So fun and engaging playing something that is not an obvious straight line, that asks you to read, investigate and not take anything for granted, and the coolest part, is that the game encouraged me to do it, "here is the problem, here is some knowledge, lets go you can do it!" very motivating.

I ended up surrendering and looking up a few few things on the net towards the end of the game: most the fairies stuff, that was really tedious and I coudnt bother, one "fuck me i didnt see it", one "fuck you that's cheap" AND the 9 thing, if you know you know.

This is like the best a modern game design philosophy (GMTK and stuff like that) can achieve

The concept of paradise has never convinced me, it is supposed to be THE perfect place but from what i want in life, that "paradise" should be a constant change of experiences, ideal places for ideal situations, but im sure i can pick flaws and never enjoy them to the fullest if i expect perfection.

Or maybe, paradise is a place that works exactly like you imagine, but that place cannot be real since there are always variables that you didnt account for, maybe paradise is a state, a sensation that you want to live, a perfect glorification of whatever with no damaging consequences.

https://youtu.be/4D4FfMOfayg

I cannot break the gameplay in fun ways like a badly made sonic game or a very exploitable game; it doesnt give me the challenge of a 3D Ninja Gaiden for example, where level and enemy design are different puzzles of situations you have to solve with the tools at your disposal, just press the jump button to go to a platform, press the assist button to activate a platform, press the hook button to go somewhere, filler, classic 7th gen games filler; it doesnt have a freedom of gameplay ramifications like a Sunset Overdrive or InFamous where i choose what to upgrade, what missions i do or what weapons and scenery i use to tackle fights. and nor it has the slightless DMC or whatever depth in the combat system, no cancels, every attack has massive areas, enemy and playable character alike, also the beat system makes timmings much more simplistic and removes complex button presses.

I have died in this game mainly because i didnt have the patience to dodge hoping I would hit faster to be done with fights sooner.

For the non gameplay part: characters, storytelling and all that, while very well executed, i cannot see the sightless hint of originality, i have already seen this story, this protagonist, these different characters, every new personallty just tells me how proud they are to be cliche, and every potential plothole or whatever is solved by classic "haha this game is goofy remember?" almost 4th wall type of shit.

Nevertheless, im rooting for more game to come out like this, experiences that grab your money once and never ask you again, thank you

The most important part of the game, which is the handling is spot on, fantastic, mostly grip but some drift is good in some close corners, and some of the main mechanics like risk reward with money, the cops, coupled with the race requrements at the end of the week makes the first hours fantastic, i remember fucking up and getting caught on the second day of the first in-game week and loosing a ton of money and having to strategize how im going to upgrade the car, what races would i participate in, where i use my 2 available race restarts and being extremely tense when running the cops with a lot of money on hand.

Said that this game took me 30 hours to complete and basically the last 20 hours werent nearly as great and the last 10 were an obligation to finish the game, i didnt have a bad time since handling is fantastic, but all the difficulty wears off extremely quickly: while being in a slow car and inexperinced, having to deal with a level 5 heat is hard as balls and an achievent to make it out alive, with a fast car and understanding how the AI works, cops are just a chore; when you understand the best path to upgrade and buy cars, money transforms overtime from a strategy game to an acumulating pile of numbers like every AAA ever does, and in races, where I sweated and celebrated my first victory after the prologe since money was hard and you never had a fast car compared to your oponents, I ended up almost lapping A$AP Rocky in a 3 lap race to take his car in one of teh last races of the campaign, kinda like the Dark Souls 1 experience but in this game is waaaaaaaay worse, i played on the hardest difficulty btw.

Every game doesnt need to be extremely mechanically profound or anything like that, but if you main story is around 25 to 35 hours long to beat, as a designer, you cannot expect the player to have the same level of challenge if you havent made any single change to the game through it, in the original Most Wanted police heat levels werent all unlocked from the start so the high heats didnt have to be tuned down so you could escape in your Civic and you also didnt have as much time to learn how they work, level 6 heat only apears at the end of Most Wanted!, also with giving full map access at the start, 30 hours to learn how something works is a fuck ton of hours

I think i will come back to this game with a difficulty mod where requirements are higher, you have less days to meet those requirements or/and there arent races where you win cars

I find extremely funny that in my day and age, i preffer playing this game over Sonic Colors or Sonic Adventure 2, i dislike all 3 games, but Sonic Boom manages to be mildy entertaining thank to the sheer unpolishness that allows the access to a lot of different ways to skip stuff, mainly the infinite jumps with Knuckles, I mostly used that anytime i didnt feel like doing one of those "WE NEED TO PRESS 3 VERY FAR AWAY SWITCHES TO OPEN THAT DOOR" or something high up that required boring platformig, the glitch is easy but easy to mess up so practising it while beating the game, if i try i can complete the game in under an hour without looking at any speedrun guides just with the knuckles glitch, but is kinda slow so thats why i didnt use it all the time.

Some people (I know I met them) will say that im not allowed to critique the game because i didnt play it the way is meant to be played and use the word "objectively" 7 times in the same sentence, but i decide how i play the game, and i prefer this way more than a 7 minute SA2 boss fight with the same interactivity as a 7 second SA1 boss fight.

Videogames are awesome

I don't want to play the videogame, the dialogues and character interactions are dummy but very comfy in a nice way and the story and world building gives it some weight, the non game part cool, but the act of pressing buttons is just dreadful, the game plays by itself i swear, there is no level design, there is no difficulty design because you decide every aspect of it down to how much cooldown you want in your abilities; controls and stuff is all animation blending and massive input buffers home to failed 2015ish MMO shooters, i think im just gonna watch it on youtube

This is the best showcase of level design I've ever seen in my life, hard as balls but when you finally achieve what you were aiming for (just complete the level, get the speed star, get the 3 stars...) you don't believe that you've done it, the game demands from you a level of muscle memory, aiming and platforming at the same time like no other single player "campaign" thanks to the level design being about what you do, not what you see, you become so aware of every jump you make, every shot, every button you press, even being aware of your camera movement is the difference between getting on time to shoot a bomb or not.

I have 12 hours at the time of this review, I got every speed star on worlds 1 to 4 and the majority on world 5 as well, a have probably restarted more than a 1000 times easily and every time I was aware of what I did wrong and how I could optimize my gameplay, also as tight as the level design is, the levels never told me what to do like every single AAA and the vast majority of indies; because the objectives (kill all red enemies and touch the pink light) and the conditions of failure were crystal clear, it wasn't "that platform is clearly higher than the rest, i have to double jump now weeeee" it was "by taking this road, I'm able to get to the finish", that's level 1-1, it gets more interesting of course.

I recommend trying the speed star on every level you can, I felt that the difficulty scaling was extremely nice when I did that because I "trained", the times aren't crazy, no big mistakes with some sloppiness is more than enough, because while the game demands you a lot, it knows you are human.

That feeling when I wanted to push myself so much from an specific level where I found a risky but fast strat, restating when I felt I could do it faster that when i finally finish that level for the first time I was top 90 in the world, few things can top that.

You can see that some of the concept art for the level design in this game was kinda similar to SSX3's, there's a bridge with a strange shape and a bunch of arrows indicating different paths to take, thing is, if you want all that to be relevant you need that concept and convert it to what the player needs/wants to do.

The base controls for your characters are so utterly unforgiving that you don't give a shit where you're going, snow/ice surfaces are samey, jump distances are irrelevant since you can interrupt your tricks at any moment, rails are magnets so if you are falling close to one you are getting attached to it, you don't need to balance on rails, you can also end rail uber tricks (foot off the board) on the ground, and to fall off you have to hit something head on, a 100% perpendicular wall or you don't fall, and of course you have a rewind; all this makes the level design basically non existant, with all that i don't give a shit about the concept art bridge when i'm playing the game.

In some of the "making off" videos they had a massive wall of text with messages like "MAKE AWESOME FEEL EASY" and "ELIMINATE FURSTRATION (JANK)"; here lies the issue, if you aren't willing to create different consequences, good or bad, to microdecisions for the player to learn and improve, engagement is the last thing that player will give to your sports game.

The trick point system is basic, basic, basic, more points for flips than spins, just do the uber trick with more points while flipping, hands off before touching the ground, hold the combo with nose and tailpresses and that's it, oh wait the "duplicate trick system", just switch between the 2 best tricks. also instead of putting an event timer or placing trick multipliers throughout the level so you create a route like in SSX3 or even real life, they decided to make a "Flow meter" so if you are stalling too much the multiplier goes down, solution? stall as much as you can while the multiplier is at 20x, that's it. World Records on trick events are 15-20 minutes on a track that should be 3, blackflipping with the same 2 uber tricks the whole fucking time. PAIN

The base game under all this crap is really nice, I coudn't find what engine this game used, but like, is good good, and graphics, while the levels are empty and it renders at 585p30 with FXAA on 7th gen consoles, i really like illumination, colors and models whenever you can see them up close, mostly in the helicopter scenes

Good base but ruined by shitty modern game design.

Pero que bien me lo paso con juegos como este, que están poco púlidos pero son motores antiguos con muchísima libertad y que lo que puedes hacer depende de tu estado (suelo, aire, x animacion) y no de cooldowns o munición o inventarios, todo está mega desvalanceado asique dependes de ti para encontrar maneras de cheesear el juego ya que algunos enemigos dan buenas hostias, del plan que si estas enmedio de una animación y dos se te lanzan has muerto, ah buah y el movimiento, vas folladisimo, añadido a que no tienes ofensiva a distancia excepto armas de enemigos o lanzar cosas, estás todo el rato a 200 por hora; vas a morir mucho y de maneras super estúpidas, pero como es tan rápido y no tiene prácticamente momentos muertos pues tampoco me importa.
Mola la progresión del personaje porque te pillas algunos ataques que crees que estan rotisimos hasta que te pillas otro y casi ya ni usas el primero que compraste, y todo son nuevos ataques o upgrades a tu vida o a las armas que pillas del suelo, nada de "+3% de daño a enemigos en el suelo" ni esas polladas.
Y la historia "THEY CALL ME A PSYCHOPATH, A KILLER, A TERRORIST, IM ALL OF THEM" cremita
Jugar a estas cosas es ignorar cualquier tipo de coherencia visual y centrarte en como moverte, cuando atacar, como pulsar los botones y sobretodo entender como funciona la lógica interna del juego para superar lo que tienes delante.
Buah, el port a PC es un puta mierda es genial, tienes que desactivar drivers como los de la rueda del volumen del teclado porque si no te va a 20fps, me encanta

Removing punchboosting was one of the biggest warcrimes in videogames ever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixNZ0itREHM&t=43s, REMOVE THE STACKING, NOT ALL OF IT YOU MORONS, and the meta needs some shake up, everyone is commiting to the Valk meta, but unlike gibby, getting out of any rough situation isnt engaging, control is a good way to warm up but its an LTM so idk, Maggie is clearly designed by people who doesnt play the game i swear.

It is still Apex and I like the current meta anyways, the Valk thing is gonna become more and more problematic each season that passes without her being touched, in season 16 pubs, you will try fighting other squads outside the ring and they will just Valk ult.

I'm kind of scared of the direction this game is having with movement, because devs clearly dont understand nor want to understand the advanced stuff and how it shakes up the gameplay, and at the same time controllers still cannot move while looting deathboxes nor they can lurch, 3 YEARS ALREADY, they don't acknowledge the movement, is crazy, only one time they tweeted a clip of someone teaching someone else in a match how to walljump, all they tweet about is fanart and lore and everytime they show a tutorial it actively skip the advance stuff, it's fucking ridiculous, oh yes #freetaxi.

In spite of all this, the movement (but punchboosting) is still in and I still want to play and learn and get better at the videogame, the interesting interactions that made me fell in love with the game in the first place are still there, so im not going anywhere, the score is about the game in its current state.

Fuck that moral system, do you really think I'm gonna do a "carry this to there and that up there" mission while dealing with shitty AI so I can cancel a villain on steampunk twitter instead of KILLING him, dude, I'm the guy with the cool assassins' mask, c'mon. In Dishonored 2 it looks like you can be a lot more creative with the powers and physics to advance through the levels, which is what I found most appealing about this game; I'm sure Dishonored 1 with unlimited ammo, mana and always max adrenaline on high diff would be much more fun to play