especially when it’s been confirmed that she doesn’t like to fight but will do it if she has to defend herself, which is all the more reason to give the player signs of her distress.

Hell, even Rebecca's combat experience is just completely gone for some reason. She turns into a near helpless character. There is one part in RE1 where she just stands in one spot and nearly lets a Hunter kill her. She fuckin' fought tons of Hunters and other monstrosities in the previous game! This just doesn't make any sense.

You fought against giant tarantulas, a giant scorpion, leech men, mutant frogs, and a giant leech queen. You even got captured by a giant centipede. Now all of a sudden you're afraid to take on a single Hunter??

And furthermore, why would she even go to the Spenser Mansion after the fact? If I was her I would have been like “this mission is FUBAR”, and got the hell outta there. Who knows if the people that she was supposed to meet up with are already dead.

I'm assuming this is because of the fact that RE0 and RE1 were directed by two different people, two different development teams. But don't you think that the people who made RE0 should have done a bit more research on the game they were making a prequel to? This is just sloppy writing.

So with an interesting story that is poorly told, has a lot of plot holes, forgettable characters, retcons, and corny ridiculousness, it's hard to get invested in it.

It also really doesn't help that the gameplay loop in this game is very laborious, tedious, repetitive, and flat out aggravating, which actually brings down the story even further because most of your attention will be deviated towards that. THIS is where a large chunk of my gripes with this game comes from and why I don't even bother playing it anymore as opposed to the other games.

[ 𝙂𝘼𝙈𝙀𝙋𝙇𝘼𝙔 ]

Once again, as old as the ol' Shirley Temple VCR tapes, this is a third person survival horror game with a large emphasis on limited saves, limited resources, puzzle solving, exploration, etc.

Tank controls, quick turning, door loading screens, limited inventory space, and fixed third person camera angles, all the shit that you would expect in an old RE game. The formula had been perfected by Resident Evil 3, and yet as these games go on they start downgrading the gameplay mechanics so that they could start replacing them with frustrating gimmicks in an attempt to revitalize a dying formula, and I'll explain what I mean by that.

Let's start with the absolutely appalling inventory system.

This is the first game in the series to have two playable characters in the same playthrough, both with their own health bars and inventory. Each character only gets six slots for a maximum of 12 which may sound like a lot right? Especially since the two characters can swap items with each other.

Actually, it's horrible for two reasons.

First of all, there are some items in the game that take up two slots of inventory when in previous games they only took up one, a few examples being the shotgun, the grenade launcher, and the hookshot.

And secondly, there are quite a handful of sections in the game where Rebecca and Billy get separated so you then have to manage inventory with just six slots, some items taking up two slots. It's fuckin' awful regardless of the fact that you can now drop items on the floor in this game.

Seriously, try to carry a gun with some ammo, or a long gun with ammo along with some healing items and a key item or two.

It's almost borderline impossible to do this without having Billy next to you, because the two characters can only swap items with each other when they're right next to each other.

This is also the first game in the series to not have the traditional item boxes to store your loot in. This was supposed to be the trade off for being able to drop items and pick them up whenever you wanted and also having the ability to mix herbs immediately without having to put them in your inventory first (but only Rebecca can do this).

The map tells you what items you dropped are located so luckily if you drop something you won't lose track of where you left it if you just check the map.

However, with the item boxes completely gone and with less inventory slots than in the previous games, it creates a colossal problem and it's the fucking backtracking.

Backtracking is one of the biggest tropes in survival horror games, and Resident Evil games are mostly known for this, but the backtracking in RE0 is legendary. It is flat out egregious.

Because as a new player, you're not gonna know what items you are gonna need and at what moment, so most of your playtime will be spent with you backtracking to a specific room you leave all your items in and then trying to get Rebecca and Billy's stupid shit in order.

And if you don't know it, you're gonna end up giving important items to a character that gets separated or kidnapped. You're not gonna know!

For example, in the Centipede fight, only Rebecca gets caught by that thing. Imagine giving her the shotgun with all the ammo and healing items. Well fuck.

Guess that means you gotta reset the game and play up until that point again..

Or how about the Tyrant fight? Rebecca and Billy get separated again before that moment. If you gave Billy the Grenade Launcher or any other weapons and items before that fight, well then good fuckin' luck trying to beat him now. And I hope to God you haven't saved before that fight because oh my god, I've heard horror stories of people having to start the whole game over because of that. They didn't have the resources to beat the Tyrant.

Yeah Rebecca gets a Magnum after Billy is lost but you only get like.. 6 shots I think, and it's not enough to kill the Tyrant.

Also, you have to fight Hunters on the way there. Again, you need to have the resources to survive, so imagine the progress that could be potentially lost because you made the simple mistake of giving important items to Billy.

These types of roadblock moments are just infuriating, because even as a veteran player, the game mechanics make you feel underpowered, which I guess is the point right? But isn't it bad enough that Rebecca takes more damage from attacks than Billy, and Rebecca is the only one that can mix herbs?

Billy is able to take twice as much damage as Rebecca and is the only character that can push heavy things. Whoop-de-doo.

Seriously, why can't Billy mix herbs? Do you know how much time can be saved if he just had that ability? This is the only Resident Evil game I've ever played where only one specific character has the ability to mix herbs.

Even in Resident Evil 5 and 6, any character is able to mix herbs to free up inventory space. I seriously don't understand this.

While I'm on the subject of backtracking and inventory, I wanna talk about the hookshot.

What in the holy mother of shit was Capcom thinking with the hookshot gimmick?

The hookshot can just kill all of the remaining momentum that this game had along with all the other backtracking that you have to do.

Basically, the hookshot is an item that you need to progress to certain areas to get key items. It takes up two inventory slots so already there's a problem, but you have to use this thing not once, not twice, but THREE times across the whole game.

Meaning that through almost the entire game, you cannot get rid of or forget about the hookshot.

There will be numerous times where you are making progress but then you reach a point where the camera points at a hole, which is a sign that you need to use the hookshot on it. So you know what that means? You have to backtrack ALL the way back to where you last left it.

So it can take upwards of 5-10 minutes to go all the way back to where you left the hookshot, pick it up, then you have to travel all the way back to where that hole was, then use the hookshot.

You have to do this again, and again, and again. My god.

Couldn't we at least use the hookshot as a weapon? You know how cool it would be if you could just impale zombies in the stomach like a harpoon gun?

That would be awesome. Maybe then I would actually like having the damn thing in my inventory.

Speaking of that, once you leave the training facility and reach the observatory, you have to take multiple 5+ minute trips to and from the facility so that you can transfer all of your items to the next location.

There are quite a shitload of items to find in the training facility. Guns, ammo, healing items, key items, etc.

You have to manually grab all of your shit and take it all to the next area as if Rebecca and Billy were pack mules.

You also have to do this when going from the observatory to the Umbrella underground labs, unless you get lazy like I did and just don't take anything besides the important items. Why?

Well first off, it's a much longer trip between the observatory and the lab. You would have to travel so far if you wanted to bring all your items with you.

And second, Billy gets fuckin' kidnapped before you go there. So you get stuck with Rebecca and her lousy inventory of 6 slots. And did I mention you have to fight Hunters on the way there and then a Tyrant boss fight?

Remember, Rebecca can't take much damage at all in this game. It only takes 1 or 2 hits for her to go from Fine (Green) to Caution (Yellow).

Ugh…

Did I also mention this is all because there are no item boxes in this game? This is what happens when you remove the item boxes and barely give the characters any space to carry anything since they get separated a lot.

It's all a repetitive, boring, frustrating slog that can kill a player's motivation, or make the situation more intense if this doesn't bother you. All the power to you I guess.

Speaking of the Hunters, they are such bullshit in this game. They weren't hard to take down in the older games, but here they were buffed to the core.

In this game, Hunters don't stagger very often from gunfire, unless you use the grenade launcher. Also, when they hit you, the character gets staggered and you have to wait for the animation to finish before they can move and shoot again, and this shit draws out a lot.

Know what that means?

Stunlock City!!

Seriously, there are times that I die because I get infinitely stunlocked by Hunters and I just have to sit there not being able to do anything about it until my inevitable death.

Another enemy that can stunlock you to death, the monkeys, are an absolute bitch to fight. They're fast, they cling on walls, they jump around you, and getting swiped by one makes the character stagger like someone just kicked them in the crotch.

The movement controls and gun aiming just don't work for a rapid fire enemy like this. Again, they can stunlock you to death as well if you happen to get stuck in a corner.

Also, these things can tank shotgun rounds and keep going. I'm sorry, but if I took a shotgun to a goddamn monkey and it tanks the shot like if this were an episode of Dragonball, we've got a problem.

Why are enemies a pain in the ass to fight in this game? They either stunlock you, are bullet spongy, don't stagger when you shoot them, or you have to fight them in such constricted areas.

The tarantulas work the same as the other games but I just run past them to save bullets and to not risk myself from getting poisoned, because blue herbs are very rare in this game, and you have to manage resources between two characters instead of one.

But the best enemies in the game in my opinion are the leech men. These guys are actually scary. They look terrifying and the music that plays when they're around is horrific. You can either fight or flight, but if you kill them with gunfire, they explode which can damage you.

However you can craft molotov cocktails and kill them with those to save getting hurt.

Speaking of the enemies, this game has by far the most egregious hallway design I have ever seen in this franchise. It's bad enough that you have to manage inventory between two characters, but you also have no choice but to fight most enemies in the game because almost every goddamn hallway is narrow.

Narrow hallways are a trend in Resident Evil games. The gameplay shines where you have to make split decisions on whether you want to use up ammo to take out the enemy so you don't have to worry about it later, or if you want to run past it to save bullets but risk taking damage so then you'll have to use a healing item sooner.

That is the strategy and the risk/reward system that a survival horror game brings to the table.

But, because you have to control two characters at once, it is borderline impossible to run past enemies, so you have to take them out, meaning that you are forced to use up your resources to prevent Rebecca in particular from taking damage.

Because like I said earlier, Rebecca is as frail as a sheet of loose leaf paper. It is very easy for her to lose a lot of health in this game.

You could just make her wait around but regardless, the hallway design is very slim in this game, and sometimes they just load these areas with enemies, so you have no choice but to fight just to get past.

Also for some stupid ass reason, if you get grabbed by an enemy but you get freed by your partner even if the enemy hasn't actually attacked you, you still take damage.

For example if Rebecca got grabbed by a zombie but Billy stopped her from getting bit, she STILL takes damage anyway. Why?! If I stopped someone from taking damage, they shouldn't TAKE DAMAGE.

Jesus Christ.

Not to mention, if you left your partner behind in another room, they can take damage from the enemies and the AI is too stupid to just run away and or run through a door to another area to save themself. So your partner can end up dying and you get a Game Over because you forgot that they were in another area in danger and they end up yelling for your help over the radio over even a single goddamn enemy.

Because there will be times where you have to split up and you have to multi-task: Fighting off enemies, making progress through areas, and solving puzzles.

So because you have to fight a majority of the enemies because the areas are so crammed up that you are forced to use up all your ammo, the survival aspect of the RE formula is butchered.

The only good thing about the partner gameplay is that switching from one character to the other is as simple as pushing a single button, and the loading times between switches are pretty quick, even if your partner is in another room.

But just try to control the second character with the right thumbstick and with fixed camera angles and tank controls. Go on, I dare you.

So about the boss fights, they're again, underwhelming. The theme here is that they take regular enemies and just make them bigger, like, a big scorpion, a big centipede, a big bat, a big leech, you get the idea.

And the tyrant right is cool and all, but we have fought tyrants time after time again in the previous games.

Some of these bosses are a joke.

The scorpion for example can be beaten by just aiming downwards and shooting it in the head, which makes it stagger indefinitely. Every other part is bulletproof, so again, just shoot it in the head and it can never hurt you.

The centipede isn't really much of a boss fight. All it does is move around in circles and doesn't actually attack you unless you touch it. It's more of a sequence of "kill the boss before it kills Rebecca."

The bat fight is total bullshit because it infinitely spawns smaller bats that are impossible to dodge, and some of them can even block your shots. So the strategy is to just stand still and spray at the big bat and try to kill it as fast as possible, taking damage non-stop in the process.

10/10 boss design.

The tyrant is the only fight in the game that actually takes skill to beat. It's fast, it hits hard, but it does have a readable attack pattern. Beating one for the first time makes Rebecca look like a badass.

And the final boss just sucks as well. All you do is distract it as Billy while Rebecca opens up some windows to shine the sun on it, because its weakness is direct light. It's not actually possible to kill it with gunfire, nor is there any indication of how much damage you are dealing to it. All you do is grab your strongest weapon(s), spray at the boss like an idiot, and hope for the best that it doesn't attack Rebecca and kill her.

After you beat the game you unlock a couple modes. The first one is called Wesker mode in which you get to play as Wesker and he actually makes the game more bearable to play since he can run faster, has a stun attack which staggers enemies, and an attack where he can one shot kill enemies but it has to charge up, but that means that guns are almost unnecessary.

Also, the exclusive costume that Rebecca gets in the mode is fuckin' incredible. It's one of the best skins I've seen in a Resident Evil game.

Although it's extremely off-putting seeing Resident Evil 5 Wesker in Resident Evil 0 and with Billy's voice.

Just, no. This is wrong on many levels.

The other mode is the Leech Hunter mode, which is just a mode where you run around the training facility and you have to kill as many enemies as you can in each room and then get to the exit. And then you are graded and you can get rewards depending on what grade you get, such as an assault rifle and infinite ammo for your weapons.

So because the gameplay is just so monotonous, tedious, drawn out, boring, and flat out annoying, the game becomes incredibly difficult for me to be engaged with. And the boss fights are just not that fun to fight. They're either way too easy or it's something gimmicky and annoying like the bat fight and the final boss.

Maybe if the story was better written then it would soften some of the grievances I have with the game, but because the gameplay loop is so shitty, it made me not want to go back to it.

[ 𝙋𝙍𝙀𝙎𝙀𝙉𝙏𝘼𝙏𝙄𝙊𝙉 ]

Now the presentation on the other hand, wow, just wow. Man is this game goddamn beautiful. In fact, this game is so gorgeous that it should be in an art museum. This is still one of the most pretty looking games I've ever seen for a console game. Even all these years later it still holds up.

The character models are the best for 2002 standards, the lip syncing is done very well, the weather effects like the rain on the top of the train looks insane, and the backdrops and pre-rendered backgrounds look absolutely amazing, they're so rich in detail. I miss games that look like that.

Other effects like fire, acid from the tarantulas, glass breaking, explosions from the grenade launcher, it all just looks so stellar. The FMV cutscenes in the HD Remaster run at a nice 1080p resolution.

Having the resolution upscaled brings out more detail than what you normally could have seen in the original version.

And the soundtrack is very ace, definitely one of the best. The save room music, the boss fight music, the final boss music, the training facility music, they're among my favorite tracks in the series.

So pretty much the graphics and the soundtracks are the best part about this game but that is a given right? I mean every Resident Evil game has excellent graphics and music.

Which tells me that this game has all the style of a Resident Evil game but it's seriously lacking in substance.

[ 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 ]

This game really needed to have either just one playable character or have a much better inventory system with the item boxes back. It's actually worse than RE5's inventory system. At least RE5 gives you 9 slots per character and there are no items that take up more than one slot.

RE0 also needed to have some better bosses, because they're just a letdown. And if the gameplay is to be as painful as it is, then the story needs to justify it, but it doesn't. So the game just falls over itself multiple times.

But, as much as I slagged this game, it did introduce mechanics that would become staples in the later games, so in a way, this game served as a blueprint for the future. If only it was just given more development or some things were scrapped entirely.

This game brought to the series two playable characters, item swapping, character switching, giving voice commands, telling your partner to shoot or not shoot, and to either wait or follow you, dynamic interesting puzzles that required both characters to solve, and having unique traits like pushing heavy items and herb mixing, something that would become a mechanic in the Outbreak games.

I own pretty much all of the mainline Resident Evil games, so I don't see why nowadays, during any day of the week, would I choose to play Resident Evil 0 over 1-4, or even 7 for that matter.

This game is just the epitome of average and or sloppy, it's below the standard of these older games. There are much worse RE games out there, but man, I was hyped playing this game for the first time, but looking at it now, it's disappointing, especially when we have the amazing RE1 Remake HD Remaster. Just go play that instead.

Or how about the RE2 Remake? That's pretty amazing as well. Like I said, there are many other better choices for Resident Evil games, so 0 just fades into obscurity for me. After I beat this game a few years ago I never touched it again, and that's not a good sign.

That is until a year later when some Discord friends wanted me to stream the game on Twitch but on Hard Mode. And that was.. oh my Lord, that was PAINFUL. But, I did do it. Of course I had to start all over cause I didn't have enough ammo for the final boss, but I did it in the end. And I'm never doing it again lol.

5/10

So I had played through the base game of Postal 2 a while back and it was a game I had some very mixed feelings on. While I believe that it's a good, fun to play game with a great amount of replay value, the lack of polish in the gameplay, the buggy nature, and the sense of humor that has aged as bad as an awful take on Twitter, makes it a very polarizing game to say the least.

I never played the Postal games when I was younger, I completely missed out on them in favor of the PissStation consoles. I never was a PC person until just recently. Even back then if I was playing on a PC I was playing old DOOM games and old browser games. For some reason no one in elementary or middle school ever talked about these games, and after experiencing Postal 1 and 2 I actually don't understand why.

Postal 1 is just as controversial as Postal 2 if not even more so because my god, the tone of this game makes the second game look like cupcake shit in comparison.

[ 𝘼𝙏𝙈𝙊𝙎𝙋𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀 ]

Right off the bat this game is MUCH darker than the later games, easily the darkest in the series. The moment you boot up the game your ears are assaulted by some loud horrific music and then after that your eyes might start oozing blood at the sight of the scary looking backgrounds. There is some very fucked up imagery here, it's almost like Satan himself made this game.

All of the loading screens have these very terrifying visuals that are hard to make out, followed by some twisted description of the level you're about to play on.

Funny enough, despite what I just said, this game still has a sense of humor. Not as on the nose like the piss and shit jokes and Arab terrorist stereotyping like in Postal 2, but a sense of humor nonetheless, it's just a lot more subtle in this game, like yeah, your parents and or grandparents are really not gonna get it.

This is a game about mass murder, and it honestly takes a lot of balls for the developers to take a subject as controversial as mass shootings and decide to be tongue and cheek about it.

Obviously just like the sequels, this game generated quite a lot of controversy when it first came out, being banned from several countries such as Germany, Australia, and Brazil.

American Senators? Oh ho ho, they despised this game, just like Mortal Kombat.

Obviously your parents should have the idea of raising you as a child correctly, teaching you the importance of discipline, responsibility, and what right and wrong are, and not judge your morality and what you do in your life based on shooting at pixelated graphics on a fucking 1996 CRT monitor but hey, who am I to judge eh?

cough Grand Theft Auto

Seriously, it's a video game, not polio.

But the Japanese? Nah, they fucking loved this game haha, so much so that they designed their own levels. Yes, you get to shoot up Tokyo and Osaka, Japan.

Though there is one part in the game that actually made me freak out because I thought I was going to have to shoot up a school at one point but that didn't actually happen.

I mean, I know this game came out before the Columbine shooting but Jesus Christ.

The subtle sense of humor is actually very effective because once you notice it then you can appreciate the game more for what it is.

Some of these fourth wall breaking moments made me crack the hell up in laughter. I'll share some of my favorites.

I was in the middle of shooting at a group of enemies and I guess I was shooting someone's dead body, and the dead body said "Stop shooting you sick bastard, I'm already dead!"

Or how about the stage where you shoot up a nursing home and the description says "Did someone say they've fallen and can't get up?"

Or how about when you throw a molotov cocktail and the Postal Dude says "You must be cold, lemme warm you up!"

Or some NPCs saying SpongeBob lines like "MY LEG!" or "MY EYES!"

Or how about the easter eggs in the Tokyo stage? There are buildings and billboards such as "Shitoba" which is a parody of Toshiba, and "GESA" which is a spoof of SEGA and it shows Sonic the Hedgehog giving a middle finger.

Shit like that makes me laugh. While yes this game is edgy and dark, it still has charm and a sense of humor.

This is how you do edgy games and not make a game like Hatred (2015), where the main character's only trait is that life is shit and nihilistic and that everyone should just fuckin' die, and says stupid shit like

MY LIFE IS NOTHING BUT COLD, BITTER HATRED in a Shadow the Hedgehog type voice and then proceeds to run into the middle of the streets and just senselessly kill everyone with no sense of rhyme or reason, with no prior development and or motivation to root for this character.

So it just comes off as too bleak.

And tryhard.

And dumb.

If you're going to make an edgy and bleak game you need to have some lightheartedness or sense of humor or some charm to mix it up and keep the game from being monotonous and desensitizing, because it does get old after a while.

The Postal Dude on the other hand is likeable because of his iconic character design and funny one-liners.

And another reason why this game works so well is because it is fun to play, which is a good segway to jump into the gameplay.

[ 𝙂𝘼𝙈𝙀𝙋𝙇𝘼𝙔 ]

This is an old school twin stick shooter where the core movement and gunplay is designed around strafing. You use the WASD keys for moving around, the mouse for aiming and shooting, and the number keys for swapping weapons. I would have preferred the middle mouse wheel but the number keys get the job done fine enough.

Moving and shooting is fucking ace in this game. Wherever the crosshair is pointing will determine the direction the Postal Dude is facing, and as long as the crosshair is in the general direction of the enemy, your bullets will hit them, even from all the way across the screen.

When this game first came out it had tank controls. Tank controls are suited for FPS games like DOOM, Quake, and Duke Nukem, but Postal is a third person shooter with isometric and top down perspectives, so having tank controls in a game like that just sucked.

Only until around 20 years later did the developers swap out the tank controls with just the standard up, down, left, and right movement.

Really, guys?? 20 years later??

Another thing that is jank about the controls is that there is a suicide button. Why? shoulder shrug I don't know, there isn't really a purpose for it besides to get a chuckle or two.

But by default it's mapped to the Q key, and there have been a couple instances where I'm in the middle of shooting bad guys and swapping weapons and then I accidentally hit the Q key and I blow my own goddamn head off.

And once you hit that key, you can't cancel it out.

Also, out of the 8 weapons, you can only move and shoot with three of them: the standard assault rifle, the full auto shotgun, and the flamethrower. All the other weapons (the pump shotgun, grenades, molotov cocktails, rocket launcher, and the napalm launcher) make you stand still while shooting them.

However, you should pick off targets whenever you can, because it's easy to get overwhelmed and bombarded with gunfire and explosions, especially on higher difficulties.

The assault rifle has infinite ammo but it's a pea shooter, and the full auto shotgun is an absolute fucking powerhouse but it burns through ammo quickly and has short range, same with the flamethrower.

The rocket launcher and grenades can kill anyone in one hit, however the blast radius is so small you'd be lucky to kill more than one person at once, so if you were expecting to use them for crowd control than prepare to be disappointed.

And the napalm launcher has short range as well, but it does have a large blast radius and any contact with fire equals instant death.

There is another thing that is pretty jank about this game. To go to the next level you have to kill 90% of the hostiles, which the game does conveniently tell you, but the level doesn't end right away.

When you kill 90-100% of the enemies, you have to push the F1 key to go to the next level. And at first I didn't know what to do after I killed all the enemies. I got this game off of Steam so I didn't look at a manual for it or anything. I only found out after looking in the controls menu.

But what really sucks about this game is getting stunlocked by rockets. When you get hit by an explosion you get launched into the air, but it's possible to get hit by another rocket or grenade while you're already on the ground and in the middle of getting up, so sometimes, this can go on repeat until you die. This literally happened to me on the first damn level.

So if you see a rocket tracking you, cause some rockets home in on you, for the love of God, hold down Right Click.

What I do love though is the difficulty customization. You get a slider that goes from 1-10 and you can tweak it to whatever you want.

I actually prefer this over the generic usual Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, etc.

However, I played through almost the whole game on 5/10 and I honestly thought the game was too easy. You can soak up bullets like a sponge and the game is very generous with ammo and health pickups.

It's also probably because this game was originally designed with tank controls in mind, so having them swapped with modern mouse and keyboard controls kinda just breaks the game.

And this game isn't long. You can beat every level in the game in just 3 or 3 ½ hours. So I recommend cranking up the difficulty for your first playthrough if you want a genuine challenge, that's what I ended up doing, starting over but on a higher difficulty.

What this game also needs is some boss fights. There are none to speak of. Maybe something like a tank, or an attack helicopter, or a guy in a juggernaut suit, anything to spice up the game and break up the slight montonony of shooting at an endless amount of enemies.

Back then the developers were just a very small group of indie developers, and while they are still an indie studio nowadays, they're much bigger than what they were back then, which is all the more reason to put more shit like that in the game.

Because after I finished this game I honestly was craving more. The only rewards you get for playing through each of the levels are Steam achievements, and that's it.

But damn this game is fun to play. In a way, playing this game feels cathartic. Back then this must have been an awesome stress reliever alongside your GTA games or DOOM games or whatever.

Besides the main levels there are optional mini-games you can do as well, but they're just levels that you have already played before, except that you do things like killing a certain amount of enemies as quick as possible, capturing flags, and surviving until a timer runs out.

This does pad out the game a bit more but it's not enough to be honest. There is no mod support or online Multiplayer. Postal Plus actually had online Multiplayer but it was removed from the Steam version. There is LAN Multiplayer (Local Area Network), but no one in my area plays this game, so yeah.

So what I believe the biggest problem this game has is its longevity. Playing through everything this game had to offer in such a short amount of time made me want more.

The Redux version of the game tries to remedy this by improving the gameplay mechanics such as giving the full auto shotgun its own ammo type, adding in a new revolver weapon, increasing the rate of fire of the assault rifle making it less awkward to use, adding a score to the game, adding additional settings like the option to turn off bullet tracers, and adding a whole new mode called Rampage, where you kill as many enemies as possible under a time limit and every enemy you kill in rapid succession adds a multiplier to the score you gain.

But regardless, Redux is still the same game as the original, just with a new art style and additional gameplay tweaks. The game is still insanely short and doesn't have much to offer post-game. And speaking of art style, I shall talk about the presentation and why I actually prefer the original over Redux.

[ 𝙋𝙍𝙀𝙎𝙀𝙉𝙏𝘼𝙏𝙄𝙊𝙉 ]

Besides the horrific music in the beginning and loading screen backgrounds, the original 1997 release of this game is goddamn pretty. All of the backgrounds were actually hand drawn and it looks very authentic, it just reeks of a 1990s PC game.

It looks like I'm running around shooting at people in an old cartoon. I just love games that look like this.

The character models are very low res and don't have any facial detail. This game came out the same year as games such as Final Fantasy VII, Quake 2, and Tomb Raider II, but like I said, this was made by an indie studio so who cares anyway.

However, the reason why I prefer the original 1997 version over Redux, and this might sound a bit controversial, but I don't really like the artstyle of Redux. It just looks cheap. I prefer the hand drawn authentic aesthetics of the original over Redux which looks like it was computer generated.

So about the soundtrack, there actually isn't much to talk about because this game barely has any music playing. Most of the time you're just hearing the gunshots, the explosions, the shouting of the NPCs, the bird chirping and the wind blowing of the outdoors, and the tunneling ambience of the cavern stage.

It can add to the edginess and sense of humor, but good thing I have a SoundCloud account if I desire some music lol.

[ 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 ]

A cult classic if I say so myself. It's great to waste an afternoon on and if you just want something quick and simple to play. The simplicity of the game's content does hurt it in the long run, but hopefully in the future the developers give the game the same amount of love as Postal 2 and we get something like mod support or Online support.

The game feels great to play, it controls like butter, it made me laugh while playing it without being insanely on the nose like Postal 2, it's edginess done the right way, I encountered no bugs or technical issues, I love how you can tweak the difficulty, and it's a pretty game for what it is.

And all of the controversy surrounding it only just made it along with its sequels more popular.

I recommend it, but whether the original or Redux are better than one another is up to personal preference, but regardless of which one you play, expect to be hungry for more.

7/10

I genuinely do not understand what sort of appeal this game has. How in God's name can people play this every day? I seriously don't get it.

This is a game that suffers from schizophrenic game design and business decisions. It tries so hard trying to replicate and compete with CSGO and yet it fails spectacularly at understanding what made CSGO's mechanics work so well in the first place.

It feels like a game that just tries to cash in on the ever still popularity of CSGO while also double dipping by copying other games like Overwatch, Fortnite, and Rainbow Six Siege.

I don't even know where to start with this shit. I'll have to go category by category just so that you can fully understand how every single issue this game has all adds up to a messy fuck burger of a product.

And holy fuck this review turned out longer than I thought it would. But I salute you a hundred times over if you manage to get through it, cause goddamn, this game is much worse than I thought it was when you go in-depth.

Let's start with one of the most important aspects of this game, the gunplay. And already we're at a bad start, because they botched it to all fuck.

[ 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙂𝙐𝙉𝙋𝙇𝘼𝙔 ]

The gunplay in this game is the definition of inconsistent. The main problem with the shooting is how it feels like you are shooting a buckshot shotgun no matter what weapon you are using.

How gun accuracy works is that as you move, your weapon gains more bullet spread. Walking gives you slight inaccuracy, jogging gives you the most inaccuracy.

Standing still makes your shots more accurate, and crouching gives you the most amount of accuracy. The less you move the more accurate your shots are.

The difference being that you can also ADS (Aim Down Sight) so that you can get some zoom in for those longer range targets.

It's the exact same as CSGO right? Well, no, it isn't. It's total shit.

Whether you are walking, standing still, or even crouching, the bullet spread is so much more severe than in CSGO.

There are so many goddamn instances where I could be shooting at an enemy standing even a few feet away from me, but the bullets spread so much that I can't get the kill, even if I shoot in short bursts or single tapping.

The bullet spread is so bad that it can feel like you're shooting at fish in a barrel. How is the spread so bad that even single tapping your enemy isn't effective half of the time?? The only exceptions where it isn't so bad is with the pistols and the shotguns.

Whether it's hip firing or aiming down sight, it feels like you have to rely on RNG to kill people in this game. Especially when the bullet spread can actually get you the most random headshots even if you're not aiming for the head.

Even crouching in Valorant does not give you as much accuracy as you may think it does like in CSGO. Your shots can still miss, and it's a fuckin' joke.

The one shot headshots in this game is some of the most random bullshit I've experienced in a shooter, and it's especially worse if you experience D-Sync.

Some of your bullets won't register on your enemy but they can just one shot kill you with no problem at all, and this is due to how shitty the servers are. It can also be why you can get shot before you even see your enemy around a corner.

The lag is also just atrocious. Sometimes the game would tell me that I have a ping of around 50 and yet I'm lagging like crazy. It makes the game virtually unbearable to play.

Here is another major issue with the aiming:

In CSGO, the amount your crosshair would bloom depended on the weapon type. The bloom is categorized from lowest to highest

Pistols
Shotguns
Submachine Guns
Rifles

However in Valorant, the submachine guns have relatively the same amount of bloom as the rifles. Meaning that jogging, hell, even walking with SMGs will still have a shitload of bullet spread.

This is stupid because SMGs are meant to be the run and gun type of weapon. So combine this with the slow movement speed that feels sluggish, like you're trying to run in an elementary school swimming pool full of pudding, and the SMGs just straight up suck, because weaker damage and yet higher spread than the SMGs in CSGO.

How did they fuck up SMGs so bad in this game? But the fucked up thing is, a very good portion of your match you'll have to use the SMGs, and I'll get into why later.

So because of random bullet spread, random one shot headshots, random D-Sync and random lag due to shit server issues, and SMGs being straight up anal sauce, this can all create a game where the skill comes from how lucky you are.

This is why it's nearly fucking impossible to get kill streaks going. This is why players get negative K/Ds in most matches. Even the Pro players struggle going positive while playing this game.

This game is brutally fucking difficult, but for all the wrong reasons.

Many times you will just be asking yourself

How the fuck did this guy kill me? or How did I not kill this guy?

Get used to it, because that is the whole game.

[ 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙈𝘼𝙋𝙎, 𝘼𝙉𝘿 𝙇𝘼𝘾𝙆 𝙊𝙁 ]

Let's make a comparison. CSGO launched with 6 maps, and as of now the game has around 40 maps.

Overwatch launched with 12 maps, and now is crossing the 30 territory.

Keep in mind, these games came out years ago.

Valorant is a game that was released in 2020, and guess how many maps it launched with?


4...

Just, 4. And as of this review, they've only added TWO maps. Is this a joke? Six maps??

Hell, two of these maps the community absolutely fucking hates: Icebox and Bind.

This might be the lowest amount of maps a competitive shooter like this has had, well.. ever.

So because of the insanely low amount of maps, the game gets very repetitive. You can't even choose what map you want to play on to avoid playing on the shitty ones. So you'll just be getting the same 1 or 2 maps over and over and over.

Each map in this game is very gimmicky. They have something exclusive to them in an attempt to differentiate from each other, but if anything, it's minor, and just makes the game more annoying to play.

One map has rope rappels, another map has portals, another map has doors that open and close, which is pretty cool. And yes that was sarcasm.

Bind and Haven or example are total shit because those maps have three bomb sites.

How the fuck can you cover three different bomb sites with just five people? Who is the numbskull that thought this was a good idea?

These gimmicks are nothing more than just gimmicks, because they don't compensate for just how poorly designed these maps are.

The maps in this game have so many fucking angles and corners that the game can become a camper's wet dream. Camping is actually an insanely viable strategy because of the shitty gunplay and bad servers that I mentioned earlier, as well as the terrible map design.

[ 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙈𝙄𝘾𝙍𝙊𝙏𝙍𝘼𝙉𝙎𝘼𝘾𝙏𝙄𝙊𝙉𝙎 ]

Oh ho ho ho ho my fucking god. Holy mother of shit. I honestly thought I wouldn't reach a point in time where I can safely say that a company has managed to make a game that is as greedy if not even more greedy than Star Wars Battlefront 2 in its early days.

This is one of the most egregious and predatory examples of monetization I have ever seen in a game. Is this what we get instead of loot boxes now? We're going from one scummy monetization scheme to another huh?

Battle Passes and overpriced paywalls. Seriously, why are the gun skins so fucking expensive in this game? It's flat out disgusting. And it's disgusting that there are people out there who buy this shit thinking that charging over $100 for cosmetics is totally okay.

Here is an example. As of this review there is a Spectrum Collection being sold right now. It comes with the Spectrum skin for the Classic Pistol, the Phantom, the Guardian, and the Bulldog, along with other stupid shit like sprays and charms.

It costs 10,700 Valorant Points. How much is that? Oh, you know...

$100...

And apparently the bundle is on discount. Oh, I'm so fucking sorry, Riot Games, let me give you a round of applause for your generosity, you really deserve it. Now instead of having to spend 170 fucking dollars I now only have to spend $100..

I'm going to have an aneurysm.

And that's not the worst part. The bundle comes with just the base skin. The base skin can be upgraded to have extra effects, upwards of 3 times. You need 10 Radianite Points for each upgrade. How do you get Radianite Points?

Oh, of fucking course, by either buying Battle Passes and grinding the fuck out of them, or you straight up buy it from the Store.

20 Radianite Points costs up to $20, which is the lowest amount you can get.

So even after you spend this RIDICULOUS amount of money on gun skins, you STILL need to spend even MORE money just to get the COMPLETE version of that skin.

The whole game is like this!!

And if you wanted to buy skins separately from a bundle, you still have to pay upwards of 2600 Valorant Points. $26 for a single weapon skin?

$53 for a fucking melee weapon skin??

You want proof? Well here are some screenshots I took.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/HpPiXcAv6YfbHASQ6

https://photos.app.goo.gl/1PSVq2735MEGzrMe8

https://photos.app.goo.gl/BeW4YDNzT2uZKyTm8

Seriously, this shit alone is reason enough to say that this game is a piece of shit. If you're one of those people who spent upwards of $200 buying skins for this game, you are the reason why corporations keep doing this shit, and get away with it.

You're the type of person that caused Grand Theft Auto V for the PS5 and Xbox Series X to exist, by making Rockstar and Take Two Interactive $1 billion alone from buying Shark Cards. That is the game that you deserve.

I'm sorry but I'm taking a stand against prices like this. This is just grotesque.

And don't give me that same copy and pasted retarded as fuck statement:

"But it's a free to play game."

That is seriously a meme at this point. The game being free to play does not justify having $200+ paywalls when the game doesn't even have loot boxes. This is the kind of shit that I expect from mobile games.

Who wants to play a game only to be greeted by a paywall that is more expensive than three newly released $60 AAA games?

There is nothing that kills my motivation more and makes me want to not play a game than opening up said game only to be greeted by giant price tags being shoved right in my face.

Stop letting this horrible shit get into our core gaming Industry. I don't want another EA or Activision/Blizzard, and you shouldn't either.

I never thought I would say it but Fortnite actually did it right when it came to cosmetics. You buy a skin, which is no more expensive than 2000 V-Bucks which equals $20, but not only is it not too expensive, but there are many ways to easily earn V-Bucks so that you don't have to buy them at all.

Not to mention, if you wanted to unlock additional effects and or variations of that skin, you just had to play the game, and that's it. So what is Riot Games' excuse?

I hate Fortnite, but I have to give credit where credit is due and give the W to it. Rogue Company has much more reasonable prices as well, not to mention the skins look really fucking good in that game so yes I'm giving a W to that game as well.

[ 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝘾𝙃𝘼𝙍𝘼𝘾𝙏𝙀𝙍𝙎 ]

The game has a class system, each character has a different set of abilities that can change the tide of battle, along with an Ultimate ability. You've got your Fraggers, your Supports, your Defenders, etc.

This is supposed to be the main game changer opposed to CSGO. A CSGO type game but with unique characters with abilities like Overwatch.

The best of both worlds, but it’s more like double dipping your cock into a bowl of ghost pepper salsa.

There is a major problem right off the bat when you have hero shooter ability mechanics in a competitive shooter like this. No matter what, whether you nerf a character or buff a character, there will always be another character that is better than that specific person.

This game will always have balancing problems. And because of this, it creates a trend where people will mostly play meta characters.

80-90% of my matches always have me face an enemy team that has either a Sage, a Jett, a Viper, a Raze, a Kay/0, or a Reyna.

Maybe Omen or Phoenix.

And sometimes, it's a combination of all of these characters. Because these are all the best characters to play. They are the most powerful. And yet there are like, 7 other characters.

A team consisting of a Sage or a Skye, a Jett or a Viper, a Raze or a Kay/0, along with a Phoenix or an Omen is literally the most versatile team comp. It's pretty much what many teams like to run even in the Pro scene.

Like, why would you play Cypher, Breach, Astra, Sova, Brimstone, or Yoru, when you could play Sage, Raze, Viper, Phoenix, Kay/0, or Jett?

Hell, Jett alone can break the whole game because of her insanely powerful utility, being able to throw smokes, soar into the air, and dash.

And her ultimate allows her to shoot kunais and quickly dispatch enemies if you know how to aim them. And each time you kill someone they refill.

You see how stupidly overpowered Jett is?

See, this is the problem. Most players go with the latter option. They just play whatever is the meta. And while I am on the topic of abilities, I want to get into the problem with the Buy Phase.

[ 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙄𝙉𝙁𝙇𝘼𝙏𝙄𝙊𝙉 ]

For some fucked up reason the developers decided to increase the prices in the Buy Phase. Guns and Abilities during the Buy Phase have have either gone up in price or went down in price but these are all minor tweaks if anything. It's still difficult trying to get money.

This just makes it even harder to purchase what you need. I reach many instances where I get really frustrated with not being able to buy what I need.

If the SMGs were actually viable then it wouldn't be such an issue, but no, they're shit, and yet you are forced to use them for a large portion of the match because you need to save money for the rifles and abilities.

The rifles are expensive as shit. It's even worse when you also have to buy armor before each round starts which already takes away at least a quarter of your earnings. So you either have to buy pretty much nothing or you're always gonna be either broke or near broke.

The developers did this for balancing, to reduce the amount of ability spam. To make the game more centered around gun skill rather than utility game.

Maybe if the gunplay actually fucking worked then I could understand this. But it doesn't. So this change just comes off as vapid and tone deaf. You just made the game even more irritating to play than it already is.

And speaking of the game being irritating to play, I need to address a gigantic issue that I just don't see enough people complaining about. It is still one of the most stupefying game mechanics that results in a problem I tend to roast Rainbow Six Siege for.

[ 𝘼𝙁𝙆 𝙋𝙀𝙉𝘼𝙇𝙏𝙄𝙀𝙎 𝙄𝙉 𝘾𝘼𝙎𝙐𝘼𝙇 ]

I seriously can't stress enough how much of a plague game penalties are. It is the biggest example of how a game becomes less like a game and more of a Chinese sweatshop.

Basically, if you get removed from the match from being AFK or if you leave a match early, you get a penalty, in which you have to wait on a timer to reach 0 before you can play again.

Keep in mind, if you're playing with friends and at least one person has an AFK penalty timer well guess what? None of you can fucking play. You either kick that person out of your party or you can't play.

What? Why? Who fucking came up with this? This is fucking stupid, I wanna play with all of my friends! Why should people have to wait on me if I get a penalty? I already commonly go AFK as is.

See, if it was a Ranked mode like in CSGO and Siege, that is totally fine. Throwing a game and going AFK not just affects you but your team as well. If you go AFK a lot then you shouldn't be playing Ranked.

But, some dumbfuck(s) at Riot Games and Hi-Rez (the guys who made Rogue Company) decided that it was a good idea to give these timer penalties to players who get booted out of Casual matches.

Well then that just defeats the fucking purpose of Casual now does it? Why the fuck do you have both Casual and Ranked modes but if you get booted from a Casual match you still get penalized for it?

These timers can go up to a fucking hour, even two hours. Two fucking hours? Are you out of your fucking minds??

Also, if you do get penalized you can't play ANY mode for that duration of time. Not just the standard plant and defuse mode, but even modes like Deathmatch, Fracture, and Spike Rush.

So you know what that means? If you get penalized, you can't play the game. At all. So you know what you gotta do for the next hour? Either fuck around in the shooting range, do private matches (if you have anyone to play with), or you fight against bots.

Or you could just..you know..play a better fucking game instead.

Seriously, what was the thought process here?? Punishing players for going AFK and leaving Casual matches mid-session?

Why not just give players the ability to join in the middle of a match? If you have a teammate that leaves the game, why not have that person replaced with someone else?

Rainbow Six Siege does this and CSGO does this. In CSGO, if you're playing Casual or Deathmatch or Arms Race and you're having a terrible match and you're just frustrated and you don't wanna be there anymore, you should not be punished for wanting to leave.

Not to mention, going AFK should not be as much of a sin as the developers seem to think that it is. Do you have any idea how long matches last in Valorant? Upwards of 25 minutes, sometimes even 35.

You have to win 13 rounds in Valorant's Casual mode, as opposed to CSGO's Casual where you only need to win 8.

Think about how many rounds you have to play before you win. It's a minimum of 13.

Matches can fucking go on forever in this game, and yet you are expected to not have to go AFK at all. Nothing else is more important. You are either playing the game 100% or fuck you, don't play at all.

You know, I'm not sure if the developers were aware of the fact that people like me have real lives. Shit that we have to do. And yet we get punished for having to go AFK.

Again, I get Ranked, but why Casuals? And why prevent players from being able to play the game at all because of something as common as "Oh shit, hang on, I gotta do something, I'll brb."

Why not just have a vote to remove player system like in CSGO? And then have that player replaced with someone else?

Seriously, this is Marvel’s Avengers (the 2020 game) levels of fucking stupidity.

Same shit with Rogue Company. The game has both Casual and Ranked modes but going AFK in Casual modes can result in getting temporarily banned from matchmaking for at least 30 minutes, instead of just having a system where players can join matches already in progress.

Because of this AFK and throw mentality but with the only option being to surrender to the enemy team and force the match to end, it reaches a point where it's less about you and more about the game. You become the fucking game.

It's non-stop sweat all the time. And this is the same shit that I get on Siege's ass for.

[ 𝙄𝙏'𝙎 𝙉𝙊𝙏 𝘾𝘼𝙎𝙐𝘼𝙇 𝙀𝙉𝙊𝙐𝙂𝙃 ]

There's never a moment in this game where you can get a chance to breathe, maybe experiment with the different characters and learn the maps.

There's no such thing as fun in Valorant. You either sweat, or you get fucked in the ass repeatedly by the enemy and get yelled at by toxic man babies on your team.

CSGO has a pretty steep learning curve. At first I didn't like the game, but as I kept playing it and I was getting better and better, I started to fully appreciate the game for what it was because of the fact that you can make the game as sweaty as you want it to be.

CSGO can be a pretty sweaty game, and yeah I can get frustrated at it sometimes, but if I get tired of one mode or lobby I can just go into another one with no punishment unless it's Competitive. It also does have that casual side to it as well. Hence there's modes like Deathmatch and Arms Race, to get you ready for Casual, and then that gets you ready for Competitive.

It's a long staircase that takes time to run up, but as you get better, you start to feel like you're on top, that you are reaching that goal.

But in Valorant, you never feel like that. Yes there are good and bad players obviously.

But if you're someone like me, someone who doesn't snort G-Fuel up your nose and inject Adderall into your throbbing erection, you never feel like you are getting better at the game, because of how broken the mechanics are. I've been playing FPS games for a good 15 years now, and Valorant makes me feel like I'm total shit.

Hence why the game is as toxic as it is. Seriously, this might be the most toxic game I've played since DayZ and Rust. And that is because of how badly designed the game is. The game fails at being a CSGO type game and it fails at being an Overwatch type game, and because of this, there is no such thing as playing the game to just have fun.

And now for the final big elephant in the room. And you probably already know about this even without playing the game. I'm talking about the infamous anti-cheat the game forces you to install.

[ 𝙑𝘼𝙉𝙂𝙐𝘼𝙍𝘿 𝘼𝙉𝙏𝙄-𝘾𝙃𝙀𝘼𝙏 ]

What I'm going to be explaining is going to sound pretty nerdy, so I apologize in advance. I'm not a software engineer, but this is based on information I read online.

So before you are even allowed to start the game you have to install the anti-cheat known as Vanguard. Basically, it requires access to Ring 0.

Basically what that means is that your operating system has different "layers", Ring 3, Ring 2, Ring 1, and then Ring 0, which is the kernel center of your computer's security.

Vanguard requires access to Ring 0, basically giving it the most amount of access to your PC. This is why Valorant requires you to restart your PC in order to finish installing it, because that's how you give software access to Ring 0.

Ring 0 is not what you should be allowing a lot of programs access to, as that is where you are the most vulnerable.

The anti-cheat runs at all times while your PC is on. It only scans your PC while you're playing Valorant.

A lot of people like to call these "root kits" which are basically backdoors for hackers to break into your PC.

How Vanguard works is that it uses an AI to scan your computer for cheating software, and would automatically ban you as soon as you try to play the game with said cheats.

Which sounds good right? Well, it's shitty for two reasons.

First of all, it can lead to players getting banned for absolutely no reason at all even though they didn't have cheats installed, because the software isn't perfect.

And second, it can be dangerous.

Vanguard itself is not dangerous, but it is potentially dangerous. And that alone was enough for me to uninstall the game after I read about this shit, because I was not going to risk having my $800+ PC rig compromised from playing this shit game.

Because there could be a situation where you are playing Valorant and a hacker decides to use the backdoor to get into your kernel, cause mayhem on your computer, and possibly steal valuable information from you.

It's like when Grand Theft Auto V first came out on PC and there was a massive security breach on the Rockstar Social Club.

Thousands upon thousands of people had their information leaked out to hackers.

Not only did they have access to people's social media accounts, bank accounts, and other critical information, but these people got locked out of their accounts meaning that they could not play the game that they just spent $60+ on, because you have to be logged into the Rockstar Social Club's servers in order to play GTA5, even for the single player, which is fucking horseshit.

Rockstar's Social Club Accounts May Be Compromised (2015)
https://www.overclock3d.net/news/software/rockstar_social_club_accounts_may_be_compromised/1

Not to mention playing GTA Online gives you the risk of hackers grabbing your IP address and whatnot simply by just being in the same lobby as you, because that is just how awful Rockstar's security and anti-cheat are.

There is an awesome video that perfectly goes in-depth about just how bad all of this is. I will leave a link if you are interested.

Gypsy - Rockstar's Dirty Little Secret
https://youtu.be/C_fdhCXlPI0

But I'm only bringing up GTA5 because well, Valorant has the same problem. It also really doesn't help that Riot Games is owned by Tencent which is one of the largest corporations in all of China.

And unless you have been living under a rock, you'll be aware that Americans are really not the biggest fans of the Chinese market.

Riot Games have claimed that they are not planning to do anything malicious with Vanguard, and yet the idea of having someone breaking into your computer just by playing the game, it's fucking horrifying. I've seen it happen.

Big companies get hacked all the time. Remember when Sony and the PlayStation Network got hacked in 2011? I'm sure a lot of people do. What if the same were to happen to Riot Games? But it's much worse because this puts your whole PC at risk.

So again, the anti-cheat itself is not dangerous per say, but it is prone to be exploited. So even if you got past literally everything I have gone through in this review, then I would hope that you are feeling at least a bit weary about this shit right here.

[ 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 ]

Okay so after all of this fuckin' nonsense you get the idea of just how terrible this game is. In a nutshell, the game suffers from all of these things:

The gunplay is heavily reliant on RNG with ridiculous bullet spread, D-Sync and laggy servers, and random chances of getting headshots or headshotted

There are an insanely low amount of gimmicky maps with a shitload of angles and corners that results in a camper's paradise

The game is chock full of revolting, anti-consumer, and ridiculously overpriced monetization that has the fucking audacity to ask for even more money from you even after it already asks you to spend a fuck ton as is (upwards of $200+)

The game suffers from the infinite problem of balance because players will always play whatever the meta heroes are because it is the most viable option to do well

The developers inflate the prices of some of the guns and abilities in-game in an attempt to reduce ability spam but then stupidly forget that the gunplay is total shit

You can get AFK banned even from playing Casual modes, preventing you from being able to even play the game for very long periods of time which defeat the purpose of a Casual game mode, especially due to ridiculously long match times (25-40 minutes long)

The game isn't casual enough in which there is no such thing as just playing the game to have fun, it's non-stop sweat and toxicity all the fucking time

And to top it all off, the game forces you to download an anti-cheat that requires access to the Ring 0 kernel in your PC's security, which can serve as a potential risk for hackers to use the anti-cheat to create a backdoor to break into your computer and either damage it or steal your personal information.

You can't delete Vanguard by the way. If you delete it then you can't play Valorant, but you know what? I could give a fuck less. Because this game deserves to be thrown in the trash heap where it belongs.

Just go play CSGO for god sake. It is an infinitely better game. Go play Rainbow Six Siege, go play Verdun or Rising Storm 2 Vietnam or Squad or Enlisted or Insurgency Sandstorm, just, fuck this game.

Hell, even Standoff 2 does all of this much better than Valorant, and that's a fuckin' mobile game.

I hate this game, and I hate this company.

Funny enough, this game was actually developed by people who played CSGO professionally. And after playing this absolute shitshow of a game, it makes me grateful that I'm not a "pro" myself. Because everything in this game just comes off as gross and embarrassing.

And it doesn't take a game developer or a player in the eSports scene to expose the god awful flaws in your game.

Playing this game only just makes me appreciate other games that did all of this shit way better.

2/10

I have a serious love/hate relationship with this game.

This is definitely one of the more unique shooters that I've played in quite a while. It's like if Battlefield and Verdun fucked and had a bastard child. That's the best way I could describe this game in a nutshell.

It's a 64 player FPS that has large scale open battles of attrition where the core gameplay is centered around teamwork, coordination, precision, and making slow and methodical movements rather than your standard fast paced Call of Duty clone where your bragging rights come from how many kills you can get in a single round and without dying from using up all your dopamine shots.

One half of this game I absolutely love and am addicted to but the other half can be a frustrating and exhausting endurance, and I will get into that. So I'll start off with what I love about this game.

[ 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗦 ]

The atmosphere that this game presents to me is just spot on. Even more so than Battlefield, Rising Storm 2 Vietnam makes me feel like I'm actually in the middle of a fuckin' war, the immersion is quite intoxicating. Playing this with friends makes the experience even better.

The role playing that people do in this game is just funny as shit. I love loading into a match just to see the people on the Vietnamese team calling the Americans racial white people slurs. Some may find it fucked up, I think it's hilarious.

I play on the American team and people start blasting ACDC, Paint it Blank, Fortunate Son, and other 1960s songs in the voice chat. It's funny, but sometimes it can get annoying and you'll end up muting whoever is doing it.

I look in the game chat and I see people saying stupid shit like "Knock knock, I'm here to burn down your crops and steal your wife."

I think people take this game too seriously lol.

The people who play this game can either make or break the entire game, hence why I have mixed feelings about it.

Regardless, despite some occasional toxicity, the community is very dedicated to this game. They have no tolerance for people who cheat, team kill on purpose, or don't do what their roles require them to do.

If that does happen, everyone just vote kicks. And every single time that person gets removed.

This is not your typical game where you rush into choke points and effortlessly dispatch a group of enemies in rapid succession.

This is a much more realistic game where you have to work with your squadmates by moving together as a team, recon enemy locations, call in some air support, and inch your way towards an objective, because being alone is not what you want to be, because it's very easy for you do die in this game.

Just like in Verdun, if you take even a single bullet, depending on where you took the hit, you'd be lucky if you survived it. If you shoot someone even once in their vitals, like their head, heart, or lungs, they will drop. It also depends on the gun, but most of the time you will die in one or two shots.

If you do manage to survive getting shot, you start bleeding out thus your vision starts blurring. Then you have to spend a good 10 seconds wrapping up your wound, and you only get one bandage. To get another one you have to get one at a resupply.

If you get shot in the leg you move like 90% slower for a few seconds which gives the enemy time to finish you off, which is already bad enough that the standard sprinting speed is a bit slow. It's even slower while you're crouched. But it does help when you want to run but need to take cover at the same time.

Also, there is no traditional ammo counter in this game, instead the game just shows how many magazines you have, and when you reload a new mag, you get a brief indicator that relatively shows how much ammo is in the mag you just put in the gun. There is no such thing as reserve ammunition traditionally like in most other games.

Here is a tip. I don't know if it's a bug or not, but there are times where your HUD will just disappear so you can see things like your squad mates, your mag counter, and the damage range your gun is set to. If this happens, just push the T key.

Some guns in this game have pretty hefty recoil, combine this with bullet velocity and even bullet spread, and it requires you to shoot in single or short bursts at medium to long range, but crouching and proning also gives you extra accuracy.

But you also have to worry about suppression and the stamina of your soldier. If you sprint for a duration of time, your soldier can get tired, which results in more gun sway. And if you get suppressed by enemy gunfire your gun will sway as well, and if an enemy gets a near hit on you, your soldier can flinch which can put your aim off.

That's why there's also a mechanic where you can hold your breath to stop guns swaying for a brief moment.

So despite only needing a couple bullets to kill someone, you still need to have good aim and pay attention to these other mechanics. The gunplay in this game is insanely satisfying. The hit registration is very good, and there is something orgasmic about getting those insane longshot kills, it just feels so goddamn good.

My longest shot was 225m with an AK47. It was the luckiest shot I ever pulled off. I saw a very faint moving dot in the distance, so I just took a shot for the hell of it, and somehow I killed someone with a single bullet, I got really excited over it lol. But then, I did it again, but at 210m, in the same match. But, those were the only two times out of approximately 80 hours of play time that I pulled off longshots that far with a gun that isn’t a sniper rifle.

Every gun feels good to use minus a few exceptions. There are plenty of weapons to choose from, some of my all time favorites are in this game.

The game has a server browser where you can choose where you want to play. Most people just play Territories which is like Operations from Battlefield 1 where you have to capture all objectives in a sector in order to keep pushing forward until you have captured every sector on the map.

Going back to the weapons, the American soldiers get the standard M16 (AR), M60 (LMG), M1 Garand (Rifle), M2 Carbine (AR), but also get the Grease Gun (SMG), Flamethrower, M14 (Rifle), M37 (Shotgun), XM21 (Marksman), M40 (Sniper), CAR-15 CommandoXM177 (AR), M1911 (Pistol), and finally the M1917 revolver.

Sadly the Australians got the shaft when it comes to the weapon department. The majority of the guns they have at their disposal are the American ones. They only have a few weapons exclusive to their team, if you're excluding variants. But, they are pretty damn good.

They get two different variants of the FN-FAL, and two SMGS, the Owen and the F1.

The FN-FAL has a hefty kick to it but the one shot kill range is ridiculous. The Owen is not that great, it's weak in terms of power and damage range, but the F1 is fucking awesome. The high rate of fire and low recoil makes it so fun to use, it reminds me of the M1918 Automatico from Battlefield 1.

But the Vietnamese, HOLY FUCK! These guys got sucked off during development.

The Vietnamese have the best weaponry in the game, there is no contest for me. They get guns such as the fucking MP40 (SMG), PPSh-41 (SMG), AK47 (AR), SKS (Marksman), MAT-49 (SMG), IZH-58 (Shotgun), RPD (LMG), DP-28 (LMG), Mosin Nagant (Sniper), SVD (Sniper), M1 Carbine (Rifle), TT-33 (Pistol), and the PM (Pistol).

I mean, do I need to explain this? How can I say no to the MP40, PPSh, SKS, RPD, DP28, and a goddamn Mosin Nagant? These are my favorite guns in history. If a game has a PPSh or a Mosin Nagant in it, I swear to God I will use it lol. Although sadly in this game the PPSh does not get a drum magazine, but it’s still fucking awesome. It dispatches enemies so quickly. The sound of it, hell, the sound of the MP40 and MAT-49 as well, they’re fucking orgasmic.

It actually makes me feel bad for the other factions, they get shit nowhere near as good. You would think that the Vietnamese would be overpowered because of this right? Well, the developers did a good job of balancing the gunplay. Because of the ridiculous time to kill, a certain gun doesn’t feel more OP than another one. Any gun can be good as long as you know how to use it, minus a couple of exceptions.

cough The Owen..
cough The Grease Gun..

However, if you want to use a specific gun, you have to be in a specific role. The game has a role system, hence where one half of the teamwork comes in. Every role is designed for a specific purpose.

There are a total of 8 roles, the Vietnamese for example get these:

Guerilla
Scout
Machine Gunner
Sniper
Sapper
RPG
Radioman
Commander

If you want to use the Mosin Nagant for example, you have to be in the Sniper role, the DP-28 requires the Machine Gunner role, the PPSh is in the Sapper role, so on and so forth. There is another catch however. Each role only has a certain number of player spaces, 2 or 3. So there is a chance that every role can fill up, in which you get stuck with the default Guerilla class along with the majority of the team. I’m assuming this is for balancing purposes. Imagine 20, even 10 people running around with M60s or flamethrowers, that would be fucking madness.

I actually have quite a problem with the role system and I’ll get into that but, on one hand the roles are meant so that your team can work together to fulfill specific needs. If you need your teammates to plant some surprise traps in some trenches or some tunnels, the Sapper can do so. If you want some air support, the Radioman rubs over to the Commander and gives them coordinates to call in an airstrike.

Snipers can take out long range targets, Scouts can pinpoint enemy locations. If your team is under heavy fire from a helicopter, a quick RPG can take care of it, that is if you have someone who actually knows how to use the damn thing…

..Oh. Ohhh.

Yeah.. Now here’s where I get into the issues I have with this game. I’ll start with the roles.

[ 𝘾𝙊𝙉𝙎 ]

The role system can either make or break an entire match if your team isn’t really competent enough to fill out their duty. There are times where your teammates will just take a role only because of the weaponry, and you know what, I do that too sometimes with the Sapper and the Machine Gunner classes, but this can be a problem because there are times where we need that RPG or that Radioman but they’re not doing what they’re supposed to.

The absolute worst example I can think of is when I play on the map Resort as the Americans. Oh my fucking god, it is an absolute shitshow. It seems like more than half of the people who play this game don’t know how to fly a helicopter. Either that or they’re massively trolling.

There is a helicopter pilot role on certain maps, and the issue is that only the people in that role are able to get in the helicopter and fly it. No one else. So if you have someone who doesn’t know how to fly, or they do know how to fly and just wanna fuck around, you will be subjected to the same cycle of getting into a heli, waiting 30 seconds or more to get to where you need to go, only for the pilot to fucking crash and kill everyone on board, including you.

This is how one of my matches went in particular:

I spawn in, get in the heli, and as soon as the pilot gets to the beach he makes a force landing, but he lands too hard and he blows all of us up, then I respawn, I get in a heli again, and guess what? It happens again. This shit has happened so often that it was actually impossible for my teammates to get out of the spawn base because there were no helicopters, because the pilots kept crashing them, either that or they got shot down.

This got infuriating. It's even worse than it led to a shitload of toxicity and arguing in the chat. It got so bad that the enemy team actually felt pity for us and they said “you know what? We’ll let you capture the beach.”

And they actually retreated and let us capture the first fucking point, all so that we didn’t have to keep getting into helis with people who don’t know how to fly the damn things. And it’s not like the game doesn’t teach you how to do it, there are tutorials that you can do, along with the shooting range and whatnot, so why don’t people just practice??

If you don’t know how to fly, then why the fuck would you take the Pilot role? Well like I said, either you’re an idiot, or you’re a troll, and a shitty one at that. To be fair, there is a kick system where your team votes to kick someone out of the role and have someone else take it.

But, during that match, I don’t think anyone knew how to fly, even the veteran players that have been playing for a while. I didn’t know how to fly either, but that’s only because I was a new player at the time, and I’d rather let someone else fly than me, since well, flying works differently in every game.

I am an ace pilot in GTA games but I can’t fly for shit in Battlefield games. But yeah, there are times where your team just does not communicate. There can be times where your team desperately needs an airstrike but either the Radioman or the Commander don’t work together to call that shit in. Speaking of airstrikes, they can actually break the entire game because of the baffling respawn system, and I’m gonna get into that.

There are two spawn points on each map, but you can get an extra one if you’re Vietnamese and a squadmate builds a tunnel for you to spawn on. But for some reason, and I still don’t understand how this shit works, sometimes I die but it doesn’t bring me back to the respawn screen, instead I just respawn instantaneously and then I get shot down again. Why does this happen? Is it a bug or a feature? If so it’s not really explained.

There have been numerous times where I am on the Vietnamese team and the enemy team calls in a napalm strike right? First of all, napalm is the most broken shit in the game for numerous reasons. The moment you even get near it your soldier will explode into a ball of flames. Napalm is instant death, no questions asked.

Secondly, because of this random respawning nonsense, many scenarios like this can happen:

The enemy calls in the napalm strike, it comes down and it kills you

You respawn instantly, the napalm kills you a second time after spawning

You respawn again uncontrollably, the napalm kills you a third time

You respawn yet again, and guess what? You die a FOURTH time to that one napalm strike

And FINALLY you get put back in the respawn screen.

Would you believe that I have had this instant respawn bullshit with napalm happen to me, not just one, or twice, or even thrice, but at least EIGHT times?

Hell, even when it’s not an airstrike, there are times where I get shot and killed, then the game force respawns me and I die again immediately. What the fuck is that about? Because of this, it’s so easy for the Commander to just rack up over 100, hell, even 200 kills by calling in airstrikes because the game just forces the enemies to respawn and they die over, and over, and over again. The kill feed just gets LOADED with the Commander's name on it.

Imagine how much free XP you get as a Commander, and all you have to do is just point at your screen, press a single button, and watch as the entire enemy team just gets BOMBARDED. It's unbalanced as fuck.

Speaking of dying over and over, death itself can also be quite infuriating at times. But of course there will be that one guy who will say the same copy and paste question "It's war, what do you expect?"

I get that this is meant to be a hardcore realistic type of game, but there is a point where the realism can get in the way of the player's enjoyment of the game.

There are a shitload of times where you will die but you have absolutely no control over it. You'll be in the middle of running to your teammates or an objective and you either get shot from out of nowhere, or you die from something like a grenade or an airstrike.

The farthest that I've ever been shot was at 310m. I am not joking. It honestly pissed me off. The absolute insane ranges that people can shoot you from but you can't see them at all, it happens way too often in this game.

There are so many times where I get shot and I'm just sitting there like "where the hell did I get shot from??" There are so many places where enemies could be hiding because the maps are so large.

Everywhere I go I am at risk of getting shot. Unlike a more casual fast faced shooter like Call of Duty or Battlefield, camping is a viable strategy in this game because death is so easy to come by at any given moment.

It does get frustrating where I'm just casually minding my own business, and then out of nowhere, BAP

I get hit by an explosion, or I get one shot killed from over 100m by some guy proning in a bush or sitting on top of a cliff or something. It happens so often. Sometimes it can suck the fun out of a match.

Sometimes it just can be an endless cycle of death, and it gets tiring after a while. Matches for me can go like this:

I spawn, I die
I respawn, I die
I respawn again, I die again

I can go on deathstreaks because I just can't counter the enemy. And having to rely on teammates just to help me out but can't do so just adds the cherry on top of the shit sundae.

Some of the maps in this game are very one sided. A few of the worst examples being Firebase (as the Vietnamese), Resort (as the Americans), and Hill 937 (as the Americans).

Firebase is shit because the majority of the map is just a plain open area with almost no places to take cover. There are times where I immediately die right after I get out of the respawn screen because it's so easy to get shot in the open.

But the Americans get most of the trenches and also have other places to hide out in.

Hill 937 sucks as an American because the whole map is just rocky mountains that are beige and brown colored, but the American soldiers all wear green, so you stick out like a sore thumb. Plus, the Vietnamese get trenches and bunkers to hide out in and shoot you from.

And Resort? Well, I don't need to explain again why that map sucks as an American.

The lag in this game can also get pretty ridiculous at times. I don't know how it happens, maybe it's cause of the servers that I play in, but there are times where I jump into a server that says it has 50 ping or slightly more, but then I load into the match and I get over 100 ping, which is not a good ping to have if you live in the United States.

I played this morning on a 70 ping server and my ping went up to 180, almost 200, and I had to leave it, cause I can't play if I'm lagging like crazy.

So with everything I went over, this is why I both love and hate this game at the same time. On one hand the game is an immersive, intense, strategy provoking, and satisfying war game with an incredible choice of guns and excellent feedback.

And the other is a laborious, frustrating, and sometimes very one sided battle with a few very shitty maps where death is impossible to avoid and getting killstreaks is insanely hard unless you either hardcore camp, or you are a Commander calling in airstrikes, and you get shitty teammates that don't know how to play the game because they just skip the tutorials and just jump right into the matchmaking.

It's brutally difficult trying to get positive K/Ds in this game, even if you are a person who has been playing FPS games for a long time.

But obviously this game is not for everyone. And that's the point right? It's meant for people who love more niche hardcore games if they're sick of any games made by Ubisoft, Activision/Blizzard, EA, etc

I enjoy this game for the most part, but there are times I get burnt out from playing it. But it's more fun when I'm playing with Discord friends, they can make the experience less painful.

The thing about games like this is that my opinions are subjective. This review is just based on how I feel about the game. Everything that I have experienced in this game may never have happened to you. If you have never played this game but you love these types of games, then I recommend giving it a try, see what you think about it, and then having your own thoughts about it.

When the game isn't on sale it's only $20, which is a steal in my opinion, and if you don't like it then that's what Steam refunds are for. The power of Steam. If I had to pay $30 or more, and I didn't have friends to play with, then yeah, I'd probably rank it a bit lower.

I have 80 hours spent on this game but I don't mind spending another 40 or so. I recommend bringing some friends with you, especially those who know Vietnamese and American stereotyping lol.

What would make me give this game a higher score would be if it had a story mode. Something like Call Of Duty World at War with 4 player online Co-Op. That would be fucking amazing. But as it stands, it's a mostly good game with glaring blemishes that could be fixed up in the future.


7/10

The return of the Redfields!
The true continuation of the series!
Albert motherfucking Wesker!
Incestual love bonding!
It’s Resident Evil on a new generation console!

Oh yeah. Like with my previous three RE reviews, I shall now pick apart Code Veronica. I get quite a kick out of writing reviews like they’re fucking anime visual novels because I have a clear passion towards the games that I love to play. That and I just like to make my reviews both informative and entertaining to read.

This is one the first RE games I played when I was younger. I played RE4, then this game, then RE5, then I would go back and play the original trilogy. I played this franchise in a very fucked up order. I was scared shitless of the PS1 games when I was younger, so I wouldn’t properly play the games myself until the PS2 generation. Probably wasn’t the best fuckin’ good idea to start with RE4, you can imagine the sleepless nights I had after playing that shit.

Going from RE4 to Code Veronica was fuckin’ jarring to me, because RE4 is a game that has a completely different direction taken, with more action sequences than any other game before it, and the whole third person shooter perspective was a first for a Resident Evil game. Code Veronica is one of the last games in the series to have the classic style of the PS1 games and it just makes me wish that we could get games like this again. For fuck sake, is there anyone out there willing to make old school games like Code Veronica again?

This is a weird fucking game to talk about. It’s one of the black sheep of the Resident Evil franchise. It clashes with a lot of ideas and it feels more like an experiment to see what would work for future games rather than a single concept that works really well. Would I say it’s underrated? Not really. Everyone I’ve ever spoken to about this game has had good things to say about it. It’s more like the game is often overlooked.

But, there is a huge but

There are some serious flaws with the game that can affect just how motivated the player is to get through it, or even play through it a 2nd time, and I’ll get into that. Some of these issues are so severe that it can affect the overall quality of the game.


[ 𝙎𝙏𝙊𝙍𝙔 ]

The story picks up three months after the events of RE2 and 3. After Claire Redfield escapes Raccoon City, she splits up from Leon and Sherry and goes on a solo mission to find her brother Chris, supposedly in Paris. She gets caught in one of Umbrella’s secret facilities and is captured. She is then taken and imprisoned on Rockford Island, which is actually another testing facility for Umbrella. Just like in Raccoon City, the T-Virus leaks out and it causes a zombie outbreak on the island. The first FMV scene in this game starts off with an action sequence that would make John Wick and Michael Bay fucking shit themselves.

Seriously, it’s so fucking over the top it reminds me of the laser room from Resident Evil 4. While this is still a Survival Horror game, it’s the first one to really start having these campy ridiculous action scenes very reminiscent of The Matrix. This game started taking an action approach even more so than Resident Evil 3 did.

So just like in RE2, Claire must escape the island and discover the fate of her missing brother. After breaking out of your degraded cage you quickly run into your… throat clear

Ahem.... AH AH AHEM!! cough

Your PARTNER for this game, who goes by the name of Steve Burnside. I may bash the shit out of Billy Cohen from RE0 but good lord Steve is just obnoxious. While he is a sympathetic character at times, everything that he says sounds like he is whining, it’s just the awful tone in his voice. The more he speaks the more it becomes insufferable. Not long after that you stumble in the mansion of the Ashford Twins, Alfred and Alexia. And let’s just say that they’re quite uh… into each other if you know what I mean by that.

Japan am I right?

So uh, besides that disturbing shit, the Ashfords are some of the best antagonists in the series. They are so fucking campy and over the top they bring that unintentional cheese the series is known for. Alfred Ashford blames Claire for the destruction of his home and facility and thus seeks revenge on her, when in reality it was actually Albert Wesker who is responsible.

If you’re playing this game for the first time you’re probably confused as to how he’s still alive. He died from the tyrant in RE1 right? Well it turns out before that happened, he injected himself with the Progenitor virus, and when he died, the virus brought him back to life. Not just that but the virus gave him supernatural powers, giving him incredible agility and superhuman strength.

The origin of the virus is kind of touched upon in Resident Evil 0, which is a prequel to RE1, but, the less said about RE0’s narrative the better..

Hence how Albert kicking the living shit out of Chris like a punching bag has become a staple in the series. Speaking of Chris, it turns out he finds out that Claire has been searching for him, so he sets off on a rescue mission to Rockford Island to find her. But by the time he gets there, Claire has already escaped the island with Steve. So now Chris has to find a way to get to Claire who has been stranded a second time because of Alexia, this time on a base in fucking Antartica. This game is just ridiculous. This is the first game in the series where things just start to go off the rails.

I do like the relationship between Chris and Claire. They do bond like real siblings. They protect and save each other when the danger is imminent. And despite what I said about Steve being utterly irritating to listen to, there were a couple moments in the game where they actually managed to make me feel sorry for him. There’s one scene late into the game which I won’t spoil, but that shit hit me in the feels fuckin’ hard. Nice work Capcom.

The story is full of ridiculous corny shit but it’s a very fun joyride. The payoff is worth the journey, but the main issue with the story however is the pacing of it. Once the game switches over to Chris the pace of the game comes to a complete halt and doesn’t pick up again until you get to the Antarctic base.

Not that Chris’s segment is flat out bad, but it involves a large amount of recycled content, and this can get pretty repetitive, because you visit and run through locations that you already played through as Claire. Not to mention Chris’s puzzles are harder than Claire’s, so if you hate difficult puzzles like I do, then this can be a real ball breaker.

The ending of the game with Chris and Wesker makes up for this, it’s one of the best scenes I’ve seen in an RE game. I laugh my ass off every single time I watch it. But after this, we don’t see Chris and Wesker again until RE5, and by then Chris has toughened up and learned to take his vitamins like a good boy. BROTHA!

But the best moment in the whole game in my opinion is when you reach a replica of the Spencer Mansion from RE1. I never knew what this place was before but after playing RE1 I was like “Ohhhh, so that’s what that mansion looking place was in Code Veronica!”


[ 𝙂𝘼𝙈𝙀𝙋𝙇𝘼𝙔 ]

This is one of the last games in the series to have the classic gameplay formula that made the franchise what it originally was. It still has tank controls, the 180 degree quick turn, the door loading screens, limited inventory space, limited saves, limited ammo and healing item pickups, and a third person camera but instead of fixed angles it instead moves around with the player.

However, like with the story, there are issues with the gameplay. It’s overall a very mixed bag for me. It still retains the survival roots, the risk/reward system with item conservation playing a huge part, but there are downgrades in terms of innovations. I already mentioned the whole pace breaker with Chris, but in terms of mechanics, it’s actually lacking the features that were present in RE3. Maybe this is due to the fact that this game only came out a year after RE3, so I imagine they didn’t have enough time to implement more gameplay mechanics.

There’s no more dodging mechanic, no ammo crafting with gunpowder, you can’t push zombies away like Jill could, there’s no more RNG to enemies and item placements, even just small things like having to push X to go up and down stairs again like in RE2. There are barely any new enemies to fight either. Most of the enemies you fight in this game are just rehashed from RE1 and 2. You can’t even get cosmetic skins to wear in a 2nd playthrough. But hey, at least you can still skip the cutscenes and blow up explosive barrels on enemies.

But there is the return of the Battle Mode from RE2 which is unlocked after beating the game. It’s just a gauntlet of killing enemies and progressing through each area until you reach the final boss as quickly as you can. Each playable character has their own set loadout but some are clearly better than others. It’s good fun. But the most interesting aspect of it is the First Person mode.

And this makes the game feel like a different one. It's one of the first times there is a First Person Perspective in an RE game, it's quite interesting seeing the game like this.

Speaking of new enemies, one of them is called a Bandersnatch. They’re able to smack you from across a room with their extendable arms. They can also stick to walls and vault over shit. To be honest, these things are a real pain in the ass to fight. They soak up a lot of ammo before they die, and they hit me 50% of the time. I try to just run past them as much as I can and only fight them if I really have to, because they’re just a waste of resources if anything. Hence if there’s a part where they show up I just say “FUCK IT” and just dash the fuck outta there. Seriously, even the Hunters are less of a bitch to deal with than the Bandersnatches.

And then there's the infamous moth corridor. Fuck this room. Seriously, fuck it. The main problem is that the moths fly around and they leave poison mist clouds in the air. But the room is so narrow that you can't run around it. It not only hurts you but it can also poison you.

The other issue is that the moth can unavoidably grapple you and lay an egg on you. And when it hatches a larva will come out and start biting you. And this also has a chance of poisoning you. But the thing is, the egg hatches at random. And you can't get it off. So there will be a chance you'll be running through an area in the middle of making progress but then the egg hatches and you get poisoned.

So you gotta either backtrack back to the Item Box to grab a blue herb, or use the stack of blue herbs in the same fucking room the moths are in. But then there's also the issue of using a blue herb only for the moths to poison you again immediately after you use it, so what the fuck, game.

And you're probably thinking "Why not just kill the moths?" If I could I wouldn't be complaining so much about them. You can kill the moths sure, but the problem is, they respawn. Yup, the moths respawn. So there is no point in fighting them. So every single time you go into this hallway, you just have to run straight for the door in the hopes that the moths don't lay an egg on you, or poison you with the mist clouds.

The developers put those herbs there because they must have known that this room sucked balls.

There is one new mechanic that wouldn’t be seen again until RE6 and that’s the ability to dual wield weapons. Well, kind of. There’s a pair of pistols that you can get very early in the game exclusively for Claire and it comes with quite a lot of ammo.

What’s cool is that you can actually aim at multiple targets. There’s a section in the game where Steve gets a pair of dual wielded sub machine guns and you actually get to play as him for a short while, and this shit is actually pretty fuckin’ fun, it actually makes me wish I could play as him more, not gonna lie. There’s just something about Claire dual wielding that just looks badass, you can see the evolution in her character after the shit she’s been through in Raccoon City.

There are however some serious roadblock moments in the game that can really affect players getting through the game. The first instance is the boss fight against a tyrant in the cargo plane. What absolutely fucking sucks about this part is that once you get on the plane, you cannot go back.

There’s a typewriter right next to the door where you engage it. However if you haven’t been conserving your items well enough, you can get into a position where you get stumped. Hopefully to God you found B.O.W. Gas Rounds for the grenade launcher and some explosive arrows for the bowgun and have saved them for this fight in particular.

Because Jesus Christ this fight is insane without them. The first issue is that the tyrant’s attacks are insanely difficult to dodge. He moves faster than Claire, so 80% of the time he’s gonna hit you. Sometimes he’ll knock you on the floor and you have to hurry and get up and move out of the way before he hits you again. And this tyrant isn’t a pushover, his attacks fucking hurt. This is one of those fights where Claire should have the ability to dodge.

Another issue is that you can only kill him by pushing him out of the emergency hatch by launching a metal container at him. However each attempt has a cooldown so you have to wait in between pushes. Another thing, you also have to inflict a certain amount of damage to the tyrant before he can be pushed out, otherwise you’re just wasting time.

But since there is no indication of how much damage you’re dealing, you’re not gonna know when exactly the fucker can be killed. So it’s just a fight that entirely revolves around trial and error, dying over and over and over again in the process. This shit fuckin' sucks, because I know friends who had to start the game over from the beginning or just stop playing entirely because they couldn’t get past this boss.

Another boss, the Nosferatu, is a boss you fight just before the game switches over to Chris, and this guy is no pushover either. His weakness is his exposed heart, and you get a sniper rifle just before the fight to assist in that, however the aiming is clunky, and you only get 7 shots. Even if you hit all 7 shots it’s not enough to kill him. You need more weapons. The AK is useful for this fight however if you missed it and you didn’t at least bring the knife with you, well then good luck trying to beat him now.

Also if you die, the checkpoint restarts just before the fight. But you can’t go back after you’ve picked up the sniper rifle. So you know what that means? You gotta reload your save file and play through again until you get to this point again and this time you’re prepared for it.

And yeah, I did just mention checkpoints in a game where dying actually sends you back to your last save. But this time, there is a checkpoint system but it’s incredibly vague on how it works. See, when you die, you can continue the game from your last save immediately instead of being booted back to the title screen and having to reload your save file.

But also, the game does get a few checkpoints at certain points. However the Nosferatu fight makes the checkpoint completely pointless. Because again, if you’re unprepared then you’re gonna have to reload your save file anyway.

These are just a couple examples of how player progression can be halted if you’re not aware of this shit beforehand. The game doesn’t warn you before you continue, so imagine all the people who jumped into this game blind and weren’t ready for this bullshit.

There's also a part in the game where Claire has to run away from a boss, but no matter what, the boss is gonna hit you. You NEED healing items to get past this, and this is just fucking stupid. I shouldn't have to use up precious healing items in such quick succession in a boss fight that isn't even meant to be fought.

You have to heal immediately after the first hit, because the second hit will kill you. At full health, a single hit will bring you down from Fine (Green) to Caution (Orange). You have to use mixed herbs or First Aid Sprays, because you just cannot take hits here.

There’s also the issue of how items transfer between Chris and Claire. The items you place in an Item Box are shared between characters. Let’s say I was playing as Claire and I put the Grenade Launcher in the Item Box and then the game switched over to Chris. That means Chris can grab the Grenade Launcher along with all the other items Claire left in the box. The problem with this as a new player is, unless you did the research beforehand, you’re not gonna know what items you’re gonna need for a certain section.

Let’s say I was playing as Chris, and I decided to put the shotgun in the Item Box, then the game switches over to Claire, then have Claire pick up the shotgun and any other items, but then at the end of the game it switches back to Chris again. If Claire had the shotgun and any other healing items on her, OOPS!!

Chris can’t use them for the rest of the game. I’m not joking. And don't forget that the Magnum is missable as well. When Chris gets to the Antarctic base there will be a room that is on fire. The Magnum is in there however you need the fire extinguisher to put out the flames.

But by this point the extinguisher is empty. There's a specific room you go into and there's a machine you have to interact with to fill up the extinguisher.

So if you happen to miss this, and then you give Claire the shotgun or the grenade launcher or any other powerful weapons or items, well then good luck trying to beat the final boss now.

And the other fucked up thing is, the game saves a checkpoint right before the final boss. So if you die, the game just restarts the checkpoint right before Chris activates the final countdown and fights Alexia.

So you know what that means? You gotta quit to the main menu, manually reload your save, and then you gotta play through Claire's section all over again.

God. Dammit.

So there are some serious issues you can create for yourself if you are not careful with your saves. I think this is why Capcom went back to a single playable character in RE4.

So yeah, the game is lacking gameplay features from the previous games, it has a few roadblock sections, and the item transferring gimmick is a problem as well. And while the game does give you a shitload of ammo at times, the game is very stingy with healing items. Even as a veteran player I still don’t have a whole lot of herbs by the end game. All of these issues makes Code Veronica the most difficult RE game in the series next to RE0.

This game is fucking hard. Unlike the previous games where the difficulty is warranted and forgiving at times, here it feels fucking brutal at times. But the difficulty just comes from the lack of polish in the gameplay. If it just had more development time it would have been ironed out, but as it stands, it’s a serious step down from the older games.

One last thing I should talk about are the weapons, and yet again, this is a step down. Remember how incredible the weapons sounded in RE3? Well in this game, almost all of the weapons have the same sound effects as the ones from RE2. The pistol, shotgun, grenade launcher, and the bowgun all sound exactly the same. Which is a disappointment but at least we got RE4 for that.

And speaking of the bowgun, the standard ammo sucks liquid ass sauce from a bendy straw just like in RE2, except somehow they’re even worse now. The bowgun shoots one bolt instead of three, so it actually takes longer to kill enemies.

And don’t even think about using it to kill enemies other than zombies or dogs, just fuckin’ forget about it. It’s way too weak. It takes at least 8 shots just to kill one zombie. Probably why they give you so much ammo for it.

There are good things about it however. It doesn’t need to be reloaded like a standard gun, and the explosive rounds you get for it are WAY better. They’re very good for bosses.

There are no more Freeze Rounds from RE3, so now it’s Acid, Flame, Explosive, and the B.O.W. Rounds which are insanely useful for the tyrant fight. The grenade launcher works the same as it did in the previous games. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it and that also goes for the shotgun.

Because of the robotic movements, the lack of nice beefy sound effects, and the fact that you can no longer blow off zombie heads and legs, shooting enemies feels nowhere near as good as it did in the older games. The lack of gore and good impact of my guns kinda defeats the purpose in my opinion.


[ 𝙋𝙍𝙀𝙎𝙀𝙉𝙏𝘼𝙏𝙄𝙊𝙉 𝘼𝙉𝘿 𝙎𝙊𝙐𝙉𝘿𝙏𝙍𝘼𝘾𝙆 ]

I fucking love this game’s artstyle. It’s a very nice mix between science fiction and goth. That small castle where the Ashford twins live looks like Dracula’s Castle and a Party City fucked and had a bastard child. It’s just full of creepy dolls, piles of books all over, and these guys must really have a fetish for insects, because the insect symbolism is fucking everywhere.

And something about the walls and floors just looks quite unsettling. This looks like a place Chernobog from Disney's Fantasia would live in. What’s new for this game is that instead of pre-rendered backgrounds, all of the locations are fully rendered in 3D. No more 1998 2D textures from the PS1 games. The power of the PissStation 2 allows for more detailed character models, higher quality FMV cutscenes, and better looking environments.

For the time this game does look good but you can really tell it is a 2001 game because there are still quite a handful of imperfections. For example the animations. I don’t know what happened here but the animations for the characters and zombies are jank as fuck. The movements for the zombies are really robotic now. The way they fall over just looks like something I would see in a Three Stooges short, it’s just really comical.

The way zombies fall down stairs when you shoot them just makes me piss myself laughing. It's like I just shot Homer Simpson it's so ridiculously dumb.

There are also moments in the cutscenes where the movements for the characters just look really off like they just don’t flow right. But obviously this is the first RE on a new console and again, short development time, but all of these flaws and imperfections makes me wonder how much better this game could have been had they just spent more time on it.

There is one amazing part about the presentation and it’s the soundtrack. Holy fuck I absolutely love the music in this game. A good chunk of the songs have opera singing in them and it just enhances the mood of the game tenfold. The tone from RE3 goes from bleakness and paranoia to straight up dread in Code Veronica.

The save room theme is the best save room theme in the whole series, period. And the final boss theme is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard in a Resident Evil game. And this may sound fucking weird if you don’t like opera music, but to me it’s very nostalgic because it reminds me a lot of the soundtrack to Parasite Eve. And I grew up with that game and the soundtrack in Parasite Eve is absolutely fucking orgasmic, it’s one of my all time favorites.

…

Fuck I wanna play Parasite Eve again now. Lmao.

And how about the music that plays during the Nosferatu fight? The shit is burned into my skull it's so intense and memorable.


[ 𝘽𝙀𝙎𝙏 𝙑𝙀𝙍𝙎𝙄𝙊𝙉? ]

This game has been released on the Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, PS3, Xbox 360, and it’s even been ported to the PS4.

The Dreamcast version is the worst to play. Because it has worse lighting than later versions, the load times for opening up the inventory are slower, and Steve’s hair design looks worse to me as well. But the most drastic difference is that the Albert Wesker story arc isn’t expanded upon in the game. The PS2 version of the game improves upon all of this, same with the GameCube.

However the best version in my opinion is the HD Remaster for the PS3 and Xbox 360. The game runs at a nice 1080p resolution. The visuals and character models are sharper and cleaner, the load times are slightly faster, the menus look better, the FMV cutscenes are at a higher resolution, and there’s even a leaderboard feature where you can compete for completion times with other players and your friends.

But what sucks is that on the PS4 for some reason, the version of the game being sold on the PlayStation Store is not the HD Remaster, but instead an emulation of the PS2 release. Why is that? So if you wanna play the HD Remaster you’re gonna have to dust off that old PS3 or 360, or get a PS3 emulator on your PC. Otherwise, you’re just gonna have to stick to the PS2 version.

Thankfully it’s cheap as shit on PS4, or if you’re more old school like I am, physical PS2 copies are pretty goddamn cheap these days. I’ve seen copies being sold online for $15-25.

Xbox One is a different story, I think… Since the console is backwards compatible with Xbox 360 games, then you should be able to play the HD Remaster on that.


[ 𝙇𝘼𝙎𝙏 𝙏𝙃𝙊𝙐𝙂𝙃𝙏𝙎 ]

Despite all of the rampant and terrible flaws that I talk about here, Code Veronica is still a great game. I personally still love this game despite all the gripes I have with it. The game is just really nostalgic to me. The charm is so goddamn memorable that it holds its own compared to all the other games. But I did have to put the nostalgia to the side and look at the game with the critical monocle. Looking back at it again, yeah, this game hasn’t aged very well. It’s a very polarizing 8 hour experience, and it could have been trimmed down if either Chris wasn’t in the game, or if his section was much shorter.

It’s a very odd game, it reeks of a “next gen PS2 game” but it’s a game that should be experienced at least once. Obviously I’m not gonna be too hard on it because of how long this game came out after RE3. I mean hell, it was released on the Dreamcast before the PS2, and it’s even more incomplete there than on PS2.

This game gets 7 Jill Sandwiches out of 10.

Atrocious. Tedious. Unfun. Those are a few words that can describe this entire game in a nutshell.

This is a Multiplayer First Person Shooter that suffers from schizophrenia, as it doesn’t seem to understand what kind of game it wants to be. I haven’t seen a shooter game that has had an identity crisis this bad since Resident Evil 6. No disrespect to RE6 though, I fuckin’ love that game.

[ 𝘾𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙂𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙮 ]

Christ on a bike where do I even start with this? So it’s an FPS game set during an apocalypse, but the apocalypse setting has no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever and I’ll get into that. The game plays like your generic Call of Duty esque casual twitch shooter but it fails hard at trying to be just that. There are HUGE issues that actually makes this game just un-fucking-bearable to play. Lemme start with how gear works.

{ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙂𝙪𝙣𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙀𝙦𝙪𝙞𝙥𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩 }

How guns work in this game is that they are divided by tiers. Every gun has a tier, and they go from 1-5. The higher the tier, the better the gun performs, things like less recoil, more damage, more range, etc. The difference between a level 1 weapon and a level 5 one is like night and day. You get higher tier guns by leveling up your faction and rank, but this shit takes fucking forever. It takes a ton of matches just to go up by one level. And even then, you still need to spend Silver to buy the gun, and this shit takes quite the grind to get as well.

Leveling up your armor will increase things like bullet defense, explosion resistance, and oxygen capacity. To do this you spend either Scrap or Gold. Scrap is earned from playing matches like with Silver but again, it’s on the grindy side. Also, to put attachments on your guns, you need to purchase them with Gold or Scrap as well. So you need Scrap for both armor upgrading AND for getting attachments. Or you could spend Gold. You wanna put a suppressor or a 2.5x ACOG scope on your gun? 500 Gold please. To get Gold you do either two things: spend real world money or you can turn a certain amount of Silver into Gold.

Now with what I just said you can most likely tell what I’m getting at from a mile away.

Of fucking course this game is Pay 2 Win. This is a Free-To-Play game so that’s obvious right? But this game just goes way too fucking far with this, it’s flat out egregious. Getting higher tier equipment and attachments is actually much easier if you just spend money on them. This game is insanely unforgiving to new players.

It’s a broken system, because if you’re a new player to this game you’re going to get fucking slaughtered, because most lobbies have players in them who already have max level gear, so you’re at a huge disadvantage already. It turns into Shoot First, Die First: The Video Game, because many times it doesn’t matter if you take the first shot, you’re most likely gonna die to your enemy because your gear is underleveled. Is this fucking Warframe PvP? It also doesn’t help that the matchmaking is just a big piss stain. Most of the time the max gear level, max level players get paired up against noobs with level 1 or 2 gear, it’s just plain unfair.

There are also preset kits that you can purchase with Gold. It’s a bundle that comes with a couple leveled up guns and armor, such as the Bandit Bundle and the Survivor Bundle. The game doesn’t even try to hide this shit. It’s like buying a preset class in a Call of Duty game.

There are also events that sell players exclusive weaponry like an AK12, a PP19 Bizon, and a PKP. And yes, these guns are max tier. They’re fully modded. And they’re expensive as fuck.

{ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙖𝙥𝙨 }

This is the main reason why I believe that this game just has an identity crisis. The maps in this game are so fucking shit that it’s giving me flashbacks to the maps from Modern Warfare 2019’s Multiplayer. The game has a max of 8v8 lobbies but the maps are WAY too complex in their size and verticality to only have this little amount of players in it. The maps are designed like the lobbies should be 16v16.

Not only are they large, but almost every building can be entered, and some of them have multiple floors. There are also many spots that are just empty space and serve no purpose. Every goddamn map in this game is like this. This is a huge problem because it makes the game flow SO much slower, because most of the match will be spent with you running around trying to find someone to shoot.

The game has that mechanic from COD and Battlefield where shooting a gun without a suppressor will make you pop up on the mini-map as a big red dot.

Almost every single match I’ve played ends before either team can even reach the score limit. And matches last up to 12 minutes. This game has a pretty quick TTK (Time To Kill), so do you play the game like it’s COD and just sprint everywhere, or do you take it slow and play it like a more tactical game like Squad, Rainbow Six Siege, or CSGO? Oh, and did I mention that this game has a stamina mechanic? Of course, make the game flow even slower than it already is.

The game wants to be a fast paced casual game like COD but the maps do not suit that type of playstyle, so in reality, you can’t play the game like it’s COD, and I’ll get into that. There’s another issue. There are no random spawns. Every respawn is always in one part of the map. It’s like how in Overwatch each team has a base where everyone always spawns at. The problem with this is that it also creates the issue of getting spawn killed repeatedly. The enemy is always gonna know where you are going to spawn, so they’re just gonna camp the spawns and wait for you to move. And that leads into my next biggest complaint

[ 𝘾𝙖𝙢𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙎𝙣𝙞𝙥𝙚𝙧 𝙎𝙥𝙖𝙢 ]

Do you hate getting sniped from across the map by a prone player in any of the Battlefield games? HOO BOY are you gonna fucking despise this game. I don’t think I'm exaggerating when I say that the game has hands down the worst camping and sniper spam I’ve ever seen in a game like this. The single shot sniper rifles are straight up overpowered. 90-95% percent of the time they will one shot kill you to the body. I’ve taken shots to the leg and still died in one shot. It doesn’t matter what rifle it is nor does it even matter that much what tier it is, the single shot sniper rifles can one shot body kill you and from ridiculous ranges almost every time. Hell, it doesn’t even matter if the enemy has a suppressor on the gun, most of the time you’re still gonna get one shotted. So it’s no wonder why there’s so fucking many of them.

And because of how large the maps are and how you can go inside every building, the maps and the sniper players go hand in hand. Most of the time you’re gonna get shot from out of nowhere. The enemies could be fucking anywhere. They could shoot at you from a window in a 2 or 3 story building, they could be crouched around a corner somewhere, they could be hiding in a bush, or they’re in their spawn hiding with a sniper rifle. It’s just a giant fucking campfest. I’ve seen less camping in Rainbow Six Siege, and that game is designed around tugging your sapi plated dick in a sweaty corner.

So because of the large maps, the low lobby numbers, the verticality of each map, the spawns, the stamina mechanic, and the fact that sniper rifles are fucking broken, it all creates a game where you are punished for moving. It’s the exact same shit that Modern Warfare suffers from. The flow of each match is all over the fucking place. It’s slower than a turd coming out of the ass of a fuckin’ sloth. Hell, even Semi Auto Sniper Rifles are really powerful because of low recoil and it only takes 2 body shots to kill someone. Everywhere I go I just get fucked.

Go left, I get sniped
Go right, I get sniped
Go middle, I get killed by a corner camper

I respawn, I get killed by a guy crouched in a corner next to my spawn point.

You see why this just sounds fucking excruciating?

It’s a game that is both Pay 2 Win, and the map design makes it extremely campy. And it doesn’t matter what game mode I play. Whether it’s Team Deathmatch, Slaughter, Search and Destroy, Domination, Capture the Flag, etc. The game is chock full of this unbalanced bullshit. Even a mode like Slaughter, where it’s supposed to be faster paced because the maps are smaller, is still shit because of the snipers, the camping, and the spawn system. Enemies are either camping on your side of the map, or they’re sitting nice and comfy on their side of their map waiting for you to approach them. Every killcam I watch is just some guy sitting ADS with a sniper rifle waiting for me to show up or they’re sitting ADS behind a headglitch with an assault rifle. Do I need to mention again these fucking people have tier 5 guns?

[ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 ]

This is a game that is supposed to be set during an apocalypse, and yet, the game manages to fuck that up. Because the setting has no bearing on how the game plays. It has no bearing on the fact that you can run around with a PPSH, an AKM, or a Mosin Nagant with 3-5 mags of ammunition, or a semi automatic shotgun with ONE HUNDRED reserve ammo. You can also find ammo boxes to refill all your ammo around the map, and they are shown to the player on their mini-map. The game is called Survarium and yet it does not play like a survival game, it just tries to imitate Call of Duty, so why the fuck is this game even set in the apocolypse? The apocalypse setting is just used as a cosmetic rather than a gameplay changer. If anything, the apocalyptic setting just makes the game more annoying to play.

Imagine just how cool how different this game could have been to other shooters if there was a survival aspect to it. Where there are very scarce resources, meaning you have to be very resourceful with your ammo and whatnot.

Kinda like how The Last of Us’s Multiplayer worked. Ammo and resources are scarce as fuck but you can craft more ammo with Parts which you get when you kill other players or find them and other resources in supply boxes scattered around the map. Not to mention armor had to be crafted with Parts as well and it can break after just a few shots. This creates a very tense cat and mouse type of game where every shot counts and you have to carefully use your items wisely, and it worked really well. It also worked because the maps weren’t that big and it was 4v4. This game could have done something like that, but no, it’s just a ripoff of COD, and a shitty one at that.

[ 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 ]

It seems like the developers just do not give a fuck about this game or never did. Either that or they have bitten off more than they could chew. There is a huge lack of transparency and communication when it comes to player feedback. The developers seem to be more worried about making money rather than actually fixing anything, by adding in more and more guns and other items that players are unwilling to pay for, instead of delivering what they promised.

As early as 2013 there was an open world aspect of the game that was promised but it never came, the next year it was promised but it never came again, and then the next year after that it never came, so on and so forth. The development of this game has just been way too slow. This game is now at least 7 years old and it still feels like a game in beta, like it’s unfinished. And as time went on they just decided to just keep adding more stupid shit into the game, because they just don’t have a clear vision of the project, nor passion for it. And this reflects in how they respond to criticism.

From what I’ve been reading on Steam and forums, the developers can’t seem to take it, as they tend to delete and ban Tweets and other posts made by people speaking out about the retarded choices they’ve been making with the game. Voice your concerns with the company even with good intention, and you get silenced. So good to know that these are the kind of people who shat out this fucking garbage pile out. To be honest, I’m not surprised. Current day Naughty Dog would get along with you guys very fucking well.

I wonder when, just fucking when, we reach a point in time where these companies start being held accountable for inherently breaking the law with violating Fair Use policy trying to shield themselves from valid criticism. But that's the mentality of game companies nowadays: Release a broken unfinished product, charge people ridiculous amounts for it, and when people call you out on it, you either ignore it or respond back with malicious intent.

I feel sorry for the people who were actually passionate about this pathetic excuse of a product. Why is this shit still even on Steam?? If anything it’s just a goddamn waste of precious hard drive space.

Fuck this company, fuck this game.

2/10

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I am so completely split down the middle of how I feel about it. I don’t know if I hate this game or if I fucking love it.

This game just REEKS of the early 2000s and it has aged like the moldy milk stains on my apartment wall. It feels like this game was coded on a fucking Maxi Pad by a small team consisting of first year college interns. It’s so dated and yet it doesn’t feel outdated at the same time, I just can’t describe it..

I typically review games in a neat and detailed structure. For example, I start with the story, then I get into gameplay, content, etc. But this game is such a fucking enigma that it’s very hard trying to describe it in that kind of format. So instead I’ll just do Cons and Pros.

{ Cons }

The graphics look like a dog’s asshole even for 2003 standards, the textures look especially lousy, like they’re from a game that came out at least 5 years earlier, the character models look hideous and their animations are very unconvincing, the seams between each area of the town are hidden behind by these really ugly rock formations that just make each map look like jumbled messes, and special effects like explosions, fire, and cigarette smoke just looks cheap and unconvincing as well.

The movement and gunplay is the definition of JANK. Platforming, since there are moments in this game where you have to platform, is clunky as shit because of the slow movement speed. Guns deal the same amount of damage regardless of what part of the body you’re shooting, maybe except for the shotgun, but sometimes shots don’t register at all, and guns never need to be reloaded meaning that even guns like the shotgun and the pistol can be shot infinitely without reloading which is fucking ridiculous.

The weapon swapping mechanic is also incomprehensibly bad, and I don’t know if that’s by design or lack thereof. It’s clunky as fuck and there are many times where it takes longer than it should to equip the weapon I want to use.

The map is almost borderline useless. It doesn’t give you a clear indication of where you’re going, meaning you will be opening the map constantly just to see if you're going the right way. It's shit.

The main character is as bland as a snarky fuckboy in a low budget B movie, with every generic one liner you could think of and with a voice as monotone as when I had strep throat at 23 years old.

And the sense of humor in this game is as funny as watching your favorite actor end up in a crappy reality television show. It’s the kind of humor that middle school special ed kids would find hilarious. And I know this because I’ve been in one. For three years. I was a pretty stupid fucking kid back then.

Toilet jokes, piss and shit jokes, butt jokes, 9/11 jokes and Arab terrorist stereotyping, dick and balls jokes, homosexual gun toting rednecks, violent video game protestors, suicide jokes, the cops being fatfucks who love doughnuts trope, and the fact that fucking Gary Coleman is in this game. It’s all pretty low brow stuff. It’s all as tasteless as a military salt lick.

I do have a sense of humor, and granted this game did get some good laughs out of me, and obviously the developers went out of their way to make this game as over the top and offensive as possible, but even at the time that this came out, the game is politically incorrect in almost every way, it’s aged as badly as the first 2-3 seasons of South Park. It feels like the jokes here were written by a 10 year old at times.

The first Postal game was much darker but at the same time there was a tongue and cheek vibe to what you were doing despite it being a game that is centered around mass shooting, and it was at a subtle level, but now Postal 2’s sense of humor in a nutshell is

Piss onto a doughnut and feed it to a cop and watch in amazement as he pukes all of his intestines out!!

Yeah because for some reason there is a mechanic where you can unzip your junk and pee on people to make them vomit.

Also, this game is buggy as fuck. Good god this is a poorly programmed game.

I’ve encountered many bugs like graphical glitches, the engine doing weird shit with the textures, frame drops, even though I’m running this game on a high end PC so it’s clearly not an issue with the hardware, it’s just a bug in the game itself, getting stuck in areas that I can’t get out of so I have to reload my save, NPCs getting stuck in T-poses, NPCs walking around but without the walking animation, dead bodies getting stuck in walls and ceilings, falling through the map, NPCs forgetting how to use stairs so they just walk off and kill themselves, enemies shooting at you without aiming their guns, the bad gun hit registration, NPCs just exploding for no reason at all, and the NPCs getting stuck on fucking everything.

Doorways, stairways, walls, and even each other. There are also a lot of spots where you can just get on top of the map and stare off into the gray unprogrammed void of video game limbo. One time I had to start the whole game over from at least the 3rd or 4th day because some guy was blocking a door I needed to go through to get out but I couldn’t kill him, even if I loaded my save file.

The AI is also laughably bad. There is a lot of inconsistency to it. Enemies either stand there and let you shoot them or they are cybernetic beings that know your exact location and can shoot you the moment you turn a corner with insane accuracy.

I’m sure defenders of the game will say the bugs and glitches have added onto the game’s charm, and granted some of this shit can be funny, but all of these issues can impact the overall quality of the game. A lot of this shit has been ironed out since what I've been told, the game was much, much buggier in its early days. This game is running on an old ass Unreal 2 Engine from 2003 so I guess the developers can't really do any more, but damn, it's not really enough. The optimization of this game is rough even nowadays.

But, I do give the developers props for sticking to their guns and continue to support the game. There are only a couple other studios that continue to support and update games that are this old to this day.

{ Pros }

So with everything that I just talked about, you would think that I hate this game right? Well to be honest, I don’t actually. Something about the gameplay feels cathartic and charmful. It reminds me of a simpler time where games didn’t try to be these massive open world RPGs with a huge emphasis on cutscenes and presentation instead of just giving absolute freedom to the player in how they want to play the game. The best comparison I could give is Grand Theft Auto III.

Postal 2 right off the bat gives you the freedom to do whatever the hell you want and it gives you that free reign all the time. You can actually play this game like it’s fuckin’ Undertale and beat the game without killing a single person if you wanted to. And this in itself can make for a completely different kind of experience that you normally don’t get anywhere else, especially in the First Person Shooter market.

But it does have that GTA III jank where you have to play through each day to unlock more areas of the map which can be annoying, but being able to play each day however I want and take my time with everything is praise well deserved. The moment I start the game, I am free to do as I please. You wanna rampage? Well, do it, why not? There’s no one stopping you.

You wanna play the game like a pacifist? Knock yourself out. I'm sure that in itself can make for a pretty interesting playthrough.

And this free agency to the player can make for a game that feels unique in its own way, a game where you could just unwind and relax after a hard day of work, where you can relieve yourself and just turn your brain off for a couple hours.

And despite the bugs and glitches, the game can still be fun to play thanks to the very good gun aiming, the ridiculous arsenal of weapons, and the fact that the game makes you feel like an unstoppable badass.

Speaking of guns, there are a ridiculous amount of weapons in this game. You have your standard pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, grenades, molotov cocktails, a rocket launcher, a nightstick, and a chainsaw.

But you have other ridiculous shit like a homemade flamethrower, a diseased cow head that is so toxic that it causes people to vomit blood until they die, actual scissors that you can throw at people like shurikens, a napalm launcher, a taser, a shovel that can behead people (somebody clearly watched The Evil Dead), a protestor sign (so you can show off your alpha male weeb dominance), a pocket knife, hedge clippers that also behead people, and a gasoline canister so you can light people on fire and blow shit up. YEAH! WAR CRIMES!

Hey, it's not called the Genova Convention when you're playing this game. It's the Genova Suggestion.

And finally, there's a grenade launcher that shoots exploding cats and you can also use.. cats as a suppressor for your gun. I guess someone in the development team really fuckin' hated pussy but I digress.

There's also a nice little nod to the first Postal game where on the second day you can set a marching band on fire with molotov cocktails.

Despite the really fucking stupid humor in this game there are some jokes that were genuinuely witty and got a laugh out of me, like where you get people to sign a petition to get “whiny congressmen to play violent video games” which is probably the most accurate thing this game gets, or how the game breaks the 4th wall and makes fun of the player for saving way too often.

Or when on Friday you suddenly catch Gonorrhea so you take a visit to the Vend a Cure at the clinic and the robot AI asks you to pee in a cup. And doing so makes the AI respond in disgust.

And despite the game’s buggy nature, the game in the long run is fun to play. In a way, it’s nirvanic. As I kept playing, I actually got addicted to it. The cops aren’t really much of a threat, and maybe that's because of the piss poor AI, but it actually does add on to the freedom of just going around killing, looting, etc.

Also, I love how you can approach every situation in this game. For example, instead of cashing your check or buying milk from the store you can just fucking rob the place. I also like the amount of surprises and easter eggs to be found by exploring. If you can get on top of the rooftops you can find weapons and whatnot.

And one of the best things about the game is how the theme of the game changes depending on what time of year you’re playing in. For example on Valentine’s Day all of the NPCs walk around holding flowers and you can go to a kissing booth and pay $5 to kiss the gimp. On Saint Patrick’s Day you can find a little leprechaun running around and if you kill him before he reaches his pot of gold you get rewarded with a shitload of cash. And if you catch him he will grant you one wish but they’re all just tricks. For example, choosing “I wish for hot bitches to work my balls” will just spawn a bunch of flaming pit bulls that attack you.

On Easter you can actually engage in an epic boss fight against the Easter Bunny wearing a fucking kung fu outfit. On April Fools Day there will be a fake DLC menu and trying to buy anything doesn’t do anything except make the Postal guy scold you, you filthy gamer whale. And on Halloween, the NPCs will wear costumes, it will be night time and you can fight skeleton soldiers straight out of Army of Darkness, and ghosts can randomly appear. Also, all of the shovels are replaced with plastic devil pitchforks. Details like that can really add onto the game’s charm.

{ Final Thoughts }

So now with everything I’ve talked about you probably understand why I’m so split down the middle when it comes to this game. It’s not a great game by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a good game. There’s a lot the game has going for it but there are some serious strikes against it. It's very hit and miss in a lot of ways. Sure there is some quality here, but the lack of polish that the game presents even 17 years later really does not help. There is a semi lack of authenticity here. The gameplay and sense of humor has aged worse than 21st century American social justice.

I haven’t played a game this divisive in quite a while, but maybe it’s the good kind of divisive. I mean for fuck sake, the studio’s name is Running with Scissors. I can tell from that name alone that these guys are fucking cheeky.

I can tell the developers must have had a lot of fun making this game, but a lot of the content in this game can really rub you the wrong way because of how dated it all is. I give props to the developers for going out of their way and giving the middle finger to people who were bitching about the controversies of video games, and just wanted to make a game that is both offensive and yet fun to play at the same time, because at the end of the day, it’s just a fucking video game, it’s meant so you can simulate what you just can’t do in real life, but there is a somewhat lack of professionalism here, they’re definitely not Rockstar Games.

I prefer the more gritty, grounded, and yet very subtle tone of the original Postal over

HAHA pee pee poo poo titty cumslut terrorist neckbeard

But, it’s a fun game, they had fun making it, so it’s somewhat of a win win, and all of this shit just made the game more popular. I just wish it was executed better.

There’s a lot wrong with it, but there are many things it does well. Maybe if I played the expansions I’ll have a better view on it, but this review is just my opinion on the base experience.

I give this game 7 Gary Colemans out of 10.

It's a very average game and there aren't that many games out there like this one. It can be mindless fun and anyone who really likes old school FPS games will really get a kick out of it.

So I just joined PC gaming a few weeks ago and the moment I gave out my Steam to some friends on Discord, one of them immediately gifted me this game, and he told me:

“If you are going to play PC, this is the first game that you absolutely should start with.”

I’ve never owned any Xbox consoles so I missed out on these games but I’ve heard a lot about them. Fast forward around 3 weeks later, and I think I have an addiction problem, the same kind when I played Killing Floor 2 for the first time.

This is the only game I’ve ever played where I can play as Jill Valentine, go to Disneyland, and shoot down hundreds of zombies with a Vietnam War era M16, but with 50 round magazines. I couldn’t even have dreamed of that shit, let alone make mods like that.

{ Core Gameplay }

Normally when I write reviews I go in-depth about story, gameplay, content, etc. I start off by talking about the story but.. I don’t know much about this game’s narrative at all really. I’ve been playing this game for at least a couple weeks now and I don’t think I’ve paid much attention to the overall narrative or the characters. I literally know nothing about this world. And that might sound unprofessional but for fuck sake, before I even started playing the game I got requested by my friends to download a shit load of mods for the game from the Steam Workshop. Speaking of mods, good fucking god, this game might have the largest selection of mods I’ve ever seen for a game. I have barely even touched the game’s standard maps, I’ve only just been playing on the modded ones because those are the ones that you should pay attention to.

Obviously the first maps I had to play on were the Resident Evil maps. And I mean like, the maps from the first three games on the PS1. What can I say? I fuckin’ love OG Resident Evil.

Does the narrative really matter in a game like this? I doubt it. I literally just did a quick synopsis search on the internet and it’s as basic as plain bread with mayonnaise on it. Do I care? Not really. And that’s because this game is one of the biggest joys to play through. This is one of the most fun games I’ve played in quite a while. It’s a 4 player Co-Op FPS game where you play on a “stage” and you have to get to a safe zone to progress to the next level. The amount of levels can vary depending on the stage. And the characters that you get to play also vary on what stage you’re about to play in. You fight off zombies and other infected monstrosities.

There are 8 different types of infected in this game:

You’ve got your Boomers which as the name implies, explode when shot and they can vomit on you which not only blinds you, but attracts common infected towards you

Your Hunters which disguise as regular infected but can lurk and pounce on you and you need a teammate to free you

Your Smokers which have fucking insane Resident Evil 2 Licker tongues that can grapple you, and again, you need a teammate’s help to get free, and they emit a blinding smoke when killed

Your Chargers which ram into you and other teammates and creates huge knockback and it also hurts

Your Jockeys which are quick little shits that are small and hard to hit, and yet again, you need an ally to free you because they can jump on top of you and your character just goes ape shit. Fuck Jockeys. Seriously, fuck them. I think I have gotten grappled by a Jockey more times than anything else in this game. These things can really be a pain in the ass.

Your Spitters which spit acid in a large area and that shit ultra fuckin hurts when standing in it for even more than a second

Your Tanks which are the strongest and most aggressive of all, being able to deal the most amount of damage and they take the longest to kill, you pretty much need the whole team wailing on them at once

And lastly the Witch. She’s like the Clickers from the Last of Us. Make noise when she is near, and she dashes towards your position and can fucking one hit down you. Hopefully your AI teammates aren’t stupid enough to shoot next ot her or you have teammates who actually know how to stealth past her instead of just blindly shooting.

This game is heavily reliant on teamwork and coordination, because it seems like I get grappled every 30 seconds to 5 minutes and need someone’s aid. Sometimes I’ll get grappled but then after I get freed I immediately get grappled again. One time I got grappled like 3 or 4 times within the span of 20 seconds. This game does not hold your hand at all when you're the last one alive, especially at higher difficulties, it does not pull its punches, which might suck ass from a bendy straw if you’ve got a bad team, or a toxic team that doesn't want to work with you.

It also sucks when you want to just play through the level casually and just take a breath, but your random teammates literally know the levels like their fucking lives depend on it so they speedrun through everything, and then proceed to bitch and whine in the game chat that you’re going too slow.

Seriously, I’ve had teammates like that. Like motherfucker, can I just get a grasp of the environment and get an understanding of playing on a mouse and keyboard for the first time? I understand you play this game until your body must be in the same shape as Nikocado Avocado’s Type 2 Diabetes, but just let a man who is new to PC learn how to play the damn game.

Some of these levels, despite the fast paced nature of the game, should be explored, because there are so many fucking easter eggs in this game it actually makes my head spin. There are not only countless references to past Valve games and this game’s predecessor, but also many other unrelated games and movies as well.

The good thing however is that if you do decide to play on your own, the AI are actually pretty competent. They can take down enemies efficiently, they never run out of ammo, they revive each other, hell, they even give you first aid kits and painkillers when you’re running low on health. If you go down a certain number of times you are dead until either two things:

Your team reaches a safe zone or they bring you back to life with a defibrillator. These are VERY rare to come across and you can only use it once. But if an AI dies you don’t need one. They’ll just respawn trapped in a room somewhere and you just have to free them. But for real players, you need a defibrillator.

You can’t give items to your teammates but you can use them on your teammates. Your friend needs temporary health? No problem! Just uncap a bottle of painkillers and pour the whole goddamn thing into your friend’s gullet. Risk of overdose don't mean shit in the zombie apocalypse.

Speaking of items, some of these can be a bit rare, so use them only if you really need to. There are health kits, painkillers, bile grenades (which attract the infected to the explosion), molotov cocktails, defibrillators, etc. Health kits are spread very far and inbetween levels. You get health kits at a safe zone, but after that, you’d be lucky to find more in the middle of the level. That’s why you have the ability to use them on your teammates.

Painkillers give you temporary health and they do last quite a while so it's a good substitute for a health hit.

When you finish a stage you and your team are given a score. Scores to things like most infected killed, most damage done to the Tank, most melee kills, etc. None of this really means anything but this is cool for me because I’ve always been competitive when it comes to games. Call me a boomer, but I really like going for those high scores, chasing those big numbers.

This game lacks any sort of progression system. And this is probably the most jarring aspect of this game to me. This point that I’m making can either make or break just how motivated you are to play the game, especially if you’re going through a headache trying to get through a stage on a higher difficulty.

There are no level ups, uprades, skill trees, or anything like that. So you as a player adapts to the game’s difficulty via your own skill and communication with your team rather than making your character stronger with skill trees and all that shit. But perhaps that’s the whole point of the game. It depends on how you look at it.

But, there is another but

There is also a lack of an in-game store to purchase items with an in-game currency by playing the game like you would expect in a typical AAA game. Things like character skins, artwork, gun skins, developer trailers, music from the soundtrack, extra levels, etc.

Sure the mods make up for this, but there isn’t really anything to work for in this game besides achievements and bragging rights. It’s just you and the game. And that’s it. You drop into a stage, you play through it, you get briefed on your performance, and that’s it. After that you move on to another stage. But, this game did come out in 2009 so I guess I’m not surprised.

This game came out during a time where Call of Duty Zombies was in its infancy, damn those were the glory days. Nowadays Zombies is so fucking overcomplicated with its mechanics that you mostly ignore it for the sake of just getting into the game as soon as possible.

But then you get ass fucked because you don’t know what to do. People just want to play the game and not have to resort to going on YouTube and look at 30 minute guide videos to learn how to play on a specific map. Black ops 3 and 4 are the fuckin’ worst when it comes to this.

There is a beauty to simplicity, and Left 4 Dead 2 is as straightforward as the stripper pole I dance on at Femboy Pole Position. But like I said, the lack of things to work for can either annoy you, or you’re fine with that. Personally, I have mixed feelings about it.

A part of me says that I love playing games where all I gotta do is invite my friends to a lobby and we can start playing immediately with no extra bullshit required.

But the other part of me craves something to work for and earn. Playing on the hardest difficulty? Yeah, no. Fuck that. It is not worth it. It isn't worth frustrating yourself and at the same time you're getting screamed at by dickish teammates over simple mistakes.
And that's why whenever the level changes and the difficulty randomly changes to the highest for some reason, everyone just votes for the difficulty to be turned down.

So about the weapons, there isn't much to talk about. Sidearms get infinite ammo but they're not very reliable. The pistol, even if you dual wield them, is pretty weak. And the Desert Eagle only has 8 shots in a mag. But not only does it take a few shots just to kill a single zombie, you're gonna be fighting hordes of them. So again, unreliable.

Melee weapons on the other hand are much better. They're great for crowd control and they don't break. If you see a melee weapon, just pick that up.

The Primary Weapons in this game are divided into Tiers. The higher the Tier, the better the gun.

Your Tier 1 weapons consist of a Pump Action Shotgun, an Uzi, and a Suppressed MAC10. They get the job done but once you encounter those Tier 3 Assault Rifles you will immediately swap out.

The Tier 2 Weapons are two Semi Auto Shotguns, a Hunting Rifle, and a Sniper Rifle. These rifles are very hard to come by, I've only ever gotten these weapons a few times, and even then, I just use the Tier 3 guns because you get them about halfway through a stage.

And then there are the Tier 3 guns.
You get an AK-47, an M16, and a SCAR-H.
They just tear through most infected within just a single mag. The M16 is my favorite weapon in this game. It's a classic choice. It hits hard, it's super accurate, it can hold 50 rounds in a magazine, it can get a laser sight attachment for extra accuracy, it's just an all around awesome gun. And the sound it makes when shooting is just orgasmic.
A full team with M16s can just fucking tear ass.

The AK-47 has more stopping power but has less ammo in a mag and it's less accurate than the M16, hence why I prefer it.

So I mentioned that I am relatively new to PC gaming. I've pretty much spent around the last 20 years of my life playing on console. I've grown up playing shooters competitively on PlayStation. But I decided to make the switch to PC instead of getting a PS5 this generation because it's been a desire for quite a while.

Also fuck Sony nowadays lol.

So playing on a mouse and keyboard for the very first time was insanely alien to me. Seriously, I've never played a game like this before. It took me at least a week and a half to get used to it. First of all, getting used to the sensitivity was a real challenge. Finding a sensitivity that wasn't too slow or fast was actually more difficult than on console.

But I haven't bothered messing around with my DPI as that would make things even more difficult. I mean, isn't that the point of in-game sensitivity options?

For at least the first week or two, it was pretty tough playing games on a mouse and keyboard. Finding the right sensitivity, getting used to the controls, and finding a proper technique for finger placement.

Sure I can connect a controller and play that way, but why do that? I wouldn't adapt that way. I wanna learn how to play games competitively on PC, and the only way to do that is to learn and get better.

So what did I do?

Well for the keyboard:

I have decided to use my middle finger for the W and S keys

My index finger for E, D, R, F, C, V, etc.

My ring finger for A, Q, TAB, and CAPSLK

My pinkie for Shift and CTRT

And my thumb for the Space Bar

If I have to push any of the number keys I will use either my middle finger or my index finger

This is what I have gotten used to. However if I'm able to, I change the Shift Key bind (usually for sprinting) to the thumb button on my mouse. It's easier, and it's something I'm just used to now.

Also I love that you are able to swap weapons with the mouse scroll, and pretty much almost every game has this feature.

The standard controls for this game are pretty ace. E for picking up items, opening doors, and reviving teammates

Right click for using healing items, mouse scroll for swapping weapons and items in your inventory on the right

And Space for jumping and CTRL for crouching.

Pretty standard stuff. I actually changed Crouch to the thumb button on my mouse. It's just easier for me. It's a personal preference. The standard controls for this game for the most part are perfect.

This is the one of the main games that has helped me get better at playing with a mouse and keyboard. The more I play, the more I wanted to improve and develop my own technique. The simplicity of both the controls and the gameplay made it very easy to just pick it up and play. It's a game that is very noob friendly for people who are new to this type of game, unless of course you want to torture yourself with Very Hard.

Because there are no objective markers, waypoints, or a map, you can get lost frequently as a blind player. I know I got lost often playing this game. Thankfully not every random player is a cunt and they can assist you if you do lose your way.

{ Presentation }

This is a game from the year 2009 and it manages to have more detail in its world than a lot of PS3 and PS4 games. I can literally read all the text on all of the signs, lying newspapers, billboards, hell even text on a wall made out of magic marker.

Again, there is a simplicity to the overall graphics, but the amount of visual clarity in the environment really just demonstrates just how much of a powerhouse the Source Engine is and PC engines in general.

I do get a lot of CSGO vibes from this game but obviously right? This game was made by the same company.

This game is pretty damn gory. It is fucking satisfying. I like how shooting infected in certain areas can tear their limbs off and whatnot. I can just feel the impact of each shot. The standard sound design of the weapons is fucking great. The animations also have that 2008 vibe to them but they're well done.

Overall this is a very pretty game for its time.

{ Final Thoughts }

This game has a very addictive gameplay loop to it. Combine this with the hundreds of mods like character skins, gun skins, enhanced weapon sound effects, custom maps, extra blood and gore mods, soundtrack mods, and combine this again with being able to play with your friends, and this makes for one of the most intoxicating experiences I've had in quite a long time.

I haven't had this much fun with a zombie arcade shooter like this since Killing Floor 2 on the PS4. I can only imagine how good it must be on PC. Can't wait. ❤️

However, be mindful of the amount of mods you download because some mods can clash with each other and prevent you from being able to start up a game. I had an issue where me and my three friends were attempting to play on a custom made Resident Evil map and we got stuck in infinite loading screens all because one of my friends had an extra gore mod enabled. That is literally the only reason why we couldn't start the match.

Sure I do have a couple gripes with a lack of progression, the lack of navigation, some toxicity in the community, and conflicting mods, but that is overshadowed by everything this game gets right. Not to mention, this is the kind of shit you would expect in a modern PC game like this. It's a must play, especially if you are new to FPS games on PC.

If I played this game back when it was new I probably would not have slept for several days.

Now uh, if you'll excuse me, I'm off for another session with some friends. Taking a trip to Devil Mountain as Rebecca Chambers from Resident Evil 0. Oh yeah, I'm making her a badass again.

9/10

Don't Even Think? More like

Don't Even Think About Playing This Game

This may be the worst Battle Royale game I've ever played. And I've played Fortnite and The Culling 2 for fuck sake. It had a pretty interesting concept but is the equivalent of driving a school bus full of children at 60MPH down a 90° angled road and slamming face first into a highway.

This game's servers were shut down in 2020 and honestly, thank God for that.

{ Core Gameplay }

Where do I even start with this? Well.. it's a Battle Royale game with a really small map for BR standards. The goal is to either be the last one standing or to escape via helicopter by activating three SOS points that spawn randomly on the map.

Not only do you have to kill other players but you also have to escape or kill a werewolf. Everyone is a regular person, but one player gets to play as a werewolf, and the goal as a werewolf is simple: kill everyone before they either kill you or escape. Which sounds cool right?

Well, there are quite a few things that completely ruins what seemed like fun.

Let me state the biggest and most obvious problem, and that's the frame rate. Holy mother of shit, the frame rate. This game was not even that graphically impressive and the map is so small, and yet, this game had one of the worst frame rates I've ever seen in a video game.

This game's frame rate is just as bad as DayZ on the PS4 and PS5.

The slowdown and frame fluctuations are so bad that it made the game virtually unplayable. Trying to participate in gun fights when the FPS is dipping all the time can be absolutely aggravating.

I remember playing this game when it first came out on the PS4 and I swear to God I was getting like, 10-25 FPS at all times. And the game still had that problem all the way until it shut down. It was actually unbearable.

Another problem is the aiming. It's really clunky. You can aim in either third person or first person but it seems like aiming in first person is even worse than the third person aiming. It's so wonky and it's insanely difficult to hit targets at CQC range. It also doesn't help that for some reason, you jump so goddamn high.

Know what that means? It's a war of attrition, because your opponents will just jump around all the place and it's insanely hard to hit your shots on them. I've seen gunfights where enemies are just jump shotting each other like they're on the fucking moon.

So you have an awful frame rate, terrible gun aiming, and enemies just jump around like they're wearing Call of Duty exo suits. And all of this makes shooting at enemies, the most BASIC aspect of a Battle Royale game, a complete chore to do.

Not to mention your enemies are bullet sponges. The TTK (Time to Kill) was really slow. I could be using a Kar98 bolt action sniper rifle and I still had to hit someone with it at least 5 times before they die. So imagine trying to hit your opponent multiple times with a single shot weapon while they're jumping around all over the place. It's a fucking joke. A shotgun is pretty much the only useful weapon for dealing with other players.

Or, you wanna know another viable strategy? Melee. Yeah that's right. Since it's such a bitch to land your shots in this game, it's actually easier to just run up to someone and melee them to death. There are melee weapons so that's all the more reason to use melee instead of guns. This game is just retarded.

Also, the game has a hunger system, and you had to eat food and stay warm to survive. If you run out of your hunger meter, or if your character gets too cold, your health will start to drain over time. Food is also used to restore your health. Food is plentiful so there wasn't a time where I died of starvation.

But the coldness? I had no idea that you were supposed to light fires in the various houses you go inside of. The game never explains it. Not to mention I assumed you would have needed a lighter or a torch or something, but no. You just walk up to a fireplace, push a button and it automatically lights up.

I didn't know your character was the fucking Human Torch. So a lot of my deaths, along with the amount of times I died to a werewolf, was me freezing to death not knowing how to warm myself up.

So what about werewolf? Well being a werewolf is no doubt the most fun part about the game. But that's just fun for you, not for everyone else. Because it seems the dumb fucks who programmed this game didn't seem to know what balancing is, because the werewolf is utterly broken.

Its weakness are silver bullets, however these are really hard to come by, so most likely you won't have enough to kill it. The werewolf also soaks up so much fucking damage before it dies anyway.

Also, when you get attacked by a werewolf, you can get stuck in an infinite stunlock, meaning you just have to sit there and watch as the werewolf completely fucks you up with no way of defending yourself. The werewolf also moves faster than the humans, meaning that it's impossible to run away from it.

So pretty much, if a werewolf spotted you, you may as well called yourself fucking dead. Because the werewolf was just way too overpowered. And this can just make the game an even bigger pain in the ass than it already was, because the werewolf just runs around slaughtering everyone before you even find another player.

Finding other players can be rare because everyone just dies early on. And when they don't die to other players, night time hits and the real carnage begins.

Of course, this being a free to play game, there were mictrotransactions in this game. Loot boxes, paid cosmetics, you name it. There were skins for both humans and the werewolves. The skins themselves do look nice, so I can clearly see where most of the effort went into with this game.

You know this game is shit when they prioritized monetization over actually optimizing the game to make it playable. And I doubt that anyone who actually spent their money on this game actually got it back, since this game was only live for around a year and a half.

The only good thing this game did for me was get me like, 60+ viewers on a Twitch livestream, because my title literally said "The Worst Battle Royale game ever made?!" And I wanted to expose what a heeping pile of garbage this game was.

Fuck this game.

2/10

It amazes me that a game like this even exists but honestly I could say the same about many games. But as notorious this game is, it was actually fascinating reading into the backstory of this game.

This game was cancelled before it even released. It was one of six games featured in Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors for the Sega CD.

Basically, they are two of the greatest entertainers of their time. They mix magic and comedy and perform it live, they're funny, they defy physics, they take jabs at bullshit, etc. They have been doing it for at least 40 years. The idea of a video game based off of them in the 90s was something that only they could have come up with.

The main reason why the game never released was because the company behind it filed for bankruptcy and shut down. But eventually it made its way onto the internet and has become a cult classic.

I also like the Full Motion Video sequences of Penn & Teller themselves.

One of my favorite Penn & Teller moments is where the two appeared on Hollywood Squares with motherfucking Gilbert Gottfried, the voice behind Iago from Disney's Aladdin, yeah no joke. And it was a really funny episode that featured a whopping 9 consecutive wrong answers.

It is a very funny watch. It's some of the dumbest shit I've ever seen in a game show.

https://youtu.be/iFMaPUtCi9o

But Desert Bus is a whole different story. This game is just asinine. But the worst offender is that everything in this game is deliberate. Penn & Teller made this game to take a jab at all the people who bitched about the controversy of violence in video games.

They decided "let's just make a game that is stupidly like reality and make doing the laborious busywork of real life into a video game." Now all we need is a video game where you can fucking do your taxes, but that might already exist.

The whole game is where you drive a bus. You drive, and drive, and drive, and drive..

Ocassionally you'll see a sign on the side of the road but that's pretty much it. There are no passengers on the bus to interact with, there are no other vehicles, there's no radio so you can listen to some music, and the road never turns. You can also push the B button to hear the sound of the bus door opens. That's.. something I guess.

Let's do some calculations. This bus is going from Tuscan, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada. And it doesn't go any faster than 45 MPH. Tuscan to Las Vegas is around 360 miles. 45 MPH for 360 miles equates to about 8 hours of driving.

This game is 8 hours long?? Jesus fucking Christ. Well maybe once this 8 hour journey is over maybe we can get some insane payoff for doing it.

.....

Wait, what's that? Nothing happens?
You mean we are stuck driving the bus infinitely with nothing happening throughout and with no reward afterwards?

Well actually something does happen after 8 hours of driving. You wanna know?

You get a point.

Yep. That's it. A singular, fucking point.

Supposedly Penn & Teller were going to have a contest where you sent them your high score, and whoever got the highest score would win a trip on an actual bus ride with the two masterminds themselves from Tuscan to Las Vegas, with a show there and whatnot. Which sounds awesome right? But that never happened sadly.

You can't pause the game by the way. The Start Button just blows the horn. And this is also intentional.
Also, if you stop moving the D-Pad, the bus will automatically veer off to the side of the road and get stuck in the sand. Then you have to wait for a tow truck to show up and tow the bus. All. The Way. Back.

So does that mean if you have been driving for 6 hours, you have to wait 6 hours for the game to start over? What the fuck.

Or you could just, you know, reset the game...

You just have to keep driving!! Jesus Christ, I wonder how many people have pissed themselves while playing this. You can't take bathroom breaks, you can't stop to grab food, you have to keep driving this damn bus. Imagine the amount of sensory deprivation from players sitting in front of the screen driving this shit for hours upon hours.

The fact that a game like this was cancelled and yet it made its way onto the internet and people have played it and even adapted it into an Atari 2600 game and even made a remake of it on Steam really speaks volumes of just how insufferable the experience is.

The people who played this fuckfest want you to suffer with them.

I can't imagine anyone playing this for more than 20 or 30 minutes. The farthest I've ever got was an hour, and that was for a livestream. And yet that hour felt like the longest hour of my entire life. You think you're playing the game for shits and giggles but then it turns into a horrific sensory deprivation induced nightmare. I see nothing but road and sand in my fucking dreams.

I mean you know it's bad when I got really bad car sickness after playing this game. I actually suffer from car sickness in real life. So imagine that. I get car sick just from playing this game.

This game is simply a health hazard, both physically and mentally.

Please send help.

1/10

Jesus Christ, I don't think I have ever felt so stone cold after playing this game. I wanted to jump into this game thinking that Konami could not have done me so wrong.

Going into this game blind was like going into the gas room in MGS1 without the 02 Mask.

I was eager to see how magnificent this entry could have been since it's the very last game before Kojima was booted out of Konami for good, and I would have assumed he would go out with an absolute bang. I adore the Metal Gear series. Pretty much every game from Solid 1-4 are within my top 15 favorite games of all time. But to see The Phantom Pain as a complete letdown is just depressing.

When Ground Zeroes came out I had some concern in regards to the direction the franchise was being taken in. And to be honest I thought that this game was completely unnecessary considering how masterfully Metal Gear Solid 4 concluded the saga. But regardless I got really damn hyped from all the trailers of The Phantom Pain.

I was like Come on, this is Metal Gear Solid 5, it's gonna be fucking amazing!! I don't understand what exactly is going on, but it looks really damn exciting. And oh my god Kaz Miller and Ocelot are here, THAT'S MY DAD RIGHT THERE!

And the games media hyped the game up as well with 10/10 Masterpiece reviews and whatnot. But upon playing this game, it wasn't just a disappointment... it was worse. Oh Sweet goggly Jesus on a tricycle it's a lot worse.

This review is going to contain spoilers for Metal Gear Solid 1, 3, and 4. Read this at your own discretion. But this is necessary so I can expose just how atrocious the narrative is in MGS5.

{ Story }

You know, even though MGS4 ended everything so well, something about it just made me crave more. Whether a continued adventure of Big Boss was worth telling even though it was rounded out so well in Snake Eater was up to debate.

But what we did end up getting is just a stale, laborious, underwhelming, and flat-out balls to the wall frustrating experience. And that's not even the worst of it.

The game is unfinished, terribly paced, and the most creatively bankrupt entry the series has ever seen, well, at least until Metal Gear Survive came out, but uhhh, heh heh heh.... Oh man. What the fuck even is Metal Gear Survive?? Lmao

MGS5 just feels pointless because anyone who has played the previous games will already have known the fates of all the characters. MGS3 was a great prequel in the sense that it told a story that we couldn't infer already. Back then before Snake Eater we didn't understand how Big Boss became the villain he was in the first two Metal Gear Solid games or much about him at all. But seeing that story play out was intriguing.

Then MGS3 comes along and perfectly tied itself in with MGS1 with the creation of FOX-HOUND and leaving on an excellent note. The government made this guy fuckin' kill his mentor/best friend, so you can see how he would become the dodgy bastard he was later on. And then the credits music would kick in and you're just like "holy shit, that was amazing."

There was no need to have a bunch of sequels that would amount to just giving us meaningless information. Seriously, I just don't understand what the point of Peace Walker, Ground Zeroes, and the Phantom Pain are.

Well, does The Phantom Pain tell a good story? Well, to justify the game's existence, there are a lot, and I mean a lot of retcons in here, but even then, the things that they could have done to make the game worthwhile and a worthy successor to MGS3 and 4 is far overshadowed by a story dedicated to a lame ass skullface villain and Kojima's new sniper bikini waifu.

The one big thing that would have been amazing was some more development given to Zero and giving some more explanation as to him being the main bad guy of the whole series. Because that major twist just came out of the blue and it was a pretty hard pill to swallow. But no, that shit isn't expanded upon in The Phantom Pain.

How about the relationship between Big Boss and Liquid? That would have been pretty sick as well. But no, not much really happens in this game. Hell, it doesn't even elaborate on Big Boss's villany, and there actually is a reason for that. I mean, the game didn't really have to after Snake Eater's ending, but they might as well have made him a pretty big asshole after the shit that happened to him, making his later actions justifiable.

Now lemme talk about Cipher. Jesus what a disappoinment of an antagonist this guy is. They hype this guy up in all the trailers for years until release but then he turns out to be one of the biggest jokers the franchise has ever seen.

Basically he creates some virus that can wipe out all the people he pleases and then he builds a Metal Gear and accidentally fucking kills himself with it. Whoops!! You see, he needed that Metal Gear because it was like very 2 Spooky 4 Me and the whole planet was gonna lose their collective shit. Also he hates Zero for some reason, that's never explained. Whatever I guess.

Remember that one trailer where Snake is walking down this hellish corridor and he is surrounded by dead bodies and you had that amazing music playing in the background? I thought no doubt that would have some insane impact on the characters and the story. But, no. It's just some self-contained mission where you walk around and slaughter terminally ill people... Good God.

Or how about Zero? I couldn't wait to see him in this game as an antagonist. He sounded really awesome in the trailers.

...

Wait, what's that? He's not in the game? He is just in some cassette tapes?

..Oh. Okay then.

Oh yeah, I mentioned Liquid was in this game. I wonder what kind of amazing scenes we are gonna get with him. Well first off, he is barely ever given any screen time because the cutscenes are so short and are spread so far and in-between, and at the end of the game he just.. leaves Mother Base. And the final mission was cut from the game so... there goes that plotline. So much for being able to see Liquid use that Metal Gear he hopped into.

And the whole Huey arc is just insanely predictable. We already know he has to be alive for the other games so of course he is going to be shipped off.

What about Quiet the sniper lady? Man, what a deep character she was... She says almost nothing for the entirety of the game so I don't really get how I'm supposed to connect to her. All I know is that she wanted vengeance for the condition that she was given but really, it's just.. dumb as hell. Apparently she has to wear less clothing so that she can breathe because she got some virus and was nearly drowned by some Russian soldiers. Hmm...

But then that plotline gets dropped in favor of her wanting that Big Boss dick.

But the one moment in the whole game that pissed me off so much to no end and made me absolutely despise the narrative of this game, was the sudden twist with Big Boss himself.

See, it turns out that Big Boss is not actually Big Boss. The real Big Boss disappeared randomly after the prologue of the game. So you're telling me this mute asshole that I have been playing as throughout this 40-50 hour game was never actually Big Boss, but just some random guy who is using the name of Big Boss?

Whaaaaaa??

This shit just comes out of absolutely nowhere and I am expected to just accept it. Wouldn't that mean that this game doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things because it doesn't affect anything that happens later on in the timeline?

What was the point of playing it then?!!

Agh, I'm gonna have a stroke. It's like a bad fever dream. I hate this story. Fuck this story. This game has the worst methods of presenting its narrative in the whole series. It needs to die. It's like the game is actively trying to waste the player's time. I don't think I have seen such disregard towards the established universe. It's like the people who wrote the narrative for this game have never actually played the other games or even know what Metal Gear is.

There are no Codec conversations, the cutscenes are spread far and in-between hours upon hours of gameplay, and the cutscenes are a small fraction in length compared to the older games, so the narrative just breadcrumbs you the whole time. It's just not like what we got before.

Story is almost everything in Metal Gear, but when you botched the story and the lore, you have essentially botched the whole game and have made it very, very difficult for the player to get engaged, regardless of how good the gameplay is. Too bad the gameplay in this game is also shit.

And I don't give a fuck about the cassette tapes. Defenders of this story try to say that you have to listen to the cassette tapes in order to get more context, but, I'm sorry??

Why are important story elements being hidden behind cassette tapes? You don't fucking put important story details inside of items that are meant to be OPTIONAL. And what if you're missing cassette tapes? What, I gotta look up guides on the internet just so I can obtain items containing story information, instead of it being provided in the game itself, like, I don't know...

Cutscenes? Codec conversations?

This is seriously some of the dumbest shit I have ever heard of.

{ Gameplay }

The gameplay in this game suffers from what I like to call Mafia 3 Syndrome. Because the minute to minute gameplay moments in this game are just repetitive busywork. It's like playing Death Stranding but in the Metal Gear universe.

Everything in this game just feels laborious, which sucks because what you gotta give credit towards Metal Gear as a franchise for is how everything the player participates in affects the story and the world. Level after level, cutscene after cutscene, scenario after scenario, it was never ending how much these games tried to blow your mind.

The missions in Phantom Pain feel like they were just put in for the hell of it. There are around 50 Main Missions in the whole game, but 90% of them don't have anything to do with progressing the story.

Mission 3: Eliminate the Spetsnaz Commander

Mission 4: Identify and destroy the comms equipment at the Eastern Communications Post

Mission 5: Extract the captive engineer

Mission 6: Secure the Honey Bee rocket launcher

Mission 7: Eliminate three commanders at three different locations

Mission 8: Destroy three tanks

Mission 9: Destroy an armored vehicle and multiple gunships

Mission 10: Extract the Mujahideen prisoner

Mission 13: Shut down the oil transfer pump

Mission 15: Destroy Walker Gears

Mission 17: Extract two Intel Team members being held captive

Mission 18: Eliminate a former rebel soldier, eliminate 5 prisoners being held captive held at Kungenga Mine, extract child prisoner

Mission 19: Identify and eliminate the PF commander, the Major

Mission 20: Extract Shabani

Mission 21: Identify and eliminate the CFA Official

Mission 22: Eliminate the enemy commander

Mission 23: EXTRACT THE WHITE MAMB--


Fuuuuuckk meeeeeee!!!


Do you see what I'm getting at here? Does this sound boring to you or what? Because trust me, it will be after a while. And you wanna know what's funny? All 17 of these missions I just listed have NOTHING to do with advancing the plot. It's all just meant to pad out the run time. It's all just filler. Only a few of these missions actually matter in terms of giving the player what they were waiting for.

There are about 50 Missions in this game, not including the Side Ops.

And even then, the cutscenes themselves are either underwhelming, they dump pointless exposition, they're way too short, or the performances are very awkwardly done.

Seriously, why am I doing all of this shit? None of it relates to the narrative. I'm only doing it because Kaz told me to do it I guess. And this can make the more bullshit sections in the game that much more frustrating, and trust me, this game has the most balls to the wall aggravating parts in the whole franchise. Lemme give you a little experience of mine:

Mission 29

Oh ho ho my fucking God, Mission 29.

Mission 29 is basically where you rescue this guy named Code Talker who actually knows the solution to curing the disease that caused a severe epidemic on Mother Base. But then the helicopter gets attacked by these teleporting, bullet sponge enemies called the Skulls and it crashes.

So you have to protect Code Talker while also fighting off the Skulls but there are major problems with this.

The Skulls are absolute fucking bullet sponges, they are almost bulletproof meaning that you will be wasting mags upon mags upon mags of ammo just to kill one of them. A rocket launcher is literally the most effective way to damage them and yet there are times where they teleport in front of me and I ended up blowing myself up and dying like a complete dumbass. So I either use up time and ammo just simply shooting at them or go the more dangerous approach and risk killing myself with a rocket just so I can effectively damage them.

These fuckers are more bullet spongy than a Tom Clancy's The Division 1 boss. They just don't fucking die.

Not to mention shooting at them risks me getting shot as well, and since Snake is more nimble than a flacid penis, I literally have to run and take cover just after taking a few shots. And yet it takes AN ETERNITY for your health to regen, meaning you can get damaged while taking cover trying to recover.

It really does make me miss the days of Metal Gear where we had health bars and Rations. But then The Phantom Pain comes along and goes the Call of Duty route with regenerating health bullshit.

But then I get ass fucked again because taking cover and sitting still risks me getting hit by rocks that rise from the ground underneath me, and if I don't move my ass, the rock will explode, and I'm even a foot too close to it, the explosion will kill me in 1 hit. Not to mention one of the Skulls can throw rocks at me, and another two can teleport in front of me and hit me with a machete which brings me down to near death. So basically, I gotta be moving at all times.

There is so much fucking multi-tasking you have to do, and it just feels like I am ill-equipped to handle what the game is throwing at me despite being almost 30 hours into it. It seems like the developers' idea of challenge is to just spam the player with bulletproof enemies and yet you can barely take any damage yourself.

I spent an hour beforehand just developing new weapons and equipment in case of a section like this, and yet I am still being anally molested from every direction.

I got so aggravated that I had to stop playing. And normally I don't do that when I play games. It's that kind of atrocious design choice that made me stop playing the game in the first place. And after that insane onslaught I just thought to myself

"No wonder I never finished this game."

It's bad enough the game suffers from an insanely underwhelming and disappointing story that just rectons everything before it. And it's further exaserbated by monotonous and utterly irritating gameplay.

Metal Gear has always had hits and misses in the gameplay department, but if a section was getting on the nerves in the older games, you would know that afterwards there would be some insane payoff.

But here in Phantom Pain whenever I was getting really agitated during a mission, all I knew was that after that I would be put back onto a helicopter and Kaz would tell me what everything that I just went through was super "important."

In Metal Gear Solid 4 if I was blowing the fuck out of things for 10-15 minutes it was because Raiden was fighting Vamp and he needed some backup while he activated Metal Gear Rex. There was purpose behind doing what I was doing, not just because some guy told me to do it.

Not to mention I was gitty every 5-10 minutes during MGS4. It was full of absolutely incredible moments, all of my questions and desires being fully addressed. But in MGS5, nothing like that ever happens.

I mean, I was really fucking hyped when I saw Ocelot and Kaz on screen during the introduction but then after that I proceeded to be bored for the next 5+ hours, watching unskippable chopper rides to every mission and doing the same shit over and over and over again for little to no payoff, and watching the same credit sequences over and over again for no fucking reason. And I have to traverse an empty map for 5-10 minutes before I can even start the mission to begin with.

Seriously, why are there credits in every mission?? Something about it feels wrong. I'm pretty sure this is a game Kojima made, I don't need to see his name pop up on the screen every single time a mission starts. I get it, this is a Kojima game. But I doubt he was proud of it. Far from it.
If anything Kojima must have been fuckin' embarrassed of this game.

It also doesn't help that the credits spoil the characters that are going to be in the mission. I don't think I have seen any other game that does this shit.

There are quite a lot of weapons in this game but you are restricted to three at a time. So the nuts on the fly arsenal of MGS4 is gone. And you don't even get anything cool like a doll that possesses enemies. But why have that when you can just run up to someone, hit Right Bumper and instantly knock them out? Or just shoot everyone in the head with a tranquilizer pistol?

But what pisses me off the most is how developing new equipment works. I don't know it 100%, but from what I know, as you expand Mother Base and build expansions, you get more space to hire staff.

There are many different divisions, but the one for developing new weapons and equipment is the R&D Team. It levels up depending on two factors: The number of staff and the rankings of each staff member. Staff can range from E to S++.

As the division levels up, you unlock more stuff to develop. Better guns, upgrades, etc.

And as you develop weapons, you unlock Tiers for that specific weapon. The higher the Tier, the better the gun performs. But you need to develop one Tier before you can develop the next one. But it gets worse.

For every single item you develop, weapons, skins, and every other item in the game, you have to wait on a timer for the item to be developed before you can use it. And the higher Grade the item is, the longer the timer. Those higher Grade items can actually take between 1-4 HOURS to develop.

Are you kidding me?? Is this a Triple A Metal Gear Solid game or a fucking mobile game? Why are there timers in this game?

Not just the weapons, but expanding the Mother Base takes time as well. Remember what I said earlier, you expand the different base facilities in Mother Base so you can hire more staff.

Doing this requires resources. But getting these resources requires you to grind. Either by farming them in the open world or by doing mundane challenges. There are 7 divisions:

Command Platform
Combat Unit Platform
R&D Platform
Base Development Platform
Support Platform
Intel Platform
Medical Platform

Now, imagine having to grind resources to expand every single one of these divisions. Some of these are really fuckin' important. Now, imagine having to wait in between expansions.

There are 4 levels of expansion. And the higher the level, the longer it takes to reach the next one. And it can take upwards of 24 HOURS to finish.

Unless..

There is a catch.

Unless you spend MB Coins to instantly skip the wait. What are MB Coins?

What do you think? They're fucking mictrotransactions. Of course right?

Konami has the fucking audacity to charge players real world money in their single player game in order to make grinding less tedious and time consuming. It's all over their Online mode as well. Many character skins, gun camos, and ACTUAL WEAPONS, they are locked behind paywalls.

Mictrotransactions. In a Metal Gear Solid game.

They played us like a damn fiddle.

You could easily say fuck this game merely because of the fact that there are paywalls in a single player Metal Gear Solid game but bringing up everything else in this review wouldn't be favorable either.

Also, there is no reason to be on Mother Base. There is literally nothing to do on it aside from participating in a shooting range or walking up to your staff and watch them salute at you all the time. It's just an empty base with barely any people on it. Oh, and you can beat the shit out your staff. Which increases their morale... for some reason. Jesus that just sounds masochistic.

You can get companions in this game like a horse, a wolf, and human buddies like Quiet, but it doesn't really change the game much except how easy you want enemies to get killed without your involvement. Or make traversing the empty wasteland less time consuming and tedious.

Since this game is open world you have to traverse an empty map with nothing happening on it for a period of time in between missions, when you're not stuck waiting in a chopper. Yeah! Progress!!

I think that's the most stupefying aspect of this game being open world. Nothing ever happens in it aside from weather changes. This is supposed to be a game where you're taking back Mother Base and fighting a war against Cipher, not to mention the Afghans are at war with the Russians. Where is the conflict?? Why isn't there anyone fighting each other?

Instead you run around a map where it's just you and the open wilderness with no one to meet and talk to. And there aren't any locations that would provide diversity to the gameplay that would justify an open world setting. It comes nowhere near as close as many other open world titles already on the market.

This means that there isn't much incentive to explore the map. Also, you are restricted as to where you can go. If you wanted to travel from one part of the map to the other, you're not able to take any shortcuts.

And there is no Fast Travel. Well kinda. But it's one of the worst implementations of Fast Travel I've ever seen in a video game.

If you want to go somewhere in a hurry, you have to call in the chopper, go to the landing zone, get on the chopper, wait for it to take off, sit in a loading screen, then you pull up the iDroid to select the landing zone you want to go to, then you're put into the preparation screen where you choose your weapons, equipment, buddies, etc. Then you sit in another loading screen, and then when the game loads you still have to wait for the chopper to land so you can get off of it. And after that, you still have to travel to the mission objective.

Wow. Just... Wow. This is just Insanity. All of this bullshit just to FAST TRAVEL? It's not even Fast Travel, it's fuckin' Slow Travel. It's actually faster to just get on your horse or a jeep and ride there.

Not to mention, you have to follow all of the roads, which makes traveling from Point A to B even longer.

You can't get on top of any of the mountains, which means two things: you can't take shortcuts and you can't get any vantage points when approaching an enemy base. Want to go prone on a cliff and take out enemies down below with a sniper rifle?

Well tough shit. You can't do that.

The AI in this game is laughably bad. They have such a small field of vision you can stand in front of an outpost in broad daylight and they won't see you. They also walk on predetermined paths so you can expect them to be in the same spots all the time.

Another thing that breaks the stealth in this game is that when you are spotted, the game goes into slow motion, in which you have a few seconds to take out the enemy before he alerts his comrades. And this means that you can just run and gun everything if you have any suppressed guns. And since you can call as many Supply Drops as you want from your base, you can have an infinite supply of ammo and suppressors.

Even then, the AI are insanely inconsistent. When you're not detected, you can just shoot everyone in the head and clear out outposts with not much effort, but if you do get detected.. you get fucking bombarded.

Seriously, you get spotted by one guy and immediately the entire base, outpost, or whatever are instantly notified of your location. And this begins an absolute onslaught of enemies swarming you and shooting at you from many different angles, whether on foot, in an attack helicopter, on a Walker Gear, etc.

There are literally two states of play: Not detected or getting bombarded from every angle. And remember, you can't take much damage in this game, and health regeneration is slow as fuck. Know what that means? You gotta camp. It's probably the most viable option for surviving gunfights.

Remember how many rockets you could tank in the older Metal Gear games? Well you'd be lucky if you can take more than one in Phantom Pain, regardless of impact.

It also doesn't help that there is no mini-map in this game unlike in the previous games. All you get is some binoculars to ping enemies and an area on the map screen on where the enemy could be. Meaning you will be opening up the map constantly just to see where enemies are located and that's just fun isn't it?

Boss fights are almost completely mitigated in this game. Remember all the legendary iconic boss fights from the older games?

Name any and or every boss off the top of your head from MGS 1-4. Almost all of them are beloved moments in each game in one way or another.

But here we have.. hide from Quiet the sniper lady, ram a human torch Colonel Volgin (who says nothing by the way) into a river, or.. hide and escape from a Metal Gear, or my favorite, teleporting rock fucking bullet sponges in Mission 29.

Are these even boss fights? These feel nothing like the ones we were used to. Since when were basic bitch bullet sponge enemies considered a boss fight, or running away from a Metal Gear?

Seriously, even the BNB from MGS4 are like legends compared to this shit. Remember Laughing Octopus? How she would play all of those tricks on you and then she tries to grab you in that weird skintight outfit making you question what she is?

And then Drebin calls you on the Codec and gives you a fucked up backstory on the person you just killed, giving you added context to the horrors of war and what impact that has led on the world of that game. That shit is on a whole other level compared to the shit in Phantom Pain.

Hell, there isn't even a final boss fight. Yeah, no joke. Think about Metal Gear for a second again.

Every single Metal Gear game had legendary final bosses.

MGS1, Metal Gear Rex and escaping Liquid Snake while shooting at him on a jeep

MGS2, Solidus Snake

MGS3, The Boss

MGS4, Liquid Ocelot

ALL of these guys are legendary. These are all absolutely incredible final bosses, some of the greatest fights in video game history.

But then Phantom Pain just.. ends. And I guess this is due to the cut content from the game. Though from what I have read and seen, the cut content just consists of fighting the same bosses for a second time so welp, that sucks. So much for making up.

In fact, unlocking the last few missions of the game requires playing through older missions you already completed but on Hard difficulty. Seriously?? I mean, I guess I'm not surprised. This game is nothing but padding.

The boss fights here don't feature any of the creativity or enginuity that the boss fights from the previous games had.

And the enemy variety here is completely lacking. There are no cool, interesting enemies like the Gecko from MGS4 or anything like that. It's just a regular guy, a regular guy with armor, a guy driving around in a Walker Gear, a guy in an attack helicopter or a tank, or annoying as fuck bullet sponge enemies that can turn people into zombies. Yeah, zombies, real creative guys.

This game also has a habit with following too many modern video game sins. The first mission of the game is nothing but lying in a bed for 10-15 minutes and then once you finally have control you are crawling on the floor at a snail's pace while tutorials pop on the screen and scripted segments happen in front of you.

And this mission goes on for like an hour.

And whenever you reach a certain moment in the game you are forced to just walk and listen to people talk. I'm used to this in games but here it just feels so unnecessary.

Another thing that you gotta give credit towards MGS is that despite people bemoaning the series for its very ample use of long ass cutscenes, you still had 100% control the second you hit gameplay. And you were not interrupted during gameplay with Codec conversations unless if you really wanted to listen to the dialogue.

The only times you would get Codec conversations in the middle of gameplay is either for tutorials or for major story revelations containing lots of character development.

Not to mention you can choose to ignore the tutorial calls. And the calls that you are forced to pick up you can skip them as well. But I don't see why you would though, I love being in the Codec as much as I could. I love listening to the characters talk, which is further complimented by the masterfully done performances.

Even MGS4, which is a game that gets criticized for its over abundance of cutscenes and narrative, the moment you were in the game, you were in the game. No interruptions or slowdown because of condescending tutorials, forced walking sections, and scripted segments.

This shit in MGS5 leads to one of the most, if not the most awkward moments in all of Metal Gear: The fucking jeep ride.

Yeah, one of the trailers had some amazing music, but then the music is used not during a boss fight or some insane moment in the game, but during a long ass, boring, and very awkward jeep ride.

"Big Boss" just sitting there, quietly, not saying a word, staring dead eye at Cipher as he reveals his master plan and it was one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen in a game. I couldn't help but lose control of my laughter at this. How was this okay? I don't understand it. That music was just gone to waste.

{ Final Thoughts }

Well.. what more can I say? I hate this game. I think that I have made that pretty clear. This game is a disgrace to the lineage of Metal Gear. It just doesn't feel like a Metal Gear game at all. This is one of the most disappointing games I've ever played.

Metal Gear is a very story heavy franchise, and it's fucking awesome, and it's complimented by just as awesome gameplay. But here we have laborious, tedious, and frustrating gameplay complimented by a paper thin plot that is badly told.

And that just isn't what Metal Gear is no matter how you put it. I love Metal Gear. I remember MGS1 being one of the first PS1 games I ever played. I was only like, eight or nine years old when I played it, and I loved the series ever since.

I have a burning passion for this series as these games culminated in me getting exposed to a community where I met a good chunk of my bestest friends because they share the same love for Metal Gear as I do.

I've owned this game since 2017 and to this day I have never finished the game to completion. I must have come back to this like 3 or 4 times, and every time I struggled to get through it.

The game lacks any sort of end goal so I as a player don't have the motivation to care about it.

Metal Gear was one of the few franchises that had not been ruined yet. It was on a massive killstreak but to see it go out on Phantom Pain and Metal Gear Survive considering that MGS4 had such a good climax is just depressing.

I have absolutely no respect towards Konami as they are mainly responsible for the game being the way it is. I feel for Kojima. I could tell that he just didn't want to make this game but he was forced to by Konami because their stocks were plummeting and they needed a new console game, so they just thought "Let's make Kojima make another Metal Gear game."

Even though he wanted the series to end after MGS4. It also doesn't help that Konami cut off the budget at some point during development forcing the team to cut content and release the game early, and from I've read online, the team were under pressure because they were being spied on by Konami.

I also don't find it coincidental that as soon as the game released, Kojima was immediately relieved from the company and was not allowed to attend any award ceremonies. So I can tell in the back of my mind, Konami is to blame for all of this.

Just like with Silent Hill and Castlevania, Metal Gear has only become an afterthought in Konami's minds. Metal Gear is now only a cash grab. Oh, and a series of Pachinko machines (slot machines).

Yeah remember when Konami announced that Snake Eater Pachinko machine? That still makes me sick in the stomach to this day, and.. watching my favorite Tactical Espionage Third Person Action franchise that gave me a fetish for eye patches go down this dark path is just, really sad to me.

Thank you Konami for taking my childhood and not letting it die on a sunrising mountain Red Dead Redemption 2 style, but in a ravaging burning house fire or a nuclear explosion.

At least I still have the older games. To me, Metal Gear ended after MGS4.

Because The Phantom Pain literally gives me phantom pain.

4/10

This game. Goddamn, this game.

Okay so let me just get this out of the way quickly: This game is my 2nd favorite entry in the Resident Evil franchise. This game is nothing but nostalgia to me and is the perfect companion to RE2, which is hands down the best game in this series.

It's crazy to think that originally, this game wasn't supposed to be the 3rd game in the series. In fact there were multiple games being developed by Capcom at the time.

One of these projects would be led by Director Hideiki Kamiya, in which it would have been the full debut of the Umbrella badass Hunk from RE2. In the game he was to infiltrate a cruise ship to steal a sample of the G-Virus.

Though Shinji Mikami didn't think that it would have been a good fit as an RE game because it was taking a much more action orientated approach. So it was shelved and later revived as

Devil May Cry. Fuck yeah.

The whole boat idea wouldn't be used until Resident Evil Revelations.
And Capcom had an exclusively deal with Sony so their next game had to be a mainline, numbered RE game. Thus the RE3 I know and love to this day was born.

{ Story }

This game takes place some time before and after the events of RE2.
The dreamy Jill Valentine is stuck in her apartment following the outbreak of the T-Virus in Raccoon City. Very noticeably phased after the events of RE1, she is fueled by revenge on the Umbrella Corporation, so she seeks to escape the city and take them down once and for all, but in a boob tube and a mini skirt.

Yeah, not the kind of attire I would personally pick during a fuckin' zombie apocalypse and a battle against an evil corporation. But for all the horny teenagers in the year 2000, this was fan-service with a capital F.

The intro to this game is probably my favorite in this whole series.
The zombies and BOWs (Bio Organic Weapons) overwhelming every street is just dreadful.

Literally everyone, even the police and the mercenary force sent in by Umbrella are just defenseless. Everyone just gets fucking slaughtered. It seems like the people here haven't watched enough zombie flicks to deal with the infected. It really does set the tone that things are fucked up beyond recognition.

Out of all three intros to each RE game so far, this is the most oppressing and bleak. A conflict that was destined to be one-sided. To Umbrella, this is just another guinea pig test.

This game is even more aggressively paced than RE2. It just keeps getting faster with each game.

So we start our adventure with Jill getting blown out of her apartment for some reason, and we are thrown directly into the streets of Raccoon City.

Umbrella are self-aware of the fact that the S.T.A.R.S members are living proof that they are the ones responsible for the creation and outbreak of the T and G-Viruses in the Spenser Mansion and Raccoon City. So they create an almighty bio weapon called the Nemesis to hunt them all down, Jill being one of the former members.

And the Nemesis is the most horrific antagonist I've ever seen in a video game. A mixture of Jason Vorhees and the Terminator. It leads to some incredibly tense encounters. I mean just look at that face. He's such a smug motherfucker, I love it.

Like the Licker scene from RE2, the moment I saw the Nemesis I was just horrified. I had never seen anything like it when I was just a child. And just like with RE2, I watched my brothers play the game, well try to, instead of playing it myself.

Jill will also bump into mercenaries on the bankroll of Umbrella on a mission to "help survivors."

Fat chance.

One of these members is named Carlos, he is your tag partner for this game. And his main objective is to fuck Jill.

Lol that's just a joke but he's basically Billy Cohen from RE0, but a Spanish version.

Since this game is back to a single disc, the story isn't as fleshed out as RE2. I can excuse that since this game came out only a year after RE2. Not to mention the gameplay is so fun that I never get bored of it.

However there are two major things that gives this game major replay value. One of these things is that you can change the outcome of the story. This the first RE game and probably the only one to give the player the ability to affect how the story plays out, thanks to the large amount of cutscenes and multiple endings.

Throughout the game you will be given one of two choices to approach a certain situation.

Like for example, going to the restaurant and fleeing into the basement to get away from Nemesis instead of running into the kitchen and blowing him up.

Or attempt to pull the brakes on the train instead of jumping out of the window because it loses control.

These choices, depending on what you select, can actually give you different cutscenes as well as placing the player in different areas.

You can even affect what boss fights you participate in depending on what you choose.

What this does is encourage multiple playthroughs to see every single asset in the story which is an excellent idea, considering this game is only half of RE2's length.

And the other major reason is the RNG during the gameplay, but I will talk about that in the Gameplay section.

What they managed to accomplish in just a year after RE2 is mind-blowing.

{ Gameplay }

Now this, THIS is the good shit. The best adjective I would use to describe it is sexy.

This is the best controlling game out of all the classic RE games. They have been polished to a real mirror shine. This game invented so many revolutionary mechanics that would be used in future games to this very day.

Where should I start?

Well, this is the first game to have the 180° quick turn. Which means that you can instantly turn yourself around with just the push of Down on the D-Pad and Square. It's fucking ace. It's responsive, it's snappy, it's fluent, it's sheer perfection. And it makes getting away from enemies an absolute breeze.

Gone are the days of having to painstakingly turn yourself around manually and risk getting hit by enemies while doing so.

This is also the first game to give you the ability to shove away zombies and dodge attacks.

By pushing R1 or holding R1 and pushing X just as a zombie is about to grab you, Jill will just shove them away instead of just taking a hickey to the chin like in the older games.

The instruction manual says that you do this by rapidly mashing L1, L2, R1, and R2 but don't fall for it. That doesn't actually work.

The older games also had a problem where if you get pincered by zombies, then you can get bitten from both in front and in back of you with no real means of defending yourself.

But if you take a bite in RE3 and another zombie is about to grab you again, Jill will shove away the zombie automatically, which can really save your life.

If you're fighting anything other than a zombie, you can dodge attacks by pushing R1 or R1 + X as the enemy is about to attack you though the timing can vary on what weapon you are holding. It does help but it's a shotty mechanic. Because if you don't have enough space to dodge you can still get hit.

Dodging doesn't make you invincible like in the later games.

Jill will do the standard backward dodge though occasionally she will roll, which uses up a lot of space meaning there is a chance you can still get hit while doing it which just sucks. If you're up against a wall or something you can still get hit while dodging. But having this mechanic at all is better than nothing.

This is the first RE game where you are able to skip the cutscenes. Which makes the game go by so much quicker during a 2nd playthrough. As much as I love RE2, not being able to skip the cutscenes can be a bitch and a half.

This is also the first game to have the Gunpowder mechanic. If you're playing on Hard Mode, ammo is not as common as it was in RE2. That is where the Gunpowder comes in.

You are able to create ammunition out of this Gunpowder. There are two types of Gunpowder: Gunpowder A, B, and C. Just like herbs, it can be combined with each other to create different types of ammo. And the most powerful ammunition can be synthesized.

NOTE: To obtain Gunpowder C, you need to mix Gunpowder A with Gunpowder B.

Here is a list of all of the ammo that can be created from Gunpowder combinations:

[ Handgun Ammo Combos ]

A: 15 Handgun ammo
A + A: 35 Handgun ammo
A + A + A: 55 Handgun ammo
B + B + A: 60 Handgun ammo

[ Shotgun Shell Combos ]

B: 7 Shotgun shells
B + B: 18 Shotgun shells
A + A + B: 22 Shotgun shells
B + B + B: 30 Shotgun shells

[ Grenade Launcher Round Combos ]

C: 10 Grenade Rounds
A + C: 10 Flame Rounds
B + C: 10 Acid Rounds
C + C: 10 Freeze Rounds

A + 6 Grenade Rounds: 6 Flame Rounds

A + A + 6 Grenade Rounds: 12 Flame Rounds

A + A + A + 6 Grenade Rounds: 18 Flame Rounds

B + 6 Grenade Rounds: 6 Acid Rounds

B + B + 6 Grenade Rounds: 12 Acid Rounds

B + B + B + 6 Grenade Rounds: 18 Acid Rounds

C + 6 Grenade Rounds: 6 Freeze Rounds

C + C + 6 Grenade Rounds: 12 Freeze Rounds

C + C + C + 6 Grenade Rounds: 18 Freeze Rounds

[ Magnum Round Combo ]

C + C + C: 24 Magnum Rounds

This gunpowder only comes in limited quantity, so be wise on what you want to create. Despite the faster facing and more aggressive gameplay, this is still a survival game at the end of the day.

And just like with my RE1 and RE2 reviews, I will leave a list of all the herb combinations.

G: Heals 25% of your health

G + G: Heals 50% of your health

G + G + G: Heals 100% of your health

G + R: Heals 100% of your health

B: Heals poison

G + B: Heals 25% of your health and cures poison

G + R + B: Heals 100% of your health and cures poison

With faster, more polished gameplay comes a much bigger threat than Mr. X from RE2 and that's the Nemesis. He's fast, he has a RE5 Chris Redfield punch that hurts, he can toss Jill around like a sack of potatoes, and he can use a rocket launcher, which really hurts if you get hit by it, and he has a fetish for tentacle hentai.

Just like a feminist on Twitter he will fucking stop at nothing to cancel the living shit out of you. He reeeally craves a Jill on rye. You can choose to either fight him or run away from the big bastard, and the latter is the recommended option. Because just like the Terminator he just does not fuckin' die, and he can seriously fuck you sideways if you don't know what you're doing.

The Nemesis is actually weak against certain ammunition so he's not completely invincible.

If you actually are ballsy enough to fight him, then knocking him out by shooting him will cause him to drop an item. These items can range from gun parts to healing items. Keep in mind that you can only get these items playing on Hard Mode. And they are dropped in this specific order:

1st knockdown: Eagle Parts A

2nd knockdown: Eagle Parts B

3rd knockdown: First Aid Box

4th knockdown: M37 Parts A

5th knockdown: M37 Parts B

6th knockdown: Another First Aid Box

7th knockdown: Either the Assault Rifle or Infinite Ammo for any one of your weapons (you can only get that after beating the game.)

The Eagle Parts are parts for the Handgun which makes it stronger, and the M37 Parts can turn the Shotgun into a powerful lever action rifle.

If you're playing this game for the first time, I do not advise fighting Nemesis just to get these rewards until you have at least beaten the game. Or have an idea on how to fight him properly.

There will be times you will have to fight him as a boss fight, but fucking hell he can be difficult to deal with.

There is one part in the game where you fight him at a clock tower and even now as a veteran player who has been playing this game for years now, I still die a few times trying to beat the son of a bitch.

His punches and his rocket launcher just hit you like an 18 wheeler. Dying here can be easy if you're not careful.

Also, about Hard Mode.. If you are playing this game for the first time, do yourself a favor, and do not play this game on Easy Mode.

Why?

Because Easy Mode is literally what I like to call Game Journalism difficulty, or Dean Takahashi Mode.

The game just holds your hand through everything. It's so piss easy that it practically lets you win. It's like playing Rookie Mode in RE2. The game gives you the Assault Rifle, Handgun, Shotgun, Magnum, a First Aid Box, maximum ammunition for each weapon, infinite Ink Ribbons, and the amount of ammo obtained from a pickup is increased by 2 or 3x.

There is no challenge to be found and the point of a Survival Horror game is completely lost when the game just gives you everything so you can just Bullet Hell everything.

Don't let Hard Mode intimidate you. It's not actually a Hard Mode difficulty. Hard Mode is just the name for the game's Normal difficulty. If you want the true Survival Horror experience, play Hard Mode.

The game isn't that hard. Just dealing with the Nemesis can be a pain at times.

Out of the classic RE trilogy, this is the toughest one of them all, but even then, the game does a great job with balancing its difficulty.

Now I'm talk about the RNG. And this is what makes the game fresh to play with each playthrough despite how short the game is compared to RE2.

All of the enemy placements, item placements, and the moments that Nemesis appears can change when you play the game during a 2nd playthrough. For example in the City Park, you could walk down to the water walkway and there will be zombies, but then in your next playthrough, Hunters can pop up.

So every time you play, something different can happen. Sometimes Nemesis will appear in one area, and then the next time he doesn't.

Maybe choosing what to do during a cutscene can also change what enemies will spawn in. This gives the game unique flavor as you most likely will never know what you will run into.

There is also a moment in the game where a key item will change location depending on what you choose during a cutscene when Nemesis pops up.

Little details like that makes the game fresh. Some might find it annoying, I think it's unique, and it's what makes RE3 stand out from the other games.

Now I'm gonna talk about the weapons, my favorite part.

Jill's arsenal consists of a standard Pistol and a Shotgun which both can be upgraded as mentioned in the Nemesis rewards, a Magnum, which is one of the best guns for boss fights, a Grenade Launcher, a Mine Thrower which I don't use that much, it's pretty powerful but you get almost no extra ammo for it, an Assault Rifle, which is a great for crowd control and has plenty of ammo, and you can also unlock infinite ammo weaponry like a Rocket Launcher and a Minigun.

The Grenade Launcher can fire Flame, Acid, Freeze, and Explosive Rounds, and the most powerful out of all of these are the Acid Rounds. They just demolish bosses. But they suck against Nemesis so use something else.

This is the first game in the series where you are able to unlock infinite ammo for any weapon found in Jill's journey.

You do this by playing The Mercenaries, unlocked after beating the game. All you do is kill enemies while reaching a certain destination under a time limit. Killing multiple enemies adds a bigger increase to the timer, as well as dodging attacks.

When you beat the mode you get Points, and then you spend these Points on whatever gun you wish to unlock infinite ammo for. Each one has a different cost but if you want all guns with infinite ammo unlocked at once, there's a bundle you can purchase for 10000 Points. Getting that amount of points is on the grindy side, though there are easy tricks you can do to get more Points at a faster rate.

And just like RE2, the gunplay in this game is fantastic. Each gun feels great to use. You can just feel the impact of each shot. Combine this with the orgasmic sound effects, and it's a game that deserves the use of your best headphones of choice. The gunplay feedback is among the best in the series.

Just like with RE2, this game is a blast to play. It's excellent gameplay still holds up even to this day. It's a game that I just don't get bored of which is a testament to its design.

It's the catharsis of creating tons of different kinds of ammo with Gunpowder, blowing off zombie heads, shooting explosive barrels to blow multiple enemies into pieces at once, the adrenaline rushes of engaging Nemesis, and finding new surprises with every playthrough because of the RNG system, makes the game always fun for me. This game is a fucking joy to play.

{ Presentation and Soundtrack }

The first thing I noticed when I was younger is that for the first time, you're actually outside.

I know you were outside in RE2 but that was for like 10 minutes in the introduction. But in RE3, the majority of the game is you running around the zombified alleyways and streets of the Raccoon City, which changes the mood from loneliness to paranoia.

With every street and alleyway you run down, you don't know what you're gonna encounter. Capcom really went out all out with this game's production value, it just pushed the PS1 to its limits.

This game is beautiful to look at. The backdrops and pre-rendered backgrounds are even more detailed than the ones in RE2, there are no sharp edges anywhere, and the FMV cutscenes are probably the best looking on the PS1. They're just so clear and very detailed. You can see the rotting flesh on each zombie, it's just grotesque, it's like moldy pizza.

And Jill's character model is a lot more detailed than before. There are multiple different kinds of ways to die which can affect Jill's character model. For example when she gets eaten by a zombie or a dog you can see the bite marks and gashes on her skin.

And when Nemesis shoves that lovely hentai tentacle of his inside of Jill her skin changes to a purpleish color which implies that Nemesis just injected her with the T-Virus.

I really love little details like that. I can tell the developers took a big step to give Jill as much detail as they could.

The soundtrack is brilliant just like RE2, but RE2 still has the edge over RE3 to me. You can hear the ambience in the music as gunshots and people dying can be heard in the distance. It gives me a bigger sense of dread than RE2. But there is no doubt that this game has better boss music.

The music that plays when you fight a boss is so goddamn addictive I just hum it to myself. This game is just junk food for my eyes and ears.

{ Best Version? }

There really is no wrong way to play this game, but as much as I have played the PS1 version, it's actually not the best version in my opinion. This game was released on the PS1, Sega Dreamcast, PC, and the Nintendo Gamecube.

The only difference with the Gamecube version is that the FMV cutscenes run at 60 FPS. I think it's 60 FPS, I could be wrong about that.

And the Sega Dreamcast version is better graphically than the PS1, with 480p resolution and a higher polygon count, but does that really matter since we have the PC version?

Out of all of these versions, the best one would have to be the PC version.

Why? One word: Mods.

Holy shit, the mods for this game. There are tons of texture, high resolution, and challenge mods like Nightmare Mode that just can completely change how we played RE3.

Oh, and you can skip the door animations. You enter a lot, and I mean a lot of doors in this game. The play time reaaaally adds up when you have to watch door animations 90% of the whole game.

Being able to skip these animations can be a godsend when you just want to breeze through the game. And the game is pretty easy to get running on a modern day system thanks to the PC Wiki.

{ Final Thoughts }

This definitely was the swan song of the RE games on the RE1. Originally Code Veronica was to be the true sequel to RE2 but because of the whole Sony exclusively deal, Code Veronica was treated as a like a spin off game, and to be honest that was the better choice.

RE3 is amazing. This game is just as good as RE2 despite being shorter. The amount that was accomplished between RE2 and RE3 is almost paranormal. The content and replay value on the disc is staggering, it's both eye and ear candy, and the Nemesis must have made many kids and teenagers easily shit themselves.

If only was the remake was as good.. Even thinking about that lukewarm half-assed remake still annoys me to shit. But that's a topic for a different review. I was actually so disappointed from RE3 Remake that it was the main reason why I even went back to the original game in the first place.

And the moment I started playing through this game, I just said two words: "That's better." It really just shows how timeless the original release is.

I give this game 9 Jill Sandwiches out of 10.

I have some insanely conflicting feelings about this game. There are some amazing aspects to this game but at the same time has issues that are so prevalent that it's preventing me from fully enjoying it. I both love and fucking can't stand this game at times. The more I played it the more it burned me out.

I only just started playing this game like a week ago, and as a first timer, this game was fuckin' painful to get though and I'll explain why.

But just to be fair, I'll start with the great things about this game.

{ The Very Noticably Good }

The soundtrack is fuckin' orgasmic for the ears. This game has some of the best music I've ever heard in a Super Nintendo game. I could listen to this music for hours. The SNES is an absolute powerhouse in terms of sound. There is something about this era of video game music that is just timeless.

There isn't a single track I dislike in this game. I also love how almost every stage has a different track. And there is also a different song that plays whenever you die, depending on the stage you're playing on. There is so much variety. Once I got to Krazy Kremland I started humming the music as I was playing, it was so goddamn addictive. The music makes up half of these older games.

This is also one of the best looking games on the system. I find it hard to believe that they even managed to make a game look this fantastic on a 4-6 MB cartridge.

This game is so good graphically that it could pass as a mid era PS1 game. All of the character sprites remind me of the old Mortal Kombat games where all of the sprites are just digitized actors. The animations are excellent and the backdrops look absolutely amazing, and so rich in detail. This is one of those games that should be in an art museum, it's that beautiful.

The controls also work fine. They do the job and are quite responsive. Moving around and platforming is very swift and I feel like I'm in control at all times. There doesn't feel like there is a moment where I get screwed over because of the controls, no, there are other reasons why.

{ The Very Noticably Bad }

The biggest reason why it's so difficult for me to fully enjoy this game is two words:

SCREEN. CRUNCH.

The camera is so zoomed in that it's insanely difficult to know what is coming up ahead, so many times I end up running right into enemies like a complete dumbass. This game is just not meant to be rushed through. And yet there are many, many moments through the game where you HAVE to rush and go fast. The only way to know what is coming up ahead is if you have played the stage over, and over, and over again, dying repeatedly in the process.

The mine cart levels are just painful. Because many jumps require pixel perfect accuracy and you only have a fraction of a second to react. Dying in these levels are just very easy. Trial and error and resetting your save file is the only way to get good at these levels.

Because if you run out of lives, it's not like other games where you just restart the level from the beginning, no, you have to reload your save file and just hope to God that you don't run out of lives on your pilgrimage to the next save area.

I like difficult games. Hell, I've pretty much mastered the first 7 Mega Man games, and those games are known for being hard. But the devs of this game went way too far with this. The difficulty in this game is legendary.

The first two Worlds aren't that bad, but once you get to Krazy Kremland, the difficulty spikes up so hard that it feels like a completely different development team designed these levels.

Enemies and obstacles that you can't see coming until it's too late, only one checkpoint per level and it's at the halfway mark, unkillable enemies spammed repeatedly throughout the level like those goddamn hornets, having to know how to jump higher off of enemies, and other things like having to know all the controls for each of the Animal Buddies.

If you're playing this game for the first time, like, emulating it like I did, I hope you looked up the instruction manual and looked at all the controls in this game. Because this is one of those games where you're not told any of the controls. You just gotta figure out everything yourself and know all the mechanics of each of the Animal Buddies.

Like pushing A and Up or Down to fly higher or lower much faster with Squawks, and, holding A before you land on an enemy to go three times higher as Rattly the Rattlesnake, and, pushing A and then pushing A again to make platforms with Squitter the Spider, and that you can push Down and A to make platforms below you, and that you can jump and push L + R to make an instant platform higher above.

These are things that you have to know in order to make getting through each stage so much easier. There are obstacles in the later stages where you need to have this prior knowledge to get past them.

The enemy placements in a lot of these levels are just atrocious. Some stages just relentlessly spam enemies at you and I feel like many of my deaths are just out of my control because of again, the scrunched up camera and not knowing that I need to know specific controls to get through certain obstacles.

And getting a Game Over can just be the absolute worst feeling ever because you gotta do all of that progress all over again, bosses and all.

And speaking of bosses, Jesus fucking Christ, the bosses in this game are just brutal. Again, the first couple bosses are not hard. But once you get to Krazy Kremland, the bosses are so unforgiving that it's straight up sadistic.

The Hornet King boss was the absolute worst. I can't tell you how many times I died on that guy because he flies around the stage and you have to shoot him with Squawk's eggs, but there are two major problems.

1: You can only damage the boss by hitting the stinger, yes, the fucking STINGER

And 2: The eggs travel at an arc, making hitting the damn thing even harder than it needs to be

Not to mention you have to hit him EIGHT times and each time you hit him he flies faster and faster. And you only get two hits to do this, you don't get any more DK barrels.

This boss drove me fucking mad. I must have died at least 30 times on this fight. It got to the point that I had to force myself to use Save States, because I was not putting up with another 20+ minutes of progress just to get back to where I got a Game Over.

Then there is the boss fight where you fight the ghost of the Pirate Vulture from the first World.

It's simple enough but what makes it so brutal is the fact you have to climb up ropes while dodging falling eggs, and you only get like, a fraction of a second to react and get out of the way. Again, I've died around 20 times on this shit alone. And again, you only get two hits. No DK barrels throughout.

The most successful way was to just go as fast as I could and hope to God I don't get hit, and just abuse the invincibility frames whenever I had the chance. Either way, I ended up using Save States.

In fact this game pretty much forced me to use them whenever I felt like I needed to. And that sucks. I shouldn't have to do that shit.

A game shouldn't have to force the player to use cheat codes or Save States in order to make progress, but without Save States, I doubt that I could have even finished this game. This game was so brutal that I can't tell if that's by design or lack thereof.

The camera really does plague a large portion of the stages and bosses in this game.

I find it hard to believe that this game was marketed towards children in the 90s and it is this difficult. Imagine being a kid in the 90s and you jumped into this game or the first Donkey Kong Country game completely blind and you didn't have Save States.

I know that you can get a handful of extra lives from the game show stages but even then, it's not enough.

You would think that after the first Donkey Kong Country game that there would have been some more regard towards children, hell even as an adult these games are insane. This is definitely one of the toughest platformers I've played in a very long time. And I've played Rayman 1, Mega Man 9, Mega Man X3, Mega Man X6, Super Meat Boy, Celeste, Cuphead, etc.

But at least with those games, if you die you just start from a checkpoint and they're frequent enough to be acceptable, and if you get a Game Over you just start the stage over. Well, except Rayman 1. I never finished that game either.

And then there are the Lost Levels. They're the hardest levels in the game, obviously, but they just put front and center all of the issues that I have with this game. There is so much precision involved that it feels like I get lucky if I even manage to beat them.

{ Final Thoughts }

This game is better than the first DKC game there is no doubt about that. That game is even more difficult than DKC2, so I can only imagine the insane amount of rage that game must have caused back then.

But even then, rarely have I played a game like this that has made me just want to drop the controller and call it a day. I play games to have a fun, not to have an excuse to break a fuckin' monitor. I understand if you like or even love this game, all the power to you.

But for a first timers, I don't see how you can enjoy this game that much without the use of Save States or an Extra Life code. Maybe it would have grown on me the more I played it, but after beating the game, I haven't really looked back at it, and that is not really a good sign.

The music is orgasmic, the graphics are stunning for a SNES game, the sound effects are great, and the controls work good for what they are.

But the awful camera, the bad enemy placements, the lack of checkpoints, bosses being hit sponges meanwhile you only have two hits yourself to get it done in one go, and having to restart from your last save upon getting a Game Over can make the game just infuriating to play without the use of Save States.

The difficulty spiking once you get to Krazy Kremland is so severe that I imagine kids back then had to just drop the game because they couldn't finish it.

Overall I just feel very mixed about this game.

6/10