I always have a hard time succinctly describing my feelings on this game, because it's one of the best superhero games I've ever played and yet just thinking about playing it is exhausting on some level. When the fights are at their best, it's about as good as Arkham-style combat can be, forcing you to do a little dance of managing smaller orcs while trying to work your way around the captain's specific resistances and immunities. There are always credible threats to your health, but there are so many ways to turn things in your favor that it doesn't really ruin the power fantasy when your near-death experience is also a chance to instantly counter and decapitate some idiot loser who thinks this is his chance to kill you.
I just... don't care about the rest of it? The world is too big and the regions feel too similar, there's more Nemesis interactions than the previous game but when you get to a higher level it's just too exhausting to keep track of all of them. There's like a hundred of these bozos and they're all mad at me for cutting their arm off and buddy, get in line. I don't care about gear! I don't care about sending hitmen to rival captains or customizing my Tolkien tigers to spit Baja Blast or Code Red during a siege. These systems aren't really deep enough to feel like you're doing anything, and they have almost no stakes other than one more orc yelling at you. It's primarily exhausting because the player is obviously meant to find them equally compelling - unless you're dying constantly, deciding to go out and do the fun part of the game (running into a fort and killing the strong guys) means you just... win? The way the AI generates new characters isn't frequent or aggressive enough to counter the player, even when the difficulty is cranked up. It's truly a bizarre design decision to have the player beset on all sides by uncountable hordes of enemies in the plot and then decide in the gameplay that the AI armies will never chip away at your gains unless you let them. Those late-game fights against strong captains forcing you to get creative single-handedly carry this to a low 7/10 score, because without the variety in combat, even the nemesis system couldn't save the mess created by tacking on all these other systems.
I just... don't care about the rest of it? The world is too big and the regions feel too similar, there's more Nemesis interactions than the previous game but when you get to a higher level it's just too exhausting to keep track of all of them. There's like a hundred of these bozos and they're all mad at me for cutting their arm off and buddy, get in line. I don't care about gear! I don't care about sending hitmen to rival captains or customizing my Tolkien tigers to spit Baja Blast or Code Red during a siege. These systems aren't really deep enough to feel like you're doing anything, and they have almost no stakes other than one more orc yelling at you. It's primarily exhausting because the player is obviously meant to find them equally compelling - unless you're dying constantly, deciding to go out and do the fun part of the game (running into a fort and killing the strong guys) means you just... win? The way the AI generates new characters isn't frequent or aggressive enough to counter the player, even when the difficulty is cranked up. It's truly a bizarre design decision to have the player beset on all sides by uncountable hordes of enemies in the plot and then decide in the gameplay that the AI armies will never chip away at your gains unless you let them. Those late-game fights against strong captains forcing you to get creative single-handedly carry this to a low 7/10 score, because without the variety in combat, even the nemesis system couldn't save the mess created by tacking on all these other systems.
jobosno
2 years ago