This is a review for the campaign. It's like I've watched my childhood die right before my eyes. I unabashedly love the COD campaigns. They're simple stupid fun that I can just turn my brain off and play. This however was anything but that. It was Warzone, nothing but Warzone. It had a shit story, kill streaks, Field upgrades. THATS NOT A CAMPAIGN!!! COD:Black Ops Cold War was the last good campaign and I'll stand by that.

The multiplayer is outstanding though. 4.5/5 I'm having so much fun playing it. Hardpoint is fantastic, the maps are phenomenal. It's all great in that department.

I kept hearing that this was some sort of secret Elder Scrolls-killer, a cult classic, “Oblivion on steroids” it even says on the back of the box. And I gotta say in all honesty: No it is not.

The graphics and animations look worse than a lot of PS2 games. Seriously, some of this shit looks like it belongs in GTA 3. Yet despite that it runs at a framerate of about 20 most of the time and still constantly freezes and stutters, rendering the game almost unplayable. Combat sucks. Attacking is incredibly imprecise, the attack animations are floaty and stilted, you look like a kid playing with a toy lightsaber, and whatever you’re using, swords, spears, clubs, your attacks have dismal range, which is especially infuriating when you’re trying to chase down something that keeps running away from you like an archer. When either you or your enemies get hit, you jitter awkwardly in place and there’s a low res blood effect that looks like it’s from an early version of After Effects, and bafflingly, the sound when you hit enemies, again with anything, swords, clubs, whatever, is a stock cartoon punch sound effect, like something out of a Nostalgia Critic video, as if it was a placeholder sound that they just forgot to replace before the final release. There’s also a backstep with stupid long i-frames that’s easy to abuse and isn’t even animated, just has you rubber band backward. The enemy AI can also be really stupid, and they’ll sometimes just sit there throwing attacks while you’re out of range. Under normal circumstances, I found most enemies were fodder, I found myself getting screwed over by the janky mechanics a lot of the time, but when things lined up (aka, I abuse the backstep), regular enemies could be dispatched by the dozens with ease. But then it’ll hit you with these really abrupt difficulty spikes and suddenly throw you up against enemies far higher a level than you that can kill you in two or even just one hit. The game also theoretically has an open ended main quest structure, but the level and reputation requirements for each area roughly constrict you to doing them in a certain order unless you plan on grinding insubordinately. There are debuffs too, which I think are supposed to immobilize you, based on the animation, but you’re still able to move through them so it’s you sliding around in the animation of you standing there, covering your eyes or something. Quest design is basic at best and repetitive at worst. Most quests are just you talking to a guy, then he sends you to talk to another guy, who sends you to another, then another, then another, and it just keeps repeating ad lapidum, until it culminates in you being sent to fetch or kill something. The whole experience is also buggy as hell. Animation glitches, audio glitches, several moments had me or my horse getting stuck on nothing and having to reload a save.

To top it all off, the writing is awful. On the surface the story is basic, find the mcguffins, save your oddly sexualized sister. In practice, it mostly just boils down to exposition, you being told things that you’re almost never explicitly shown. And it feels like every character is drunk, as characters make some of the dumbest, most baffling and counter intuitive decisions I’ve seen in a game like this. The dialogue isn’t much better. It sounds like they wanted to make it old timey, but couldn’t be bothered to do the research, so they just threw words like “pray” and “verily” into sentences at random. The delivery makes it worse, this voice acting is some of the most horrendous I’ve ever heard, I have to mention a particular npc in the Japanese part of the map, who cycles between like three different accents in the same conversation. Then again, you’re probably not even going to hear all of it though, because the volume is hugely inconsistent, I had frequent cases of the music drowning out the characters voices.

This game is a complete disaster. But I hate to end on a completely negative note, so if there’s one positive I can think of off the top of my head, I found it amusing that bandits had a pocket sand attack.

this is a weird game. there are some incredible "aha" moments and clever uses of the time loop mechanic, but it also is restrictive in weird ways. there are so many times where a logical solution is not presented and instead you have to do whatever abstruse thing the game deems as a good solution. furthermore, its story is just monumentally fucked up. and like, it's fine for a story to be fucked up if there is a point to it, but this is fucked up in a way that doesn't even really say anything interesting or make sense—it just seems like the goal is to shock people for the sake of shocking people. also, why cast james mcavoy and daisy ridley if you're just gonna have them do sub-par american accents?

I got our old PS2 working again, so I decided to pick a couple titles up from a retro games store near me. The guy at the counter told me this was one of his favourite games and said he was excited to know what I thought of it. That’s probably going to be an awkward conversation.

The good first, it’s a damn incredible looking game for its time. It honestly looks better graphically than some early PS3 games, and it’s running at 60 frames a second? Damn the PS2 was a good ass system. The general feel of hitting things is good, and the ragdoll physics are pretty funny. Kicking dudes into groups of other dudes like bowling pins was always fun, and watching your character do a cartwheel and flop around when he dies always made me laugh and softened the blow a bit. Other than that though, this game isn’t very good. Movement is sluggish, made worse by an automatic lock-on that means you can never really control what you’re aiming at. The timings for attacks and combos are very weird and unreliable. You basically have to throw the whole combo before the first hit even lands, so you can’t cancel out of it if it doesn’t connect. But on top of that, this is one of only a handful of games to use the dualshock’s pressure sensitive buttons for some combos and attacks, and I’m not talking some complex Tekken-style inputs here, I mean basic attack combos. They’re hard to pull off correctly at such a fast pace, so fighting is really awkward with you just finnicking around, trying to get the correct inputs and throwing out wrong moves left and right. All of this I found led to a lot of cheap deaths where I’m finnicking around trying to get combos to connect properly, and I just get screwed over because of it. It was especially bad during the boss fights. In addition to that, the game has a leveling system where you get points to spend on your stats, except you only get points for enemies you land the final blow on, so you have cases of your AI partners stealing your kills on you and you not having enough points to keep up with the escalating difficulty curve. A particularly frustrating incident was when I was fighting the first boss Echidna (who, by the way, straight up uses Eddy Gordo animations), and after dying to her again and again and again, I get her health down, about to land the final hit and….Volt kills her. There goes my big bonus.

This isn’t a particularly good game, but if nothing else, between the hilarious ragdoll physics and that incomprehensible, out of left field Nomura writing, I was laughing for much of the time. And it’s short. Even with all the trial and error and frustration, I beat the campaign with Sion in like a night.

Being the third game in the Zero Escape series, you probably know what to expect by this point. However, this is different from the first two in that it completely ditches the VN-style presentation for more cinematic cutscenes. This doesn't really pay off very well considering the animations are pretty bad. You can tell they had like no budget when making this game because the presentation is a big step down. The models themselves look fine, though I do miss the Kinu Nishimura designs of the first two games.

The story structure is quite a bit different from VLR, where instead of every choice splitting off into a new branch, the flowchart is sort of random. You don't know beforehand where on the timeline each scene takes place, (assuming you're not using a guide) so it's like filling in pieces of a puzzle, the puzzle in this case being the flowchart. It's an interesting direction, but not a straight upgrade from VLR since there are fewer branching points.

Now, about the story itself... it's okay, I guess. It starts off really interesting, but it gets kind of ridiculous towards the end. It's cool to see events that were alluded to in VLR play out, and I enjoyed a lot of the character moments, but some of the twists are just bizarre. There are also a lot of unintentionally funny moments because of the awkward animations. I can't decide if the big reveal at the end is really stupid or actually genius.

I wouldn't say ZTD was disappointing, in fact I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, but it's really not as good as the first two. There are parts that I'm not sure were planned from the beginning, or if they were decided last minute because of budget/time constraints. I guess you could say, "Life is simply unfair..."

🐌/10