Really, this is between 4 and 4.5 stars for me. Pretend it's 4.2. Ratings are arbitrary, who cares?
You can basically copy over the stuff I said about gameplay, atmosphere, and structure from my review of Metro 2033 Redux. I could Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, but that would be a waste of bandwidth.
But the STORY, dear God, the STORY makes 2033 feel like mere groundwork for this. The first game, if you recall, was a simple "deliver X to Y, and Z, A, B, C, etc. happens inbetween" structure. At the end of that game though, the Dark Ones are annihilated. Except they aren't. There's a Dark One that's only a kid that the weird mystic I didn't mention in the Metro 2033 review due to lack of space wants you to make contact with. Meanwhile, D6, the wacky secret Soviet bunker (they must make them by the dozen!) is preparing for a possible Hoover Dam from Fallout New Vegas type scenario. But ALSO, a traitorous ex-Ranger is delivering a mysterious container to the Communists. There's also a hinted love interest for Artyom thrown in for good measure. He deserves it, I'd say.
The interlocking nature of all these narratives, and the overarching mystery, makes for better setpieces than the first game, in my reckoning, and in these first two games, it's all about linear setpieces. The environment design is also as good as the first, if not slightly better, given there's a Super Mario 64 style endless oneiric hallway near the end. I won't spoil the context. In short, 4A does it again, although I'm confident the next game will kick my brain in the ass, still, comparatively speaking.

In the middle of the development of the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, a few crucial creatives started 4A Games in Kyiv. They weren't the first studio to schism from GSC Game World, and they weren't the last, (because, it seems, Sergiy Grygorovych is a donkey), but by now it seems 4A has taken the prize as the chosen spiritual successor studio for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. lineage or whatever, even though S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is coming.
I have never played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (I'm getting sick of typing that out, there's so many punctuation marks), but I am given to understand it has this gameplay/vibe, just more open-ended. And by this gameplay/vibe, I guess I mean the Big Roadside Picnic Energy game. You know what I mean; post-disaster- no apocalypse necessary, but it's preferred; an overwhelming Slavic atmosphere that if I could pin it down is somewhere between pure dread and dogged determination in the face of increasingly long odds; uncanny monsters and anomalies. You know it when you see it.
Although this game has certain kinks added to that formula, probably from the source material. Both Communists (not the cool type, the Marxist-Leninist type) and Nazis (there is no cool type of Nazi) are besetting the poor bastards who are just trying to survive. Most iconically, bullets are currency, although specifically high-quality bullets. The cheaper, post-collapse-of-all-professional-munitions-manufacture pills are worth nothing, which makes sense.
Mechanically, the game is sound. Before it was remastered it was probably less sound, but as of right now, the game is sound. There are often, throughout the extremely linear campaign(which is to its benefit, given the subway theming, because mission by mission, on the loading screens you see your particular route through the titular Moscow Metro), moments where stealth is incentivized, although not mandatory, and this probably lends it some replayability, alongside the generous difficulty options. The real thing that makes this game special is the atmosphere and the tension; at any moment, you feel like, you could end up in a dangerous tangent, whether it's the enemies cornering you in a cell and then pulling a trigger in your head, or the monsters killing you, or the weird alien fellas killing you. It all boils down to feeling like time is running out, basically.
That's due to the linearity to a great extent, but it's also due to the story; you are a 24-year-old guy in Exhibition who has up to this moment been your average survivor. Orphaned, yes. Living on a knife's edge, yes, like everyone in this hell the world has become, but so far not slipping off. Anyway, the station gets attacked, and you're forced to get help in Polis from a faction of good guys. That's a simple premise, but the trick is in the experience, the moving on down the line (and above the surface, God help you), the forward momentum, the world that is constructed around you by the developers. Even in this sort of jank state, the developers show a great understanding of narrative and environmental design (the latter looking better in this remastered state than it did before, probably). This was a wild ride, and I am dying to know how they improve on it with the other two games.

This is a good game, but there's far too much of it. If I had taken a week or a bit more than a week to concentrate my gaming activity to only playing this game, I'd have probably been dead by hour 20. I can't tell you of what; probably acute nicotine poisoning, given the subject matter of this game.
Oh, the story? Who gives a fuck? I am not the sort of gamer that has to have every story in their games be good- and at least this one didn't actively anger me like Far Cry 5's did. The villain was stunt casted. There's a Rambo mission. They hath given me slop, and I have eaten, and yea, I have not vomited. I can't say that with every game like this. Give me a break.

If one ever found this game, somehow, one would be befuddled. And I should know, because I was. Who is System Create? Why do they have a registered trademark sign in their logo, when this appears to be the only thing they ever made? Where did they come from? Where did they go?
Then you play it, and things begin to make more sense. This was probably not a high-priced game. It is a 3D colour-matching game, sort of like Columns, except it looks like it was made by the sort of fly-by-night operation that thrived in Japan in the PS1 era, because it probably was; 20-30 people, the knowledge of how to make a video game scattered and spiced amongst them, some brand-new computers, and a dream.
The dream (in this case, going off vibes: bigg mone), judging by the fact that nobody has heard of this game (and I mean nobody; if you survey the hardcore Japanese PS1 gamers of the era they'd probably scratch their heads as much as the nearest Westerner), has its wreckage somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. But that's unfair. This isn't that bad. Not much meat on the bones, but it is thoroughly competent and pleasant (aside from the splash screen that comes in after the opening animatic and before the main menu loads in. Bad vibes. Can't explain it), and the soundtrack ought to please anyone hungry for someone going way harder with a General MIDI workstation keyboard than this game demanded (specifically with that Latin-flavoured track, goddamn!)

This game was made by a Japanese systems architecture company. It was their first and last game. The precise reasons why are obvious: the controls were devised by a person who had no idea how one would expect a futuristic hovercraft to control, even on the original stickless PS1 controller, and all of the graphics, they say, came directly from the PlayStation SDK. I have heard this before from several reviews of this game, but I don't know if I believe that ALL of them were. I am fairly certain the character designs, for instance, came from the lower echelons of DeviantArt, which is impressive seeing as this game released 5 years before that website came online.
Diversification is a bitch.

It came, it went, it left no good reason for its existence.
Those who think that the downfall of Saints Row started in 2022 (it didn't- hot take, the reboot was the best one since SR3) have seemingly forgotten that this and Agents of Mayhem existed, and I don't blame them. You can hardly forget the third and fourth entries in the series- they are, for better and for worse, the legacy this series has left for itself in the eyes of many- but you can easily forget this, a mere afterthought to SR4, an overinflated DLC, and somehow an attempted escalation of SR4, when SR4 was and is viewed by the company who made it as the Point of No Return and No Further Escalation (!).
By this point any semblance of believability and reasonability Gat might have had from the first 2 games (I'm assuming he had them, anyway, as I have not played the first 2, nor do I have the means to) has been sandblasted in favour of cheap gags. By this point any narrative reason that the player might have to complete all its side content has been abandoned, and the devs know this! They have a cutscene basically saying this! By this point, in short, the grand, decadent, messy party SR4 (and of course, to a lesser extent, SR3) threw had long since given way to the not unpleasant but hollow aftertaste of the birthday cake and the thoroughly unpleasant moment when one realizes, "oh fuck, I'm old".
This franchise did indeed feel old by 2015. After assuming several different identities in such a brief period of time- GTA clone, GTA clone which leaned into more arcade-ish tendencies, open world urban crime game shot in the arm with late 2000s-early 2010s Borderlands-esque we-browse-the-Internet-and-think-we-can-fake-what's-cool-among-young-people-well-enough humour (this last one feeling somehow only slightly iterated on in 4 with a Crackdown-aping superpower system)-it had been wearing this last mask for too long, and it appeared with Gat Out of Hell that it would become its death mask, save for an odd spinoff that justifies its existence even less than this one, Agents of Mayhem.
People do not realize why the reboot was necessary, or even that it was necessary at all, tonally and from a gameplay perspective. This game singlehandedly demonstrates why it was necessary. I do not need to argue the point any further: this game argues it for me.
I did have a medium portion size of fun with it, though, not gonna lie.

Brian Gibson is no stranger to intensity. He has been part of the noise rock duo (at their inception, briefly a trio) Lightning Bolt since 1994, as the band's bassist-who-fools-you-into-thinking-he's-a-guitarist. It's a band known for both their intensity and complexity, but also their overriding sense of fun.

As it so happens, he lives in Providence, RI, which is according to Google only 50 miles away from Boston, home of Harmonix. You know Harmonix. Even if you don't know the name, you know Harmonix, because you know Guitar Hero, and you know Rock Band. Well, he worked there during their halcyon days prior to their absorption into the Epic Games Metaverse Hogwash Society, primarily, from what I can tell, in the art/VFX department, which is a very important department for a rhythm game, of course.
In 2015, he quit, because he had been working on a game for seven years with a programmer named Marc Flury. This is that game.

It's funny that Brian Gibson is from Providence, because immediately you are reminded of another famous resident of Providence, H.P. Lovecraft, everyone's favourite racist horror author, who introduced the idea of cosmic horror to the world in the early 20th century. This is, quite literally, a cosmic horror game. You're a beetle in space, running at breakneck pace along a track, attempting to survive as barriers and bosses present themselves without explanation, but with ample warning. For, you see, this is, as Brian and Marc have styled it, a "rhythm violence game".

This means, essentially, every obstacle is something like the notes from Guitar Hero or Rock Band, with some differences. Firstly, they telegraph themselves to you rhythmically in advance, leading to something of a high-velocity game of Simon Says, the noises they make are more percussive and industrial/experimental, and when you hit them two times in a row, you don't lose a bit of your audience approval meter, you fucking die. Every moment of this game is both unsettling and brutally violent, without a lick of blood or gore, which means, naturally, this is the sort of game that a kid could bamboozle their parents into buying if they were unable to get them to purchase Red Dead Redemption 2. Of course, they'd be playing themselves.

In short: this is a fantastic example of gameplay-as-narrative. There is no story in this game. The story is how the game is intended to make the player feel (anxious in the face of the uncanny and uncaring void) and what the player does (survive in said rhythmic hell void). This is a unity/purity of artistic vision and game design that every game, indie or AAA, should strive for.

It still scares me half to death, though.

I'm glad there was a toilet within spitting distance of this machine. See, everyone else is lying to you: this is actually the most potent and instantly effective laxative known to exist, which is the actual reason why this was almost immediately recalled. You do not want young children and teenagers soiling themselves in an arcade, obviously.



Why is this in the IGDB, again?

Imagine, if you will, a game that was purpose-built to be a killer app for the PS3. Imagine, if you will, the sort of seventh-gen (well, in my case, seventh-gen ported/upscaled over to eighth-gen) graphics that would have made other studios weep and kneel at Quantic Dream's feet.
Now, imagine the David Cage Method of creating the finely-crafted illusion of the player shaping the narrative. That is to say, imagine a tree with every branch painted in garish, absurd colours, haphazardly placed, contradictory, tangled, cringeworthy to look at, an eyesore, crying out for the inevitable weekend project of cutting the damn thing down. Except it never gets cut down. It gets petrified in data, on discs and on digital storefronts, waiting to baffle the unsuspecting consumer and/or critic into submission, into actually liking it.
Well, I am sorry, Mr. Cage, but you can't pull the wool over my eyes this time. Eight years later you will with Detroit, but not this time.