Remember playing HL2RP and a CP just suddenly started being tough and you acted in a silly, but not out of character way and got arrested for 5-20 minutes over it?
Imagine that but filled with lag, crashes, bugs and being unable to find anyone even on a 100 player server.

Only the most insufferable power hungry losers play cop or enroll for staff, the types of people who will call an admin if you spawn the wrong vehicle by accident, then turn heel and leave you handcuffed unable to free yourself for 20 minutes and getting off without any problem.

It's really immersive how everyone hates all authority in most servers because they're anti-fun buzzkills.
Just go play DarkRP.

Remember when later Guitar Hero games had songs that can't do anything but have boring easy-mode charts? Yeah, that's this.
Pair it with a really shitty rotation model where if you want to play a song for any other period than when it shows up for a few days, you have to pay 5 whole dollars for it and only when it's in the item shop, and you've got Fortnite Festival.

Pair it with incredibly boring visuals, as you've got a very ugly giant stage with band animations going below even GH2 quality, but hey, during those long breaks certain instruments will get in songs due to a bad track-list, you can use your emotes!
There's really no huge flair either, there's nothing like the audio getting filtered when using Overdrive, the particles while you're using it are very small and tied almost entirely to just your player, and most of them are battle pass/shop purchases anyways.

Generally it just is very clunky as well, you can't quick restart a song or practice it, instead you can just jump into the song from the start and if you fuck up you have to back out to the main-stage with on some songs this being a downtime of like 40s.
You've also got to deal with the fact that all the notes share the same color so on harder tracks (if you can actually FIND one) it's a bit annoying to deal with as it's harder to read for no other reason than it has to be the Fortnite purple color.
Lastly there's just a lot of instabilities, It's on the second season now and there's still major issues with just random hitching in the middle of songs (far better than it used to be at-least) and crashes happen randomly as well.

AAA Licensed Rhythm games are pretty much dead, and this is the best you'll get out of it in the modern industry, just move on and go download like Clone Hero or YARG or something.

Epic, Stop trying to make metaverse Fortnite happen, It's not going to happen, nobody plays the shitty racing mode, Festival is mediocre, Lego Fortnite has been nothing but boring and the Creative mode's expansion has pretty much exclusively been used to make things that you could already play, like arenas or boxfights etc. but now they have a random theme of Streamer/Country/IP, or just are something I could have played in ROBLOX back in 2009, it's not working and players are just going to jump to the one where they already have all the different things they want to make.

Um Jammer Lammy builds on a lot the first game did, fixes a few problems like the weird stiff animations that feel delayed, but it misses the mark by continuing issues from the first game, like having really delayed inputs and a judge that makes no fucking sense.

Like, the only way you're going to even dream of getting a positive result from your notes is if you do them before they end up flashing, it's really weird and I don't understand how this survived all the way up until the second game where the judge and controls are all perfectly fine.

Past that the tracks are pretty neat, minus the sixth stage where it's brutally hard (YOU SHOULD BE BANNED FROM EVERY GAME) and that's all fine and dandy, and the extra Parappa mode is cool, but the versus mode is really crap, if you want to play versus just play the second game.

The cutscenes range from just confusing and weird to confusing and hilarious though, I don't know what they were thinking but they clearly toned it back down for the second game.

I do recommend it a play, with most of the series being very fun rhythm games even putting aside their frustrating difficulty in the first 2, fun times.

I've struggled through 6, glitch filled, laggy hours of this game so far and I can at least preface with this.
PvE shooter fans, this game is NOT designed for you, If you were expecting a horde shooter with a bit of momentum like L4D2 or KF2, this is not it.

My problems with this game are very peculiar, so to try and put them across, I'm splitting the game into 3 categories, the fundamentals, the bugs, and the robots to try and narrow down my irks with it.
-----------FUNDAMENTALS-----------
To start with the fundamentals, it's just... meh. (WARNING: a lot of this is in the perspective of dealing with the bugs, who suck. A lot of this is a lot more fun in perspective of the robots due to a bunch of issues not happening with their AI/environments)
To start off, you've got your movement, running around feels good enough and doesn't have annoying weighty turning to it, but praises for it end there, you cannot jump and instead have to rely on an autojump from either sprinting or holding down a key, it is NEVER helpful, and only manages to get you out of 1ft ditches after a bit of scraping around the edges and getting stuck.
The diving is a shit system, it's fun to play around with ragdolls for a few minutes, but this is never EVER fun to deal with for more than a few hours and quickly devolves into total jank, you think you're going to jump a barricade to get into cover? Nope, you're going to bump off of it and get stuck in a ragdoll state for 2 seconds, you think you're going to jump over some bugs and shoot at them as you go? Nope, you're going to get stuck on one and be aiming the wrong way.
By extension the ragdoll system is extra annoying in combat, if you ever get knocked down, just give up, you're going to be torn to shreds if you're playing against bugs.

Combat? It's really not good, the guns that you'll get around your first 10 levels kind of suck, you've realistically only got 3 you can rely on, the starter AR, the marksman rifle and the auto-pistol, the shotgun is terrible and the pistol is just a straight downgrade.

Shooting feels like shit for a simple reason of that it's just imprecise, you will almost always be shooting from a third person perspective, and your aim can drastically be off center for a multitude of reasons, if you're spinning around your aim needs to catch up, if you're moving around your accuracy decreases heavily, and the third person perspective generally just causes a lot of missed shots.
You might be thinking, oh, but you can just use the first person camera!
And why yes, that is an option and is vastly more precise..
It sucks.
Not because of any accuracy reasons, but because of the presentation first gameplay later design of the areas and the visuals and the fog they constantly layer in on you (and also the FOV setting moving the scopes AWAY FROM YOUR CAMERA) You cannot see shit in such a cramped environment.
There's a melee system, not that you'll be using it due to never EVER wanting to be near enemies at any time.
Stratagems are a neat system, punching in codes to spawn in airdrops, but there was a common bug where you would just get the wrong thing, so you'll throw down a machine gun and end up carpet bombing your entire team, did I mention there's friendly fire? Because yeah, there's friendly fire, another thing they added for "teh lulz" ignoring the fact that "hey wait a minute! this is incredibly frustrating in practice, and will be insufferable to deal with in matchmaking!"
Also they just generally have a problem with the stratagems of just not being thrown far enough, you throw it as far as you can and maaybe it's like 10m away from you, it makes it way too difficult to take out armored targets, especially with the fact that you already have to wait on a delay for them to launch anyhow.

The stims are a pointless system, I don't know why they included this in the game other than that "well we have resource management so we should have medkits" but WHY do you need them? Any time you're taking major damage you're probably jammed in a corner or being instakilled, it just feels like it's there if you get scraped by a few zergs you forgot to kill, why not just roll all that health into your max HP and only let you refill them with specific drops/specific locations? It'd be a lot more intense instead of just "whoops got ragdolled gg" or dying instantly because you got hit by a Bile Spewer/got lit on fire for 2 seconds.
But I assume being tanky goes against this shitty idea of being expendable, which is why they give you like a thousand lives and never punish you for dying other than the fact you'll have 1 life less, you can easily push through high difficulties as a low level player just because as long as you get to the ship, it doesn't matter how many people died in the process.
Just makes it all really unsatisfying, you're expected to die, and you WILL die, so you're just dealing with the frustration of getting killed by bullshit reasons over and over, but it's okay apparently because they balanced the game around it so it's still playable, just annoying.

Presentation wise, shit just sucks, as mentioned before it's just impossible to see in front of you very often, and the "LE DEMOCRACY XDDD" stuff gets so annoying super fast, it feels like they're trying FAAAR too hard to just be Starship Troopers, but miss the mark because they made sure to give all the dialogue a pass so that they sound like idiotic American conservatives, just short of saying "HEIL EL PRESIDENTÉ"

Lastly, the progression system sucks, who the fuck thought that putting core gameplay progression behind some shitty slapped together battle pass system would be a good idea? Just because it's free doesn't mean it's good.

Core gameplay gets like, a 6/10.
-----------------BUGS (ENEMIES)------------------
Onto the biggest annoyance of the game, the bugs.
These will be the things that you have the biggest problem with, they will be the ones that just swarm you and jam you in corners, these will be the ones that constantly dip the areas in green fog, these will be the ones that barely take damage from small arms, but yet are too fast to get hit by airstrikes that you don't lead them into killing yourself in the process.

It's really easy to roll up the problems for them, they have no identity. I assume this is because they were designed first.

All the small-medium ones are generic zergs who don't do anything interesting other than that they sometimes lunge at you, and all the large ones are jack of all trades.
Focusing more on the large ones, you'll commonly encounter packs of the Chargers and Bile Spewers, and they're fast, they're insanely tanky, and can easily instakill you.
The chargers won't always instakill you, if they slam down on you which they seem to just do at random, you'll just die, but normally they just charge into you, which if there's more than 0 other enemies around you, you're likely to get killed while you're downed.
Bile spewers just deal insane damage if they hit you at all, if you get hit, you're going to either die or lost 80% of your health.

Again, these things are FAST, TANKY and SPAWN IN LARGE GROUPS.

Fucking atrocious design, at least dealing with bullet-sponges in other games you're not put at a risk of them suddenly catching up and instakilling you because you stepped in the slightly different piece of shrubbery and are now slowed by 70%.
5/10 and a walk of shame for whoever designed them.
------------------------ROBOTS-------------------------
The robots on the other hand, are where the gameplay shines, you're commonly going to have vastly better visibility, and outside of like 2 enemies, which are RARE you aren't going to struggle with taking them down with just what you have lying around, 1 of those 2 is easily defeated by just getting another ally to spin them around but can also be defeated by using anti-armor weapons, and the other is incredibly slow but also vulnerable to anti armor weapons.

Their enemy types in general are far more diverse, you'll have your regular zergs, your suicide bombers, your moderately healthed rushers, and enemies armored from the front except the very top of their head pushing in, there's a lot of variety and outside of the generic zergs/rushers you're going to approach dealing with them differently, and it can get hectic (but manageable!) very quickly.

Also, they have actual fucking bases! and use ranged attacks! So you're actually now taking advantage of the cover in the game.

There is some annoyances though, if you ever get lit on fire you're going to be dead in seconds if you don't stim or whatever, but it's not even close to as frequent as the Bile Spewers, and the flamethrower from the mech enemies doesn't do as much damage as being lit on fire from another source, though it still hurts.

And with that added visibility, and them being more glass cannons with added ranged, it allows you to play strategically, you can split up into groups because you're not going to be doomed if you're alone with the bugs, and you can take vantage positions to assist players all around, it's pretty fun to fight through them, but a bit on the easier side.
8/10, The gold standard for how this game should be designed, and this game will be far greater if they design enemies in the image of these ones.

In closing the game is a bit of a dud as a horde shooter, a surefire dud as a love letter to Starship Troopers and with dealing with the bugs, but a great experience with resource management and strategy mixed with action when dealing with the robots.

Really late on this review, but I've only just now come to terms that I'm not going to end up finishing this, I got about 60-70% through, and I was playing on the second hardest difficulty I think?

Anyhow, I'll start off with the things I remember liking about the game.
The game is like, astonishingly well optimized, even when it was pulling my PC to parts the gameplay rarely stuttered ever, at worst the audio would cut out from the bad lag I was getting, but that was it.
IDs programming team needs a nobel prize for their efforts, they're great.
On that note the visuals are great and the dismemberment and just impact of shooting feels great.
Movement feels spectacular at least in its fundamentals, and the soundtrack is decent, though I'm not as much of a fan of most others.
Enemy design is good, outside of the upgrade weaknesses, they all felt unique and fun to face, minus one.

Onto my overall thoughts though..
To start, the weapon variety just kind of blows, I can't remember all of them but they weren't very interesting.
You've got your standard lineups of shotguns and super shotguns, which feel nice but the regular shotgun feels a bit too weak, and the super shotgun that sometimes feels like too much risk to use due to ammo constraints, no real complaints there, FPS shotguns are kind of hard to fuck up, but I wasn't a fan of their upgrades at all.

You've got your automatic weapons, the plasma rifle, chaingun and assault rifle, I don't really like any of these, the chaingun is decent I guess, and the assault rifle has one upgrade that gives it sniper functionality which was fun to use, plasma rifle is incredibly boring as it always has been.

And you've got your exotic weapons like the BFG and Rocket Launcher, don't care for them in any game, especially not here.

You've also got your extra gadgets like your melees and your grenades etc. etc. etc. but I don't like any of them, I hate how many cooldowns you have to manage and how many things rely on different mechanics like oh armor needs this thing and there's the ice grenade the blood punch the sword the flamethrower etc. it's just too irritating to juggle all of that to play optimally when I just want to focus on running and gunning.

And lastly, the chainsaw.
Fuck this mechanic, I hate glory kills, and this just forces you to use them for gameplay purposes.
I totally get the idea, it's visceral and it lets resources be delivered in a gameplay first way, but this is just dreadful to use, if it was ONLY the chainsaw and glory kills weren't a thing, I wouldn't mind it as much, but there's just too many breaks in the action and it makes the game feel far too easy.

Then there's the weapon upgrades that just hard counter certain enemies, dealing with cacodemons becomes mindlessly easy when you can instakill them with a grenade launcher shot + a glory kill, it's boring, they might as well not be in the game with how comically easy they are to kill.

Onto the level design, I just hate the levels in this game, all the levels feel like they're the same blueprint of just Combat encounter -> Puzzle -> Boring floating platforming section -> Combat encounter -> Puzzle, etc. etc.
with the puzzles and platforming being braindead easy, and the combat taking place in similar boxy arenas where you're unlikely to ever be caught in a dangerous position, there's far too much agency given to the player and it really nullifies any challenge that I could have been having.

Enemy design, as mentioned above I had very few problems outside of the weaknesses, for some of them it was neat like shooting a weak point with a precision shot, that felt fun though it makes dealing with elite enemies a bit easy, the cacodemon is now useless, but past that no big deal.
Marauders though? An interesting concept, but totally failed in the execution, these things are just annoying, you have to play by THEIR rules in a game that has been consistently designing itself at giving you the most agency at all times, by staying in their mid range, and then waiting for THEM to attack before you can start putting the damage on.
It's just boring, and makes them a bit of a priority but not a fun one, if there were better ways that I didn't know of to take care of these, in a more open experimental sandbox-y way, that would have been great to know, but as far as I know, it's just waiting for them to do their thing and punishing, it's dumb.

The story is really uninteresting, I couldn't tell you what was happening, the voice acting and characters felt a bit too over-the-top while also feeling a bit phoned in, so I just was totally out of it for most of the story I experienced.

And finally the boss fights, I don't remember much about these, all I can remember is not enjoying them, from my memory it was just another giant arena with monsters spawning in, with the safest strategy to kill all the monsters, damage the boss, and if more monsters spawn in rinse and repeat, just felt like killing a regular monster but just extra spongy, not a great experience.

If you liked Doom 2016 for its relative simplicity, this game might be a step too far, too many experimental mechanics, too many abstract level designs (platforming?? seriously?) too many cooldowns to manage, and too many interactions to remember to go through fights, rather than just focusing on what matters, tough running and gunning action.

It is absolutely depressing how much lower Valve gets in my personal view year after year, I spent most of my childhood being a diehard Valve fan and they do nothing but repay their customers with NOTHING.

We're talking milking a game with cosmetic drops made by community members for months, taking a majority profit off of those, and not producing any actual meaningful content updates, they did this somewhat for CS:GO during its many long hiatus periods, and they do this incredibly for TF2, It is genuinely insane that this is okay, these games generate massive amounts of profit, any other dev would be bending over backwards to support it, at the very least hiring a crew just to support it, but they do nothing, but they'll gladly continue screwing community content creators with bad cuts, and pushing people into gambling, causing high tier items to become stupidly rare, going to hundreds and sometimes even thousands of dollars.

Why? Because Valve's management, are the dumbest fucks on the planet, rivalling some of the worst in any other industry, Coyote VS ACME cancellation level, they've got some of the best talent in the industry but they're so mismanaged due to their shitty corporate structure that all they're ever incentivized to do is work on new projects, new projects you'll never see, outside of the blue moon chances, like a VR Half-Life game that barely made it past the finish line and was totally reworked from the bottom up a year before release, and an update to Valve's second biggest cash cow, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Onto that disgrace, we have Counter-Strike 2, the Counter-Strike you knew, but now everything is worse.

To start the game, you have this gross sleek competitive style they're trying to go for, that looks like complete and total dogshit, 2011 called, they want their art designers back, and it's piled on with the shitty menu design that prioritizes you seeing your shitty ugly agent skins and gloves before anything else, great!

You fire up a game, but oh no, what's this? They've removed short and long matches, now you can only play this middle of the road medium length match that appeals to nobody, Yay!
Oh well, at least the gameplay isn't that much different, all they did was add the smokes, and to start off the gameplay just feels like shit now, something changed and everything feels floaty and imprecise, it's gotten a lot better than what it launched at, but the fact that this was a replacement for one of the biggest competitive games in the world, and it launched like this, after months of beta, is nothing short of a colossal embarrassment.
And what's this? The buy menu, it's shit now!
You have to pick a small selection of weapons in this Valorant styled menu list, effectively dooming most off-meta weapons to be never picked again, and thanks for just reinventing the wheel to blur together with your vastly superior competition.
And to top it all off, there's been a gigantic cheater problem, bigger than I've ever seen when I was playing CS:GO, Multiple times when I infrequently play in friends in low rank lobbies, you will run into blatant wallhackers, the ones you can check in replay and see them staring at people through walls, fucking fantastic, and the matchmaking isn't much better either, did I mention that there were multiple bugs of innocent users getting VAC banned for extreme things like using a console command to look like you're spinbotting, or simple things like, using certain AMD software?

And guess what? Several fucking things from the original were just completely dropped in the transition, Arms Race was removed, only to be reintroduced months and months later and advertised as a content update, thanks for bringing back the thing you took away, dipshits!
Danger Zone was removed, though I doubt anyone will miss it.
Wingman lost like most of its map pool.
Riot Shield was removed from Casual hostage playlists, no fun allowed I suppose.
Multiple console commands stopped working, like net_graph, left-handed viewmodels, and the anti view bob commands.
Achievements were removed for no reason.
And to top it all off, now all the maps use the same default operators, incase you were worried that they weren't shoving the awful agent skins down your throat enough.
I'm pretty sure it didn't launch with community server support, so thanks for pissing in the face of what your companies games were built on, douchebags.

But here's the good part of the game, they update3d the graphics.
That's it.
That's all there is to this.
There's the interactive smokes I guess, but they're a pretty minor thing and it's nothing that couldn't have been done on the old engine.
Onto those graphics, it just looks... bad.
Sure, CS:GO's graphics weren't great either, ranging from oversaturated to too dirty and gritty, one looking like a fashion show model and the latter looking like a Call of Duty NPC.
But this? This is fucking awful, Half-Life Alyx is one of the prettiest games I've seen in my entire life, and this just looks like complete and total dogshit, like the models were just sloppily ported from source 1 to 2, and then hiding any imperfections with their new shading.
Sure, the shading is pretty, but it makes the aesthetics of the game wildly inconsistent, realistic guns, colorful shiny pseudo-cartoonish characters, oversaturated world, realistic blood, disgustingly ugly bloom coated fire, etc.
It just makes the whole thing look like a visual mess, and a sloppy attempt at converting the game to a clean visual ala Valorant.
Sorry Valve, as much as I love you, your art team is no match for Riot in terms of aesthetics mixed with readability, they're placing your teeth on the curb and jumping on your head from a second story window, and the viscera left from the aftermath is in the shape of a shiny Phoenix Terrorist Model.

All there is to know about Valve at this point is that you just should not interact with their live service games after like 3-5 years of release, that's around the time they just totally give up and stop giving a fuck and start screwing their customers.
And all there is to know about their upcoming products is that their upcoming game that is basically a total blur at this point, Neon Prime is rumored to be dropping the sci-fi aesthetic because some idiot at Valve got spooked by sci-fi games not doing so hot lately, mainly in context to Starfield, which is a game that sold well and only bombed due to being a shitty Bethesda game.

To all of the people fucking their customers day in day out on the live-service areas of Valve, Fuck you. Except Eric on what's left of the TF2 team, love you man.
To all the Valve devs slaving away at new single-player titles? Bless your heart, as your monetization pisses your customers respect for your company away, thank you for constantly reminding them what Valve was built for, making quality games that don't ask for anything more than the entry ticket price, Half-Life Alyx is one of the best games Valve ever made, and Counter-Strike 2 is going to live in the pits of hell next to Ricochet.

Played this game for about 2 hours and couldn't stand a second past the opening 30 minutes, this game is trying so hard to be a love letter to old Immersive Sims but it's just so fucking boring and frustrating to play, It feels like trying to remember a mother's garden by burning a scented candle that smells mildly of roses, it's cheap bullshit and I'd rather be doing the real thing.

To start off with the only other thing I can make note of, the visuals, the game looks pretty, it's a nice unique almost retro future space station in an alternate history world where Kennedy lived until like age 120 and technology (and in particular, the space race) was heavily developed.
Unfortunately the game makes sure to ditch it far too often in my 2 hours time played, too many areas that are just beat up shithole labs, or ugly vents, etc. etc. or just throwing you out into space, and at that point I feel like I'm just going through the motions in a generic setting.

Graphics are just not great, for a 2017 game the graphics are just oddly weak and look hazy and low quality, this is the quality of like a 2014 game, and it forces motion blur on you, any effort that gets put into the actual good looking areas is lost because it feels like I'm playing an upscaled Xbox 360 game.

Onto my biggest problem, the gameplay.
To start, we've got a BAD PC port on our hands, it runs fine, but it's all the nasty disgusting issues past that that really ruin this!
To start, we've got a lowered cross hair, wow, love those! and because of it all the weapon viewmodels look a bit awkward. no option to change it to a centered crosshair.

UI does not function properly on keyboard and mouse, you can't move tiles from storage unit to storage unit/inventory without just using WASD/arrow keys, and it's just such a crazy oversight, I thought Immersive sims lived and died on their PC versions? Why is this just an afterthought?

Weapons feel like shit, I had the wrench, the GLOO gun, the pistol, a few grenade types, and what I had hoped was a crossbow, but what was in reality a fucking nerf gun.

The wrench is fine, it feels a bit clunky as it's a first person melee with not a lot of weight, but what can you do, you need SOMETHING and it does the job, burns stamina a bit fast which gets annoying though.

Pistol just straight up fucking sucks, every enemy you're dealing with that's worth shooting at just soaks up every bullet so you're dumping like 2 clips per enemy, I was playing on normal difficulty, and it was getting frustrating as all hell, did the game expect me to drop everything I was doing and just start mass producing ammo boxes in the recycler? I made like 4 and I thought it'd do for now, but I was out within an hour.

Gloo gun is a neat idea, but using it in combat is so clunky and unfun that I tried not to use it, until the shitty psychoscope gave me little pokemon stat insights telling me that it's pretty much the best way to win combat scenarios, oh fucking joy, the least fun gun to shoot with is my ol' reliable.
Using it for putting out hazards is just dull, it just feels like a pointless chore just to remind you "LOOK AT HOW COOL THIS GUN IS!!"
Using it for platforming was neat though.

Crossbow is used for stealth, but for a note on the stealth in particular, you're given very little actual use for it early on, every area you go through is either too open and big to bother with taking it slow unless you want the best years of your life to rot away walking slowly from generic enemies, and the rest are narrow hallways/staircases where it's impossible to avoid detection, Thankfully you now have a nerf gun that'll distract them for 2 seconds, yay!

Grenades feel awkward and shitty to throw, should have added a landing location indicator.

Enemy types are just dull, in the first 2 hours they introduce the Mimics and the Phantoms.

The mimics are a neat idea, these little headcrabs that turn into props to get the jump at you, except...
They just don't do this, they run around directly Infront of you, giving a healthbar pop-up so you know it's there, and disguise right Infront of you, basically inviting you to get the free first hit on them, all the while the game does an annoying fucking jumpscare sound every time one poofs out of being a shitty prop, wow, so fucking scary, the mug turned into a headcrab, wow.

Phantoms are just annoying, they're tanky, they deal a shit ton of damage basically whenever they feel like it and dash RIGHT IN YOUR FACE constantly, wow, so fun! I was probably supposed to just douse them in the GLOO gun, but it was getting really boring so by the time I figured that, I was clocked out and didn't want to play the game anymore.

With all those heavy hitters, I quickly found that managing health was a total chore, you might as well spec into the medkit bonus very VERY early on as if you fight enemies at all you'll burn through them constantly, mostly just because a phantom tags you for 40 damage because you existed for a bit too long, or you walk into an electrical box hazard for .2 seconds dealing 70 health, I was at best an hour into the game when this started happening, glad I'm just thrown to the wolves even while the game is putting me through the most boring tutorial sequence imaginable.

Speaking of that, the tutorial sequence that I was going through fucking sucks, they're just throwing things at you and expecting to figure it all out, just dropping you like 15 upgrades, all your weapons and I don't even think they explain the recycler until you're at a point where you've probably used it like 3 times.
The story pacing in the sequence sucked too, you're given a hook to keep the mystery going, only for your biggest questions to be answered within the next 40 minutes, and they don't follow them up with any more, just follow through on more boring quests through boring areas with boring enemies.
Quest design was pretty annoying too, just a lot of moments where you're dragged on because they tell you to go to area A, but you can't go to area A without watching a video in area C, but you can't go to area C without the keycard from area F, and so on and so on.

And then there's the part where I stopped, when you get the psychoscope, it throws this piece of shit on you, the pop-up that I can only hope told me how to take it off disappeared within 1s and now I was stuck in a fight not knowing how to get 60% of my screen's visibility back, then I died setting me back a 25s load screen and the last 5 minutes of progress, through a room where I have to fight 2 phantoms, with a pistol and some explosive tanks, great, just fucking fantastic.

Outside of that, the propulsion controls for flying through space worked well enough I guess, I would have preferred something more like old school/HL2 esque swimming controls instead, but it's smooth enough.

Anyways, I can't see myself returning to this game anytime soon, as all I'm seeing here is a mediocre game made by a studio who makes as many bad games as they do good, with the only tagline I can imagine they're putting in the trailers being "By the people who played System Shock"

Second time I've been burned on a Arkane game, first Deathloop now this.

I gotta say, going into this game I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did, usually Rockstar's games are just... alright for me, they're weighty and/or awkward to control, laggy, and just focus on things being far too cinematic to enjoy the game-y aspects of it, and end up making the experience a little dull by overdoing the large open worlds.

But Bully feels like it's not even made by Rockstar, it's a very VERY arcade-y game, the area is very small and it focuses on just being charming before cinematic.
However I don't recommend playing the PC port, or the Scholarship Edition in general, the PC port is crap and you'll need a patch to make it function without crashing and to enable 60fps, the MKB controls are terrible especially without rebinding, and the restored cut content is pretty mediocre and just pads out the game to a level that just starts to get a bit dull, and there's a few new bugs like certain voice lines being incredibly loud for no reason, and a few lines are swapped out for lifeless, bitcrushed placeholder ones.

Gameplay is pretty decent, it's nothing difficult and the fighting only involves different combos of the same button, and a grab attack on another button (as well as some other weapons but they're a bit clunky, so they don't get used much outside of dedicated missions) but past the simplicity of it, it's just simply kind of fun, it's fun to just start pounding on some dude, comboing him to the ground and then grabbing onto him while he's on the ground and punching his teeth in.

The different factions don't really offer a whole lot in the gameplay past some slight changes, the biggest of them being the upper and lower ends of the spectrum end up being a stark contrast to anything in the middle, the Nerds are total pushovers and get destroyed in an instant and the Dropouts are far tankier than any other enemy and have way more threatening attacks.

The missions with unique gameplay quirks, like turret sections where you defend a target or an area etc. are pretty boring and get repetitive pretty fast, but there's enough variety to at least be fun enough, stealth missions are a bit dull but there's not many of them.

The police/precincts being able to grab you and instantly arrest you if you're at maximum wanted level is a bit annoying, but soon enough you learn that outside of a rare spawn that has a melee weapon equipped, most enemies are easy enough to outrun, and it makes it a bit fun trying to beat up the otherwise forbidden types of NPCs, like the children, girls and adults, and seeing how much you can get away with before you have to leg it out of there, In general I found the combat loop fun enough that I spent a lot of my time in-between missions just beating up random NPCs for fun.

The minigames for the classes are a bit dull and I didn't bother to engage with most of them after the first go through, but you actually aren't required to do any of them, and can just skip class the entire game, which I think is a perfect execution, all you miss out on is some unlockables for failing/skipping them, and the faction challenge minigames were also skippable as well, which is good considering I wasn't a fan of any of the ones I played.

Standard mission design is fun enough, usually just journeying through areas beating the snot out of other kids and then getting paid, pretty short, pretty simple, but it passes.

Onto the story, it's a pretty simple tale of a fish out of water kid coming to a new school and trying to unite the cliques, saves the day, gets respected by everyone and gets the girl, nothing crazy but the tone of the game is of those old campy high-school movies, so it fits.

Characters are pretty nice, Gary (at least when he's IN the game, he pretty much vanishes until the final level after like chapter 1) is a funny guy, even though he's a total asshole sociopath, and Jimmy is similarly enjoyable as a tough-guy wise-ass always picking a fight with someone, Petey however... kind of doesn't exist, he's just kind of the meek pushover and nothing changes for him other than Jimmy helping him out at the end of the game.

Faction leaders are all alright but they're pretty much just cardboard cutout stereotypes of what you'd expect their faction to be, the Nerd leader is a gizmo-creating pervert, the Preppy leader is a snobby rich kid who uses his friends as assets, the Jock leader is a football team lead, etc. etc. It's serviceable, but a bit dull and had room for a bit more wiggle room considering how many empty missions there are.

Pacing is a bit all over the place though, Chapter 1 is the best paced as it's just introducing you to everything somewhat slowly, focusing on the trio of Gary, Jimmy and Petey (honestly the whole game would have been way better if it focused on their dynamic rather than slinging you into just cleaning up factions for the rest of the game until the final level) and the hijinks they get up to, it's really the highlight of the game as that's when it really feels like a playable high-school B-movie, they get up to antics like pranking kids on Halloween dressed up in character appropriate costumes, but before you know it suddenly Gary betrays you (probably would have been better as the ending twist, and would rhyme with other Rockstar games) and suddenly you're just cleaning out factions, then next thing you know it's Christmas, then it's more factions, and again and again and again, one thing just HAPPENS, sometimes things are out of order, you'll do a mission for the Greasers and then do 5 missions in a row undermining them, and it just feels all over the place, then you've got the last chapter where you're catapulted into a new area with a new faction who are the BIG force fucking with everyone else, dethroning you within the span of like 30 minutes, you go there, meet a girl and literally within 30 seconds of meeting her you're planning how to get revenge on a teacher who wronged her, and within 5 minutes of total screentime together she's a love interest, and in the next scene they're kissing, it feels like there was a whole chapter missing from the game at that point, but on the other hand it does play into the B-movie vibes a bit, so maybe the weirdly suddenly development and lack of it for other characters is inspired by that, IDK.

The graphics for the game are a bit dated though, they're the same style of psuedo-realism seen in games like the GTA Trilogy, but they make it age not so bad by having everything have a nice sense of identifiable color to it and making character designs more like caricatures than real people, though it's not perfect, you'll still see some weird looking faces and animations for them.
The music however, is GREAT, Shawn Lee, the tracks really feel like they're straight out of a classic movie, the bass in most of the tracks, the post-punk style that a lot of the fight themes have, the super 80's chase themes, and the general walking around theme, it's all great, the variety really sells the experience and the variety for each faction's fight theme is great, it's easily the biggest factor for keeping the tone intact with the game, I can only hope that he gets his talents recognized in another game at some point.

Bully is a great game, and any fan of any GTA-esque open world game should have already played this game by now, it's a gem made by a company known for some pretty same-y yet industry leading shlock, give it a try if you haven't already.

Control is a very wonderful, very well written game, any fan of Alan Wake would probably love this game's writing and all the setpieces and scenes Remedy sets up brilliantly.

I don't think most people should play it.
EDIT: I've thought on it for a few weeks, I recommend playing this game solely because it's an amazing experience writing wise by Remedy, it plays boring as shit, but it's so worth it for the acting, the narrative, the writing, all of that, they're just so good at everything they do EXCEPT gameplay.

Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful thing to experience with all the beautifully done modelling for the brutalist bureaucratic office spaces of Control, as well as all the FMVs, set dressings and incredible graphical fidelity for performance that has become standard with Remedy's titles, but just, watch someone else play this game.

I'll start with the pros and cons of everything other than the gameplay, and get to the slew of gameplay complaints near the end.

To start, the game is beautiful as mentioned above, but the PC port is not going so great, I had a consistent input lag problem that was only slightly reduced by turning vsync off, and it made aiming difficult, also any time I died I was getting a loading screen of at least a whole minute.
Some minor NPC faces just look, weird, but for optimization and budget sake, I get it.
The facial animations on the other hand, typically are really bad, they look stiff and weird and just look very uncanny, I don't know why the cutscenes focus on the faces so much knowing this.

The tech to make all the debris is great, it looks amazing seeing all the stuff fly everywhere in combat and it makes it super cinematic, and the fog when killing enemies is amazingly cool.

As good as the writing is the dialogue isn't the best, conversations between characters always feel very stiff and awkward, and Jesse's inner monologues are just weird and usually unhelpful comments like pointing out that something is odd
Pacing is just kind of all over the place, things just kind of suddenly happen after a long duration of nothing during the gameplay segments, but I guess this is because I didn't stop to do side-quests.

The audio logs/hotlines were filled with some of the far more interesting stuff in the game, but I ended up not listening to a lot of them around halfway through because they didn't have transcripts and waiting for Trench to slowly say something vague over the span of a minute and a half for the fifteenth time started to get draining, but the Dr. Darling stuff is great, amazing job with the FMVs as usual for Remedy.

But onto the gameplay, opening with the pros, the weapon options are really fun to mess around with (Shatter and Pierce were my favorites by far) and really let the gameplay flow in different ways, same with the powers (though I did probably miss a ton, I didn't go for side quests)
Puzzles in the hotel in particular are really interesting and fun, but really short and only like 3 exist
Ashtray maze is a really fun segment, though sadly very short.
Entire ending sequence is great, the highlight of the game by far and if not for it I would have been coming out of the game quite sour, but they're less gameplay and more setpieces.

The gameplay loop is REALLY bad, the shooting is imprecise with a misleading small crosshair and the third person camera angle can make you accidentally shoot a wall which can get very frustrating fast, the reloading feels far too slow and....

The game feels like it was designed by the people who made Destiny, the enemies are bullet sponges, there's like 2-3 particular enemy types that are drastically more threatening than all the rest out of what seems like an oversight (FUCK the rocket enemies, getting hit 2 times is near guaranteed death from them) mixed with some just plain boring annoying ones (suicide enemies, yay!)
Drawn out encounters that make exploring the areas and seeing all the sights and taking note of the scale in the beautifully crafted world just too much to focus on, as you deal with the fourth set of bullet sponge enemies in the wave that'll come back if you ever come back to that room again anyways and to top it all off, useless weapon mods that give you shitty modifiers like +4.3% dmg to armored enemies only on Thursdays, and MATERIAL GRINDS TO UNLOCK ITEMS.

Prop throwing power feels really bad, should have been designed more in line with Half-life 2, where it just SNAPS right directly infront of you and doesn't try and smoothly fly over to you as that will get it caught onto things easily, and the damage is universal with whatever you throw so anything you throw lacks weight or impact as it just feels like a damage ball and not an actual object.

There's a bunch of really boring "puzzles" that feel like they're lifted straight from Half-Life 2 where you pick up a battery, and put it in the battery slot, it's super boring, Physics manipulation was cool when it was new in 2004, now it feels like I'm putting the square in the square hole, move on with game design, please.

Navigating through some areas particularly in the early-game when you haven't unlocked a lot of the convenient fast-travels feels awful as the areas are confusingly laid out and the map does more harm than it helps outside of the most basic A -> B areas, AKA only the first area.

The Dark Souls Bonfire esque checkpoints, while a neat idea, in practice just mean that if you die suddenly you have to go through the death loading screen, and then walk all the way back, and part of the combat encounter you just did has been restarted, I spent a LOT of time walking back from where I died, almost as much time as I spent recovering from the loading durations.

Weapons would be more fun to play with if you could hold more than 2 at a time, I guess this was a limitation for console controls though.

Levitate controls are just bad, you can easily accidentally tap the button again to drop, and now you can't gain any more height, and you've probably sank far enough that you can't reach another platform, you die and have to walk all the way back (happened TWICE on one of the final segments)

Enemy spawn behavior can be just bad sometimes, on one of the final segments, where you have to take out radio towers, the very last one spawns a bunch of enemies that will destroy you if you don't get into cover to block their attacks, and there's too many of them to just dodge them.

They spawn these in an area with no cover, and don't spawn until you walk into it, and after you kill them, they spawn 2 more, Irritating as hell, killed me 3 times, 1 minute loading screen per death, another minute to walk back, and one more minute to climb back up.

Over-all it feels like the game would have played way better if it was first person, it would have made things a little less cinematic, but it could be worked around with having third person for the non combat segments.

The gravity gun power would work better as it could be designed more in line like the gravity gun and not having a different angle than your character would make your throws less awkward and imprecise, the gunplay would be able to be designed to be more reliable, and it would make the environments a lot cooler, giving you a better sense of scale and able to really kind of get immersed in the office environment, feel like you're part of the action.
That, and the third person movement feels oddly weighted, it just feels awkward to move until you get the dash power which just goes instantly.

I can't say I had a terrible time with Control though, but I'm still holding out that one of these days Remedy will have a game design team even half as good as their writing and narrative teams some day, I know you have it in you Remedy, Max Payne did it, I know you can too.

This game perfectly encapsulates what it feels like to fall down a rabbit hole in internet mysteries, in sudden tragedy from a face you'll never see the eyes close forever, let alone see ever, their only appearance to you being a small avatar and a name that represents them in a sea of other similar people.

The innocence of that pre-social media world, the more sincere nerdiness, the closed mindedness of the older generations and their fear of the devil in any product their children consume, the juvenile arguments two kids in their teens get into as well as the fake girlfriends they make, the kids who join the platform even if they're underage and stand out from everyone else, the corny mascots for the teenagers that all the teenagers make fun of, the cardinal sin of pissing off a nerdy community and then they pull the rug out from under you (Long live the freelands!)

Each character feels like a human being, though the story writes the personalities to be a little more indulgent in the problems rather than cowardly or just suddenly disappearing like how it would work in reality.

[SPOILER WARNING]
Dylan is such a well written character, he's just this enthusiastic programmer who gets wrapped up in the speeding away success of MerchantSoft and ends up getting too big for his boots, becoming an egotistical prick, and a hypocrite, to a point where he even punishes you for striking the content that you were told to take down, due to a copyright claim from a music artist, who ignores a poor girl upset that she's getting harassed, who acts snobby and rude to everyone including his coworkers like Samantha, and causes the Mindcrash, killing at least 4 people and putting Tim in jail for 6 years, as well as injuring thousands of others, all because he was overenthusiastic about putting his game Outlaw into the new version of Hypnospace, and has to live with that for 20 years, only coming clean once he's finally been discovered, he had truly become rotten at that point but he at least was finally ready to repent and take responsibility for his crime, with a eulogy that feels half as a tearjerker letter to those poor innocent souls taken away, and half as a nostalgic goodbye to that old internet from Jay Tholen himself, but, hey, wait a minute maybe Dylan's honesty isn't what it seems.
Maybe Dylan is just building himself another safety net, only waiting till the eleventh hour to finally come clean about his crimes, clearly only having a face value idea of those people who's blood is on his hands, he asks you to send things related to MerchantSoft to him in hopes he can get it deleted letting him get away freely, he probably joins the archival project so he can cover up his tracks when news came out that Hypnospace was being explored by archivists, he centers his eulogy around himself and his fucking stupid game that was the cause of all these problems in the first place, and his perceptions into the people he killed are shallow face value tearjerkers, meant to get him into court on a favorable confession rather than being nailed down with the evidence and the story that he ruined a teenagers life by throwing the blame on him, this weaselly worm that represents the worst out of the tech bubble, the Mark Zuckerbergs, The Elon Musks, or what could become that any condescending nerd if you give them the power of god for a moment.

Tim is just tragic, he's just a kid wanting to impress a girl he likes by doing cool hack-y stuff, and ends up getting wrapped up in the mindcrash all because he made a scare to win his love interest back, and ends up going to prison for it, and getting blamed for something he had no responsibility for, getting sent to prison for 6 years over it, all the while M1NX and R3ckoning in particular, were trying to reveal the truth, but they were just too late, Thankfully Tim moved past it (but probably spent years dealing with the guilt, and the remorse over Tiffany) getting a job in Computer Science, and having a loving wife and daughter.

Adrian is a huge hidden big bad, he's a soulless corporate tool, who hired his brother (who are separated by TWENTY YEARS, they hardly know eachother. he's using Dylan's ego as a springboard to get programming work out of him) and barely is seen until LeakyPipes, where you see he's a total bumbling idiot and doesn't know the first thing about tech, and doesn't know the damage he's done by letting a puny, worm of a man play god, and just goes totally hands off, not hiring enough extra staff to do proper work on Hypnospace and letting Dylan move programmers that question his authority off of the programming and onto things like HSPD Dispatch, culling geek forums and putting them on backburner servers because he wanted the product to sell better to general audiences and thoughtlessly allowing malware onto his platform, even punishing you if you try to take it down, due to it being a sponsor.

It's a beautiful story, really, offering a storybook version of these modern/late 2000s social media controversies, mixed with the condescending web admin who shuts down the entire forum because people made fun of him of the 90s, through the lens of Geocities and email chains, wrapped in a bow of hazy dreamlike 90s nostalgia.

Truly one of the best games of all time.

I really really hate having to hate this game so much, it's so close to being great, a visual and mechanical overhaul for a great PvE game, but the game is just so BAD, particularly after all the updates they gave to it.

Fundamental design is just spectacular, You've got survival horror item management by not wanting to spend too much ammo if you don't have the cash to back it up, you've got armor you don't want to waste, you've got limited weight to carry and speed that changes depending on what weapon you have out, etc. and you've got the visceral gunplay to back it all up.

But where the original game ran to the finish line, Killing Floor 2 gets locked in place by an EDAR trapper and then gets killed by a Rioter.

To start off with the "bad" we'll go with the vanilla game, it wasn't that much of a downgrade compared to the original but there were a few problems like the spawns.
In the original Killing Floor, enemies would always spawn at their spawn points and walk out of there, it gave maps a bit of predictability and allowed for more variety on where you decide to hold out, but in Killing Floor 2, the spawns are just for out of sight areas.
This ends up causing major issues, now your holdout areas are extremely limited, going from holding in a tight area until a large zed spawns to just holding out in the largest outdoor sightline possible because otherwise you're going to get sandwiched the moment you hear a Scrake spawn in, and in solo it means you have to constantly keep your head on a swivel as otherwise for all you know a group of 8 zeds just came up behind you.

Another issue is that class balance is just not great, they play equally enough on most difficulties, but when you get to Hell on Earth, why would you be running Commando, Sharpshooter or Firebug?
Biggest issue by far is that Field Medic is incredibly OP, and not at all fun to play.
Typically I'm the one filling that role on my team, and if your team gets even slightly overrun it's super easy to just swap between your two weapons with healing darts and just spam people to full, if not just throw down 2-3 grenades and clear out all the weak enemies while healing all your teammates, and every heal grants both you and them a buff if you have those traits selected (and why wouldn't you)
It ends up making medic just boring to play, you're just babysitting your team most of the time, if you ask me, for KF3 they need to rework medic or even remove it, maybe giving the default pistol a healing ability or making Medic's healing come from dealing damage rather than just only focusing on your team.

For issues that plague the game NOW though?
For starters, they moved into a paid weapon DLC model after they said they wouldn't, priced them awfully and then released a season pass containing all the weapons after nobody was buying them, and then they released a SECOND season pass because nobody was buying that either.
Hell, nobody was buying the character packs or cosmetic bundles either, so they threw those in a few pack DLCs and sell them for like 50$ total now.

Most of the new enemies introduced post-launch were pretty abysmal, to the point of ruining the game's flow, and refusing to revert them after widespread dislike from the community.
To start we have: Alpha Crawlers, they're Crawlers that explode into gas when they die, Get punished for killing a fast enemy, Fun!
Rioters: Clots that have quite heavy armor around their head and torso, forcing you to shoot at their KNEES to take them down, and they have an ability that just buffs the damage of all nearby zeds and makes them sprint more often, so you've not only got this enemy that's annoying to kill, but they're also a priority target, great.
EDARS: The biggest, WORST offender, a bunch of robot enemies that have annoying abilities, and ONLY take damage from a weak point in a specific spot on their chest, they barely take any damage to the head and don't die if they lose their head, You've got 2 ranged ones that spam you with damage and are also nimble, unlike the far more competently designed Husk, who shoots large blasts but glows bright orange and is very immobile, and then you've got the worst EDAR of them all, the Trapper, it runs up to someone and immobilizes them for 2.5s or until they're killed, when the update first launched this thing was a nuisance but now it's just another annoying priority target to deal with, and to top it all off killing them just has this weak sounding EMP, which is INCREDIBLY unsatisfying.

Then you've got the bosses they added, you've got the one good one, Hans Volter, who has a threatening ranged poke attack, a gas bomb attack that punishes grouping without a plan, and has a very counterable phase change by shooting down his shield, alongside the regular bunch of running and punching people.

But past that you've got a lot of flukes, there's The Patriarch, the least offensive of all of the bosses, who just has a lot more going on in his kit, his minigun forces you to get out of the way immediately, his rocket forces you to get out of the way immediately, except this time you will take a shit-ton of damage if you're not careful, and when the phase changes he goes invisible and runs away to heal, very hard to counter it compared to Hans.
Then you've got King Fleshpound.
This is just a boss sized Fleshpound that spawns Quarter-pounds, Wow.

There's the Abomination
...Who is just an incredibly tanky Bloat that you have to shoot through numerous pieces of armor to start dealing actual damage to, great.

Then there's the Matriarch, the first actual boss since the Patriarch, who has been in the game files since the early access came out.
...And her extra spawns are FUCKING EDARS, the one thing that is the MOST irritating to deal with during boss fights, and then her boss fight is just boring, just a bunch of standard "does damage" attacks with the most interesting thing being that you can break off her arm cannon, but that just causes her to use an attack that pulls you in, and can follow it up with a near fatal melee attack, and one other attack that chains lightning to nearby players, fantastic.

Other than that there's just generally bad system designs, they added upgrades which just ruined the very carefully balanced economy system and sharing your money with teammates, to just selfishly dumping it all into making sure ALL of your weapons have the highest damage possible, Survivalist was a class they added that can use any classes guns, but specializes in nothing (in a game where the major benefits of a class are the specializations they have at the end of a tree, great!)
and the progression systems are super grindy, especially the perks, boxing you into just having one main perk if you don't enjoy grinding for hours and hours on boring difficulties with no traits unlocked.

At best I can say this game is a good springboard to get people into the original game, and maybe KF3 will be better.

In all honesty, I expect KF3 to be a low FPS DLSS reliant UE5 game that nosedives in population within a few months.

To start things on strong, the art design and music for this game is great! Some real talent went into bringing this game and it's world to life! Unfortunately though, everything else this game has to offer is a complete and total shitshow.

To start things off, it's your general sonic affair, Eggman + Bad guy of the week, and this time it's the "Deadly Six" who came in second place for "corniest team name" right behind "The Super Friends"
All of the new antagonists are boring cliches that don't get expanded upon at all, they could all pass for mini-boss enemies in most other platformer games and have no unique sense of style.
The world that the game takes place in, Lost Hex, is a crumby setup to justify the weird level design and it has no sense of direction in the environment.
The environments in the games 7 zones are pretty much just exactly what you'd see in a Mario game, except they repeat the "grassy area with trees sometimes" style like, 3 times, so you've got your typical expected Ice World with awful controls, the Volcano world, etc.
But for some reason this wasn't enough for them, so for the FOUR STAGES each zone gets, half of them will just be completely and totally random, suddenly you're in Dessert World, or Casino World, etc. it's just complete and total inconsistency and it's just confusing, it at the very least looks nice (again, props to the art team.)

Now, for the gameplay, it's just really really clunky, to start you just are really... really slow and even slow down when turning, and a lot of the platforming segments have a lot of waiting or have plenty of easy falls that either instakill you or make you waste 50 seconds doing the short scenes bringing you to the next area, and it's just the opposite of what you'd expect in a sonic game.

The level design and by proxy camera seem to be taking inspiration from Mario Galaxy, where you're looping around these small spheres, but it's just weird and disorientating to keep up with when you're running around at a decently quick pace, at worst sometimes I was genuinely feeling nausea from the camera bobbing up and down weirdly with each jump in certain areas.

The Wisps from Sonic Colors are here for some reason, I don't know why, there's like maybe 2 spots in the entire game where they're neccesary, and most of them are a total piece of shit to control, Rhythm in particular had a bad habit of just going the opposite direction for no reason, or just plummeting to the ground on a whim. (and all the wisps grind you to a halt after every use letting you know the power-up ended, which.... I already knew) No further comment on them, waste of an addition.

Level difficulty is a total clusterfuck, some levels will be long, some will be done in <2 minutes, some have plenty of pits to fall into and some are just linear railroads where you jump sometimes, up until you get to the last world where it goes from confusing and inconsistent to different flavors of fuck you constantly, usually due to design oversights (got killed by a floor I had no way of knowing would fall like, 3 times in a few levels)

The extra additions to your move set are kind of shit, the wall-run is only ever useful in very rare circumstances and typically will cause plenty of problems trying to jump up on walls you're hugging, instead sticking to the wall and going nowhere, the mantle onto ledges has been a hinderance for trying to drop down more than it's helped me get a jump I just barely missed, the kick is just a situational second homing attack for like 2 enemies (1 out of the 2 being a boss) and having the slam be a bounce is just confusing, did this game even get playtested at all?

The exotic levels with their own unique mechanics were never not a drag, the Ice Skating just is breakneck speeds on levels that have too precise of platforming, where if you get too much momentum you're likely to just sail off of your intended landing target if you go too fast, and you can't double jump.
The snowball level was just boring, it was a gimmick that was fun for about 3 minutes then it was just the ice levels again, but slow.
And the rail grind levels? Awful, every last one, I fell a hundred times because I would overshoot a jump due to my momentum, I died a dozen times to the bomb carts being instakills instead of just losing your rings, and I died about 5 times to the second rail level because there was a part where you're being bombed by birds, have to stand on the right color rail to not go towards the door too fast or too slow, and have to make sure you're not on a track with a bomb on it, and the visual overload made it impossible to see where I'm going.

For the final note on the game, something that I went out of my way not to mention until now... The homing attack.
The worst mechanic in all of the 3D sonic games, rewarding you for just being in the general direction of a boss and double tapping A, and they managed to fuck it up here.

The Homing Attack now has this little attribute where if you wait, it ramps up in damage, which would be neat if not for the fact that half the time it doesn't lock onto the boss for no reason, or only locks on for 0.5 seconds, and regardless it ends up making a lot of boss fights easily cheese'd, by just forcing 2 fully charged hits you can clear some bosses in 30 seconds, even very very late in the game.
It's also the core utility used for jumping onto bumpers to get moving, and it again, had a bad habit of going to the wrong thing, a lot of hits taken because of it, just generally unpleasant to deal with, and I'd sooner the homing attack just get removed from the game for being awful.

Not worth a play for anyone other than the most die-hard sonic fan, and even then, this game is just awful, one of the worst Sonic Team has made.

Went back and did this as a replay with a friend, and WOW this game did not age well, it's just clunky from top to bottom, okay at best movement, weird shooting, badly designed bullet-sponge enemies, bugs, crashes, and awful pacing.

When you start the game it's a decent set-piece mission or two, but then they throw you straight into one of the first strongholds, and from then you're spending an extended period of time just doing the incredibly boring activity missions that last like 5 minutes for a long stretch, and then jump straight back into rushing through the rest of the game at breakneck speeds, I don't know why these aren't placed in-between the actual levels.

The characters are like, really really shallow, even the ones that are trying to be a little more subversive are cardboard cutouts with no personality to speak of, with their only claim to fame being a few quotes or whatever.

And the game has this weird sleazy feel, every scene with a female character in it feels sexually exploitative, even the characters that are supposed to be strong female leads are commonly just treated poorly.

The gameplay feels just incredibly clunky, the mentioned above bullet sponges, weird movement and shooting, but there's also problems like the driving feeling VERY slippery and the impact mechanics making no sense, you'll drive one car and it'll plow through everything and you'll drive another, larger one and it'll get completely stopped by a car parked on the side of the road, it just feels weird, and that's not mentioning how many times I'd drive a motorcycle into a lifted up bridge and instead of soaring off the stunt jump as intended, I just crash into it as if it's a wall.

The guns feel pretty awful to use, feeling either weak or inaccurate, with the 2 weapons I stick most to being the fully upgraded scoped AR and dual pistols because everything else just is too inaccurate or weak, and then past that there's the exotic silly weapons which just... don't land past a few uses, the RC Possessor was fun though.

There's also a lack of missions that are just fun, about 2 or 3 of the missions have anything unique and interesting and the rest are just go to place, kill guys, stand still to do objective, mission ends as you're still in the building, no cutscene, nothing.

There were plenty of bugs with the game too, PC version has a weird unwelcome aim assist that you can't turn off at all, camera angles get weird constantly, you'll have enemies spawning in front of you regularly, and vehicles despawning even more frequently, there was a bug that happened a few times where the FPS cap of 21 during a cutscene didn't go away after the cutscene ended which required a full restart, and there were a good few crashes in the middle of a long, annoying mission.

I kind of don't recommend going through this one again, hopefully my replay of SR4 ends up better, as I remember that game having a lot more going on and having massively improved writing.

Neat little game, but it's honestly... really confusing on what's going on or even where to go, and I think to an extent that's the point, it's a surreal dream-like game, but after dwelling on it for a while, it starts to hit me that this is just a classic Final Fantasy game formula (reminding me of 4 in particular) You're going around, collecting party members, travelling to other worlds, grinding mobs without a care in the world, go in a ship and airship for some reason, and then suddenly next thing you know, oh, I'm on the moon.

If I could nail down any feeling I get for this game, it's just a classic Final Fantasy game experienced through the eyes of a child who doesn't understand much about what's going on, and delivering that through this, surreal grunge-y aesthetic that feels impenetrable, just that classic RPG gameplay where there's probably a story, but you clearly aren't going to comprehend it before the curtain call, I'm probably totally off base with this takeaway, but it's a fun one nonetheless so I'm sticking with it.

Anyways, past that, the art-style is just really nice, reminds me of old claymations and the like, but the way everything just looks in-game is just beautifully (and I'm trying not to use this word too much to describe this game, but) surreal, the combat animations have these funny filtered FMV clips, like a floating hot-dog or a real hand doing a quick gesture to signify the move comes out, as a weird bunch of shapes and swirls or meat appears to show the particles of the ability, it's really cool looking.

Music is great too, with a lot of tracks feeling like the guitar leading it is just some possessed strumming by someone clearly not mentally present, and some tracks adding a bit of a twang to it to feel just, uncanny, and it really fits the whole mood the game has going for it.

However, as with most experimental RPG maker games, the gameplay is just kind of... there, and it doesn't help that the surreal nature of the game makes it a chore to navigate around, if you want to get around the game without getting confused and stuck for long periods of time, you'll probably be needing a walkthrough, though I found this to be quite fitting for a game pulling a lot of ideas from the old Final Fantasy games, but nonetheless it is a detriment to the experience.
Combat is also pretty dead simple, you get a good few items and the combat is trivialized until you get to the RPG trope of "That one enemy that spams status effects/can't be hit by normal attacks" then it's just a snag for a moment until you get back to mowing things down mindlessly between boss-fights, but even then by that point even the bosses are really easy to deal with, and in the final stretch of the game you're given the money to spam party-wide healing items and dynamite for the rest of the game, so, it ends up just feeling pretty weird and unsatisfying.

Regardless, the game is worth a play, just not a perfect experience, I've heard great things about the sequel though, so maybe it's worth it just for that.