Free superchats on sign up means you can blast "wearing my james sunderland c o c k ring" on screen and change the canon of Silent Hill.

Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.

Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.

Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...

Shenmue represents most of the problems I have with cinematic games, trying its hardest to emulate other works of art without understanding how or why stories succeeded in the first place. Normally, I’m unreasonably charitable to these sorts of games, even when they’re putting on airs of ‘prestigious’ art, but Shenmue’s affectation is so uniquely hollow that I struggled to see the good in it. As a pastiche of arthouse film, Shenmue manages to capture the surface level qualities (de-emphasis on plot, deliberate tempo, a focus on the realistic and mundane) but has none of the underlying substance that makes this (vaguely defined) genre work. The expressive visuals, nuanced characterization, thematic depth, and strong emotional core that makes these movies meaningful? They’re nowhere to be found in Shenmue.

Shenmue wants to immerse you in the town of Dobuita, but it gives you no reason to care about the town in the first place - the presentation is too flat and matter of fact to be visually engaging, with an atmosphere as dry and unimpressive as a local news program. It’s all a misguided attempt at ‘realism,’ further hampered by the limitations of real time rendering, providing a world that’s too blocky and undetailed to pass as any form of ‘reality.’ Even modern titles on cutting-edge hardware are nowhere close to emulating reality, so to see this attempted on something as old as the dreamcast feels totally wasteful. To be fair, Shenmue tries to liven up its presentation through fancy cinematography during cutscenes, but the restless camerawork comes off as gimmicky, haphazardly zooming and cutting and swiveling around characters for seemingly no reason. Copying cinematic techniques with little purpose in mind, never punctuating the script or enhancing the emotional impact of the scenes.

While the presentation was uninteresting, the script is somehow even worse. A bloated cast of stock characters are never defined beyond their singular character traits (and blood type?), with the protagonist somehow being the most boring of all. Ryo is a hollow shell of a human, incapable of any semblance of emotional intelligence or self reflection, never revealing any clear or defined character beyond the monotony of his brooding appearance. This is supposed to be a character study of a young man going through the grief of his father’s death, but the script does nothing to convey this, creating a character so vague and unrealized that he might as well be silent. In an actual movie, Ryo could provide subtle characterization through his actor’s performance and body language with minimal reliance on the script, but a dreamcast game could never hope to accomplish that! Games can’t handle this level of subtlety through animation alone and need to find emotional nuance elsewhere!

The whole plot just goes through the motions of a bottom of the barrel revenge story and somehow expects you to get emotionally invested in a non-character giving up on his non-friends and his non-neighbors so he can fight some non-villains and avenge his non-dad who was only on screen for 5 minutes. Most stories would try to explore the dad’s character and really sell you on how much he meant to others, but Shenmue really scrapes by on the bare minimum. There’s also some sort of romantic drama buried deep in there (included purely out of obligation), but it doesn’t accomplish anything because the 2 leads have absolutely zero chemistry and, once again, you run into the limitations of the hardware, characters’ faces too blocky and rigid to sell any sort of emotion.

To give the game some credit, it has some interesting themes in the 3rd disc, with the game turning towards a neorealist story of life in the working class - a shipping dock where people are too busy trying to survive to care about the blatant crime or injustice they see on a daily basis. But this final act doesn’t do much of anything with the premise. Ryo enters the workforce on the precipice of Japan’s economic bubble and the story does nothing to explore these socio-economic conditions, mostly using this setting as window dressing to propel B-Movie action sequences (most of which, once again, don’t stand up to actual Hong Kong cinema). Rather, Shenmue’s greatest quality is that its writing is so vaporous that you can project whatever meaning you want onto the experience - like a mirage, you can find something of value from the narrative, but only when viewed from a safe distance where you never have to engage with the text.

It might seem strange to avoid talking about Shenmue’s gameplay or unique approach to openworld design in this review, but that’s only because the format doesn’t matter. Of course, delivery and form are extremely important when it comes to storytelling, but Shenmue’s grounded slice of life realism means nothing when it’s in service of such vapid narrative and presentation. I love the idea of a world that doesn’t revolve around the player, that forces you to slow down and engage in the mundanity of day to day life, stopping to take in small details that would be overlooked in most titles - I’m just waiting for someone else to do the format justice. Someone else that can flesh out a world beyond technical details and understands that being slow doesn’t equate to being meaningful.

Shenmovies:

Have you seen any of these popular movies? Most of them are only superficially similar to Shenmue, but fans of the series might enjoy them! Yu Suzuki even took inspiration from a few of them when designing the series!

Casablanca
My Neighbor Totoro
Tokyo Story
Police Story
Chungking Express
Fist of Legend
Roman Holiday
The Hustler
Your Name
The Grandmaster
Reign of Assassins
Come Drink With Me
Ashes of Time
A Touch of Zen
Late Spring
In The Mood For Love
La Strada

Of the three new games put in fortnite in the last week or so, Festival is by far the most fitting. Lego Fort feels a bit tacked on and barely keeps touch with the main platform, and Rocket Racing feels like a minigame for Rocket League that for some reason, is found in fortnite, but Festival actually kinda makes sense. It's actually shares the styling of fortnite for one thing, but is also a pretty reasonable extension of the relationship the main game has had with celebrity and music for the past near-decade now. Add on top fortnite's very obvious avenues for the monetisation and licensing of everything involved with a rhythm game and it really feels like this should really work. It's so easy to visualise the way it should be - get the Weeknd skin and it comes with a Weeknd emote and a few tracks to use in what is basically rock band 5, the new live service music game that could ride on for god knows how long.

Well, first problem with that is Harmonix have presumably lost all the staff that knew how to make rock band, because festival is just fundementally terrible, keeping the worst aspects of rock band (multiplier scoring, uninteresting charting, difficulty coming from endurance and repetitive notes, note accuracy not mattering), but worse.

Main issue is really the charting. It is, for one, shockingly easy, with even the very hardest currently available chart (Kendrick Lamar's I on expert, vocals), being barely a mid-level Rock Band chart in terms of diffculty, and games like even the relatively casual DJMAX wouldn't rate it about the bottom half of its difficulty scale. Realistically, that alone is enough for the game to really fall apart for even new rhythm gamers quickly as there is next to no challenge, but the woes go further than that. In an adapatation to making this work on controller face buttons, the chart is now secretly split into two, a bit like djmax, and opposite holds arent allowed (i.e you cant hold the middle and fifth button on expert because they would be the Square and Circle PS5 Buttons simultaneously). Whilst this isnt a distaster on it's own, combined with the already weak charting of Harmonix and you end up with some extremely unengaging rhythm gameplay. It's repetitive and boring.

The song choices are just shit too. The licensors might have truly pulled all the big guns, but protip, Seven Nation Army, a song that repeats the same 3 second riff for 4 minutes, is not a good track for a rhythm game. A whole bunch of tracks will have 30 second plus sections where you just wait and emote, i guess? Don't put that in your rhythm game!

This last thing probably is a result of, for some reason, still sticking to the old guitar-drums-voacls-bass set up for song charts despite that no longer being neeccessary, and them all fundementaly playing identically due to the loss of peripherals and lack of imagination.

The nail in the coffin is really the monetisation, which is really poor. I know music licensing is silly and that rhythm games often come with a tax, but a super limited rotation of free songs, an awful battlepass that's twice the price as the BRs, and $4 a pop if you want to keep a song with no other frills attached is twice as bad as rock band's traditional pricing, which itself was pushing it. And when that's put side by side with content for the real game at a more reasonable price, it sticks out even worse.

I don't want to even bother talking about the Jam Stage feature, one of the most worthless game features ive ever seen, which lets you mix some samples with friends. It's remarkably limited, doesnt sound good, and you get a whole two tracks to sample from. It's embarassing.

The other two additions to Fortnite this month, rocket racing and lego fortnite, are also bad - Rocket Racing is kinda boring and Lego is cursed by being a survival crafting multiplayer game, basically delivering it straight to the pit of medicority, but Festival is the biggest stinker, and a huge waste of potential. Given time and a lot of work and deep discounts, epic can probably force it to be a long term thing - but the start here is the worst game i've played from Harmonix and you have to wonder whether they will just dump this and go all in on the lego.

After finishing Sonic Frontiers, I was ready to back up over it, peel out, and leave it in the rear-view. I was done, I was out, I had no obligation to play its insipid DLC much less touch the case, except to move it out of the way for RoboCop: Rogue City, a proper damn video game.

But The Final Horizon, Sonic Frontiers' free story DLC, is a strange thing. Complaints about its difficulty and lackluster implementation of Sonic's friends, who hasn't been playable since Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), are common despite its current 3.0 average. Video guides often depict gameplay set to easy mode, and the first walkthrough I pulled up for the Master Koco Trial - an apparently common point of frustration - leads by calling it "unfairly difficult". I know what you're thinking, Sonic Team fumbling the ball? How could that be!

All this has left me with a nagging curiosity, a growing itch on my back that can only be satisfied by reinstalling Sonic Frontiers and experiencing The Final Horizon first hand. I'm a weak man, a cowardly little creature, and so I found myself sitting in front of Sonic Frontiers' title screen, basking in its stupid weepy music yet again.

Before getting into The Final Horizon, let's briefly talk about the state of Sonic Frontiers a year out from release. Loading up the game hits you with a barrage of notifications about what's changed, including adjustable sliders for speed (as always, sliders go to the right), other little tweaks, and the inclusion of birthday bonuses. I'm not a fan of how obtrusive the birthday UI is, but I do like that you can run around and collect tracks from past Sonic games to put into a playlist. Being able to listen to Palmtree Panic instead of the forgettable noise that comprises Frontiers' soundtrack is a marked improvement, and it's nice that I can put on the theme to the Mystic Ruins considering this game still has the pop-in of a Dreamcast title.

Poor draw distancing was already a major problem in the base game, severely impacting the readability of the open zones and often requiring the player to slowly trace geometry as it draws in. The problem only becomes worse in The Final Horizon as Tails, Amy, and Knuckles are all built around verticality, resulting in objective markers being placed far higher or further outside the island's bounds. This clip of me staring at an objective hovering over the middle of the fucking ocean is a perfect distillation of the Frontiers experience, a riddle solved only by remembering what game you're playing.

I don't care much for Donkey Kong 64's roundabout level design and segmentation of collectables and have been told this might pre-dispose me against collectathons. Well maybe there's a nugget of truth there, because The Final Horizon veers into DK64 territory, segmenting its collectables between Sonic's friends, resulting in the player frequently running by color-coded Koco that cannot be interacted with unless you're playing as the corresponding character, who until the end game is likely locked for story reasons. If anything, I think The Final Horizon should've gone whole hog here, litter the environment with color-coded rings, I might respect it more. Not enough non-euclidian design here, if you ask me!

Sonic's friends just aren't fun to play as, either. Tails' flight, Knuckles' glide, and Amy's Tarot Card Goobercycle all have an initiation delay that makes them feel lousy to jump into, and I don't even know what Amy's cycle is meant to offer considering her faster spindash makes it redundant. Knuckles' climbing feels like maneuvering a tank as 'forward' inputs only seem to register in the direction the camera is facing, resulting in him feeling about as awkward to control as he was in Sonic 2006; his glide is incredibly stiff to the point of near uselessness, too. I am not kidding when I say all of these characters played better in Sonic Adventure, though you can make use of some of their abilities to bypass platforming sections to great effect. I'd usually claw my way up to a collectable and then find that I was high enough to simply fly, glide, or hover-jump over to one or two more without needing to actually platform my way through another obstacle course, and frankly I see that as a positive.

In fact, Final Horizon does address a pretty big complaint I had about the base game automating too many of its platforming sequences. The training wheels have been completely blown off the bike - along with my legs - and this is kind of a double-edged sword. You have to actually engage with the game now, and I think that's where a lot of the perceived difficulty is coming from, especially with the trial towers. Sonic fans being asked to actually play their game instead of drinking in the spectacle as it's played for them, you love to see it happen.

Not that my snide, cynical take should rob anyone of their criticisms about Final Horizon's difficulty, but I think the root of the problem is that Sonic just doesn't control well and is unsuited to platforming in an environment that isn't open or which requires precision. There's a reason Sonic Team chose to affix the player and guide them through platforming challenges, and I believe Final Horizon lays bare why.

I didn't have any trouble with the combat trials and in fact found them to be absurdly easy even on hard mode, but the Master Koco Trial is one of the worst boss rushes I've ever played. I didn't get into it much in my review of the base game, but I think Super Sonic fights are usually the weakest part of any Sonic title, and the fact that all of Frontiers' major bosses are modeled as such made me despise them. So needing to go through them back-to-back, platforming sequences, unskippable cutscenes and all, was just tiresome. You need to perfect parry each boss and trap them in a stunlock using your cyloop which kinda feels like not the way you're supposed to defeat them, but it's certainly the most efficient method. Shoutouts to Knight killing me during the final quick time event because a tiny part of my thumb barely touched the X button enough to register an input, and that's an auto-fail for the entire boss rush. Very cool!

It was about at this point I started to wish Sonic was a Konami franchise, because at least they would've demoted Iizuka to parking attendant years ago.

All of this culminates in a bare-knuckle battle against Sonic's longest, greatest, most deadly adversary: an uncooperative 3D camera. I love to spend the majority of a boss fight requiring perfect parries stuck behind Super Mario 64 trees. At least you get a new Super Sonic form, despite Iizuka refusing to so much as utter the words "Hyper Sonic" in fear that he'd somehow introduce "power creep" to the series, which you might note is literally an insane thing to believe. Mr. Egg Person does finally get a happy ending as he's reunited with his precious daughter, a note that is entirely too sentimental and undeserved for his character. This is a man whose previous years long diabolical plan was to build an amusement park. But, you know, like an evil amusement park, which is bad. I think if Ian Flynn writes hoaky tripe like this regularly then he's just as poor at what he does as Ken Penders, albeit less interestingly so.

I remember people saying that Sonic Frontiers may have issues but it laid out a promising groundwork for things to come. I also remember questioning the wisdom in that and guess what, they followed it up with this.

"Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in garten exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest naughty one can jumpscare us. Any smallest thing beneath yon palyground out of men's knowing. Only banban can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the garten." -Banban Meridian, or The Evening Badness in the Indie Horror Community by Cormack Banbarty


I really recommend everyone that travels abroad and has multiple life changing events happen to them to play some dogshit stuff the second they arrive back to their country. It's really humbling, and reminds you of the eventuality of life. I will forever be grateful for my friends for making me scrape the bottom of the barrel for some seconds of dopamine release on stream.

This is cancer in video game form.
It's a fucking joke, it's the lowest effort I've ever seen in any open-world game to date.
It's not even like all they did was just copy and paste; because they didn't. They made changes that somehow make the open-world even duller then it already was.
There is no progression to you're character, whatsoever. At the start of the game all the way to the end you'll be at the same power level doing the same things for nearly 60 to 70 hours.
The story is dull and boring while the game treats it as if it's some sort of grand narrative, its head is so far up its own ass it's pathetic.
The backdrop is just Far Cry 3 but somehow looks worse, like wow for a Next Gen game this looks like ass.
the new characters are all just the same boilerplate "crazy person who loves needless want and destruction", the companies system from FC5 are all pretty much unless now since a lot of them don't do shit
the gathering supplies system from FCND is back but feels more grindy since the system was made around making you wanna buy the supplies with real world money, but since it's not here it all just feels like a slog.

This game deserves to be shunned and laugh at. We shouldn't be ok with the game coming out like this. If I'm gonna be paying 70 dollars for games from now on we deserve better.
This game is a proof of concept; that you can make a game so devoid of content, so devoid of meaning, so utterly devoid of a purpose, and it'll still sell.

No more, I'm so fucking tired of it and it needs to change.

El que nació en el Caribe
Goza de una facultad
Al sentir su libertad
Se identifica y la vive
Al cambiar la que lo inhibe
Por su mar, por su palmera
Una eterna primavera
O un sol que nutre su piel
Va sintiendo que no es él
Y pierde hasta su bandera

Absolute dire writing in this one, yeah bite me I play this games for the story. What are you going to do? Wipe the tears off my face and tell me everything's going to be alright and that I should find my better self? Coward, I will destroy me in the most fashionable spectacle. I'm an absolute fucking dreg and I'm living it to the fullest, baby.

There's nothing much to say about the gameplay itself, it's the standard ubisoft FPS with dumb "guerrilla" aesthetic that translates to bottles being used as silencers and garbage around the weapons to make them look DIY. It's worth noting that the weapons you use are US made and based on models used by the americans, while the other guerillas and even the soldiers of the country use AKs and and other assortment Poor People Rooty Tooty Point and Shootys (tm). You also get to ride horses in this one and learn why people complain about FOV.

Turns out Ubisoft can actually be political when they aren't writing about white people's land and the results might be the single most offensive game I have played (that isn't actively trying to be offensive).

Every single character speaks as if they were auditioning for the main role of Spanglish with Adam Sandler and somehow failing misserably at it. Every single character, without fail, talks in the most obnoxious way in a mix of spanish and english, utterly destroying any meaning both languages could convey and making them biological weapons to any person who plays this and is able to speak both. "You have great Resolver" says the protagonist to a guy who's telling him how he commits war crimes daily and is supposed to be the good guy because he calls the americans yanquis, despite the fact the game states he works for them and is in Not-Cuba after a failed Not Bay of Pigs invasion, which is good because they were trying to overthrow a dictator that was elected by the people, but turned out to be evil because the US is doing a blockade on the country and people starve because of him and his plantation of....cancer curing plants, for which he uses slaves because he's evil and he's bad and he's the only explicitly black character in the game as far as I can tell a bad person who sends soldiers to capture more people to be slaves but they just kill them and he's muy malvado.

It feels like they went and asked each and every single cuban living in the US that was forced to leave because they either owned actual slaves or was in cahoots with Batista what they thought the country turned out to be, and then rewrote it to be even more dumber. One example I can throw is how the game uses red and white with stars to tell you when someone's bad and blue and white with stars to tell you when someone's a glorious guerrillero with cojones ready to overthrow the fascist dictator of Yara. My grandmother from my father's side lived in poverty and couldn't learn to read or write before Castro dismantled your fucking casinos, gusano.

After the tenth time this same character named Juan used spanglish to tell me about how he tortured people in a funny way I just couldn't outweight it with the fairly mediocre shooting and looting so I ended up uninstalling it. But please, if you actually finished this, tell me if it's all a cover and the game actully gets good, I genuinely want to believe you and try this in full, because I can't honestly believe this thing is real.

In conclusion, I'm from Cuba and I say kill 'em all.

it's genuinely insane how far this series plummeted from the heights of Origins. Valhalla is a bit less sprawling than the disgustingly bloated Odyssey, but it's somehow fifty times more boring. i'm glad they scaled back the loot shit from that game, at least. but it doesn't really help when the level-locked map regions still make the game brutally linear. what's the point of this being an open-world game at all anymore, if you're going to force players to approach each region and its questline in a strict order anyway? there is no reason at any point to explore, to get lost in the world. especially since this world is the most painfully dull in the series since the flat muddy townships of colonial america. i would trade the breadth of the newer titles in a heartbeat to go back to the breathtaking heights of the ezio trilogy. i want to jump off tall buildings again. and then i want to climb back up.

Overkill pulls an “Overkill”.

PAYDAY 2 is a game that, while not especially near-and-dear to my heart, is something I still have a great fondness for. Back in 2013, myself and a couple of my high school buddies picked up the four-pack on release day and promptly played it into the ground. One thing that we loved doing were hybrid stealth-loud runs; we’d go in, run stealth for as long as we could, inevitably fuck up, and then finish up the heist with guns a-blazing. Overkill quickly patched the way that concealment worked, so that players wearing heavy armor would be spotted by guards within fractions of a second. Dominated guards started having their pagers go off, and clearing all of the security on a map would result in reinforcements showing up for no reason to muck up your routes. Stealth heists became all-or-nothing overnight. You either did a full suit-only, minimal-kill run and restarted when you got caught, or you didn’t bother doing them at all. I didn’t enjoy heisting in stealth after that.

Not too long after that, Overkill added a movie trailer for the then-unknown John Wick to the intro of the game, meaning that you got to watch an advert on every boot. Crimefest 2015 wrapped up with Overkill adding paid lootboxes containing guns with superior stats that you couldn’t get by any other means. I fell out of love with PAYDAY 2; the developers and publishers had jointly fucked enough of it up that I couldn't bring myself to play it any longer. The moment PAYDAY 3 was announced, I told everyone who would listen the exact same thing: “I want to get in on this before they have a chance to fuck it up”. Overkill were going to fuck it up, I knew that much. It was just going to be a matter of when.

I didn’t expect it to be on release day.

We arrive now to PAYDAY 3, a game that's a step down from its predecessor in nearly every way imaginable. Worse progression, worse soundscapes, worse music, bland heists, and always-online servers that are still struggling to function six goddamned days after the scheduled release date.

If Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t exist, this would easily be the most botched launch of the past decade. Back when Diablo 3 released — one of the most notorious always-online titles — Blizzard’s servers choked, serving players across the globe with the infamous Error 37. Memes mocking it were everywhere. You couldn’t escape them. Wherever you looked, people were talking about Error 37 like it was the Super Bowl; everybody was constantly going on and on about how it was a complete failure on Blizzard’s part. And it was, to be clear. But do you remember how long Error 37 lasted for? It was such a big event, and people talked about it for so long, so surely it must have been a while. Two weeks, at least? A month?

One day. Blizzard had it mostly sorted within 24 hours.

How sorry of a state we find the modern gaming industry in where PAYDAY 3 has been literally unplayable for most of its buyers for what’s coming up on a week now and people are still making excuses for it. Only in video games is it still acceptable — worth playing defense for, even! — to sell a broken product at a premium. Many have been pointing fingers around, insisting that it’s the fault of someone else; Overkill/Starbreeze are blaming AccelByte (their server provider) for not being able to handle the influx of players, the gamethinkers are blaming Deep Silver for presumably forcing some hands to make the game always-online, and people who have had to deal with Overkill’s bullshit before are saying that the fault lies squarely at the feet of the developers.

Here’s the thing: I don’t really give a fuck whose fault it is. What I care about is the fact that the game doesn’t work.

Even in the brief flickers where it does manage to suck down a gasp for life, though, PAYDAY 3 feels remarkably unfinished. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that everything that’s here was cobbled together in about a year and promptly rushed out the door; it’s got some of the worst UX I’ve seen in a game in recent memory, and getting anything to work feels like an active battle with the program. No longer can you pick a heist, set up a lobby, advertise that you’re going loud or stealthy, and let other players trickle in; everything is now relegated to matchmaking that’s split up by difficulty tiers, meaning that there are effectively 32 (eight heists by four difficulties) blind queues going at any given time. If you want to do, say, Dirty Ice on Very Hard stealth, you need to queue it up, hope you get dropped into a lobby with people in it, hope that other people show up before the five-minute auto-start goes off, and hope that every other person there is also trying to do stealth, since there’s no longer any pre-game chat or lobby tags to coordinate these things before the heist starts. Shop weapons (and masks, and suits) are no longer split up into categories and are instead dumped haphazardly into a single big list, making it difficult to tell what goes in which slot. Securing bags and loose cash no longer alerts you to their value, making it look like they’ve just disappeared into thin air; the first time I tossed a bag off a bridge and into a helicopter, it vanished without any fanfare and made me think that I'd thrown it out of bounds. For some ungodly reason, typing anything in text chat requires you to hit the enter key twice before you can start writing. Sometimes, while in menus, hitting backspace will send you back to where you were; other times, you'll need to hit escape.

The UI is similarly atrocious, and reeks of being made up of placeholder assets — ignoring, of course, when they are literally just placeholder assets. The iconic, flashing POLICE ASSAULT warning in the top corner of the screen has now been replaced with plain, white, 24pt Arial; every menu option is a generic white-text-on-black-box that inverts when you hover over it; the ability to close the game is buried at the bottom of the "More" tab in the main menu. It's hard to describe, but I can assure you that it's not the kind of thing you want to experience for yourself. Buttons and menus just feel vaguely squishy, like whatever you're trying to select wants you to give it a couple of tries before it'll take. It just feels like it was made in a hustle; a minimally-viable product.

We've got eight heists on launch, and heist number nine isn't scheduled to come out until sometime this winter; aware readers should begin hearing the sound of alarm bells ringing at this point, considering how PAYDAY 2 launched with eleven heists and had five more added in the time it'll take PAYDAY 3 to add one. Also gone are multi-day heists, shrinking the diversity and length of available missions down even further. Everything on offer here feels like little more than a retread of already-existing heists: Road Rage is Green Bridge without an explosion, Dirty Ice is a slightly larger Diamond Store, Gold & Sharke is a scaled-down Big Bank, Touch The Sky is a near-perfect copy of Framing Frame Day 3 but during the daytime. Easily the worst part, however, is how nearly every heist just amounts to "go to a place and steal a thing". It's so dreadfully boring. There's nothing here that even grazes the unique setpieces found in the earlier games, like the meth-cooking in Rats, or the deal-gone-bad in Undercover, or the property destruction in Mallcrasher. It's just break in, bag up some loot, throw it in a van or a helicopter, and then leave. Nothing we haven't seen a dozen times before already. Where's the creativity?

And speaking of, the new skill system is just as lifeless. Just about every option is some variation of "gain X% to [stat]", with almost nothing else on offer. Stuns you dish out last 20% longer, marked enemies are marked for 20% longer, getting ammo from an ammo bag gives you +20% damage for ten seconds, you can perform takedowns 20% faster. It's all just numbers buffs. While anyone who's played PAYDAY 2 on the higher difficulties knows about the importance of damage breakpoints, these are fucking boring boosts that do nothing besides make your numbers a bit bigger. Where are my Jokers? Where's Inspire? Where's Bulletstorm, or Graze, or Hostage Taker, or even just the ICTV? If you don't want to bring these skills back, at least come up with something new that can substitute as a meaningful upgrade. High-tier skills in PAYDAY 2 often drastically changed the way that you would interact with the game, adding new mechanics and playstyles to use in taking down the cops; here, they do little more than provide some damage and resistance buffs.

The progression system is terrible, top to bottom. It's one thing to make it move at a snail's pace — I only unlocked two guns in two hours of playtime, when launch PAYDAY 2 would have given me ten in the same amount of time — but it's another completely to make it purely challenge-based, too. Following in the much-maligned steps of Halo Infinite, heists themselves no longer offer any form of experience; the only means of leveling up is by completing challenges, all of which are some variation on "kill X amount of enemies with Y weapon" or "complete X heist Y amount of times". While challenges early on are plentiful and easy to complete, they swiftly devolve into mindless grinding once you get the initial handful out of the way. One challenge asks you to finish the first heist in the game one hundred and fifty times before it pays out the experience points. I cannot even begin to imagine how they decided that this was preferable to just giving a flat amount of experience points at the end of a heist; it's possible (and becoming increasingly common as more players get higher in level) to finish a heist where you steal every single piece of loot on the map and get ultimately rewarded with zero experience. With cash being as plentiful as it is, experience points are the gate to you accessing the rest of the content. Without experience, you can't actually unlock anything to spend your mountains of money on, unless you really feel like buying dozens of CAR-4s with differing paint jobs. Even then, half of the fucking paint colors are locked behind level gates.

It's not a drip feed. It's more like water torture.

There's more to complain about, but this is already getting a little excessive. There's more to be said about the loss of Simon Viklund and the subsequent downgrade in both music and gun sounds, there's more to be said about the fact that you have to wait in a queue even for single-player games, there's more to be said about how navigating the menus feels like fumbling around in a dark room for the light switch, there's more to be said about how they went back to obfuscating weapon stats instead of just giving you the numbers, there's more to be said about how the too-snappy reload animations look like they're sloppily aping Call of Duty: Warzone's, there's more to be said about how the inevitable microtransactions are going to fuck this game up even further. There's more to be said, but I'm exhausted. I don't want to think about this game anymore.

This is the kind of abject flop that I'm not entirely certain Starbreeze will be able to bounce back from. The company is already standing on Bambi legs after brushes with bankruptcy caused by Overkill's The Walking Dead and a full-on INTERPOL raid as part of an insider trading investigation, and another failure on this scale might not be something they can afford to suffer. PAYDAY 3 ads were plastered all over the front page of Steam the day that this dropped, and the game completely vanished from the list of top sellers within the first few days. At the time of writing, there are about 5,000 more players online in PAYDAY 2 than there are in PAYDAY 3, and those are really not the kinds of numbers you would hope to see not even a week after release. Starbreeze's stock prices have plummeted to their lowest point in four years, and the last time it dropped this far down was when Bo Andersson was getting walked out of the studio in handcuffs.

It's sad. I like PAYDAY well enough as a series. I wanted this to succeed. It didn't, and I doubt it will.

There is no reason to play PAYDAY 3 in a world where PAYDAY 2 still exists.

I wish that I could say this game has it's moments, but it just doesn't. If you're not engaging in movement that is at best repetitive and at worst unresponsive, you're probably being forced into combat that consists of either A) getting shot in the back as you try and run away, B) repeatedly pressing right trigger as you get shot at, or C) indulging in some of the worst gunplay in any game ever (while getting shot at). Top all that off with a story that is more likely to put you to sleep than engage you at any point, and you have the complete package of a game that fails to excel in anything it pursues.