if you turn the music off and put eurobeat, this becomes 6/5

comically bad story, not great video editing/replay mode after missions (can only scroll through at 2x speed for a 20 min mission). SP campaign is fine on normal, challenging on hard. DLC Top Gun planes break the progression. The MRP grind for weapon and plane unlocks is also blehhh. Like i want to try all the cool planes you put in, why do i have to grind/repeat missions over and over to unlock them. Especially if i'm not interested in the multiplayer.

lack of co-op story mode or custom missions is unforgivable, as multiplayer after launch window is dominated by pros and it's hard to practice. if you had a forge mode and some other reasons to continue playing casually.

if it's on sale and you like planes that go neeeeeroooo, this is alright.

my first GT game, and definitely not the last, although this is far from perfect.

what the game gets right is attention to detail in all the car / racing parts, but completely fails in the gameplay/loop. 400+ detailed cars? i'm sold, they all look, sound, and handle distinctly. it's so much fun. photo-real tracks, great weather effects, great materials, lighting, god the game looks so good on ps5.

ok so you want to have to earn the greatest cars in the game, fine. how do you do that? you grind the same 24hr LeMans race against the AI over and over. As of update 1.4, you get a decent amount of in-game currency for daily races, and 0 for custom races with your friends. however they also made the most expensive cars in the game even more expensive.... the game just wastes your time when really what you want to be doing is experimenting with cars on tracks and trying to find your groove or living a fantasy (because this is a video game after all). Especially if you aren't interested in daily races with certain tiers of cars (which thankfully the game allows you to use even if you don't own them). Oh so you just want you and your friends to race VW Minibuses on Dragon Trail? here's what you have to do:

1. play through Menu Book 9. That's about 2-3 hours depending on how bad you are / difficulty setting. yes you have to play SP to UNLOCK MP in a game you bought.

2. all of you have to own the car, own all the parts for it. what does that require? more time. grind, look for the car in the store, etc.

3. One friend has tuning parts for the bus, but one doesn't. how do your other friends match the car, well you can set the PP requirement to min to level the playing field, but then you can't equip silly suspension parts of tweak the gearbox with custom ones that increase PP. oh and did i mention you have to grind points to earn these parts since they cost in-game currency for a quick race with your friends online?

and all that time you spent with your friends how does the game reward you? oh ZERO GT Cash........

Just make it so every mile you drive you get some cash. no matter the event type. do the Call of Duty thing where even if you are losing the number goes up and you get something out of it. give bonuses for clean races/finishing on the podium.

give the hardcore fans spoilers or body kits as grindables. when my friend comes over i want to show him the coolest cars, not have to explain, "sorry, i don't have an additional 100 hours to unlock that car."

coming from GT, the handling model was incomprehensible. i feel almost no difference between cars since you can set every car up for drift or grip tuning. engine swaps also make little sense as you can't put in a 4.0 Liter V8 into a tiny hatchback and expect it to create enough downforce to not spin out with FF design. but whatever. this is arcade, not sim.

races are really repetitive, online and in SP, but at least in SP you get cash and then you get cars with that cash. there isn't any weird gating, and cash is readily distributed.

in online you have to "race 100 races with a BMW to get this tier of BMW." wtf is this grind. who thought this is fun in arcade-racer?

i do like aspects of the online GTA-style server, although its really limited in design. so much more could be done but it seems EA only wants to do some car releases and track releases, no major gameplay loop overhaul in the coming months. no cops in online races is boringgggg. credit for allowing you to earn currency in party-only races, as me and my friend will just hang out and have goofy races for hours as a mindless way to catch up.

the diving pedestrians is a nice touch, and the limited destruction has those fun elements of the Frostbite engine.

all kinds of technical issues on PC really make this a rough sell (keys not rebinding this many years after launch). the fact that object destruction/physics and some really cool features from the original release were not ported make this a let down.

coupled with the very-early 2000s dialogue and "ooorah marines" run-of-the-mill story, it's pretty forgettable. but a <10-hour game means you can finish it before it gets reallllyyyyy tiring.

boss fights are comically bad, which means the end of the game loses a lot of the goodwill the first half had earned by feeling "wide-linear" (linear objectives within a constrained space, but multiple options to approach). i like the different guns don't get me wrong, but ultimately you put a silencer and a long-range scope on everything meaning customization feels superfluous. it's more about movement/environmental awareness than a DOOM game where you use certain weapons for certain encounters.

even so with all of those complaints, it's still a remaster of a historic piece of gaming, updated for modern systems (which has its benefits than trying to run back-compat Windows Vista), and is a part of FPS-gaming history. I enjoyed some of my time playing it, so if you get a chance, sure go for it.

quick summary of thoughts after 1 evening play session in PVE (mostly in context to Valheim), got to gear level. i apologize that i am not interested in PVP and base raiding. i don't have time for Ark Survival evolved i play games when i can, not have games play me 24/7

+ custom difficulty modifiers/sliders, reducing weapon deterioration and increasing resource gain (while not increasing resource spawn rates) feels like a nice change for someone who doesn't love the grind
+ borrows a lot from MMO combat (World of Warcraft), which while being unoriginal, is a nice inspiration. early bosses have some unique map design elements which is a very nice touch.
+ some improvements to UX over Valheim, item management, inventory, etc.

+/- spells feel very samey. this dodge heals, this dodge does damage, this dodge slows... overall they add some flavor.
+/- you don't lose your weapons/equipment when you die. i like this... but then you'll never have 1 hour sailing adventures to your body across the map. and that memory will stick way more than any death in this game.

- having your gear level track which monster you want to fight is silly. especially because if you unequip a powerful item it removes the ability to select a target? lmao.
- add mods plz
- no DLSS. AMD FSR 1.0

===

So I got all the way to level 70-ish before the 1.0 release scrapped all of that. I was mostly playing this to hang out with someone, and scrapping my progress while mildly understandable absolutely killed my momentum to play this and to play it again. I guess I could use console commands or something to get close but since they changed so much with the spell system I will have to replay this.

The Arm Thrust move noise…. Hehe.

Team Plasma is narratively very underwritten. Team Rocket is fascism super club, Team Aqua/Magma are ecoterrorists with sympathetic gains, and here we got Team Plasma as a workers liberation front who just decide “eh it’s not so bad” as the finale. N/Ghesis bait and switch is laughably trite, and pulled so quickly at the end that you’re just like “lol.” Unfortunately the game is so stuck on the 8 badges before anything gets going part that it’s a victim of its own setup.

Music - couple bops in here, especially the bustling cities doing city pop / smooth jazz. 1.5x gate music is going up to YouTube right now because it’s a breakbeat/downtempo masterpiece.

Design - nothing really memorable here. Compared to previous gen’s lazy in naming and design. I empathize it’s hard. Just prefer Gen 3 or 1-2 more.

Delta, 1.5x speed, with share exp makes this a breeze… I can’t believe how much time we wasted as children. Were we just killing time to wait for our bodies to grow up to see the world? Narratively, the going off on your own with the resources you collect to build yourself up for the challenges of the world is always compelling. Me playing this as an adult is fun to look back and reminisce on the times I spent in the back of cars waiting for the me to graduate to the world.

ALSO YOU CANT NAME YOUR RIVAL — Gamefreak let me name them Buttdick I don’t need “Steve” or Genevieve or w/e it’s my fantasy

The sarcastic answers are nice addition

The first shooter to make me dislike violence.

My biggest problem is narratively the story boils down to “violence begets violence, and that’s bad.” I like most of the characters, and I like what the game tries to do with them. But ultimately it’s a cover shooter where you are forced to complete violence even if you don’t want to. There were sequences where I wanted to not kill any of the characters and I’m forced to.

What makes Last of Us 1 a bit better is that I forgot about all of the heinous actions carried out by Joel, and then by the end it’s a narrative double whammy of having it be for nothing and watching his descent into full madness.

Here, your revenge plot has the writings on the wall instantly of what it’s going to force you to do, and the consequences of it. No politics to discuss, no morality, just tragedy to experience.

If they could make the combat just a little more difficult/complex especially for the boss fights (removing abilities as the key aspect to defeat them), this would be the greatest game of all time.

Is this better than BotW? Absolutely. But after having played 100s of hours of BotW this doesn’t give me more than the building/traversal mechanics to really appreciate. The combat is identical. The cheese with certain abilities is still here (this game is for kids I understand),

Oh and if shrines were better integrated into the game (or the resource they give you).

Review is if you never played BotW, but spiritually I am closer to a 3.5 or 4/5 compared to BG3 which is my GOTY. Music/art really is what sends this to 4.5.

This gives me mental energy of playing Skyrim, where within first 10 hours you know all the mechanics, you just enjoy the silliness.