I really REALLY like this game, although despite how much I like it, I kind of struggle to justify $40 for it unless you're a really big Jet Set Radio fan like me. I took the game kind of slow, tried doing a lot of side content, picking up collectables, etc. and my final play time was somewhere around 11 hours.

I do have a lot to say, and although some of it might come across as kind of snarky, please keep in mind that I do really like the game! I just write like that.

The gameplay is phenomenal, with tricks and graffiti feeling very nice and snappy to pull off, altho the 3 styles of movement all feel very similar. They do have slight differences to things like speed, but its so small that they might as well be the same. This game has a surprising amount of combat, but i felt like it basically came down to attacking once and then jumping and spraying graffiti. Plus the fact that it will automatically swap you to on foot controls makes it kind of annoying to hit & run enemies. It isn't the focus of the game though, just a minor portion, and any combat usually quickly ends, and you go on your way, jamming out and doing art, just as god intended.

The art, world design, and character design is also amazing, I was extremely impressed at just how well they were able to faithfully recreate the Jet Set Radio style, down to the resolution of the textures and kinda janky outlines. Some may not like the jank, but i find it charming in a sort of nostalgic way.

The soundtrack can be hit or miss, but thats kind of to be expected with a game with so many musicians from different genres. Personally, I prefer the more upbeat, crazy songs with lots of sampling, and definitely early in the game its a lot less of that, but the further i went along the more i enjoyed it, and even the songs i was iffy on at first grew on me.
Everyone is always going to point to Hideki Naganuma's songs, because he's well known and well liked and did a lot of JSR and JSRF's soundtracks, but there's a lot of really good songs on this games OST by other artists. Klaus Veen, Olli and Doctor Lazer, artists with songs in Team Reptile's other game Lethal League Blaze, make an appearance and have great songs, although i'm also quite partial to the songs by 2 mello, kidkanevil, KiloWatts, Sebastian Knight, GRRL, and wev.

On a different sound related note, the sound effects are... kinda lacking. Sometimes it feels like they didn't have time to make one, at one point someone gets hit with a skateboard and it makes the most pathetic little like hand lightly punches fabric noise.

Story is eh, I pretty easily predicted mostly everything that was going to happen, but if you're playing the game for the story i don't know why you're playing it, so thats minor.

And lastly, because of this game's obvious massive inspiration from Jet Set Radio, i think it'd be fun to do a little compare and contrast, talk about things from that game which aren't in this game which i miss. I unfortunately haven't played JSRF so i can't compare with that.

Firstly, I kinda miss having a few characters that were fully voice acted. DJ Professor K is such a character that it'd be impossible to fully live up to him, but the fact that he has no counterpart here makes me sad. at least his voice is so burned into my mind that I can imagine him saying various lines of dialogue. but even aside from K, this game doesn't really have a dedicated "police" character, like Officer Onishima from JSR, who I always liked, with him slowly getting more and more angry as he yells through his radio to bring in tanks and shit. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk kinda makes you think they'll have that, with 2 police characters, but neither of them show up outside of boss fights and cutscenes, with the latter just kinda dropping off the face of the earth for... some reason. I don't think he died or anything, just stopped existing.

I enjoy the fact that alongside the 31 tracks in the game, the game primarily uses these "mixtapes" which essentially fulfill the purpose of seamlessly blending between 2 tracks, with various elements from the next song kinda getting added to the previous song, which I loved from JSR. the one issue with it is that you're always going to know the order of the songs, because they only go into one other song, but the songs are good enough that i don't mind listening to them a lot as I play the game for... nearly 7 hours with minimal breaks jesus christ what is wrong with me.

compared to JSR the controls are so much more fluid and easy to use, JSR always felt weird to me, with jumps being really high and floaty, and doing literally anything giving you so much momentum making it hard to turn. BRC fixes both of those things and then if the momentum is still an issue you can swap to on-foot movement at any time, which is great.

Uhh thats all i can think of, I really like this game a lot, but i'm not sure if its worth $40 unless you're a JSR super fan, so maybe wait for a sale. Sorry Team Reptile, but $40 is a lot for a game that i think most people will probably beat in 4-8 hours and never play again.
For me a big part of JSR was the replay value, and at least right now, aside from a few challenges unlocked in the post game, I don't think there's a way to do any of the previous challenges (not that they're very hard to begin with) without making a new save. Maybe in the future they'll add just general challenges like score attack (without a "get more than this high score to win and then never do this again"), time attacks, etc., but until then its looking kinda like a game with a set end that most people won't go back to after that.

I don't like this game, I just don't. But lets start off with the game itself and what it does right!

Word of warning: this review is kinda all over the place and also will talk about basically everything in the game. So expect spoilers (of monsters and stuff, there's not really a plot, it's Doom)

Doom 64 is one of the sequels to Doom, which there are surprisingly quite a few of. If you go from the original game to Doom 3, thats still 6 games!
While Doom 64 was developed in close association with ID (mostly for the engine), the game itself was developed by Midway, and it seems pretty clear that they weren't quite sure WHAT they wanted to do for their take on Doom.

On one hand it seems like its trying to be a direct sequel or spiritual successor, it seems to take place at some point after Doom 2, it has all of the classic Doom gameplay and even uses the same engine, down to some of the extremely weird quirks.
But on the other hand, it seems like they wanted to make it some sort of horror shooter? Albeit, Doom was originally envisioned as that, they very clearly decided against that for the most part with the final release.

So lets go through everything one by one because i kind of have a lot to say about it.

Gameplay: It's Doom, but... for some reason the physics feel more slippery? They often times put items on stairs and you just kinda fall down the stairs (when i say fall i mean that you just lose all control of your character) and then float OVER the item, which is frustrating.
They also added a new weapon, "The Unmaker" which is neat in that it gets better with each secret Demon Rune that you find... but it just completely obsoletes the plasma rifle, which I don't like. The only real "obsolete" weapon in the original Doom games is the pistol.

Level Design: Just plain fucking awful. Sluggish, maze-like, Hell Knights literally around every corner, and claustraphobic. Lots of puzzles that actually make no sense, AND are slow. in order to get into one of the secret levels you need to press 4 switches in the correct order. Problem, there is nothing ANYWHERE that eludes to combo and if you press the wrong button it just completely locks you out... why????
about 90% of the switches in the game you have no idea what they do. and you can't even hear whatever happened because it usually is on the other side of the map. So you have to wander around until you find what changed.
Unlike the original games, Doom 64 actually supports spawning in enemies directly, which is great! However, they use this feature to just randomly (and silently!) spawn enemies in tight hallways that you've already cleared. Its not very fun.
They also for some reason have lots of weird traps in this game? Inescapable pits (like 1000x more than the original Doom had), Dart traps?, Homing missile traps, maybe some more i'm forgetting? At least they found some use for the Revanent's homing missiles since they had to be cut from the game, but I feel like Doom is not the place for traps like this, maybe in something like Heretic or Hexen, but not Doom.

Graphics: I don't like the artstyle of this game at all. It lacks the clarity that the original games have, and overall is just boring to look at. The monster's designs are overall kinda eh, they look less like demons that want to kill you, and instead like something that would be in literally anything aside from a fast paced FPS.
However, I do like the game's heavy emphasis on color, and I wish that the Doom community would actually support the custom map format for the original games which allows for colored lights... seriously UDMF came out in 2008 why does no one support it let me have my funny colored lights please.

Audio: Hey remember the great metal music that Doom, Doom 2, Plutonia and TNT: Evilution had? Well Doom 64 has... Silent Hill white noise... in a fast paced first person shooter? When i'm not completely tuning it out, it's distracting. On my second playthrough, when i got to the last 2 stages I just started playing the E3M8 midi from Doom on a loop. The worst part about that, is that I started enjoying the game more as soon as I was listening to real music. Its amazing how much music can affect your mood, especially when playing a game.
Aside from the music, the actual audio in the game is... muddy, distorted, and drowned in reverb. Just like the graphics, the audio in the original Doom had amazing clarity and you can tell exactly what enemies were where and when one died around the corner. Here I don't even know what half of the enemies sound like, and I have no clue when an enemy dies. As stated before in the level design section, I can barely hear when a door opens or closes, which also sucks.

Port: This probably doesn't need to be it's own category, but i'm doing it anyway. It's a Nightdive port, so it runs phenomenally, I don't think I encountered a single issue that wasn't present in the original game!

Enemies: Most of the enemies are the same, so i'll skip those ones. Others were cut for filesize reasons.
-Zombie-men/Shotgun Guys: I literally cannot tell these two apart in this game. while in the original game the zombie men had this green and white color palette and the shotgunners had this red and black one, here i think they both wear white shirts? Like I said I can't tell the difference.
-Chaingunners: Cut
-Nightmare Imps: New stronger imps that have a bit of transparency to them, as well as a duller color palette to help them blend in a bit. Not a bad idea tbh.
-Spectres: Better graphics hardware allows them to blend in even more! Maybe a bit too much with how dark the game is.
-Pain Elementals: I do not know WHY they felt the need to buff one of the most annoying enemies in doom, but they did. They fire TWO Lost Souls instead of one, AND if a Lost Soul cannot spawn (either due to being in a wall or in another enemy), it will deal blast damage. Just one problem with that, Doom has big hitboxes, and Doom 64 has small rooms. While this fixes the issue of players essentially pacifying a Pain Elemental by just standing in front of it, it makes fighting Pain Elementals at basically anything other than long range a DEATH SENTENCE. due to the big hitboxes and small rooms Lost Souls are CONSTANTLY spawning in the wall, and you'll end up dying to it without knowing what happened. Oh and there's no different animation or sound to let you know that this Lost Soul death causes an explosion rather than just dying, have fun!
Hell Knights/Barons of Hell: for some reason, the hardcoded infighting exclusion that these big guys have in Doom 2 is removed, so they will infight. Alright I guess?
Revanent: Cut :/
Archvile: Cut
Arachnotron: They gave these guys an extra barrel for their plasma rifle. Makes them quite the threat, I like it!
Spider Mastermind: Cut
Cyberdemon: An actually really REALLY interesting and fun change! Instead of shooting rockets out of his dick, Cyberdemons now actually shot rockets out of their gun! This is a big change because instead of shooting rockets at player height, they will always be angled slightly downward, which means that you can take splash damage from a rocket without being next to a wall! This makes fighting them MUCH more interesting and scary, and I honestly enjoyed fighting them with this new threat more than...
The Mother of All Demons: This boss sucks. Boss fights were never really Doom's strong suit, and ID clearly knew this because every single boss fight had other enemies to infight or distract. This Boss has a pretty interesting fight beforehand, and then you just fight the boss. alone.
Overall, she just seems like a way for them to repurpose cut content. She has 2 attacks, Shoot 4 EXTREMELY fast homing revanent missiles (there is barely any cover in the arena and you basically need to circle strafe to avoid them, if you slow down AT ALL, you WILL get hit) and send out a bunch of flames along the ground which knock you up into the air (borrowed from the archvile), if you get hit by one of those flames you're almost guaranteed to get deleted by the missiles, due to Doom not having any air control.

And in a league of their own, Lost Souls:
These guys need a category all to themselves.
Lost Souls were already annoying, especially in conjunction with Pain Elementals, they would just charge at you and body block other monsters. However ID did grant one grace, after the Lost Soul attacks, it forgets who it was targeting, giving a window where the Lost Soul would need to turn around and find their new target.
Midway took what little help ID gave and shit all over it.
I'm going to get a bit technical so stick with me.
In Doom, all enemies have reaction time, it can be set per enemy type but they always just set it to 8. So when an enemy wakes up, it takes 8 ticks (around .23 seconds at Doom's internal 35 ticks/second) before the enemy attacks. When playing with the "Fast monsters" launch option or on Nightmare! difficulty, the reaction time value is ignored.
When a Lost Soul forgets its target, it doesn't just forget who it was attacking, it falls back asleep. meaning that it has that 8 tick window.
Midway decided that was stupid, and made it so that Lost Souls do not forget who they were attacking. This means that Lost Souls can now infight for more than 1 attack, but it means that they are IDENTICAL with their "Fast monsters" version.
They will eat ANYTHING they are hostile against alive in a scary amount of time. I watched a single Lost Soul SOLO a Mancubus (600HP) in around 15 seconds.
The player at MOST can have 400HP, but by default will have 100. That means that a single lost soul can kill a player in around 2.5 seconds.
2.5 seconds... for just ONE Lost Soul, combine that with Pain Elementals now spawning 2 each attack, and they are by far the most dangerous enemy in the game.
I think I used the BFG most against Pain Elementals and their Lost Souls, which is so ridiculously that its laughable that its even a thing.
It's understandable to burn 1 BFG shot to kill an Archvile in Doom 2, those things have a scary attack, are pretty tanky, and can resurrect other Demons. A Lost Soul on the other hand dies in a single shotgun blast in Doom 64 (they nerfed its HP a bit), but it is still by far, the most dangerous enemy in Doom 64. And there is an enemy that can spawn them. What terrible game design.


So overall, its mediocre in basically every single category except for gameplay, which is mostly untouched from the original games. I'd rather just play any other Doom game.

Whats left now is some more minor unstructured thoughts of mine:
-This game is either not difficult at all or ridiculously bullshit, with 0 inbetween. Around Map 18 (i think?) there was a massive difficulty spike, which quickly became frustrating, but then after 2 or 3 maps it went back to the same difficulty it was before! I played on "Watch Me Die!" which is essentially the equivalent of the original Doom's "Ultra-Violence", but on my second playthrough I had to enable fast monsters as well just for it to be sort of difficult. In the early stages at least I thought that i had messed up enabling fast monsters, because it didn't feel that much harder. It turns out in tiny hallways with 1 or 2 enemies, its kinda hard to tell that fast monsters is enabled.
-The hud is just a downgrade from Doom. They show your health, current weapon ammo, and armor, thats it. It sounds like such a weird thing to complain about, but coming from the older Doom games where they show you the ammo you have for ALL of your weapons as well as what weapons you have, it is annoying. The extra info that Doom shows helped a lot in a fight, where you knew before you swapped to a weapon that you had enough ammo to actually use it, instead of wasting time swapping to a weapon only to have to swap back, with Doom's honestly pretty slow weapon swap speed.

I love XCOM, I really really do. Unless I'm forgetting one, I own every single XCOM game, even the godawful game "The Bureau: XCOM Declassified". I play XCOM:EW with Long War on Iron Man Hard Mode for fun, But this game pissed me off to no end.

I've tried extremely hard to like this game, I've sunk a solid 50+ hours into it, but almost every playthrough ends with me alt-f4'ing out of the game in rage, something I have NEVER done with any other game.

So what don't I like about it?
Well, its just bullshit 24/7.
Bullshit is a part of every XCOM game, BUT in the end it is your own skill as the commander which 99% of the time is the final say of if your soldiers live or die.
In XCOM 2, I didn't feel the latter at all, it only felt like bullshit.
It felt like most of the game was made to be as frustrating as possible because XCOM veterans in QA testing were having a bit too easy of a time.

There's so much that I take issue with in this game that I'm going to go through a list point by point.

1. Turn Limits:
Turn Limits are fine, most strategy games have them, other XCOM games have them, but the ones in XCOM 2 feel way too tight.
any mission with an "Evac" timer essentially requires you to just ignore all of the aliens and hope that you don't get shot by their overwatch, good luck!
I never completed an Evac mission where all of my units Evac'd. Most of the time, they either died getting the VIP to the Evac zone (which is fine!) or were left behind, usually by 1 or 2 turns.
You could argue this is just me being bad, and its possible, but the fact that I never once had one of these missions that i'd consider "successful" is pretty telling.

2. Advent Stun Troopers
Melee units with extremely long move distance who when they hit essentially have a 99% chance to render your unit unconcious. unconcious essentially means dead, except if you win the mission they come back to life. their health doesn't matter, they will get knocked unconcious.
These motherfuckers can run across the map and essentially instakill any human unit, but sure.

3. Vipers
These ex-thinmen may no longer explode into poison when they die, but instead can grab you from across the map and strangle you. The poison spit has always been kinda annoying but its also always been kinda a non-issue. Also if the grab fails that doesn't end their turn for some reason.

4. Poison
Hey look! Poison gets its own point even though I just said it was a non-issue! This is kind of stretching a bit, since I don't consider the poison spit attack an issue, I consider the status effect itself annoying.
In XCOM:EU/EW, you took poison damage whenever you took an action, which meant you could strategically sacrifice some health to do something, or hold still and hope that your dude would be ok for a bit until you could heal them.
In XCOM 2 however, it just damages you at the start of your turn, meaning that early game if you get poisoned you're essentially dead, and later in the game its just annoying because you essentially just have a ticking death clock.

5. fuCKING RULERS
The Rulers are essentially mini-bosses which show up from time to time, they sport a hefty health pool, pretty high damage and stats, and have the unique mechanic that they can leave to fight another day, but won't heal their health ever, so you can slowly whittle them down over several missions until finally taking them down.
it sounds great until...
RULER REACTION
every time you take an action, the ruler also gets an action. With that hefty damage they have, they can essentially wipe an entire squad just because you moved them
They're hard enough without anyone else to back them up, but if there are other aliens around, just fucking leave, its not worth it. You just failed a mission because the game randomly chose to spawn one of these fuckers.
Tactically evacuating has always been a part of XCOM, but usually you do it if the situation looks bad, and you know that you can't win, usually because of your own mistakes, rather than a singular coinflip (not even a bunch of 99% misses!)

Overall, these are kind of gripes, and I know that the game is supposed to be you against a stronger alien threat, especially now that they're in complete control, but the least they could do is give the players a fucking chance.

Of course, the game isn't all bad, there's quite a bit that I like about it!

The new classes are an interesting more "futuristic" take on the old ones, although I think the ranger's sword kind of renders the shotgun obsolete, just run the rifle so you have longer range.
The armor system brings about a lot of interesting tactics, either with you trying to get your soldiers in position to shred enemy armor, or putting your soldiers in a bit more riskier positions since with their armor they can tank it.
The game looks phenomenal and the designs for the aliens are amazing, I'd say Advent's armor is 100x cooler than anything in XCOM:EU/EW.

I really hate that I don't like this game, but I can't keep torturing myself by reinstalling it every now and again to see if I do better, I have to stop myself once and for all.
Overall, If you like XCOM or would like to try XCOM for the first time, you can still pick this game up! its possible you will enjoy it, but for me, I'll stick to Enemy Within.

Oh yeah and the game doesn't run super well, but it'd have to be really bad for me to mark a game's score down for that, especially a turn based one.