Ubisoft had many skeptics regarding their promise you can play as anyone in this game, even including a friend who later loved the game. you boot it up, and a few hours in you, "wow, the madmen actually did it".... then you meet the oldest whitest most conservative man in the world who has the voicebank that makes him say "wagwan fam" in the voice of a 22 year old and you realize what they actually did was let you play as 12 characters with a bunch of small variations.

I don't know what parts of the AI character Yhatzee wrote but I'm going to assume he was embarrassed by his work and undersold how much he did. And in that case- christ, this is career low material from Ben. Didn't even let him write "cunt" in the 18+ rated game for adults!

You ever wonder how we have comedy games and horror games, but not comedy horror games? Worry no more; your day has come.

Stray Souls is a horror game developed by a guy too crap to stay at Bloober Team. Constructed using unreal engine store assets, metahuman technology, and AI, it weaves a tale of a horror protagonist so goddamn fruity he'd be embroiled in a James Somerton plagarism scandal and his vaguely incestuous cannibal sister that'd make The Coffin of Andy and Leyley seem quaint. If that sounds like it's kicking down the barriers of taboo, it doesn't end there, as the game also asks questions like "what if a grandma was weird?"

This is truly one of the most fucking baffling games of all time. Its opening is the first and probably last piece of media to be directly inspired by Spike Lee's remake of Oldboy. Your character is 7 feet tall. He's using tinder on a computer from 1998. You shoot demons with a golden desert eagle (later revealed to be the gun that JOHN WILKES BOOTH USED TO KILL ABRAHAM LINCOLN??????????????) as you shout epic win quips. It's a survival horror game with the ammo economy of a penultimate resident evil level, except at the final boss where its very possible to softlock yourself out doing all of the three endings. The motion capture is all wrong and your characters idle facial animations look somewhere between a guy in LA Noire trying to lie and you really needing to hold in your piss. Your sister remembers being shot by your dad but not the part where she was eating a human body as she was being shot. They used AI art and the result is a legally indistinct Bryan Cranston with 8 fingers.

All of this to serve a finale that, to nobodies surprise, suicide themed. Turns out you can take a hack out of Bloober Team but you can't take Bloober Team out of a hack.

The studio behind this game shut down a few days ago leaving behind only a legal threat against people who damaged the reputation of the game. What they mean by this is that people found out the director was retweeting 13/50-tier racism and transphobia. They could also mean the numerous videos about the game being shit. Either way they'll probably be SLAPP'd down.

If they don't, however, please enjoy the streams by my pals at the Kemono Friendzone while you can. They pay me in lint to say this.

https://youtu.be/olFpQ_nJ3_0
https://youtu.be/6-VZ57B4BnI

"Kill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives, Kill those fucking Yankees who ordered them to torture"
-"Gangnam Style" star PSY in the song "Dear American"

If you use maoist standard english and play this like a stealth game like 14 years of Metal Gear games have conditioned you to do instead of using all the weapons and explosives the game provides you to slay each and every one of the 45 AmeriKKKlan SSoldierSS on the map they sentence you to death via the electric chair. I've done my part so I can say these words.

Maybe the greatest third person shooter ever made from a conceptual standpoint[NOTE] if you ignore the story being like that. Kojima spent 60 million dollars with the foresight 30 years of game design full of little quirks and details behind him to refine the gunplay and ensure every death was rendered at what was at the time an unparalleled level of photorealism. It was then released onto unsuspecting audiences. It will never happen again.

Ain't that a shame?

[NOTE] I have not played the Hamas Max Payne clone made by a Palestinian teenager, maybe that ones better? We'll find out someday.)

The first triple-A game to be designed entirely by memes.

I do want to go over a few positives:
-Carry over: fuck yes. I actually did buy some cosmetic shit in the end because of this scheme and also because I'm a simple person and I wanted Ash from Evil Dead for Zombies. That being said I kind of wish the weapons didn't get carried over, it's very obvious they were balanced with planned obsolescence in mind. Even store bundles (which I got a few for free, from Twitch) just cannot hold a candle to the new MWIII guns, which is kind of insidious. Plus none of the new weapons can use the old camos you grinded out.
-Zombies: I loved DMZ from MWII, it was the mode that got some of my friends back into Call of Duty and for good reason. It's just a very addicting, very time-scalable mode where you're constantly pushing against your own hubris. It's very easy to lose everything but it's just as easy to come back even stronger, which pushes it way above most garbage survival games where an albanian child with wallhacks can completely undo hundreds of hours of Rust or ARK. I REALLY hope Marathon is more like it and not like Tarkov, to be honest.

Zombies is a very brain-dead (lol) mode, complete slop, complete fun. It lets you, as rapper Charles Barkley once said, "slam with the best or jam with the rest". You can just relax and shoot the shit with your friends in tier 1 doing cargo jobs or you can build your way up and gamble everything on the tier 3 zone, which we've done a few times and even squadding up with other people is completely insane and probably well above our pay-grade.

It's a tiny bit too spongey there which is awkward since you need to pack-a-punch in tier 3 to stand a chance in tier 3. really not a fan of that choice, would've preferred if it maybe cost significantly more in lower tiers to get it up there (which would work right now as money doesn't carry over between sessions) so there's still an incentive to upgrade it in the appropriate zone. Very easy to put that aside though when you can be Ash from Evil Dead, yelling obscenities.
-Ash from Evil Dead: see last sentence. he has 30 minutes of voice lines so is maybe the best deal you can get in terms of dialogue.

And some negatives:
The maps: I never grew up with MW2 multiplayer as I was a Halo kid. Now that I've played them I've come to the conclusion this was requested largely by people who last played them when they were 9. Most of them suck complete ass and I think both the developers and the community know it because they brought back map voting so you can at least avert course sometimes. Often its to the safety of Estate. I think the biggest testament to how bad they are is that they've recently merged Rust and Shipment into a playlist and I've only ever played Rust once on it. People would rather play the dogshit map with bad spawns that also happens to be useful for weapon grinding than the dogshit map with bad spawns that was iconic and appeared in 400000000000 "if you remember this... your childhood was awesome!" memes.
-TTK: don't get the point of this. During the CoD-Halo wars of the xbox 360 era the low TTK of Call of Duty was often used as an argument both for and against the game. I even remember a verse from a goddamn BrySi rap from Machinima from this. I won't be repeating it I have one extremely embarrassing memory involving that guys videos as is. For many people it was the draw, and then MWII (2022) was apparently too fast?? Don't get it. It felt fine to me but now this new TTK sucks ass because it was built for a mode where it was presumed you could get shot by 4 people at once. Not fun!
-SBMM: not saying anything new here but its not configured right. I don't think it should be removed entirely but it does definitely need tweaking. For a live service game hellbent on being your second job it has a very arcade game feel of deciding when you've had too much fun and now the game is over. Bad!
-The Campaign: Didn't beat it. The warzonification of the CoD campaign has to fucking stop. I know they didn't have any time to make this game and in that case I would prefer the campaign be compromised above all else but did it really need to be level designed like Far Cry 3 But Worse?

I did watch a friend play through it to the end and yeah that sure was a story huh? Hiring some of Hollywood's worst writers to try and turn Call of Duty of all franchises into prestige television has not been a graceful experiment. It's fun when it's a meathead parable of a world at its end, inspired by dozens of big meathead blockbusters with characters who have good one liners. The idea of a squad whose goal is to respond to catastrophe by quashing further catastrophe without the world being aware is a cool idea (at least that's what people said back when it was called Zero Dark Thirty (yes I know it's based on a real event i was alive when it happened)) but you can feel the old PsychoCoD try to inch its way in at points but never to completion. Shame. Ah well, better luck next time in 2025?

Overall: not great! for both the player or phil spencer who just got this as his first release from newly acquired activision/parting gift from noted fan of women bobby kotick before he vanishes into the night like a ghost. however I love slop and its the game my friends bought so as another reviewer on here said, I will continue to be part of the problem. We used to call that "being the cancer killing gaming" 10 years ago.

yes i did rate it low because i am bad at the game. theres no rules requiring you to be good at dark souls before you rate it on here. but also any game that offers coop but only as a perishable good in limited quantities is probably not very good to begin with; very deflating to have you and your friends all buy the game and then you can no longer play with them (or at the very least play whilst making progress in your own save) because a dragons breath has a much wider hitbox than you think. Every annoying ass contrarian on here has this as their favorite game; never beating the woke /v/ allegations.