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gamemast15r

Completed

Windows PC

This is probably the edgiest fucking game I've ever played in my entire life. This game would not be nearly as edgy unless I put on black eyeliner with makeup, blared Insane Clown Posse from a friend's car stereo and threatened to cut myself every 5 seconds with the back end of a rusty needle that I found on the ground at a Paraguay back alley brothel. If I had to choose between getting my nuts chopped off and playing this game well I'd rather play this game but still. It's ok. It's an ok game. I bought it cause I liked Postal 2 and Postal Redux and thought it would be similar. But it's ok. It's not really intelligent but it's not a game I would play for intelligence. I would play it because....I guess shooting people. And honestly? The shooting to me feels like a sloppy as shole to be on a completely honest playing field though, regardless of my opinion for the edgy content.

Pros:
Play with mods and it's a decent Postal Redux clone
Voice acting and lines are often hilarious, though unintentionally so

Cons:
If played without mods it kind of feels...meh
Played through five hours and the achievements didn't even activate for me

All in all to me it is ok. It's not the best but it's not the worst. If you like it cause it's edgy and against the norm of today's society power to ya, I can't even hate. But as a game in itself I would look elsewhere.

From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/

4 Likes

Open review

Marvel's Spider-Man

2018

gamemast15r

Completed

PlayStation 4

This review contains spoilers

Marvel’s Spider-Man is an open world superhero action game developed by Insomniac Games as an exclusive for the Playstation 4 console and distributed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Before I go into the origins of the game through the research, I wanted to tell you really where I was when this game came out. I remember seeing the E3 trailer debut in 2016 as I had just gotten out of High School that year, a time in my life that I extremely loathed and had just gotten into working. I didn’t really think too much about this game persay, I was more so into my edgy games back then (still am now of course), but I had remembered how I played Spider-Man 2 on Gamecube and Ultimate Spider-Man and other superhero games as a kid and had a sort of nostalgic feeling towards these type of games. I wasn’t as invested in exclusives as much back then, and having just gotten a job that’s when I truly delved into buying up consoles for games I’ve wanted to experience; I would later experience Infamous in 2017 as my first PS3 game ever with a sort of world building and tone that I heavily enjoyed. For a while that’s how this kinda went, I just forgot about this game, didn’t care as I had bought games like Until Dawn, Bloodborne, and Yakuza 0 before starting to officially build up my childhood. But still a piece of my childhood felt missing, for all the old games that I got I felt like I had missed something, especially with the MCU hype train around and with all my nerd friends going on about the recent spoilers and potential future of the franchise. This was at a time when it felt fresh and interesting to me as I had kind of ignored it and had a limited world view during my high school years, so when E3 popped in 2017 and showed the demo at the construction site (which was before I got my PS3 of course), I was a bit more on the hopeful and interested side but kind of shrugged. I didn’t really care about it much at all from then on until one day I was in Florida on vacation, and I decided to pick it up at a Target on the first week or so of release, then came back home and played it. All I had thought about was “How would this compare to Spider-Man 2’s web swinging?” and “How would this compare to Ultimate Spider-Man’s story beats?” or “Will this be just as good as Batman: Arkham’s combat?”. This was at a time when the recent Spider-Man games were mostly either based on movies and were considered pretty awful, or kind of one off multiverse games that I didn’t really care for.

What does this all mean exactly? It means that Insomniac had a lot to prove here, and went considerably against the grain compared to the constantly rushed games of previous years. Having read up on its history, it started after Sunset Overdrive (a game which I don’t like in a lot of ways) was released. Meetings had occurred between Sony Interactive Entertainment and Insomniac Games about developing a game based on a Marvel property. A lot of workshopping went back and forth, and it was decided that this would be its own original story with the approval of all involved. What ended up coming out was one of the best exclusives on the Playstation 4, one of the most acclaimed games based on a licensed property and I believe that it’s one of the best Marvel games of all time. There was also a prequel comic: Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover, that was released sometime around the game’s release but I never read it myself, so I’ll post the TV Tropes page in the comments section below. Truth be told I don’t really know much else about the game historically that could be really interesting, nothing crazy as far as I’m aware either as the game was rather successful and I feel the way that it was being built mixed in with the popularity of the Marvel formula almost guarantees instant success. However, what I can say personally is that the game does enough stuff that’s different from the usual formula and tropes of Spider-Man that it’s for the better. I ended up platinuming this game over a period of seven or so months including waiting for the DLC to release and finally wrapping up the New Game + stuff out of boredom for all trophies acquired.

The beginning is a bit of a cold open, a police raid on Fisk Tower to apprehend crime boss Wilson “Kingpin” Fisk, a behemoth of a man who controls the New York Underworld. A traversal through the headquarters leads to a battle between what seems to be a human tank and the eventual defeat of Fisk. However, what leads in the void is a power vacuum that leads to one of, if not the worst crime wave that’s happened in the city’s history that goes on for a while. A group of men in demon masks and suits begin to take over Kingpin’s property, all while mayor Norman Osborn runs in the background. Things aren’t how they seem however as a bank robbery by Herman Shultz, aka The Shocker, lead to the realization that the leader of the Inner Demons, named Mr. Negative, threatened him into committing robberies for them. Other villains like Tombstone, a biker gang leader/drug trafficker, works for Mr. Negative to build vehicles for them; meanwhile Taskmaster, a mercenary with the ability to copy other’s moves through sheer memory, puts Spider-Man through a series of tests that push him to the limits all for the purposes of studying him and defeating him for a mysterious organization that’s never revealed. This is only the side content however, as the main content hits the peak after Mr. Negative and his demons attack an awards ceremony for police officer Jefferson Davis (who helped Spider-Man thwart a Demons attack earlier), hosted by Norman Osborn, in an attempt to assassinate the mayor himself. However, while Norman manages to get out alive, Jefferson on the other hand does not. This is where I should bring up five different characters, each one important to Peter Parker/Spider-Man in their own way and are whom I consider the pillars of the game and are the other parts that are balanced in congruence with the story.

The son of Jefferson Davis, Miles Morales, falls into a slump after the death of his father; Peter’s Aunt May (who runs a F.E.A.S.T. shelter, led by Martin Li, a popular philanthropist) brings Miles on both to help the young man out and as a sort of parallel to Peter himself. Both Peter and Miles had their father figures killed by senseless violence, and Aunt May hopes to try to do the same for the boy as she did for Peter, and Peter starts a sort of mentor figure role for the young man. Those are two of the pillars, the other three include Peter’s ex-girlfriend: Mary Jane, who felt that Peter smothered her and didn’t let her help or engage in anything dangerous due to the factor of her safety. She helps throughout the story in her own way, gathering the intel and sneaking into certain locations to take pictures to expose the criminal activities. The relationship between Peter and Mary Jane are at first full of conflict and awkwardness, but over the time in the story lead to a growing respect and a willingness to work togethers as true partners, instead of just Spider-Man carrying all the weight. Yuri Watanabe is a police captain who works together with Spider-Man as a connection with the police force during the crisis ensuing and provides emotional support as well even though her presence is more up front in the DLC. The last one is one of the most important characters in the entire plot: Dr. Otto Octavius. I’ll disclose that role later on in the review but in the beginning, he’s Peter’s mentor and science partner whose attempting to work in creating artificial limbs leads him down the obvious path to villainy, not helped by Norman Osborn, his old business partner/fellow scientist who does everything in his path to screw Otto over in an attempt to strong arm him into working for Oscorp (which I don’t think is possible to be a public official and run a corporation but whatever).

Whilst at the awards ceremony, it’s revealed that Mr. Negative is actually Martin Li, the head of FEAST who clearly has an agenda against Osborn, going on a homegrown terrorist campaign in an attempt to ruin him. After he is apprehended and sent to The Raft, a giant prison located in the river known to hold super-villains, a giant breakout occurs and chaos ensues. Li escapes, but so do villains like The Vulture, Scorpion, Electro and Rhino break out as well. All of these guys have issues with Spider-Man but after confronting them all on the roof of the prison their leader is revealed: Dr. Octopus, aka Otto Octavius. Peter barely survives and starts an outbreak of “Devil’s Breath”, a biological weapon that infects a whole bunch of people and causes grounds for Norman Osborn to issue martial law, hiring mercenary Silver Sable and her group to help enact his plans.

Aunt May is revealed to be infected with Devil’s Breath and is working on limited time, and after some bombastic set pieces (a dual fight between Electro and Vulture is one of the highlights of the entire game and I believe was revealed in E3 as an example), each of the members of the Sinister Six, the group led by Li and Octopus, are arrested and brought in. It’s revealed down the line that the two have formed together in their mutual hatred towards Norman Osborn. Li was experimented on as a child by Osborn, and as a result of the failed experiment he gained both his abilities and a lifelong hatred of the CEO/Mayor after his parents died as a result. It was also revealed that Devil’s Breath is the result of a series of unsafe experiments meant to save Osborn’s son, Harry (an old friend of Peter who supposedly went overseas) from a life threatening disease after Mary Jane infiltrates Norman’s penthouse. In an attempt to gain the antidote to Devil’s Breath, Peter gets his ass squashed by his nigh bald headed mentor and Otto escapes with both the antidote and Norman as a hostage.

Miles sparingly appears in this game, I mean he appears but his role isn’t as prominent other than a stealth section in the latter part of the game but isn’t as important to the plot as much. This game spends the time developing the beginning of Mile’s legacy, his motivations and his character as he fights the lack of his father figure and his looking up to Peter. Everything comes to a head as he’s bitten by a genetically enhanced spider that MJ brought from the Osborn lab she snuck into. After healing up, Peter goes to the top of Oscorp Tower to fight Octavius, whose hatred for Norman supersedes his relationship with Spider-Man and it’s learned that he knew Peter’s secret identity the whole time. Feeling betrayed by his mentor, Peter unleashes his strength and brutalizes Otto to a pulp before leaving him for the police. This final section is to me what really seals the game for me, as choosing between saving Aunt May with the cure and synthesizing a vaccine for everyone else, Peter chooses to be selfless and accepts the death of the only mother figure he had left.

The finale reveals that both Mary Jane and Peter have started their relationship anew (with a cameo from Stan Lee of course), this time with a newfound respect for each other’s abilities and a willingness to work as equal partners. Miles gains spider powers and shows Peter, who also reveals his secret identity as Spider-Man. Yuri (for now) still remains the captain of the police force while Otto is in jail. However, the final stinger in the credits reveal that the lab in the Penthouse that MJ snuck into has a secret button in the back, which shows a young man revealed to be Harry Osborn, stuck in a tube full of green liquid and black goo, which reacts to Norman’s hand as it touches the surface.

I love this game, I’m mixed on the non Spider-Man missions but the characters are great and fleshed out, I appreciate the respect building between MJ and Peter (though I rolled my eyes at the break up angle, I just don’t like those kinds of plot lines). As I said before, Miles doesn’t really show up too much, but his importance as a background character shouldn’t be understated as the parallels between his father’s death and Uncle Ben’s for Peter along with the burgeoning powers show the birth of another Spider-Man (and he IS Spider-Man by the way). They’re both likable and work well with Peter himself, who has his funny moments but has moments of vulnerability too. Nothing shows this more than the final scene between himself and Aunt May, which perfectly embodies the qualities of what a hero should be: selfless and willing to put others ahead of himself. There isn’t a lot I can say about this plot and characters that others haven’t said before but better, and I did the best I could juggling them all even though I missed some spots, but the writing and the plot are fantastic. Insomniac did a good job with this and the character development of everyone, and even the main villains of Mr. Negative and Otto Octavius, both did heinous acts but both show depth in different ways: villainy through trauma, and blindness by hatred. Like I said, I can’t say enough good things about this, however the DLC on the other hand I have mixed feelings on.

The City that Never Sleeps is a DLC storyline that takes place AFTER the base game, and whilst there’s a lot of things I genuinely enjoy about this content, there’s some stuff I don’t like about this game. The gameplay is exactly the same as the original with side content structure involving new villains, but the only thing I don’t care for in this regard is that when you boot it up that it takes place in a different instance of New York, where I would’ve rather it have been seamless (though it makes trophy stuff easier with different instances). Other than that it’s pretty solid, and the plot only has one thing in it where I was mixed on it but I’ll address that later on but for now, I’ll go into recap mode. After the events of the base game, the criminal underworld is left with a giant void in power, a void in which the Maggia (Marvel Comic’s version of the Mafia, only named the Maggia because the actual Mafia had a stranglehold over newsstands and therefore not wanting to offend them, Marvel switched some names around. Look it up, it’s fascinating stuff) is more than happy to take control. I love some mafia styled content so I LOVE this aspect of the game, and the story is split into three separate chapters but I’m going to make this a brief recap. Spider-Man tries to stop one of the Maggia from stealing a painting when he encounters Black Cat who steals a USB hidden inside of one of the paintings. After a while of chasing her down, it’s learned that the man who hired her, Hammerhead (one of the heads of the Maggia and one of my favorite criminals in Marvel period), is coercing her into doing this by “threatening her son”. With Black Cat’s role in the comics as Spider-Man’s foil, one thing I kinda knew was going to be a bluff is that there’s this blatantly obvious hint that Peter is the father when really the role that the both of these people have in each other’s life kinda made me figure out this was a ruse to manipulate him so that angle kind of made this DLC get knocked down a bit. However they team up together after learning that this USB contains the fortunes of all of the families combined (a really stupid move for mafia families to do this lol) and they both go to raid a vault that Hammerhead owns in order to find “her son” but obviously it’s a betrayal as she locks Spider-Man in the vault and escapes with the USB. There is no son, and Hammerhead orders her death in an explosion, one which Spider-Man arrives too late as her apartment already exploded to smithereens. However, her body wasn’t found so there’s hope she’s still alive, and it moves into the next section: Turf Wars.

After the last section, the Maggia groups go to war against each other and Hammerhead is clearly in the lead. A raid with Spider-Man, Yuri and her police only lead the former two alive, leading to a mean streak and the beginning of an arc. I’m going to go out of my way to say this: this isn’t Spider-Man’s story, or anyone else’s but Yuri’s I feel, as the rest of the DLC starts to establish her future as a villain possibly in Spider-Man 2, or at least it should considering all of the hints. Besides the point, she develops a hatred for Hammerhead with the death of her officers and Peter tells her to take time off. Hammerhead steals weapons from Sable International however and ups his game even more, attacking police head on and kidnapping the other heads of the Maggia. Eventually, Yuri goes mad as it’s also revealed that she has a history with Hammerhead as well, and that the police massacre was only the straw that broke the camel’s back. Attempting to execute the other mob dons on Live TV, it’s revealed he stole one of Sable’s special projects: Project Olympus. This ends up being…an experimental exo-suit; however Spider-Man stops the scheme and foils Yuri’s assassination plot on Hammerhead, who later ends up in the hospital but is revived with a taser by one of his goons. This begins the last section: Silver Lining; which starts off as Yuri has gone off the grid and has murdered numerous Maggia gangsters and Silver Sable herself comes back to take down Hammerhead for stealing her stuff as the equipment that he stole is supposed to be used in the civil war back in her home country: Symkaria. I’m going to stop here and just be honest: I guess it’s possible that a lot of supervillains would want to be a cyborg but I don’t really like Hammerhead becoming a giant mobster in a mech suit? I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right for me personally, but I guess it’s not out of the realm of comic logic. Stuff happens however, and after a battle Hammerhead kidnaps Sable, and Black Cat comes back to give Peter a USB containing the weaknesses of Hammerhead, having painfully and obviously faked her death. Truth be told, Spider-Man rescues Silver Sable and they work together to take down Hammerhead using his weakness: the metal plate in his head is weak to heat. After beating him, Sable leaves back for Symkaria and so does Mary Jane, who wants to report on the happenings over there. With this in mind, Peter trains Miles to protect New York on his own as he wants to join his girlfriend over there in her reporting. As I said earlier, towards the end it turns into a shoulder shrug for me, I love mafia stuff but truthfully I wish it kind of focused more on Yuri and her turn to being a villain for me personally but that’ll probably show up in the second game. To finish off here before going into gameplay for the game in general: the DLC has some extra content from looking for bombs to helping a cop look for the stolen paintings Black Cat’s father, Walter Hardy, hid around the city to the equivalent to Taskmaster’s missions: Screwball, who is a social media lover/psychopath, she starts up challenges for Spider-Man to obtain social media fame. It’s not a bad choice persay, though I found Screwball to be kind of annoying? I don’t know, nothing could live up to Taskmaster but it is what it is and that’s ok to be honest.

The gameplay for Spider-Man is rather simple, but effectively smooth and feels great; as Spider-Man’s power you get to swing on webs through New York, solving crimes by beating the shit out of criminals with police (lol), getting an assortment of collectibles and beating main/side missions in the open world. The fluidity of the web swinging feels amazing and ranks up there with Spider-Man 2/Ultimate as some of the best, if not THE best, mobility in my personal opinion which makes it feel even better considering unlike the other two games can actually swing in between certain objects (such as a water tower) or just zipping to the top of certain surfaces by pressing the L2+R2 buttons as to not lose momentum. Wall running and parkour are for the most part seamless though there are times where the wall running feels a bit odd to me but everything works in part to help you keep momentum. Of course there are fast travel points with the subway systems but I didn’t use those as everything just felt more natural and made sense using the swinging that was given to you.

Beating up criminals of course has random crimes pop out in the open from rooftop arms deals to segments specific to story bits like prisoner groups, or members of Mr. Negative robbing bank trucks; all of these feel good in-line with the combat given to you. This combat of course, like a lot of good open world combat games, takes heavy inspiration if not outright copying certain bits from the Batman: Arkham series (kind of like Shadow of Mordor/War did). You build up your combo via chained hits, special gadgets and doing it all while not getting hit in order to build up a sort of “Focus” meter, which when built up could be used to heal yourself or to permanently knock out an enemy in the middle of combat. Like Batman, a notification will appear warning you on who/when someone will be attacking you as well, and depending on the spider costume (unlockable through doing side quests and getting tokens) you’re wearing you get benefits helping you in combat like the Noir costume stopping enemies calling for backup or the Negative suit unleashing a shockwave of negative energy. While I only wore certain outfits (Raimi Spider-Man and comic Spider-Man for the win) for the cosmetic benefits, each of these outfits offer something fresh that could be used in the middle of combat, though like the Raimi suit, none of the free ones or the DLC ones offer much in the way of an advantage though you could play through the entire game without these so your playthrough isn’t dependent on certain suits. The gadgets in this game are pretty cool too, ranging from webs that’ll automatically knock someone out of the game by shooting an enemy to a wall with force, to trip mines that when people walk over it that it’ll web them to a surface to the Suspension Matrix, which keeps people in the air temporarily, setting them up for special attacks. It feels really good when you’re able to chain a bunch of these gadgets together to get an amazing combo and knock everyone out flawlessly, but it’s even crazier seeing people on Youtube chain stuff together and I also feel it’s relatively easy for almost everyone to do this sort of stuff with ease too. Regardless, though it’s not some sort of groundbreaking and fresh new combat system that feels like Arkham, it feels pretty damn good and the truth is that’s all that really matters. Other than that, it’s a simple gameplay loop whose combat is only as flashy and complicated as you want it to be, at least combat wise and I’ve seen people go fucking nuts on youtube with insane combinations.

The collectibles don’t just help unlock suits however, doing the collectibles/side quests help fill in a lot of the backstory for this new Spider-Man world (for example, Taskmaster’s side missions not only gives tokens but beating this side quests hint at someone hiring him to keep their eye on Spider-Man and through each activity you can actually see him watching you do the mission), divulge some lore pieces (like the Harry side quests involving a special side project going into Peter’s past with Harry Osborn, and old friend who he hasn’t heard from in a while), or are just doing the every day Spider-Man activities (one mission in particular just blatantly references Gta 4 with name drops of Niko, Roman and DeShaun (from The Lost and Damned DLC) and it’s strange but I love Gta 4 so whatever) and it all feels unique and interesting, a familiar but fresh interpretation of the Spider-Man universe and the city reflects that as well. You’ll find familiar landmarks such as the Avengers tower, a statue of Stan Lee (RIP), Uncle Ben’s grave site, a theater that in a meta context had a marriage proposal from a guy to his girlfriend before that got sadly got upended due to certain issues, Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Santorum, there’s all sorts of references to the greater Marvel universe that for the first time in a long time I’m actually really excited to see what or if there’s a greater Marvel universe that’s being planned or if it’s just Spider-Man 2 and Wolverine (though either way even if it doesn’t that’s ok too considering the superhero fatigue going on).

The gameplay section ultimately is going to be a bit on the short side, because it’s not an overly complex game and it’s not the most in-depth stuff to describe that requires pages upon pages, but it’s a pretty damn good system. The only times that I ever really sat down and felt that the gameplay was a bit on the iffy side was during the stealth sequences with Miles Morales or Mary Jane where you have to sneak around in a linear format with little stealth prompts to cause distractions. These sections, while they play just fine, are also the worst part of the game and frankly make you wish just to get back to the action like it should’ve been for the entire game. Nothing wrong with varying stuff up, but I felt like the gameplay loop of Spider-Man was fine on its own, that it didn’t need the stealth sections and that what they did throw in there we’re average, akin to a shoulder shrug.

The graphics looked fucking amazing back then, and still does now. Honestly when they decided to “Remaster” it, I was kind of surprised because of how good it looked before I came to my senses and remembered that it being remastered was not only to make the first game on the same console as the exclusive sequel-prequel Miles Morales, but also people like money and if the rumors of a Horizon: Zero Dawn remake are actually true I’m not even surprised that this came out. Sure it has its fair share of goofy moments, like looking inside of buildings from the outside reveals that it’s literally just a bunch of small rooms mapped together to make it look believable and managing to get out to the yachts will reveal a flat NPC, or the fact I somehow ended up under a subway station under the map (in the PS4 version) but the truth is everyone and everything looks great (side note, still not a fan of the Remastered Peter Parker but I guess everyone has their own feelings on it lol). I’ve played through lots of different versions of New York from previous Spider games to True Crime: New York City to god knows what else, but it feels like a good New York atmospherically. The sound design is also pretty good in that regard, with voice acting top notch as usual with hits like Yuri Lowenthal as Peter Parker (which apparently there was pushback on because he voiced the main character in Sunset Overdrive), William Saylers as Otto Octavius, I can’t really say that there’s a sort of standout performance as everyone just feels effortless in their role and it all seamlessly fits together. The soundtrack is good too, John Paesano did a good job at capturing the whimsical web-swinging music or breaking out the intense music when stuff is going bad. Overall, like usual I don’t really have anything bad to say with this as I’m easily pleased with this sort of thing and if you’re into good looking games this’ll be one of many that still look good even now.

To wrap up the review, it’s obvious that the game’s good and that I’m sucking it’s dick. Because it’s good, I would definitely say that you should pick it up, even if you’re not into superhero games or anything related to that for media in general (which I wouldn’t blame you for considering the oversaturation of it now). Since the release of this game, Insomniac has been a VERY busy company while developing games, so busy in fact that it’s basically become the most prolific company along with Naughty Dog as the top tier of Playstation Studios. Since this game released in 2018 they released Spider-Man: Remastered on PS5/Steam (happy for the Steam version though I never played the remaster on any console), Spider-Man: Miles Morales on both PC/PS5, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and the oncoming Spider-Man 2 as well as one of the next games in their new Marvel Games Universe (which I thought was gonna consist of a bunch of different games from different devs but I was wrong I think): Marvel’s Wolverine (which is rumored to be like God of War 2018 and Ragnarok in terms of gameplay style and scope). All of this without apparently going through crunch, and if this is true they run a tight ass ship and I’m happy to hear; most of the time I bitch at the end about “PLEASE REMASTER/RE-RELEASE THESE GAMES ON PC FOR PRESERVATION”.

I still will do that, but not for Spider-Man or it’s future releases because I have no doubt these will be put on PC. However, if they could remaster the rest of their back catalog (mostly seems to be Ratchet & Clank/Resistance/Spyro and hell any of their catalog which is bigger than I thought it would be) and maybe put them out somewhere I would be very grateful (especially cause they’ve been working with Nixxes, who makes great ports as opposed to Iron Galaxy with The Last of Us Part 1 on Steam). It seems that the future with this company is great, and I hope to see that continue on for the future. In any case, I’ll finish out this review with the fact that I’m going to Platinum/Review Spider-Man 2 once I’m done with it so I’ll be writing up one for Miles Morales here soon.

Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man_(2018_video_game)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5807780/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5807780/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv

https://marvels-spider-man.fandom.com/wiki/Marvel%27s_Spider-Man

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/SpiderManPS4

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/MarvelsSpiderManHostileTakeover

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFxcUzE9rUE&t=22s&ab_channel=gamemast15r

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfdJnPb5CyQ&ab_channel=gamemast15r

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_kEHCMSkGU&ab_channel=gamemast15r

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymU4sYlue9c&ab_channel=gamemast15r

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeokpGh6Qaw&ab_channel=gamemast15r

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOQm5yMQrMM&ab_channel=gamemast15r

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vstNhm6LG8U&ab_channel=gamemast15r

https://marvels-spider-man.fandom.com/wiki/Marvel%27s_Spider-Man

4 Likes

Open review

Infamous 2

2011

gamemast15r

Completed

PlayStation 3

This review contains spoilers

Infamous 2 is an open world action adventure “slightly less edgy 2000s superhero simulator” developed by Sucker Punch Studios as a sequel to their 2009 hit Infamous, as well as a Playstation 3 exclusive. Dev time for the game had gone relatively smooth for the most part on the sequel, technology had been implemented more for cutscenes, more people on screen and a mission creator while the devs focused on a new sunny setting compared to Empire City of the first game: New Marais. Honestly trying to comb through for dev history feels kind of pointless as everything seemed to have gone pretty smoothly and normally, so If I find anything cool research wise I’ll make sure to put it in the links below. However, I remember this game fondly, I could even say more so than the first Infamous; if the first one was the one that introduced me to the PS3, then this game was one of the games that made me want to get it, end of discussion.

I remember seeing this game everywhere and getting hyped for everything it had to offer from Karma playthroughs, to transfer game rewards to my most excited and hyped feature: UGC Missions. I remember as a kid I would scour through Youtube finding playthroughs of all the UGC missions amongst other things and just being excited to potentially create my own story missions and stuff. Alas however, budgets killed the hope of ever getting a PS3 until a little while after my first job. What I can say about this game is if I remember correctly, looking back on my Trophy Log I started playing this after the first game (which was my first PS3 game ever), and I think I was in the middle of hopping in between this and Yakuza 3? I would have to go about and check to see what’s true and what’s not in that regard but I’m pretty sure that was the timeline. I played this game first as a continuation of the good playthrough before years would pass. I would be attached to other games, new communities, and waiting for the right moment before I decided I wanted to beat the original two on Evil playthroughs. That came true when I decided to just do the first one early in June/July before I went on a trip to the UK and Infamous 2 started right around the time I had gotten back. Having just platinumed the game last weekend, I figured I’d write a review on why this game is one of my personal favorite PS3 exclusives of all time.

The plot is as follows: a bit of time after the events of the first Infamous, Cole and Zeke meetup with an NSA agent named Lucy Kuo in Empire City. Lucy reveals information that one Dr. Sebastian Wolfe, the man who created the Ray Sphere, can help him fight The Beast with another invention he’s come up with. For those who don’t remember, at the end of the first game, Kessler reveals to Cole that he’s been put through these trials specifically to fight The Beast, a seemingly unstoppable harbinger of doom that’s destined to become a reality and cause the fall of humanity. However, before Cole & the Gang can Jungle Boogie the fuck out of there, The Beast starts his roaring rampage in Empire and in a guided tutorial of Cole’s abilities, a fight commences which results in The Beast being pushed back (but destroying the old city) but with Cole drained of the majority of his powers.

Later arriving in New Marais, shit has already erupted within itself. New Marais is being held hostage by Joseph Bertrand, the leader of a fascist militia (creatively named The Militia) who currently quarantined the city under martial law and established an anti-conduit regime. They raid Wolfe’s lab, which results in the discovery of the RFI (or the Ray Field Inhibitor), which is only able to be powered using Blast Cores. However, Wolfe is kidnapped by this militia after the lab is blown up (with blast shards lying everywhere); and after finding leads to his location, a breakout results in Wolfe later being killed and Kuo being kidnapped instead. Searching for leads on Kuo’s locations results in a multitude of characters being introduced: Laroche, who is the leader of the rebellion going against Betrand and Nix, a conduit whose personality revolves around destruction and chaos whose powers include black napalm sludge (reminding me a lot of Sasha from the first game in the process). This is where the beginning of the Karma System really comes into play: Kuo is considered the Good Path who preaches options that limit casualties, while Nix is more on the line of chaos and destruction. The first big choice is presented: Gather the rebels to raid the Plantation where Kuo is being held prisoner, or follow Nix’s option where she straps bombs to a trolley and sends it rolling into the plantation, but the results mean that civilians die.

Whatever route you take, you break Lucy Kuo out of the prison but as a result, a bunch of Ice people also break out of this prison as well. To be encountered later, not only does Cole help Lucy to control her powers but goes out to the swamps with Nix to learn her backstory: Bertrand gathered a Ray Sphere built by Wolfe (both members of the First Sons at this point) and sacrificed a lot of people to give himself superpowers, leading to Nix taking the path she has over the fact that her family died. Either way, you work with both of them to destroy the Milita’s grip over the city, culminating in a raid on Fort Philippe (another karma moment) which can have Cole exchanging powers using a giant machine with either Nix or Kuo. Either way, whoever you choose will further alienate the other side but gives Cole some extra powers either involving Ice or Napalm depending on Karma. Another attempt to take down Bertrand leads to the reveal of his superpowers: he’s the leader of the army of mutants you’ve been taking down as well. His plans involve terrorizing the people with these mutants to have them support Betrand and the Militia.

Attempts to find Betrand in the northern districts leads to fights with the Ice people, which turn out to be Vermak 88, a group of South African mercenaries hired by Betrand and given ice powers after being experimented on. The process has led to them all going insane, and as a result a war is led on everyone in their vicinity. Along the way, bonds grow stronger or break depending on the Karma, but a near trap by Betrand and Zeke’s intervention/saving you leads to Cole apologizing and forgiving Zeke for his actions in the first game. This has been sorta semi-hinted throughout, but for those unaware of the first game’s plot, this title does a pretty good job and keeps spoilers to an absolute minimum other than The Beast. Regardless, one last ambush against Betrand (the reveal being he used the mutants and is trying to ship conduits all over the world to incite a genocide against them after being disgusted with himself) leads to a giant monster chase and everyone banding together to take him down once and for all. A bunch of men, multiple hours and seven chainsaws later, Betrand’s mutated corpse is cut up and taken off the streets while The Militia are weakened heavily.

Other subplots go on as well, such as Zeke’s infection (along with Laroche I think?) with The Plague, spreading due to Cole’s activation of the Ray Sphere in the first game as well as the gathering of new blast cores leading to Cole obtaining new powers with each one. However (in an actual cool way of displaying The Beast’s inevitable arrival), the Beast starts out 1,500 miles back in Empire City and has been slowly making his way down while Cole & the Gang try to find their Blast Cores to power up the RFI. Slowly over time, The Beast makes his way down before you’re able to find them all and Zeke in a sort of ingenious display of intellect and balls, decides to just nuke the fucker. Does it work? Well, sort of? They nuke The Beast right while they’re outside of the city, but are unable to fully take him down as he only disappears and reforms later on. Cole later raids Betrand’s ships to sink them before conduits are able to be shipped out to warring nations all over the world when John from Empire City appears in a red suit. Now people in the know, know that John died when Cole either destroyed or activated the Ray Sphere back towards the end of the last game. So how is he alive? He doesn’t explain yet, but it’s clear to most of us that he’s probably The Beast. After leading Cole to a conduit dying of the Plague, and saving her life, The Beast’s motivations are revealed. The Beast has been trying to save everyone from the Plague activated from Ray Sphere radiation, but he’s only able to activate conduit genes inside of certain people to grant immunity. Each time it’s used however (if I remember correctly), “normal” people die to power up these conduits, and so John’s argument is to sacrifice most to save the chosen few.

Cole gets all of the blast cores and gathers the RFI to learn the truth of what the Ray Field Inhibitor really does. Going with the “Inhibitor” name, it ends up nearly killing the conduits as its point is to kill the Beast by sapping away its powers. However in the process, it’ll basically kill all of the conduits on Earth. So the choice is now, save a few and sacrifice the majority or the other way around? What happens depends on your ultimate choice, and surprisingly your karma doesn’t really matter here sadly. You can kind of flip flop if you want to, be good but ultimately choose evil or vice versa. Regardless, whichever one you go with leads to untimely consequences and a twist.

The twist being that the one who'd normally side with will flip: If you choose the Evil Approach and work with The Beast to save the conduits but kill humanity, Kuo will join up out of being afraid to die while Nix and Zeke defect to join the Rebels. This happened because The Beast killed Nix’s “Babies” (a bunch of mutants who she trained to be her family) and just wants revenge. The results involve everyone dying, with Nix being slain by Cole and his amp; while Zeke is zapped repeatedly over and over again in a way that to me, signifies how brutal and far gone Cole has become, having murdered his best friend and being unable to turn back. However, John is tired of his conquest now, and doing what he thinks is right, transfers all of his powers to Cole while John fades into oblivion. The ending results in humanity being on the brink of extinction, Cole becoming The Beast and making his way from place to place, bringing chaos while also saving any and all conduits he finds.

The good ending is the canonical and opposite approach however: everyone gathers together from the Militia and Rebellion, to Nix and Zeke to fight against The Beast while Kuo defects and disappears. However, everyone almost dies here, including Nix who sacrifices herself to damage The Beast while Cole charges the RFI. Cole finally activates it and the results are that everyone perishes except Zeke; while humanity is saved, conduits all around the world are dying. Even people in different countries who haven’t even activated their powers perish but the Plague disappears and Cole’s heroism is rewarded by a monument and title of “The Patron Saint of New Marais”. However, when Zeke takes Cole’s body out to sea for burial, a piece of lightning strikes, forming a question mark over the ship as it fades to black.

My feelings on the game’s plot is that while the Karma System feels ultimately shallow in the end, that it’s a pretty solid way to end the Infamous duology with the themes. If Infamous 1 was the origin story, the sequel is Cole’s growth to doing what’s right (or wrong). In fact, everyone's character development is a lot better in this game, ESPECIALLY Zeke. In the first game, Zeke was a buffoon whom I hated because of how much of a self centered dick he was. In this game, he’s actually a lot more likable and works to regain Cole’s trust back to become a better person. Nix is kind of stereotypically evil in her responses which is okay sometimes, but becomes kind of tropey, not that I was bothered by that. Kuo is pretty cool and level headed, I like her a lot and by the end I can honestly see her character making the choices that she did through the plot of the game, even if it came out of nowhere. I guess overall, I don’t have much in the way of issues with the plot other than some holes but I can get into that in the next paragraph.

Another thing I want to mention is that like I said before, the game is good at negating spoilers and only hinting at things that happened. No references to the Kessler twist is brought up aside from a reference during the nuke mission and a few Dead Drops commenting on certain similarities. Another thing I like is that depending on the Karma brought over (or not brought over), whatever Dead Drops you get has altered dialogues about your choices from the first game. I think that stuff has amazing detail, and I like how it’s delivered. The Dead Drops don’t give you much in the way of new plot, but provide background items such as John’s connection with Lucy and Sebastian Wolfe, comments on Cole’s actions in Empire City, Bertrand’s time in the First Sons, Vermak 88’s involvement with the Militia, amongst other things. The background events from TVs reveal events on what’s going on with the government, there’s just a lot of flavor text I enjoy. The only thing I don’t understand is the obvious plot hole: If Cole’s heroic and canon actions means all conduits die, why are there sequels? I don’t really know or understand this but whatever I guess? It seems like the games were meant to end here, but money brought the sequels into play.

The gameplay is quite similar to the previous title: you parkour around the open world city, fight enemies with special powers (depending on Karma), drain electricity for health and energy, pick up blast shards to upgrade your powers and gain XP, complete missions and side quests, completing UGC Missions (User Generated Content) if they’re available, along with interacting with special karma events for a bit of a boost. Starting again with powers and transportation, for the most part it’ll still consist of special powers (such as the glide power) along with parkour. For the most part it’s still the same, tapping the X button the climb the side of buildings and the ability to glide across electric wires are still there amongst pretty much everything from the previous games. If I were to add something NEW that the game put in for transportation is probably the piping that is placed on the side of buildings that when jumped on, Cole boosts himself up electrically to slide himself up to the roof faster. The free running in this game feels a lot smoother than in the first game due to whatever system improvements they improved, however you’ll still have times where your character tends to gravitate towards certain objects and areas you’re not trying to go towards, and if you’re nearly dead or in combat then it can be frustrating to deal with.

However, one thing that helps is a specific power, though sadly you only get it way later in the game: Electric Tether. You can choose to switch between several different powers on the fly, and though I don’t remember what the electric tether replaces at the moment (maybe Kinetic Pulse? The ability to levitate vehicles and objects?), it’s fantastic for being able to reach further distances for faster and smoother parkour moments, almost like one of Spider-Man’s webs or something. Of course, being able to get more powers in this game, you have the ability to switch them on the fly and in this sense, you’re able to figure out what sort of build you want. Do you want the usual electric bolts? Do you want a burst fire electric bolt? A slower, but more powerful version? You can mix and match these sorts of powers, though most of these you can only unlock using XP and/or completing certain karma ranks/in game events (like hitting four enemies off of a roof at once as an example). If there’s anything I can give this game praise for, is that the amount of variation is pretty good, though I noticed that they forgot about the psychic mind reading stuff from the first game. However, sometimes switching out these abilities (holding down on the D-Pad and pressing the buttons you want to switch powers around) can feel kind of cumbersome.

If we’re going with Karma from earlier, as said before certain powers are locked behind certain karma ranks (such as Thug, Outlaw or Infamous and Guardian, Champion and Hero). You’ll be able to get these ranks by doing the actions that correspond, such as saving people or arc restraining criminals for good while the opposite is bio leeching everyone and killing indiscriminately. What I can say is that for the most part, the karma systems are very forgiving in how it’s implemented and I’ve killed numerous people by accident before but still stay in the good ranks and vice versa if that’s what you’re looking for. Of course, if you’re trying to go out of your way to be a hero or a bastard, then eventually you’ll get there. Some other ways you could do this is by completing designated karma moments during main missions (the only way to truly rise the ranks as some of it is blocked off early, as an example choosing whether to swap powers with Kuo or Nix gives you different powers and advantages), completing specific karma side missions or regular side missions in a karmic aligned manner (which isn’t always possible) or you could alternatively just grind them in designated UGC missions (though you’ll get limited XP) if you’re able to get the servers online. What I can say with the Karma is that it’s not really an in-depth system, it’s very in your face and blatant with how it makes its choices, sometimes making it feel a little bit shallow. That being said, it’s not the worst thing and sometimes I don’t really want some in-depth Karma system like the Metro games as an example and that’s ok.

The blast shards are back and gathering a bunch of them leads to your electricity capacity being raised in small bits. One pretty cool thing if you played the first game is that if you collected half the shards in Empire City, you’ll carry them over along with a level one karma of your playthrough into New Marais (if you so choose of course). Another thing I’d like to bring up as an improvement, unlike the first game, they patched out the “die instantly getting caught on random objects” glitch which I’m VERY thankful for because that was annoying to deal with. As such, the environment is also a bit more forgiving with water (essentially because New Marais is surrounded with it). While it’s instant death in deeper waters, more shallow waters (in the flooded areas) means you’ll still get damaged of course, but you don’t die instantly and it gives you a chance to escape.

Combat also feels a lot better melee wise, moving on from the fists leads to this game’s AMP, which is a giant metal stick capable of annihilation if upgraded all the way. If you upgrade it, then you’ll be able to reach 50% and 100% special attacks, in which pressing triangle leads to a special animation which can either finish off an enemy when they’re hurt or just wipe one out in general. However, if there’s a downside to combat in this game is just the factions this time are a lot less interesting: it mainly boils down to the Militia (the main faction in the first area and a group of southern fascists), Vermaak 88 (a south african mercenary group with ice powers who covers the northern area) and mutants, which can be seen mostly in swampy areas or in random situations. There aren’t a lot of cool gangs with their own personality, and while I understand that these factions are in here for a story based purpose, half the time I forgot who Vermaak 88 was and they’re essentially the coolest looking in the entire game. They also fight with different tactics: mutants just tend to swarm, the Militia act like an actual military while Vermaak tends to jump everywhere with Ice and stay on the move (which by the way, fuck their shotgun enemy type in the ass I hate that bitch).

I guess to finish off on gameplay stuff, at least with UGC stuff and hard difficulty mixed with trophies, UGC missions are needed to get one or two trophies I think? If you care about those, it’ll be a bit more difficult to do them now because Sucker Punch migrated servers for an eventual sunset in the future, so in order to do them now you’ll have to figure out something with the internet. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a solution so I can’t help with that sadly. One thing I can say is good trophy wise is that now, unlike the first game, you don’t need to unlock all the Karma powers. What this means is that if you already did it once for the good playthrough, you can essentially speedrun the evil playthrough and solely do the missions only and while they may be a tad more difficult without certain powers (on Hard Difficulty, that’s how I’d recommend it), the open world nature means there are more ways to escape and heal if need be. If I failed to bring some stuff up, my apologies as the game is for the most part other than a key few differences, the same as the first game except they feel a lot better; and honestly if it’s not broken, then don’t fix it is a good, sound mentality..

Speaking of sound, I’ll start with the voice acting audio wise by saying I still prefer Jason Cottle’s gravelly Cole Macgrath than I do Eric Laden’s. That’s not to say that it’s bad or anything because it’s not, in fact I often didn’t even think about the voice actor change. However, it’s strange they were able to get Caleb Moody back as Zeke from the first one, and not Cole’s original voice actor. I have no clue as to why this is, maybe it was a monetary thing or maybe it was just they wanted someone more youthful? Who knows, what I can say is that Caleb Moody does fantastic playing Zeke as someone who is more mature and regrets his mistakes from the previous game. Those are my main two standouts, though keep in mind everyone does a good job, from bringing Phil Lamar back as John from the first game to Michael Ensign as Sebastian Wolfe’s savory British voice and Dawn Olivieri as Kuo. Environmental stuff with New Marais is cool as ever sound design wise, with the favorite being grinding the electric wires on top of buildings and the weapons sound like how they feel, pretty damn good.

Music wise is pretty good too, the music being split into the Blue and Red side for Good and Evil Karma respectively; having only replayed the evil section recently I’d say that Closing Time is probably my favorite on that karma as it has a sort of jazzy flavor to it mixed in with the orchestral trappings. Fade Away by The Black Heart Procession on the Good Side (and Credits sequence I believe) sounds sad as hell, and is probably my actual favorite piece in the entire game period, accentuating the bittersweet ending to the Infamous franchise. La Roux sounds like something RL Burnside would make if he was doing video game music, and Shoot the Messenger sounds distinctly like a jazzy noir flick. In fact, to say that the whole soundtrack is southern flavored is an understatement and honestly fits the game like a fucking glove.

The graphics being Playstation 3 are predictably going to look like Playstation 3 graphics, however being me I can’t really complain on that end because I’m usually cool with stuff like that. Models look upscaled and have a bit more detail compared to the previous game, some models are just changed entirely however, especially Cole himself who honestly looks more youthful in comparison to Infamous 1. Funny enough speaking of Cole’s model, while I prefer how he looks and sounds in the first game, you know he almost had full on hair and weird looking track pants in the beta? Funny shit, I’ll post a link of a low res trailer below but thank god they didn’t go down that route. Enemy models are pretty interesting for the most part, with my favorite being how disgusting the creatures you can fight end up looking? Vermaak 88 is cool too as a gang, and Militia is ok I guess but I’ll be honest, I preferred how the gangs back in Empire City looked as they all felt distinct and just more…interesting I guess? That’s not to say that all of Empire City is better in every way of course.

In fact, while I love the dark and edgy vibe of Empire City of the first game, if I could give criticism it would be that having played both games back to back (sorta) that it feels like the developers smushed some jelly or something sometimes, like some weird filter stuff that I didn’t care for. In this game, with the brighter aura surrounding the city of New Marais thankfully they took that stuff off for the most part. Speaking of New Marais, while I prefer the city of Empire sometimes, the contrast between the two games speak to me as a sort of tonal character arc: the dark and gritty origin story while this game speaks more to Cole becoming the hero (or villain) that he’s meant to be fully and having a sunny and colorful, but dark backdrop in the form of the New Orleans expy is honestly an excellent choice. Whether fighting through the old buildings of the aging city against the Militia or trying not to electrocute yourself in the harrowing and kind of scary flooded section of the city makes it arguably more memorable than most areas in the first game. There are still comic book scenes of course, but the game definitely employs a lot more cutscenes as well to reflect the budget. Graphically and atmospherically, Infamous 2 is a game that improves upon its visuals in every way as a sequel should, even if I prefer some of the original some times.

Infamous 2 as a game to me, while still feeling a bit behind in some areas, represents what quality of Playstation Exclusives are, and in some ways is the high bar that modern generations haven’t been able to reach. That’s not to say there haven’t been bangers: Spider-Man, Bloodborne, hell even The Last of Us came out a year later and I’d say that’s the most popular one ever. But I feel that since the PS3 generation, there’s been a bit lacking in terms of truly original and creative content that truly excites me personally. The basics of Infamous for the most part were improved in every way, and if I were a head guy at Sony Interactive Entertainment then these would be some of the first PS3 games I would port to PC (as they should be). However, this being what I consider to be the pinnacle of the franchise, Sucker Punch would later take a dramatic shift in terms of quality and memorability (although the Festival of Blood DLC was pretty solid).

The sequel that took place after this, Infamous: Second Son, while decent enough, kind of killed the momentum of the series that truthfully, kind of died with Cole. Maybe that’s what should’ve happened? The ending of the second game said that all conduits died, and there are enough plot holes in Second Son that make me wonder about should’ve been? I don’t know, it’s hard to say. That’s not to say Sucker Punch hasn’t had a great track record in general, as since this game and the next sequels, they came out with the phenomenal Ghosts of Tsushima. Sometimes though, I wonder about what’ll be in the series future, especially because they announced no new Infamous or Sly Cooper titles. That and even the UGC stuff, while barely functional, was recently announced that maintenance would occur to have them move to a different server before an eventual sunset. However, during my evil playthrough they never came on once, and I’m not going to go through fifteen different INS server options to figure out how to bring them back. However, as far as I know they haven’t been fully shut down completely so I’d say if you wanna get the platinum, try to go for it now while you have the chance. And as a final thing, I hope SOMEONE at Sony definitely considers a remaster and a port, and if you don’t wanna put in UGC then get the best of missions perhaps as a sort of added content? I don’t know, but I don’t feel like ignoring our past will do us any good, not only as it’s a piece of gaming history but arguably because there are people out there that still love this game like I do. If there’s at least one person that loves something, then it’s at least worth the time and effort to keep the legacy going by any means necessary.

Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infamous_2

https://www.suckerpunch.com/upcoming-infamous-2-ugc-maintenance-and-legacy-franchises/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17G-JZvbmmY&ab_channel=NeoGamer-TheVideoGameArchive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6F_phv10gY&ab_channel=NeoGamer-TheVideoGameArchive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89IqJU_npcA&ab_channel=hRDLA

https://infamous.fandom.com/wiki/Infamous_2

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Open review

Saints Row

2006

gamemast15r

Completed

Xbox 360

This review contains spoilers

Saints Row is a “gangbanging set trippin” simulator/open world crime game developed by Volition (rest in peace), who before creating Saints Row had developed the Descent series of games as well Red Faction 1 & 2 as well as the notorious Punisher video game. Saints Row had started its foundations as a Playstation 2 game titled “Bling Bling”. The game was announced at E3 2005 with the new name, Saints Row, as an Xbox 360 title with supposed PC and PS3 ports to follow later. These ports however were canned to focus more on the sequel, WHICH IT SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN, but nonetheless they were. I remember seeing a beta trailer where the Saints were green and I had watched a mrsaintsgodzilla21 video where apparently a sequel to the aforementioned Punisher game was being developed with a lot of Saints Row mechanics in mind as an open world style game? I’ll put both of these down in the links below but otherwise development. As far as I’m aware though, I can’t seem to find anything in terms of crazy development stories so I believe the game went off pretty well other than switching from Playstation 2 to the Xbox 360.

I originally encountered Saints Row through playing it at my Mom’s friend's house. As a young child, I didn’t have an Xbox 360 or any next gen games so I was mainly used to playing the previous generation for the longest time. This same friend of my mother’s funny enough is where I also got introduced to my love of horror, because she gave me Condemned: Criminal Origins as an Xbox 360 game but that’s a different story. I had played Saints Row pretty much all the damn time when I was over there along with Grand Theft Auto 4 and I was always really excited to go over and play the game. Afterwards for the longest time, I hadn’t really played too much of the Saints Row series at all, in fact I think I had played Saints Row 2 before playing the first one again after remembering the game’s existence. I would repeatedly play it on and off once I got my Xbox 360, and would be one of my main go-to games for entertainment as I messed about offline. I ended up replaying this a little while ago for the first time backwards compatible via the Xbox One after Microsoft made the game compatible around 2018. I believed I had finished it last year or the year before, and so I’m writing this review now because my buddy BFD Survivor enlisted me for a future playthrough on Saints Row 2’s port for PC (after we fix the damn thing of course). Saints Row as a series would become mixed in my eyes but I can safely say to this day that this and the second game are some of my favorite open world crime games of all time, in fact they’re two of my favorite games of all time. This review isn’t going to be a supercritical one as much as it’s just going to be me sucking this game’s cock and verbalizing how much I truly enjoyed my time with this game, while maybe offering a critique here and there.

The plot begins with your created character (aka Playa; clever Volition, clever) as you walk down the streets of Saints Row, a district in the city of Stilwater. Stilwater is a city rampant with crime, drugs, prostitution, all the good shit you’d love in a city overrun with criminal issues. Passing by someone selling stolen watches and a hooker, a gang war unfolds in the district over unclaimed territory over a gang tag on a nearby wall between three gangs: the Vice Kings (Yellow clad gangsters led by the well connected record executive CEO named Benjamin King and involved in lots of prostitution which Julius used to roll with), the Westside Rollerz (a blue gang mostly led by white boys who love underground racing and are led by Joseph Price and his uncle, William Sharp, a wealthy financier, and Los Carnales (not THE Los Carnales, are a red-clad latino gang who deals with drugs and guns led by the Lopez brothers along with their colombian backers). It nearly ends badly for you, a bullet in the forehead by some lone Vice King dweeb when you’re saved by two people: Julius Little and Troy Bradshaw. Looking to stop the gangs once and for all from destroying their neighborhood, Julius tells “Playa” to come by the church in the middle of the district if they want to take back the neighborhood from the gangs. It’s here where they get “canonized”, and are thrown into the middle of a gang initiation which you could either win or lose depending on if you get stomped out while meeting some of the other lieutenants in the Saints, mainly Johnny Gat and Dex. After this you sort of get used to the basics: buy a gun, kill some Vice Kings, and take over some territory (while doing some optional objectives like strongholds or stealing hoes from other pimps). Afterwords, the district is yours and Julius comes up with game plans for every gang in the city: Johnny Gat is set on the Vice Kings (which Troy backs out of aggressively), Lin is sent to infiltrate the Rollerz (first time seeing her of course) and Dex is told to come up with a way to take down “the” Los Carnales.

The Vice Kings story arc starts off with meeting up with Johnny Gat and his girlfriend Aisha, who reports that her sister’s been kidnapped off the street, presumably by Vice Kings lieutenant Tanya Winters who heads up the prostitution ring of the gang. This culminates in Aisha and Gat coming up with a plan for a big fuck you to the Vice Kings. See, Aisha is actually an R&B artist (whose songs you can listen to on the radio stations) and she signed to Kingdom Come Records, Benjamin King’s record company. However extortion is at play and with the kidnapping of her sister, all bets are off the table so the two come up with a plan to fake her death by bringing her to the session before blowing up the entire building with a car bomb (with a nice little 2Pac “7 Day Theory” reference to go. That goes off surprisingly without a hitch, and Gat’s next plan is a very simple one: kill Tanya Winters, and emphasis is placed on how she slept with both Anthony Green (King’s bodyguard) as well as Warren Williams (a former rapper named EZ Money as well as the guy who managed Kingdom Come Records) behind Green’s back. This dynamic will come into play later but for now, but Gat tells the Playa to take over her brothel at Prawn Court, which will mess up the prostitution business King has going on. Prawn Court is conquered but no Tanya, and a cutscene that follows shows King’s inner circles (including Tanya) bitching about the Saints. King tells them all to calm down as he’s going to rebuild the record company and that he’ll put pressure on police chief Monroe to crack down on the Saints so they can retake the brothel. The cops crack down on the Saints, but after Johnny hears that the Vice Kings are attempting to retake the brothel, sends the Playa back to Prawn Court to kill the invaders. Afterwards, Gat calls to let him know that Tanya is holding up in the old Sunnyvale Gardens police station and to drop by the church later as they have “murdering to do”. This “murdering” plan doesn’t go too well as the raid ends in an ambush where Gat gets shot in the leg with a shotgun and is kidnapped by Anthony Green while the Playa has to jump out of the top floor window to survive.

The gang meet up at the church and Julius comes up with a plan for the Playa to pose as Tanya’s chauffeur so she can lead them back to where Anthony Green is holding Gat. It works and the Playa raids the condo where Johnny is being held, killing Anthony Green in the process and saving Johnny, though Tanya escapes AGAIN. Rendezvousing back to the church, Dex comes up with a plan to force the police to put pressure on the Vice Kings…by making Johnny and the Playa dress up as them and cause chaos. They do so, killing all sorts of people and destroying public property and bringing about news attention. There’s also this growing tension between Warren Williams and Benjamin King over their clashing ideologies: Warren just wants to kill and go for the throat while Ben is thinking about the long game with their political connections and they have an argument over what to do with the Saints again. To put even more pressure on the police/Vice King relationship, Johnny decides to blow up the cops working with the gang using RPGs looted from Anthony’s crib and the fallout (which includes blowing up Kingdom Come Records AGAIN) leads to Warren Williams and Tanya leading a coup against King. King fights his way out but barely survives, calling his old buddy Julius for help and the Playa is sent to rescue King from his own men. Warren also attempts to kill him in a drive-by but this ends up with Warren out of commission and betrayed by Tanya who kills him while he’s down, ascending to the Vice King’s throne. King and the Playa lure the rest of the Vice Kings to their death via police ambush before they lead an attack on the penthouse Tanya is in. In order to get the codes to get inside, they interrogate “eurotrash” clothing guy and Tanya’s fashion stylist Stefan before raiding and shooting Tanya out of her own office onto the streets below. Gat, the Playa and King split up with King thanking the Playa for their help and giving him the keys to the penthouse.

Quote of the Section: “Hope you don’t mind Hepatitis”.

The Westside Rollerz story arc begins with the Playa meeting up with Lin, whose first job is you stealing a shipment of vehicles and bringing them to a garage for a “special surprise”. This surprise involves tampering with them to where if they hit up a high speed then it explodes, and Troy joins up with you on this job to taunt them enough to activate their nitrous. The whole race goes up in smoke and the Playa leaves with satisfaction, though things still aren’t going fast enough for Lin. Lin’s next plan is simple: attack a Westside Rollerz mechanic named Donnie, who’s friends with the co-commander Joseph Price. However, this is a ruse so that Lin can save him so she can get introduced into the inner circle faster. The plan works, and Lin gets to meet with Joseph Price and his uncle William Sharp, who discusses some of their other plans. How the Playa is able to eavesdrop outside the house to hear about it all without any guards around I’m not sure, but Donnie lets loose info about a car shipment. The Playa protects this shipment from the gang, which forces them to find another way to get the parts. Fun fact, Steve Jaros (the lead writer) posted on Twitter or X or whatever the fuck that “The Buyers” ominously mentioned were apparently Shogo Akuji and the Ronin from the second game so fun stuff. The group decides to strip a bunch of different cars for parts instead, and the Playa fucks that plan up as well. However, Price and Sharp deduce that the Third Street Saints must be getting their info from somewhere, and who did they recently introduced into the circle? Lin. Lin calls the Playa and tells them that something is going down at a pool hall, but this turns into a Rollerz ambush which ends up in you getting knocked out, a bunch of dead bodies and you in the trunk of a car with Lin. The two hear Sharp talking to Donnie about loose ends and shoots both of them with a .44 before kicking the car into the river. Lin is able to set you free before dying, and the Playa escapes to cut off and kill William Sharp as revenge. Price sets up a meeting with his gang and organizes a convoy to raze Saints Row to the ground, however Troy intercepts the call and Julius goes with the Playa to raze them instead with a rocket launcher. Afterwards, Price calls demanding a final showdown and instead attempts to run over the Playa but fails. Chasing him down on the highway, the Playa finally kills Price and the Rollerz are smashed to nothing.

Quote of the Section: “I almost got ran over by a motherfucking truck, whatchu think?”

Los Carnale’s story arc (It’s not THE, Los means…fuck it) starts with the Playa meeting up with Dex who gives a rundown of the gang. Los Carnales is ran by Hector and Angelo Lopez and is backed by the biggest drug cartel in the world, so Dex wants to play it safe and cut out the profits. Two drug labs and a Carnales truck hijacking later (with plans to use it for some unknown purpose against the main drug plant) and the higher ups notice almost immediately. Hector instructs Angelo and their enforcer, the feared Victor Rodriguez, to launch an attack on Saints Row. The Carnales do that though Victor and Angelo soon leave while the rest of the gang is wiped out by the Playa. Afterwards, Dex gathers Troy and the Playa and reveals his plan: use the truck they hijacked to sneak into the main Carnales drug plant in a sort of Trojan Horse move in an attempt to take it over. It works, which leads to Manuel Orjuela (the Cartel representative) to question Hector’s speed in wiping out the Saints. This questioning comes to fruition when Dex brings the Playa to a Friendly Fire gun shop to pick up a sniper rifle to assassinate Hector during a meeting with the Columbians, intending to frame them as the perpetrators. The plan goes off again without a hitch, and Victor relays the news to Angelo who is in the middle of getting head from his girlfriend Luz. There’s also a little subplot around Manuel having his eye on Luz, intending to take her for himself but that’s not really followed up on too much. Dex, Troy and the Playa gather around for the next stage of the plan: Troy wants to kill Manuel but Dex wants to meet with him first then decide what to do. They attempt to meet up with Manuel at a strip club, but Victor is there and chases them all the way back to Saints Row before losing them entirely. Fun fact about this mission, Victor is invincible the entire way so don’t bother shooting to kill him.

Meeting back at the church, Julius is furious at Dex for attempting to meet with the Colombians without consulting him but Victor storms the church with goons. One violent shootout later and the legendary enforcer is dead, with Troy using his burning body as a lighter for his cigarette. Angelo is furious and intends to kill the Saints himself before slapping his girlfriend Luz over Manuel’s romantic interests and storms off. Julius later gets back from a meeting with Manuel with a proposal: the assassination at the shipyard led to a lot of drugs being confiscated by police. If the Saints can get the drugs back, the Colombians will drop Los Carnales and back them instead. Using a plan from Troy to blow a hole in the evidence room with a car bomb, the Saints raid the station while the Playa defends from the outside and they get the drugs back. After a handshake meeting between Julius and Manuel gets ambushed by Angelo who shoots up the place, Manuel gives them the location of the Lopez Mansion but tells them to “leave the senorita alone”. Dex and the Playa raid Angelo’s mansion to kill him before giving chase via vehicle, though Angelo escapes by driving over an open bridge. The final mission has Dex pulling up beside you at the church, telling you that Angelo plans to escape the city via the airport, and the two of you drive off to finish him off once and for all. The two manage to kill all of his armed guards as well as destroy his airplane, finishing him off once and for all. Luz arrives too late, having missed her flight arrives with constant questions before almost getting shot by the two. Dex gives him the keys to Angelo’s ride and tells him that Julius was right about him and they split off.

Quote of the section: “Bullshit, that was last year’s fall collection!”

After you take down all three gangs, Stilwater is finally yours. You’re promoted to right hand man and the Third Street Saints have become the most dominant gang in the city. However, Julius is pulled over by the police and disappears permanently, becoming the last time your character hears from him in game. A voice calls you up, a voice belonging to Chief of Police Richard Monroe. See he has his own game plan, and his is to use Julius as leverage against the Saints to make them do his dirty work for him. This dirty work involves assassinating mayoral candidate Marshall Winslow, himself a citizen hailing from Saints Row, for his boss. How do you do this? You literally hijack his campaign bus and leave it on some train tracks, leading to a fiery death and an explosion. If you’re paying attention throughout the entire game to radio ads you’ll learn of an upcoming election between (pretty sure) Democrat Marshall Winslow and Republican Alderman Richard Hughes where they attack each other viciously over various political beliefs. Of course, the chief of police decides to renege on his deal to let Julius go and tells the Saints that he’ll be in contact soon with more work. The Playa, Gat and Dex decide that enough is enough and that there’s no way the gang is going to be the police chief’s lapdog, so they decide to assassinate him publicly at Winslow’s funeral. This almost fails but ends with a whole bunch of dead police officers and the Saints escape away from the carnage. The final mission, just a cutscene really, involves Playa getting called to meet Monroe’s boss Hughes (with Julius supposedly meeting him there) on his yacht. Meeting up with him, Hughes thanks the Playa smugly for handing him the election and covering up any loose ends with the chief of police. Hughes has an “urban city renewal plan” that he plans to use to wipe out the Saints as the last gang in the city, having previously been criticized for displacing poor people. You’ll get a montage of the other characters in the game before Hughes decides to have you killed and here is where you’ll get three final reveals. Troy reveals himself to be an undercover cop and all of the previous hints become relevant in context (for example, his refusal to go after the Vice Kings, his knowledge of how police stations have evidence lock up, the constant questioning and even clues that you could piece together by reading the manual to the game). Julius is also revealed to be alive, and looks over the yacht at the river and looks at his watch before walking away. The final part has Hughes attempting to walk away as he tries to get his guards to kill the Playa before the yacht explodes in a fiery blaze, being the final twist in the game. No context, nothing; just a giant explosion and the feeling that Julius blew up the both of you.

Final Quote: “Can you hurry this up? I wanna go to Freckle Bitch’s.”

The plot to Saints Row is very much a “from rags to riches' ' sort of story, where you start out as a small fry and make your way up through the food chain as you wipe out each and every gang in their own storylines. The characters in this game are unique and memorable, and I don’t think a day will go by where I won’t think about iconic gangsters like the loose cannon Johnny Gat, the sophisticated gangster Benjamin King, the elder statesmen Julius Little or even smaller characters like Luz from Los Carnales, Stefan the annoying Eurotrash or Donnie from the Westside Rollerz. Each and every character adds a bit of flavor to the game that I appreciate, and culminates in a fun storyline that ends with a bang (literally). If I were to say anything about the campaigns it’s that I feel like the Vice Kings is the top one in terms of quality, with Los Carnales being my personal favorite and second one with quality. Both of them have their moments, their arcs and honestly connect to each other with little brick jokes that make it seem like it has a chronological order (Vice Kings first and Carnales last) that I just love. My least favorite is the Rollerz, mainly due to the fact that everything seems rushed and kind of out of order sometimes. The first two missions with the racing and car hijacking feels like could happen after rescuing Donnie, none of the missions feel particularly impactful aside from Lin’s death and truthfully I guess it just doesn’t interest me as well as I wanted it to. It’s not that it’s bad it’s just that it pales in comparison, and probably should be beaten first just to get it out of the way (even if I always go against Los Carnales first).

It’s a simple plot, not really filled with too many twists until the very last moment though a lot of this was due to development issues (though Troy being an undercover cop apparently was always a thing that was going to happen). For example, the only reason that Julius Little ended up becoming an antagonist was due to the fact that the animation for the cutscene ended up being shit, and so they had to reuse an Aisha animation where she checks her watch and this ultimately pushed the franchise into a different direction entirely. The character development for your character isn’t really huge in an emotional way as much as a financial way, though you do get a hint at your future snarkiness with classic lines like “I almost got hit by a motherfucking truck, whatchu think?” and “Bullshit! Those are last year’s fall collection!” referring to shoes that Luz is wearing. I don’t really know what else I can fill out here, there’s just so much personality to this game, little comedic moments wrapped around an actual serious gangster story where you take the central role in growing your small-time street gang into something much bigger. It’s a tale that’s simple but effective and one that I can appreciate with the little details as well as the sense of humor that it brings to the table, while also probably being the most serious that this franchise has ever been. Honestly, I miss this version of Saints Row even if I liked 2 and 3 a lot and I wish they would’ve gone back to this.

The gameplay is an open world crime based game where you can complete activities, shoot people, steal cars and engage in lots of customization and other activities that they don’t exactly spell out for you. What I’ll start with gameplay wise is the driving, which I’ll be straight up feels consistent and fantastic. It doesn’t feel as weighty and bloated as say Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5 would later feel, chasing some desire to be realistic with its behind the wheel escapades. I couldn’t give less than a fuck about that, if I’m going to drive a car in game then I want the handling to be smooth and when I actually make a drift that I don’t make a fat U-turn the other direction sideways and the Saints Row series I feel has almost always done a good job with that with pretty much any vehicle you drive. Keep in mind though, there aren’t any drivable boats, motorcycles or helicopters unlike the sequels so you’ll basically be going between “Cheap ass car”, “Cheap gangster ass car” and “Holy shit this is a ferrari” level of quality in cars (not just sports cars of course, they have Rolls Royces but they have their own names for copyright reasons). The gunplay is really simple, painfully so: you literally have a weapons wheel you hold B to open, and you use the right thumbstick to pick one of the weapons you want. There is no reloading sadly unless you’re idle or out of ammo but there is a melee button you can use to hit people with whether it’s a pistol whip or an assault rifle swing that knocks people dead in the face but that’s also it. There’s also melee weapons like baseball bats, knives you know the usual shit in these games that work just as well for low level goons. Best part about combat is how smooth everything feels, and the ragdolls are just the icing on top. You can consume all sorts of stuff from fast food at your local Freckle Bitch’s for health purposes or go to the liquor store to pick up booze and blunts, though the booze and blunts is more for the show than to add any benefits.

In order to do main missions you need to get respect, and respect can be obtained in many different ways: killing rival gangster is a sure way of doing it, so is customizing yourself and buying clothes and cars (obviously if it’s purple you get more of a boost to your respect) but the main way is to do side activities. Side activities range from Insurance Fraud, where you jump in front of cars in order to get a lot of bank to drug trafficking, where you ride alongside someone and protect them as they deal drugs from both cops and rival gangs to hitman and chop shop activities. They’re all varied and different enough to where if you have trouble with one, you can hop over to another activity and gain enough respect for multiple different missions if need be. If I remember correctly, during my playthroughs there were ones that I didn’t even touch at all. However, unlike the future Saints Rows, they go past 6 levels to 8 levels instead. There are no mid-rewards like Saints Row 2, it’s just one straight shot to the end for the final reward instead; however you don’t have to complete everything in one go thankfully so you can always come back later. Some of these rewards include losing notoriety faster (Drug Trafficking), reduced damage (Insurance Fraud), pimp outfits and the Pimp Cane shotgun (Snatch), and weapons in your weapon cache (Mayhem) along with others I’m sure I didn’t list. Other side activities that are smaller but have rewards include collecting CDs (which every ten or so gives you a new track created for the game) and tagging, which requires quick time events and rewards you with unlimited sprint for all of them. If you’re a completionist, it’s recommended to get all the activities done before you complete the story (or at least the drug trafficking stuff) because otherwise some of the rewards are pointless. Other smaller activities that don't really give you much in the way of reputation but can get you a quick buck involves taking hostages, which involves stealing a car with a passenger inside of it and holding them for a certain amount of time for a cash bonus with cops chasing you. Another one you can do is robbing shops: you can either break into the safe yourself and open it up with quick time events; if you rob it during the day you just get cash, but if you rob it during nighttime you can steal a box to put it in the trunk of a car to deliver to a fence to sell.

When you play the game, you originally start out with a beat up house (called a “Crib”) in the Saints Row district, where you can access any clothes bought or weapons in your cache and even money you collect from your various districts. When you take down each of the gangs, you own their cribs (like Benjamin King’s penthouse or Angelo Lopez’s mansion) for example and these are a lot more flamboyant and stylish. They aren’t like Saints Row 2 where you can buy up a bunch and customize them but they’re nice places to save your progress and drive cars out of your garage. You can also save at every stronghold you unlock in the game and that’s pretty cool too but doesn't really have extra features like cribs do. Not for customization, there’s a lot to work with here from character customization at the beginning (though you can always change it with plastic surgery at Image As Designed), you can buy clothes and change different colors (though finding a belt to work with an outfit can be a giant pain in the ass in my opinion), and repair/customize cars at the local garages which you can save for your crib for later. I won’t go too into detail on this as there’s a lot you can do with it but it all looks and feels incredible getting your own style down, whether you’re trying to look like somebody or if you’re trying to make the most cursed character alive. The only downside to this is that there’s no female characters to play as, so it feels kind of weird and inconsistent if you’re trying to create one character to play from the beginning to the end of the series.

The last main thing I’d like to bring up are homies: these are recruitable companions (lol) that you can either hit up on the cell phone (once you unlock them), or mostly whistle for on the street that will follow you on command. The ones on the street are the easiest, have their own weapons and the more of the story you go through, their weapons get better. There are also special homies, ones which you unlock either through completing certain side quests (like getting Will from completing Snatch in the Saints Row district, or Mr. Wong from the Chinatown hitman activities for example), while there are two you can unlock from calling certain numbers. If you call 555-2445 on your in-game phone (from the pause menu) you can get a homie named “Chicken Ned” who shows up with a baseball bat. You can also unlock Zombie Lin after you complete the mission involving her death by calling the business “Eye for an Eye”. I like these little easter eggs as they add a little bit of flavor in the game, and there are more easter eggs and callable numbers to boot. You can call up numbers like 911 for the usual response from paramedics and even get healing, calling Big Willy’s Cab sends a cab out to your way for a pickup (though you can also travel via trains at train stops), or call up random numbers you see in the city for funny voice messages and nothing else. There are also numbers you can call up to unlock cheat codes as well as little easter eggs you can find here and there like civilian suicide hotspots, the teddy bear full of money in the Lopez mansion, or just little references that add to the world of the game. Also, you can blow up trains and I think that’s fucking hilarious. That’s about it for the gameplay that I can think of but I’m sure there’s more I’m missing out on describing.

The sound design for Saints Row is something that’s painfully easy to describe, and I’ll start with the music here because the music slaps. Granted, I’ll sit down here and say that I have listened to all of it? No, in fact I mostly listened (and still listen) to KRHYME FM, and let me tell you something man that radio station has all the fucking hits. There are songs that I’ve discovered off of that soundtrack that I STILL listen to today, from Masta Ace’s Soda & Soap, DJ Mathematic’s Real Nillaz, The Alchemist’s & Lloyd Bank’s Bangers track. That’s not to say that there aren’t any other good radio stations, in fact I bounced a lot between KRhyme, TheKronic and Sizzurp and bumped tracks like Eric B. and Rakim’s I Ain’t No Joke, R.A. the Rugged Man’s Black & White, Mathematic’s Spotlite and a whole bunch of other tracks I don’t remember off the top of my head. In fact, I’m genuinely surprised that there were three separate rap stations, not that I would complain about rap, hip hop and R&B but I’m surprised they didn’t try to condense it down since apparently there are three tracks spread across at least two stations (from Aisha in-universe of course) and tracks from artists that come from the SAME ALBUM (Mathematics mostly) that are put on different stations. I think so at least, shit’s strange as hell. Other tracks you mostly get from unlocking them by collecting CDs as mentioned before (shoutout to David Banner’s Saints Row, one of the most addicting tracks to listen to in game) for exclusive tracks or Masta Ace’s Take a Walk (which you can only buy from Scratch That, a record store in game). I can’t and won’t speak for the other radio stations, though next time I play it I really need to try the drum & bass channel because I love me some drum & bass but besides the point, the culture of Saints Row is heavily influenced by the hippity hops and the rippety raps and I’m always weak for it, especially considering it came out in the mid 2000s.

What I’ll say about the sound effects and sound design is that they bring the game to life in a way that feels great and unique. I’ll start with guns because by god do the guns sound amazing; the shotguns feel impactful, the M16 has this smooth and buttery sound that I could probably listen to forever and would make me fall asleep in a strange way while the AK sounds crunchy and menacing. Pistols for the most part sound like starter weapons (except the GDHC which hot damn) but again they feel and sound like they have impact and if you want your weapons to sound great they need that impact. The noises that the submachine guns make sound pretty similar for the most part but are nice either way while the special weapons are great in the case of the Rocket Launcher, though I’ll say that I wish the McManus sniper rifle had a little bit more oomph to it? I don’t know, it’s not bad but It doesn’t always have the feel that I need, though the grenades more than make up for it to me. Cars screeches, footsteps, and the city surrounding you all sound bustling with life in a way that just feels and sounds good! I don’t know if I had really much else to say about the sound effects because I’d just be repetitive and stale at a certain point but what I can say is that the random pedestrians and some of their voice lines are also hilarious and are honestly so random but not crazy enough to be GTA levels of satire (which to be honest can be kind of annoying sometimes).

The voice acting for Saints Row is pretty impressive in all honesty, considering the presumably smaller budget compared to a titan like Rockstar Games was able to pull some impressive talents. Keith David plays Julius Little with a smooth and deep gravelly voice which oozes charisma; I'd basically let him narrate my sex tape (if I ever had sex that is LOL). Daniel Dae Kim is someone whom I didn’t know before Saints Row but he plays Johnny Gat so effectively as this sociopathic murderous gangster that I certainly knew who he was AFTER I played the game. Michael Clark Duncan plays Benjamin “Motherfucking” King and for those who don’t know him, he also played Kingpin in 2004’s Daredevil along with John Coffey in The Green Mile and his acting credibility is phenomenal whether he’s playing an innocent man or a cold and calculated motherfucker (rest in peace by the way, why do the good ones always pass man?). Michael Rapaport (whom GTA guys know as Joey Leone) plays Troy Bradshaw here and does it pretty well, sounding honestly like an undercover detective from the Boston area and he just kind of fits the mold and makes it feel believable. Mila Kunis plays Tanya pretty well too, and while it’s easy to recognize Mila from pretty much everything she’s in, she plays backstabber in this game pretty slick. I could go on and on and on about the voice acting but the truth is that I legit can’t think of a performance that was bad, or didn’t really fit or anything to those lines. They did a stellar job with this game and I hope these guys got paid handsomely for this as there was never a time where I WASN’T immersed. If they had a line that was supposed to make me laugh, I laughed. If it was supposed to be hardcore gangster shit, it was exactly that. Granted there won’t be any emotional crying or anything but that was never this game’s vibe to be honest.

Graphically speaking the game is honestly pretty good looking, with a lot of bright colors and smooth models compared to the bleak and ugly (but iconic) look of Saints Row 2. Cars look fresh as hell, the animations on the characters involve A LOT of ragdolls and honestly looks pretty good. In fact, everything just feels pretty consistently great and I feel that the game takes full advantage of the power of the Xbox 360. There’s a lot of unique and interesting models for different pedestrians that add to the liveliness of the city; from dudes in giant soda and hotdog mascot costumes to people actually dressed up like pimps and driving dinky little ass pimpmobile muscle cars. I’ve never really been great at describing graphics but again everything is just smooth and shiny, and when it’s not everything blends it in perfectly so it’s not visually unappealing. When I say it looks good, I don’t mean like Playstation 5 graphically amazing, that shit wasn’t possible back then. But stylistically it’s just pristine, clean yet dirty and gritty at the same time. Let’s take (not the Los LOL) Los Carnales territory for example; as a grimy ass cartel with huge stakes in drug trafficking, you could go from their gated community in Ezpata to their dirtier dock operations in Poseidon Alley and up to their industrial territory in Black Bottom. You’re probably thinking, “yeah no shit, it’s an open world game of course you can do that”. But there’s something so consistent about how you can have so many different environments blend in together so well to create a perfect city like Stilwater while also fitting the personalities of the gangs inhabiting it. Westside Rollerz for example, a bunch of rich white preppy boys who love Fast & Furious right? Of course they’re going to control the stadiums area, their little upper class suburbs and down into places like Chinatown because aesthetically that’s just how their gang would operate trying to copy something like Fast & Furious. The Vice Kings on the upper hand, while they have their territory in lower income neighborhoods (like their old turf in Sunnyvale), their leader Benjamin King has so much influence and power in the city that he’s basically taking over all the rich neighborhoods.

I could go into more obvious shit like how the top of the map and the bottom of the map are separated by wealth gaps, the rich being on top and all the popular metaphors and shit I couldn’t properly explain. However, for me this is moreso a place for me to gush about how atmospherically Stilwater just feels like the perfect sort of playground, everything just lines up perfectly for the gangs, the structure, the variation. It’s a place that FEELS like a place (and apparently was inspired by the likes of Detroit and other midwestern cities), where Saints Row 2’s atmosphere represents corporate gentrification that infiltrates the communities later on. If Stilwater in SR2 is coming home to realize everything’s changed, Saints Row the original feels like home. That’s just the environment of course, I also appreciate how in this game the gangs actually feel like street gangs and not just an eclectic bunch of different dudes from different races and such with extreme differences. I say that not as a diss to Saints Row 2’s gangs, because I actually really like them and how they pop out. But these gangs actually feel like gangs with different street styles with their pant legs rolled up, bandanas and the whole nine yards; like it actually feels faithful to what a gang would act like back then. This is an atmosphere I really enjoy in my gangster games, an atmosphere that was really popular in the early to mid 2000s that I honestly really miss. There’s a weakness that I have for what I dub the “G-Unit Era” with the flashy clothes, the backwards caps, the chains and all that shit. I love it, I can’t get enough of it; this is the kind of vibe that I wanted with the Saints Row reboot. I love the vibes from each of the gangs, their colors and identities are unique and make them feel special and natural in their environment. If you want a fun fact about the Saints themselves, they used to be green in their older iterations until Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out and Voltition decided to switch to purple to make them more unique.

The last section I’ll put down is multiplayer, one which I haven’t played other than jumping into one empty lobby and walking around the warehouse as a curiosity. There were several different game modes, such as Co-op missions which only had two to three missions with a cap of two players and others like Team Deathmatch, Protect the Pimp is basically a VIP mode and Big Ass Chains for example I believe is like Capture the Flag? It’s the usual set of game modes and while I feel like there’s some unique Saints Row content I’d love to experience once or twice, overall it was one of those “shoehorned in multiplayer grabs” that kind of got abandoned after a little while if I remember correctly. It’s weird because they decided to do one for the sequel too for some reason before dropping it right after that.

Saints Row is a classic open world crime game that I honestly both thoroughly enjoy and I feel more than matches up with the reputation that the Grand Theft Auto series has developed. Both have interesting gang dynamics, multiple open world activities, a sense of humor that makes me chuckle, fun gunplay and overall is 100 percent a recommended time. I love me some open world crime games but I personally feel that the only games that have ever been truly able to match up with the GTA franchise in terms of quality are the first two Saints Row games. The Getaway was fantastic but the replayability and the hardcore feeling of the series made it a once and done deal, Driver is cool as a Hollywood car chase movie but doesn’t have that oomph for me, True Crime as a series is okay but a little bit janky in certain instances. People give the first Saints Row game shit for not being more humorous and over the top like the second game, or for having really frustrating difficulty spikes. I love this game, and always will and every once in a while I sit down and I replay this game because everything about the first game to me is immaculate as fuck.

As for the future (or now lack thereof) for the franchise, there was a lot of hope. The sequel to this game would become the most popular title in the franchise as both staples and the pillars of the entire franchise. The sequel would release on every console and catapult the series as a legitimate rival to Rockstar’s franchise, and soon after that came all forms of plans for the series which included canceled handheld games (which I’ll get to after Saints Row 2) as well as a canceled movie with 50 Cent. However, over time to differentiate itself from the semi-serious tone of Grand Theft Auto, Volition pivoted towards a goofier approach, one that worked with the third title but began to lose steam from the fourth one and on. One failed spin-off and a really shitty reboot later, and sadly Volition has closed. It’s a damn shame, because the truth is these guys made a really solid foundation for a fantastic future, one that was cut up and crushed due to budget constraints and a vision that seemed destined to fail. Overall, that shit sucks, especially considering the fact that there was a group at Volition (more like a duo) that had planned to repair the Saints Row 2 PC port (a port notorious for glitches and bad connections) after they found the source code as well as fixing it up in general with the “Gentlemen of the Row” pack. Again, I’m just going to lament here and say that I’m very much sad that the game’s source code wasn’t found, because the game is great and deserves to be ported to PC for all the fans in the series to play if they didn’t play it before.

Links:
http://xbox360.gamespy.com/xbox-360/saints-row/717127p1.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fPyaIZLws8&ab_channel=mrsaintsgodzilla21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1hDuC7dTPM&ab_channel=MafiaGameVideos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Row_(2006_video_game)

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/SaintsRow1

https://archive.org/details/saints-row-dump (Behind the scenes stuff from Volition themselves)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udo3ZAuZOW4&ab_channel=NeoGamer-TheVideoGameArchive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-heKzYYGC3I&ab_channel=mrsaintsgodzilla21

4 Likes

Open review

This Is the Police

2016

gamemast15r

Completed

Windows PC

I haven't played this game too much but that's for a reason. It has so much potential, the soundtrack is amazing, I like the story to an extent (Although some things fall flat). The whole point of the game (or at least what it seems to be when you first play the game) is that you manage police officers and send them out on calls to stop criminals and such, along with variations of crimes (both serious and funny in tone depending) and political figures you can use to your advantage (like the Mafia, City Hall, etc). But theres one major problem I have with this game. After you're done there isn't much to do or much left, I mean sure you could replay the story again and there's also sandbox mode but I mean sandbox mode feels like a tacked on thing with less effort than the story. It's not like others where you can choose which ties you have or what special crimes you have to solve or anything, it just kinda starts you out and that's it. Some more customization would have added to the replayability of sandbox mode, then you have the problem where they add extra difficulty to the game per week or something. When I play sandbox mode, I want to be able to choose what I can do and my difficulty, not have to go on some pre set challenge mode. With all of those complaints aside I do love this game, and I would highly recommend anyone try it, at least for the single player. But just be aware there are a lot of great ideas but some execution missteps.

From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/

3 Likes

Open review

Too Human

2008

gamemast15r

Completed

Xbox 360

This review contains spoilers

Too Human is apparently an Action RPG (lol) developed by the likes of Silicon Knight and published as an Xbox 360 Exclusive by Microsoft Game Studios themselves; known for seminal titles like Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, as well as the Gamecube-only remake of Metal Gear Solid, called Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. However while they might be known for these arguable classic games, they’re also known for their history, or rather history of ineptitude towards their later life due to many reasons, the one that seems to be the most prominent is the founder himself, Denis Dyack. This game originally started as a Playstation Exclusive four disc Cyberpunk RPG before Nintendo took over the company while they were developing Eternal Darkness for the N64 originally.

Fast forward a couple of years, this game was put on hold while Silicon worked on the aforementioned Eternal Darkness and The Twin Snakes before in 2005 they were somehow taken over by Microsoft Game Studios and it was released in 2008 to mixed reviews before eventually getting shut down due to bankruptcy after trying to sue Epic Games over it’s Unreal Engine. Now my feelings are definitely not in the mixed, they’re A LOT worse but I find exclusives to be fascinating due to the history behind it and boy does this game have a history of mismanagement. Now I believe I picked this up over in San Diego last year on a trip though I’m honestly not sure and I wanted to pick it up for a while and give it an honest go, and even beat it to say that I beat it. I have some thoughts here:

ACT 1:
The Story starts off where you play as Baldur, a Bald (heh) amnesiac member of the Aesir in some sort of Sci-Fi take on Norse Mythology. Now I’m gonna start by saying this, I don’t remember this game’s plot too much, maybe because this was one of the most boring fucking games I think I’ve ever played and the story personally wasn’t the most captivating so I’m gonna be taking from a variety of sources while I’ll link them at the bottom. But continuing on, The Aesir Corporation holds reign over humanity during a never ending war against machines led thousands of years ago by some ancient evil kingdom called YMIR? Nuclear Winter happened due to the use of Antimatter weapons and now the Aesir are humanity’s last hope though even that is dwindling in itself. However, the actual story plot starts off with Baldur leading a hunt against an old cyber enemy, known as GRNDL-1, at a place called The Hall of Heroes. Now in the background there’s this conflict between the Aesir and Hel, with something called “The Pact of the Fallen” being dissolved which forbids the collection of dead from being taken from Hel. Freya takes Baldur to the Norns in Cyberspace, with hints of both Baldur being gone for a while and a romance that happened long ago between Baldur and Freya before Baldur got with his now dead current wife Lyanna. The Norns hit on Baldur I guess and give him some info/access to all Cyberspace wells before sending him on his way. In the current day, Baldur continues to fight through the Hall of Heroes, getting introduced to the poisonous Nidhogg (which you can’t get rid of until much later in the game and New Game Plus). You eventually find GRNDL before slaying it in a battle, after which you report back to Midgard (a cyberpunk city) and you have to choose between cybernetic and human abilities.

ACT 2:
While here, you can run into some guards who discuss how Loki is trapped in their prison, and that he was framed and should eventually be out of there soon. Now I personally never encountered this but it’s a nice little bit of foreshadowing to what’s to come. Baldur arrives at the feasting hall, with Heimdall and the others feasting to his victory. Baldur has a flashback to two shadows over him while he’s in surgery and after some banter, Freya and Baldur have a heart to heart about him missing his now dead wife, urging him to move on from the past. However he disagrees and is sent to Heimdall to find information about who killed his dead wife. Turns out another Aesir, Hod, murdered Baldur’s wife and has fled to Svartalfheim to apparently join the machines, with Tyr heading the hunt for him. Baldur insists on taking over the expedition, and he’s suspiciously told to destroy his cybernetics. After he leaves, Heimdall and Thor go to Loki’s torture chamber in his prison and wake him up, only to beat him up and tell him he’ll be tried for Treason before being thrown back into the torture chamber as he apparently killed another god. It’s also learned that the soul of Fenrir, a machine that Loki brought back from the Land of the Giants, was locked into a sword and given to Baldur. They go out to search for Hod in the frost forest and get attacked by machines, only going in further and further. Baldur goes into cyberspace again to have a weird freaky conversation with one of the flirty Norns about Loki’s cybernetic origins and sacrifices in a way that feels like she’s either siding with or is Loki in disguise? Who knows, to be honest, I don’t remember too much of the plot anyways. Eventually Baldur finds Hod and challenges him for killing his wife, however something isn’t right as Hod sees him as Loki; and a narrative flashback shows Hod apparently killing Loki. Loki had betrayed them and staged an attack on Asgard, and had gotten a dome straight through the head for it. Baldur chases Hod down in a frustrating boss battle before Hod finally comes to his senses; he sees that Baldur is most definitely not Loki and is executed for his crimes. However, Baldur does NOT destroy his cybernetics and instead brings them back to the Norns in Midgard and it’s learned that a signal was hacked into these cybernetics, and Hod was set up.

ACT 3:
Heimdall and others are required by the headless Mimir for information about The Jormungandr, a YMIR war machine that’s the last of it’s kind and the general consensus is to take it give the AESIR the balance of power that could lead to them winning the war once and for all. Baldur and Thor are assigned to take Mimir and go to this “World Serpent” machine and Thor implores Baldur to go to the Norns once again to acquire some knowledge on the machine itself. The YMIR created these machines out of bloodthirst and the need to conquer everyone, and when destroyed their creations continue to fight back, but only with basic programming and no real motives. Again it’s kind of hinted at that this one Norn is actually somewhat related to Loki in disguise due to her dialogue but it might pay off. Another cutscene shows a red haired cyber woman who is replacing her body with another one to try to achieve immortality and both Baldur and Thor leave for the war machine. In one of the game’s only hints of genius, Baldur enters Cyberspace and after leaving believes that Thor has died and that Mimir has gone insane; and then enters another Cyberspace well only to wake up in the first one. It reminds me of an Eternal Darkness hallucination, and again I actually liked this sort of thing and I feel like it would’ve been interesting if they perhaps took more cues from it (the good ones of course). The three fight through the war machine only to learn that Loki has taken control of the machine using his super cyber hacking mental skills and GASP impersonated the flirty Norn. Baldur and Thor fight through the whole ship and end up at the core. Thor wants to destroy the ship while Baldur wants to escape and warn the AESIR, however it turns out that Loki jump started a rebellion in their absence and has recruited humans working on the inside to break him out of his prison cell, which ends in success. The traitors left alive are executed in the feasting hall and it’s thought that Loki took to hiding out in Helheim with his daughter Hel, the red haired woman from earlier. They bicker amongst themselves before ODIN, the AI that controls the AESIR, decrees that they invade Helheim and kill him once and for all. Everyone agrees to stop Loki’s world domination plans and set out.

ACT 4:
If you go to the Cybernetics lady before heading out you’ll catch a little foreshadowing glimpse of a twist to come, everyone departs to assault Helheim. Loki and his daughter Hel embrace and Loki departs to fulfill some master plan I guess. The AESIR fight through only for Baldur and Tyr ro encounter Garm, some robotic beast dog whose battle ends up with Tyr sacrificing himself. Baldur fights his way up the tower to encounter Hel herself, and a number of reveals are thrown out: Hel still wants immortality and has been experimenting with corpses to keep them alive, Nidhogg has been freed (no follow up) and Ragnarok has begun, Baldur had actually died before and had been experimented on, also his wife Lyanna is still alive; when Baldur had died before Lyanna couldn’t move on and ended up trying to kill herself repeatedly, and then the Aesir had dumped her on Hel’s doorstep. Basically confirmed later, Hod had murdered you, and wanting to bring you back to life, brought you back from Helheim after a resurrection experiment but now you have amnesia and glowing blue shit on your face, with this actually breaking The Pact of the Fallen. Anyways you end up finishing Hel by strapping her to some sort of experiment table thing and she gets sawed in half, and before escaping Baldur’s possessed sword murders the Lyanna clone thing. Helheim is nuked with a fusion strike and everyone goes back to Midgard while the dead roam the world. Everyone reunites at the Feasting Hall, with Baldur chiding everyone for causing problems by resurrecting him to begin with: Tyr dying ruined any chance of them understanding the old weaponry, and now Loki roams free. Baldur abandons the Aesir, while the others prepare for the upcoming war with Loki, and the game finally ends with a post credits sequence of Loki meeting up with a cybernetic giant before the game cuts to black.

Final Story Summary:
The game’s story to me personally, as I mentioned, wasn't the most captivating one. Sure there are interesting things that it does with the game, and it’s weird seeing a different version of the Norse gods after having recently played through the two newest God of War games. It has some cool foreshadowing going on here and there, a couple of moments I thought were cool but honestly I personally feel the story is riddled with issues that mainly stems down to one fact: They imagined this game as a three game trilogy. That’s nice and all but if you create a game that leaves unanswered questions and plot hooks, then make a good fucking game first. Because of that there is no conclusion and it’s just kind of left on a strange note. That and make most of the characters interesting please, like who the hell is Hod? Who were most of the people at the Feasting Hall? One of them was apparently Freyr but I didn’t know that because they don’t say much in the way of shit. I kept getting Thor and Tyr mixed up because they look the fucking same. ODIN as an AI is a neat idea but I only ever remember hearing him twice. I don’t know, it just felt underwhelming as hell and deserved better. Again the one point I really like is in arguably the worst Act, Act 3 where he has that little hallucination thing from Cyberspace but other than that it was kind of moot. It’s one of many reasons where I honestly fell asleep a couple times playing this game, other than the worst contender: The Gameplay.

The gameplay fucking sucks. The combat feels like Kingdoms of Amalur mixed with Hunter the Reckoning or something; like it felt like it should’ve been an MMO more than anything. Which to be honest, I’m not surprised considering the game used to have a drop in co-op multiplayer, however with this multiplayer shut down, I’m sure it feels a whole lot worse. You fight by moving your right thumb stick in different directions, which is supposed to lock onto enemies automatically and fight them. Now here’s the issue with that, the combat system often clashes with the camera leading you to attack enemies you’re not trying to hit, or you’ll leap across the area to another enemy only to stop short randomly and miss because the game decides it doesn’t want to go that far. Now the camera can sort of stay behind you, and you can sort of change how far or close you want it to be so that’s cool, but the problem is that the camera fucking blows at actually keeping you in the present with combat. There would be times where I’d kill an enemy and I would want it to actually lock onto another one, but sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it’ll work but other times it’ll just keep locking onto the corpse of the enemy you just killed, so you’ll have to wait ten seconds to switch to another enemy, or if that doesn’t work it’ll just do nothing and you’ll be shooting into the fucking void where you’ll have to press it a couple of more times to actually have it lock on and then it won’t even hit the enemy you actually want. When you’re not in combat you’ll sometimes have these Eternal Darkness styled angles which can be cool but when it bleeds into the actual gameplay it makes for a frustrating experience.

I want to use a boss as an example, there’s a final boss in Act 3 called The Everlasting Hate and this made me everlastingly hate this stupid fucking game. So the whole point is to kill this boss you have to actually take it down by ripping off limb by limb, not a bad strategy right? Well, when you factor the actual camera into it, trying to go for these pieces can be a chore if it won’t let you do any actual damage aside from limb damage and you’re only able to hit certain spots like the arms/shoulders because trying to get the camera lock on to actually focus on it and let alone HIT the damn thing is exhausting, and it won’t let me destroy it by shooting so I’d have to break out a melee weapon and seventy five percent of the time the damn thing wouldn’t even hit and then after a minute or so of struggling I’d die. Now there’s a cool detail where if you die a Valkyrie comes and picks you up, bringing you to a golden hole in the sky. This would be better if it was skippable, but it isn’t so you will die and keep dying (not only on this boss but in general) and dealing with the same shit over and over again taking up more and more of your previous time and you will be seeing this nonstop throughout the game (though cool little detail, any soldiers that go with you and die will also get that so it’s kind of cool that way). Oh and also not during this battle but during Act 3 in general it’s a painful process because while you’ll usually have soldiers following you around in the other acts in this one you only have Thor, and he’s fucking useless. Half the time he’ll just run into a goddamn wall, while other times he’ll barely do anything for damage while boasting for the fifth time against Loki that he’ll “crush anything that he sends him” which clearly he can’t. Speaking of trying to crush it in melee combat, since all the melee combat goes with the right thumbsticks, it apparently has a series of combos you can do in order to do special moves like juggling enemies in the air. This has barely worked for me, oftentimes I’ll try to juggle and Baldur will slash like once and then fall down, other times I’ll somehow do some special slide move that I was only able to do randomly flicking the thumbstick around. However, I’m willing to admit maybe I’m just not good at doing combos? Ok, cool. However, I’d at least like to not feel like I’m constantly weak, which of course in these types of “RPGs” (let’s face it, this game is a dungeon crawler with a skill tree) they like to do the Gear based system where you just constantly have to switch armor and weapon types often to fit some arbitrary based number so you can survive for a decent time like the newer Assassin’s Creed or something. There has to be a better way of doing RPG combat than this because truth be told this kind of combat feels lazy as hell, and I don’t want to constantly switch out weapons just to be able to feel like I’m doing something and it isn’t just for this game this is for every fucking game that uses these systems, and these loot systems are necessary for furthering progress in the game and are your only reward for exploring. Sometimes you’ll get these obelisks by moving something in the environment by going into Cyberspace Wells and doing something there, like force pushing a door; these are ok and thankfully aren’t brain teasers but they’re also not even really good puzzles to begin with. You’ll get four powers over the first playthrough: force pushing, force pulling, walking on water, and the ability to burn Nidhogg down in the last one. However, the only way you can actually use this effectively is to play the game on New Game Plus and there’s no way I’m spending any more time actually playing this game only for the reward to be: MORE LOOT. Like I don’t need another weapon that does like five extra damage, how about you actually give me something interesting?

Speaking of weapons, I hate saying this but I mostly just stuck to using a Laser Gun of some sorts while jumping or rolling (which only works sometimes if the enemy has a giant AOE attack) away because truth is that while it’s not that hard to stay alive, it’s also not that hard to die. Sounds weird right? Well, when I was playing there would be rooms where it would be fine and I could just melee them and move on, and then others where they just kind of threw a bunch of enemies at a wall to see what would stick. So you’ll have like five enemies who just spam missiles while twenty five to fifty enemies run at you with a sword and then you have like one or two spiders or giants in the background, which can be manageable if you weren’t trying to constantly dodge the missiles. Luckily for spider enemies, killing them was as easy as abusing the game by dodging as soon as they raised their arms up to hit you with the AOE attack that could knock you down. Now luckily you have big arenas to maneuver around in for the most part which helps things but number one they can close in really quick and also number two as another criticism you’ll for ninety five percent of the game see these big arenas. There is absolutely nothing of interest around them other than the fact they’re giant, they’re confusing to navigate and the only reward you can really get from exploring a bit are little obelisks in which you can activate to get more loot; no lore, no nothing, there’s absolutely nothing of interest in these environments other than loot obelisks. So for most of the game, you’ll just be nonstop fighting enemies in room after room and open arena after open arena and I’ll be honest with you this shit bored me to tears and as I said before, I nearly fell asleep A LOT playing this game. And personally I feel like this is the biggest sin a game can make is having an excruciatingly boring game loop with absolutely nothing redeemable. Sometimes it can even be frustrating as after each death, your loot will degrade with status as your armor loses functionality and weapons lose damage output, further punishing you for the shitty game mechanics THEY put in there.

Now what I can say is that these mechanics also didn’t matter as I just kept switching them out with higher output weapons and lord knows you’ll gather enough cash to buy more loot later on from The World Tree, which is considered this game’s hub. For the most part you can walk over to the weapons store run by Tyr (I think?) and the Cybernetics store run by….whoever the fuck. You’ll also be given the choice of doing a Cybernetic or Human upgrade tree with separate abilities on top of the numerous classes you’re already given which I guess is cool with choices but truth be told I’m not going out my way to experiment because that would require me actually playing more of this game and I’d sooner get my face fucked with third degree burns. Other than that you can walk around, open up MORE LOOT OBELISKS, encounter random conversations that you can’t engage in and some you can, but other than that it’s just kind of boring, though the aesthetics are nice but I’ll be talking about that in the next section. I guess to finish off any criticisms, if people are able to sit down and make a great build and kill shit that’s amazing, but the dungeon crawler MMO combat feels sloppy to play and unintuitive and I can’t believe they decided to make that a thing? I forget if I said how I played before but oftentimes I’d feel like I would have to just keep jumping back and shooting people, while also spamming my delayed healing ability, my shields or an over powered special attack using the RB button to clear some enemies in front of me though even that wouldn’t work out the best as said with The Everlasting Hate or Hod’s boss fight in Act 2. One last thing, but speaking of The Everlasting Hate, you’ll have special enemies sometimes (or a lot in the later acts) that have edgy ass names like “The Cruel Death of the Dark” or “Bone Gnasher” or some really strange shit that you’d see some Norwegian Metal Band take up as a handle instead of actually threatening names? I don’t know, I just found it funny to me.

The Soundtrack/Graphics/Art Style: The art style is cool I guess, they got a whole cyberpunk norse thing going on which is cool and the environments in hub look cool but the actual level design/art design of the dungeons are repetitive and boring, with the same shit over and over again that both helped put me to sleep and confused me on where the hell I was going. The soundtrack was ok, some orchestral stuff but truth be told I don’t remember hearing much of any music in game and what little music I did hear was glitching the fuck out, mostly during The Everlasting Hate boss fight where it would just start warping itself before canceling outright and starting again in a broken loop, I don’t know if anyone else ever encountered that issue but for me it was jarring. Honestly I think the graphics were probably the most interesting thing as it reminded me a lot of that mid to late 2000s Fable-era Xbox 360 styled graphics which I have nostalgic memories over but nothing too exciting.

To finalize my thoughts on the game: I have it in my collection due to the fact it’s fascinating in its history, the development of a game that was tumultuous at best. Before Silicon Knights went into bankruptcy over a lawsuit, they were ordered to destroy all copies of Too Human and X-Men: Destiny over stolen lines of code from Epic’s Unreal 3 Engine. On top of unsold copies of those two games, Silicon Knights were apparently working on games like a new Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness 2, and the two sequels to this game. Having played the game out of morbid curiosity and a penchant for collecting and playing console exclusive games while ranting about how each of these need a port; I’m glad I played through it once but I don’t think I will ever again except if it’s for a really good reason. The idea that Denis Dydack thought of making a mess of a game in the first part of a trilogy is astounding, and again a BORING mess at that. To me that’s the worst thing a game can do, is not only be bad but BORING bad. I would even go as far to say I don’t think I would care if it ever got a port but it should be preserved not only for history’s sake but as an example of what NOT to do while making a video game. I would also say that I think we would’ve been better off if we had gotten whatever version of Too Human they were making when it was supposed to be a PS1/Gamecube Exclusive. I wouldn’t really recommend this game to anyone unless you’re a fuckin masochist or unless you also find bad games as funny as I do. I’d rate this below a 2 out of 5 but unfortunately it’s still a game with some competent parts in it so I can’t but if you saw a copy of this and thought about giving it a try, I’d say collect it with the intent on sticking it on a shelf and never touching it again and if you played this game as a kid and thought it was cool but didn’t remember any of it? Don’t try it again, it’s a whole lot worse than what you thought it was, though (Un)luckily if you have Xbox Gold you can download it for free on Xbox One and it's in your library to play whenever you want because shoutout to Xbox's backwards compatibility system it's great.

TL;DR I’d rather play Forspoken ok thanks bye.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-aAJRDHn8I&ab_channel=GamerPete
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3TIfOKG74Q&ab_channel=MattMcMuscles https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TooHuman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVlVq3pStk8&ab_channel=GVMERS
https://www.unseen64.net/2008/04/11/too-human-playstation-1-cancelled/

3 Likes

Open review

Killzone: Liberation

2006

gamemast15r

Retired

PlayStation Portable

This review contains spoilers

I don't really know how to start this off really, but I guess if I were to start it off I would do it by just being matter of fact. I disliked this game very much, I wanted to like it a lot but it ended up disappointing me.

Killzone: Liberation is a sequel of sorts to the story of the original Killzone on the Playstation Portable. You play as Jan Templar two months after the events of the first game, and as far as I'm aware the plot has to do with Jan trying to rescue hostages from Helghast general Metrac (and his right hand man Cobar) while also trying to figure out who the traitor is within ISA ranks (again) who is helping out the Helghast with their invasion on Vekta. Rico and Luger from the original Killzone return to help out, but other than that I don't remember too much because one, the game was only released with 4/5ths of the plot.

That's right, only four fifths of the game is available to the normal user, because the final chapter was released as free DLC on the game's website which you could download on your PSP. I'm unsure what happened with that but I believe it's lost now? Regardless, even though it's a shame that it's lost, as I wish most if not all lost media (game and otherwise) should be found; the game's gameplay to me was frustrating enough to where when I did the fourth chapter where I killed General Metrac I just said thank fuck and turned off the game.

See the gameplay is a top down game (which is ok) shooter, which even though it controls kind of funky at first you do get used to it and the combat feels ok...at least for the first chapter or so. My frustrations begin at the beginning of Chapter 2.

Chapter 2 from what I remember they start deploying these little asshole spider bomb things that crawl at you and WILL instantly kill you unless you shoot at them from a distance and kill them as soon as possible, or you get lucky and they blow and you roll away last minute. I think one of my main issues with this is that in game, you don't get too much ammo depending on your weapon and your auto aim can go all over the place (especially aiming grenades holy shit). There's been more than a couple times where I wanted to slam my head on my desk because of deaths where I didn't even feel like I did anything wrong. And the further you go along game wise the more spongey the enemies get; most enemies if not all will take an entire magazine or perhaps even two to get the job done. You also get pretty much one gun and you have to balance between the several different grenades (mostly smoke and regular grenades, most of the others didn't really do much in terms of usefulness and I only used C4 for specific objectives).

Now of course, there are upgrades to carry more grenades and specialty items, problem is in order to do this you need to do the challenge levels apparently outside of the main game, and I'm gonna be honest with you this is fine but most of them are the same repetitive missions and maybe I'm just an awful piece of shit gamer but I'd rather get shot then continue to play more of this game's challenges just to level up, so I brute forced it through the game and of course suffered through it.

I think for me the most egregious part of the game was one of the bosses, Cobar's tank. See you're put into an enclosed area with a giant spider tank shooting missiles everywhere, of which you have limited missile launcher ammo to not only destroy the missile launchers on the tank, but the turret as well (which is fine, it pissed me off but whatever). When it gets to the spider bombs however? Suck my dick, my balls, the sweat underneath my balls, eat my shit, go fuck yourself. That's when my patience really started to wear thin, not only because the absurd difficulty spike, but wrestling with the controls and the auto aim sometimes makes it to where you don't even hit the fuckin target, you move like one inch to the left by accident and you miss it entirely with the top down controls. I probably sound like a whiny bitch who sucks at games and maybe I should just be better. Maybe you'd be right, but truth is the gameplay killed all enjoyment of it and by the fourth chapter the only thing I thought was "I just want to beat this game so I can get to the final boss" which I was basically screaming when I died repeatedly at the final boss and had to repeat it again and again from the very beginning. Another thing to segway into are that the checkpoints can be atrocious and there are times where you can lose lots of time and progress (sometimes 10-20 minutes personally figuring in the sponge combat).

I guess wrapping this up before I think of any more details, I really wanted to like this game. A top down Killzone game sounds like it would be great if done well, but of course Guerilla's track record before Killzone 2 was honestly a bit spotty and I believe that this was the ultimate lead up to this spottiness. Of course the environments look great, the voice actors are back, you can tell that this is a continuation of Killzone 1 with lots of similar locations (like the dreaded swamps), music, etc.

Another positive thing is that the opening cutscene looks fucking great, and even though I dislike this game I hope one day Sony decides to remaster this game, add the 5th chapter and along with the rest of the Killzone games put it on PC or bring it to the newer generations even if it's for free underneath that PS Plus stuff if they're afraid they won't cover the costs of a remaster. I'll say this, I bought this game and transferred it to my PS Vita when the whole "Shutting down the Playstation 3 Store" thing was going on, so it looked REALLY good on my handheld console. I'm not sure how it would look on emulator, and it looks like ass watching it on youtube but it looks good overall. That being said, I dislike this game and I don't really wish to ever play it again and that's a shame.

EDIT: To those who like this game, there's a PS4/5 digital re-release now

https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP9000-CUSA37874_00-UCUS986460000000

So you could grab it and download if you really want. I don't think it comes with the DLC, and maybe one day I'll give it a try again (against better judgement) just for the platinum lol.

3 Likes

Open review

Midnight Fight Express

2022

gamemast15r

Completed

Windows PC

This review contains spoilers

Midnight Fight Express is an isometric beat em' up game developed by Jacob Dzwinel and published by Humble Games (of the Humble Bundle site I believe, good for game key deals); I didn't really know anything about this game until a buddy of mine (shoutout to my dude Gage, love ya dweeb) who threw the trailer at me. As a huge fan of Hotline Miami and games like this, I immediately liked what I saw and gave it a wishlist before forgetting about it for a while. I decided to pick it up around Christmas last year and went in blind, and I was pleasantly surprised.

The Plot is a simple one, you play as a dude named Babyface who is woken up by a strange talking drone up in a random apartment with no idea of what's going on; only the urging from the drone to trust him and take down the city's criminal organizations as they're enacting a plan that could doom the fate of humanity. Truth is that's really it, there are some twists and turns here and there but it mostly just feels like an excuse for the gameplay, but basically fight your way through waves of dudes to take down the Boss-On-High's criminal lieutenants while in-media-resing inside of an interrogation room as you recount your story for two detectives, Agent Smithman and Agent McCloon (which both come off as parodies of Agent Smith from the Matrix and John McClane even if it's in name only). I guess that's one thing I will mention is that it's definitely parody and homage based; you'll see references to stuff like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (as a Big Smoke parody named Large Soda), Modern Warfare 2 (a whole airport terrorism scene and even fighting a bunch of expies of Makarov in an elevator) to even a level dedicated to referencing Fight Club, Hotline Miami and I believe Sons of Anarchy? For the most part these are fine, though I feel like in the back of my mind it's a little jarring if you're actually trying to take the plot seriously, but for the most part I wouldn't take it seriously as the game doesn't really either, it's just going from set piece to set piece beating people up. Speaking of, the gameplay.

The gameplay is pretty solid, repetitive sure in the beginning but definitely solid. If I could describe the gameplay (and game overall), I'd say it's a combination of Hotline Miami, Sifu and the atmosphere of My Friend Pedro. You go from place to place, picking up weapons, throwing them, doing combos, dodging and trying to manage your crowd while coming off as cool as possible. For me, it definitely worked enough to make me invest my time going into the challenge mode to replay all of these (though to my detriment as some of them tend to get really frustrating, like a level where you can't get hit by pepper spray once even though sometimes the stun animation doesn't even render and it's in enclosed spaces). Sometimes there would be glitches too where I'd beat all the enemies and then it wouldn't spawn in but I think that was because during the end I was god-modeing it to get the challenges done, I also think a restart checkpoint system would be advantageous to this effect just in case but for the most part it works well. Doing these challenges get you rewards like new props and enemies to fight in practice mode, cosmetics to create your own character (which you can do basically as soon as you get out of the tutorial I believe?), certain cheats for repeated runs, etc. Again to me the ease of challenges at the beginning give a lot of incentive to go through them, though keep in mind some of the later ones tend to be really frustrating and mind numbing. Keep in mind you get new abilities as you advance, like a 3D printer gun which regenerates ammo over time and can be great for parrying or removing certain enemies from play or a rope gun which can drag enemies to you amongst other abilities (though you get it a bit later in the game) and helps give a bit of combat variation. If I were to name a least favorite level it would be The Graveyard, mostly because the zombies tend to grapple you if you get close and either instantly kill you or nearly kill you, really breaking up the flow of combat but otherwise are for the most part decent if not challenging, especially the levels where you take control of a vehicle and shoot from it, of which there are three in a total of 41 levels (which includes the tutorial). I guess to finish it off, the gameplay is good, and when it REALLY connects you feel like a f u c king god, or the human equivalent of that being John Wick or something; if you're in the mood for a good beat em up with variation it's a definite recommend.

The graphics are rather minimalist as it understandably focuses on gameplay flow but it fits with the overall atmosphere, the environmental art design looks good and all the objects you can use to fight look like they fit in. No voice acting as far as I'm aware and the soundtrack is by a guy named Noisecream and by god did they do a fantastic job at the soundtrack that is immersive as hell in your murder spree, continuing the sort of synthwave (best I can explain) vibe that Hotline Miami, My Friend Pedro and The Hong Kong Massacre did to great effect.

And that's basically what I could compare this game to, the love child of all of those games and it's a pretty solid title that'll take up your time if you're REALLY invested in it as I was these past couple of days (minus a few headaches). If you're into beating the s h i t out of people and don't care if the story takes a bit of a backseat I can definitely recommend for the full price it's asking, also get the soundtrack too it slaps.

From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/

3 Likes

Open review

Killzone 3

2011

gamemast15r

Completed

PlayStation 3

This review contains spoilers

Killzone 3 is a first person shooter exclusive for the Playstation 3 released in 2011 and developed by Guerilla Games. Over the past year or so I’ve decided to go through the Killzone games after beating almost all the Halo series and the Resistance series (which I’ll review at some point later on). Having beaten Killzone 2 last year and temporarily given up on Mercenary after having my save data corrupted unknowingly, and with a buddy of mine going through the Killzone series on the highest difficulty as well. I decided to give this game a spin, and I have some thoughts. First I’ll go with the plot.

So the first thought I had in mind was that the game’s plot was strangely weaker than the previous game’s, which itself personally wasn’t the most memorable. The game starts mere moments after Emperor Visari’s murder by dipshit Rico, who rightfully gets chewed out by his superior Narville. The orders are in and everyone is to evacuate back to Vekta, which is cool and all except for the fact everything goes to hell as the Helghast go apeshit and attack the ISA with full force. Now here is where I’m going to mention the first story critique: I like starting off immediately after the second game, however there’s one thing I want to mention. Your squadmate Natko isn’t around, at ALL. Now this was explained apparently by Studio Director/Art Director Jean Bart van Beek, who stated this according to the Killzone 3 Official Guide: "Following Rico's costly mistakes in Killzone 2, Nakto probably requested a transfer to a different squad... But the real reason for Nakto's absence is that we felt the story could do with a few less characters, so we can focus on the important ones. Nakto is of course still in the game, he's the character your buddy plays in co-op." Ok, cool I guess, except if you don’t go through the coop game it’s a literal plot hole, albeit that most people will forget about anyways considering most of these guys have the personality of dog piss stained cardboard but it’s still a noticeable plot hole to me. So yeah, no clue where this guy is and he’s never mentioned again and if it takes place mere moments after Killzone 2, how could the dude request a transfer to a different squad? Who knows and who cares I guess. Back to the plot, the ISA fight through the nuked city of Pyrrhus to try to find their way out; Rico of course disobeys orders again to rescue sniper Jammer, who has been cut off from the rest of her platoon. Sev (The Player) tries to escape with Narville, however everyone blows up and is sent flying everywhere and the remainder of the ships evacuate out leading the rest of the ISA to be stranded on Helghan. This is mixed in with cutscenes of the Helghan military squabbling over crushing the ISA and power politics involving Jorhan Stahl (voiced by Malcolm McDowell) and Admiral Orlock (voiced by Ray Winstone with the name of a silent movie era vampire but I digress), where they piss and moan at each other while the rest of the Helghan military guys just kinda exist? Now keep in mind Malcolm and Ray really make these scenes in my opinion, and it’s nice that they’re trying to show a bit more of all sides now but also I don’t know who most of those dudes are, which fair enough not everything needs an explanation but I still kind of thought it was shrug worthy.

After shit went haywire, we fast forward six months where Narville orders Sev to check up on some technological thing that’s supposed to get them home. However, after sneaking through Helghan base camps in the Jungle, Narville gets in touch with ISA command and it’s learned that they’re given orders to “Stand down and surrender so they can begin negotiations” which is an unbelievably shitty idea. Helghast discovers where they are however and Sev races back to base, going against Narville’s orders to escape and hold off the Helghast where they fight it out as much as they can before they get captured. Sev and Narville are separated, and Sev is kept in an entirely different drop ship before getting rescued by Rico and Jammer, who now lead a team called “The Raiders”. After shooting their way through numerous facilities, they end up at Stahl Arms and rescue Narville (dressed up as Helghans in a stealth mission) before he’s executed live by Stahl himself in a power play against the rest of the Helghan military as he’s effectively gone AWOL. I forgot to mention earlier that this moment is played In Media Res as the first chapter with a couple things mixed up and different, which I guess is cool for a tutorial aspect but at the same time it feels inconsistent to skip some things this time around but whatever I guess. Also, Stahl’s men have been collecting green stuff on the planet and have weaponized it into something called Petrusite, basically a real nasty war weapon which can basically disintegrate people. Everyone fights their way out and Stahl escapes, before the Helghan Senate promotes Orlock to Visari’s position. Stahl is ordered to turn over all weapons to Orlock and his plans are discovered; he views himself as the true ruler to Helghan and as such plans to use Petrusite to conquer Earth. The ISA in the meantime escape and fight through a junkyard, a Petrusite weapon field thing and a giant ass spider mech before launching themselves into space to stop Stahl, but not before arguing with each other constantly about disobeying orders and I have thoughts about this.

They end up at a Helghast space station (Rico’s second time, what a record); Narville, Sev, Rico and Jammer take the fight to them to stop it. Stahl and Orlock meet to the trade off but predictably end up backstabbing one another, and Stahl gets the upper hand after going on the usual villain monologue about his intentions. Stahl then escapes, intending to warp to Earth to begin the invasion but the ISA shoot their way through and stop the fight in a space battle, dropping a nuke on Stahl’s cruiser. However one issue with that, the ship ends up dropping it’s weapons into the giant Petrusite field and the entirety of Helghan gets wiped out in a Petrusite infused genocide. I don’t really know what to make of this except they fucked up and killed a lot of innocent people as well; and surprisingly they have a little post credits sequence that has an escape pod where Helghast presumably find Stahl alive. I guess my thoughts are how did Stahl live through this? Also, I find the whole murdering the entire planet thing interesting because it will presumably raise the stakes (though I heard it was a flop) in Killzone: Shadowfall and to me kind of shows that both the Helghast and the ISA are fucked up in their own special ways, though it’ll take a lot more to me than “Everyone is bad in way” to actually get me interested I guess. Also I want to bring up some stuff before I go to gameplay here:

In Killzone 2, Rico disobeys orders constantly and goes gung-ho, which basically ends up getting squadmate Garza killed and the entire Helghan fleet on their ass; now he definitely has the most character development in this game and he actually mellows out a bit and thinks about his actions. However I don’t understand (maybe I’m just stupid) the theme here? Before in Killzone 2 it’s “Don’t disobey orders unnecessarily” and in this game it’s “Disobey orders for the right reasons”? I guess that sounds good but I just feel in conjunction with Killzone 2 it just feels kind of weird, like an inconsistency. Also for the most part I don’t get much in the way of character development for Narville and Sev other than more arguing about disobeying orders and such. Also I don’t know shit about Rico’s raiders, Jammer doesn’t seem to have much in the way of personality and in the end they just end up being Call of Duty protagonists. I don’t need to have them read their innermost fears and feelings but Christ almighty give me something please? Also in Chapter 6, you end up escaping the base and race after Stahl’s cruiser, but you also randomly teleport into vehicles to go after them? Where did they come from? Were the vehicles in the nearby hangars? I’m not sure if it’s just me overthinking but I noticed a couple of inconsistencies here and there and it leads me to believe that game development might have been a bit rushed in certain spots.

To me, Killzone 3 basically has the same gameplay as the second one, but with an added sort of cool Brutal Kill system that has stuff like stabbing people, poking your fingers into their eyes, snapping people’s necks, stabbing more people, etc. It feels good, the gunplay for the most part still feels good (the headshots you can get with the sniper and silenced pistol feel punchy as hell and satisfying as an example) though a bit awkward like the others; basically it’s not Call of Duty snappy. The sixaxis stuff still feels unnecessary, only being used to open valves and place bombs. Other than that the gameplay is basically the same as the last one: go from place to place and kill people while following an objective. Of course there’s more in the way of variation, for example you end up driving vehicles in scripted segments like a tank in Chapter 3, in Chapter 5 not only do you get to play Minigunner a couple of times but in a cool as hell segment you get to fly a jetpack and blow people up (sadly the only time in the campaign), Chapter 6 you drive some sort of Star Wars lookin vehicle and in the last chapter you fly through space. Also I want to mention, the final level has two spots or so where there’s no gravity and you can jump high so that’s nice. All that variation is good, I like that they tried to spice it up but honestly I don’t have much to say except as for actual gameplay if you liked Killzone 2 it felt like more Killzone 2 with minor improvements. I guess other than that, I had a couple of glitches here and there; one that was particularly egregious is that since I’m a trophy hunter, I wanted to get the trophy where you get 40 soldier kills on a beach while driving a tank. Now I don’t know if I was just missing some but according to some comments the more you update the game then this trophy just doesn’t pop up. So I deleted my Killzone 3 update files, played through the mission again, got it then exited before reinstalling the files again for one trophy; if you don’t care for trophies this shouldn’t apply to you but also I have weird OCD so it was painful that I had to do that. Other glitches I had included stuttering in certain spots, lip syncing in cutscenes being completely off most of the time, the ends of sentences being cut off about half the time and a glitch I WISH I recorded where in Chapter 6 Narville kept walking towards the wall and then shot into the air and disappeared before reappearing in the next room. And last but not least, fuck the Completist trophy and the MAWLR (giant spider mech in Chapter 8) fight; the trophy stuff can be vague as hell and the actual boss is rather frustrating to me personally jumping in between two separate spots trying to shoot down pieces of mech while avoiding Petrusite lasers. One last thing, the multiplayer was shut down and unlike Killzone 2 it hasn’t been brought back yet so I’m not sure what the multiplayer was like but if you’re trying to go for a platinum I wouldn’t bother to be honest.

The sound design/graphics/everything else here is decent; again the voice actors are good with Ray Winstone and Malcolm McDowell really hamming it up as Helghast generals/industrialists fighting with each other. I didn’t know that James Remar (Ajax of The Warriors fame) voiced Narville so that’s cool and everyone else sounds good and fits into the vibe. The soundtrack is decent with more of the same vibes it brought to Killzone 3 with the orchestral stuff, it’s nothing really crazy and I won’t be listening to the soundtrack in the whip but like it fits the game. The art design is more varied this time; the junkyard and the ruined city are still grayish and whatnot but I enjoy it when they get out of that environment for the Jungle and the snow. The jungle probably is my favorite just because of all the foliage, I think it’s an interesting insight of what the Helghan homeworld actually looks like and I would’ve liked to see more areas of the planet that had interesting flora and fauna. The snow I just like because it has more color palettes then most of the game combined. I guess also to throw something else out there, the game still looks great graphically and is again another reason why Guerilla Games is lauded, their games for the most part look beautiful. Sometimes the effects are a little much but generally speaking it looks great and I can’t complain, and didn’t really need much upgrading from the last game.

I guess if I were to give my thoughts on Killzone 3 it would be this: it improves in a lot of areas but it also falters in a lot of areas. The story was less interesting in certain aspects than the second game and better in other areas, the gunplay is still kind of sluggish but the brutal kills are cool. Again I think this game does better in location variation, but then it glitches randomly and does some goofy shit with it. I’ve heard people say Killzone 3 feels like an expansion pack, I wouldn’t necessarily agree but I also can get why they say that with how the game is plot/world building is. I would still say in a lot of ways Killzone 2 is better but I guess if I had to choose I’d rather come back to this one more? Again I don’t know, It’s still going to get the same rating as Killzone 2 but I guess I’m not too surprised these two go hand in hand so well to be honest. I guess if you play this, just be aware there’s some weird stuff that goes on in this game and I suspect again it might have been rushed a tad bit but I’m not sure. That being said though it’s not a bad game, and though it’s still worse story wise to Killzone 2 I’d say it makes a good companion to that game as well. In time I’ll play through Shadowfall and go through the slog of trying to get all my progress back for Killzone: Mercenary; which though fucking miserable trying to get all that progress with the valor cards than losing it to a random save crash I’m unsure of the origins of, still stands out as the best game in the series from what I’ve played apparently.

3 Likes

Open review