Only played the trial on EA Play (basically the whole game but limited to 10 hours), but give me a fucking break lol

Good for when you have 10 minutes to kill and want to do something stupid. Not really good for anything else though.

Looks shamelessly bad for a game that runs this horrendously, but besides those glaringly obvious technical deficiences I still vibe with this series immensely. Virtually all of the new weapons are hits, and the added option for duel-wielding any two combination of guns means that battles can be staged at an even more ludicrous scale than before. It's not even near the same level of design mastery as DOOM: ETERNAL, but the singular nature of Sam as a franchise still ensures that there really is no other shooter series available that allows you to, for example, annihilate 200 enemies at once with a damn portable blackhole, or grind footsoldiers to a pulp while riding through a grotesquely picturesque French countryside on a combine. It's the little things here in life, ey?

I think my problems with this game arises primarily from its hyperlinearity; levels are designed in segments, meaning you have to clear the objects of one segment before being catapulted into the next. Seeing how the game's design is so clearly derived from KATAMARI DAMACY, I can't help but wonder why Esposito chose this approach to level design in favor of DAMACY's more free-form one. Here, the levels play themselves – chances are that if you just swirl around with the hole in a purely haphazard manner you'll still clear the course in five minutes or less. It's a puzzle game that requires little input, and even less thought, to beat. A sort of anti-puzzle verging on anti-game. Flabbergasted at how such a tap-in idea can result in such a nothing experience.

Beautiful, sparse, petrifying. LIMBO's big brother in every way. Absolutely masterful. Want to write more on this eventually, but I'll settle on this for now.

Kicking off the new year by clicking abandoned on this bonafide disaster. Fuck, man, just give me back the original MW2.

No, you're not terrible at defending, the game is just really that embarrassing.

So happy to finally have my Switch repaired (after months of mulling over the expenses among other things), because it finally gave me a chance to play this (no, I don't have a PC). It's fantastic. Existential comedy and clever design rolled into one. If more games were shorter than three hours, the world would be a better place.

Fittingly addictive (i.e. capitalism as an illogical numbers-chasing game). Gets messier than I would've preferred in the back-half (which mostly just comes down to its brilliantly stripped-down, spreadsheet-esque UX becoming overburdened with stuff to keep track of), but still, it's an impressive achievement to take one of the dullest genres under the sun and making it into a game about something. Probably as good as a game like this could ever be.

Played enough of this now to realize that this is not for me. There's a place for games made for mastering, but I very much don't enjoy a game that offer nothing but that. A short game made long through inordinate difficulty is just not my jam. Might return once I git gud™, we'll see.

Sidenote: as someone who's far too young to ever play Arcade games or NES-titles until literally now, and as someone who has a severely limited grasp on the history of game development at the time, I don't know just how uniform the high difficulties are between different games, nor exactly why. If someone more educated would happen to see this and would like to give an explanation, be so kind.

Holy shit, they really took "bad ending" literally huh?

Finally conquered the final level of the campaign, and so with that in mind I feel comfortable logging this as "finished", even if I probably want to keep coming back to it, not to chase high-scores, but just to indulge in its therapeutic meditations on togetherness. Lovely game.

The type of work that elevates the rest of the medium, daring them to keep up, raising the bar as a result. Despite the sheer bleakness of a game that literally begins with your character re-emerging into the world — reborn from the void — from an apocalyptic bender, it paints every citizen of Revachol with empathy. It's hilarious and beautiful, a rendition of a world in a state of utter despondency where the real detective work is piecemeal-ing together a semblance of fully-formed hope of a brighter tomorrow. That hope begins and ends with its inhabitants, by the very flesh-and-blood toilers who have to pick up the pieces of foregoing generations and keep on carrying on. If ruin and decay swathes us in a thick fog in the game's beginning, then the people we run across and occasionally help throughout the runtime positively reaffirms the values of living, of choosing to wake up from the void. Oblivion will have to wait.

(P.s. petition to make "disco" into the new "based" please)


The last two worlds bring this game down significantly. Managed to get through them only once I committed to creating save points during levels as well, as there were so many scenarios stacked on top of each other (poor hitboxes, whatever's going on whenever you try to jump while on staircases, superfluous maze-puzzles etc.), that I found myself getting more and more frustrated. It didn't feel like I was getting better, only that I was beating my head against trial-and-error annoyances. Granted, this could also be just me who suck ass at 2D Mario, and that more experienced players gets through this blindfolded, but it did feel less than fair towards the end there. Still, when you move through each obstacle and find that flow, it's a different breed of satisfying. Looking forward to see how the 2D-sequels will fare in comparison.