Everything is just bad here!

Yes it is more like a remake of classic Contra (I played Super Contra and Hardcorps). But come on it could be much better from the team of 20+ people.

Graphics is just awful. I’m don’t super care about polygons, but I saw on my switch screen how low quality was textures.

Core gameplay becomes boring from time to time and even in Super Contra was levels from the top perspective (here no). In Hardcorps there was much more dense action in first level. Why you decided just to remake something that already stale presentation-wise and sell it for 35 bucks?

8 levels. Not much of difference action. Bad quality graphics. No good design code. Perks are just makes game much easier (instead of changing it’s style like “more powerful shots, but less hp”). Core gameplay is just stale and doesn’t evolve much.

My opinion instead of making blind remake of old game in that particular case, you should make a reimagine.

I'm pretty sure this could be a super interesting game for kids or to even play together with my kid if I had one.

And it is definitely better than Tiny Kin. It feels like a Tiny Kin is a cheap parody of Pikmin. This game feels more complete.

Still, I can not give 4, because at some point in the middle, I started to get bored with the easiness of monsters and no puzzles at all in the locations.

So again, if I had a kid or was younger, probably I would love that game, but for now, it is too simple.

There was a phrase in a game: “The art should represent chaos in times of order, and represent order in times of chaos”

While I agree with this phrase I think that the industry in 2023 more represents order and Talos Principle should represent the chaos of art, as it was in the first game, but goes to a more structured yet upgraded version, whereas it should break even more boundaries.

In pursuit of gigantic forms, the game trapped itself in a cage of vast worlds where everything is numbered and follows the same pattern: 8 puzzles, 2 lost puzzles, 1 lab, 2 memories, 2 stars, and 1 golden puzzle. Ironic, because by the lore the Robots who built it were trying to run from structure and order, and they wanted to start to !create! instead.

There are no eastern eggs anymore, no symbols, or some breaking of 4th wall. Even the endless appearances of the old human world from part one became just a «collectible» here.

The game could not even laugh at one of its flaws - too big spaces. Example: there is South3 where you get into the desert with mountains on the horizon. And the game doesn’t let you go there and says something like “you reached the end of the map” upon reaching a certain point. Considering the Talos Principle being philosophical puzzles that break “the walls” the game could let you explore the empty gigantic desert and your companions could make some jokes or interesting comments while you are doing that for nothing. But even that simple level of metaphor is not possible here. And that is sad.

Sadly, the cleverness of the first game was exchanged (instead of being complemented) for just new tools to solve the puzzles. Yes, a lot of that, and this is a big plus.

Each world gives you one new puzzle tool. And here are many new things that aim to make puzzles more deep and complex… and variable.

And while they are indeed variable, I would say that this comes with the cost of the deepness of the puzzles. They become creative only at the end of the game (also, here and there during it). This again brings us to «more doesn’t mean better/deeper».

As for the overall gigantism, it is just meaningless. There is no context of it that would justify such, no action (maybe moving structures) or any in-between puzzle interactions (ok, just a bit). Personally, I would cut the number of worlds from 12 to 6 and make them more dense + put a lot of out-of-context puzzles. While the first Talos Principle was an epiphany for me in a world of puzzles, by today the world already saw things like Witness.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the game is a degradation of the first one in terms of creativity/meaningfulness and in terms of meta or under-context things.

The variation of puzzles is not enough.

I think the overall visuals are nice. The game sparkles with lots of animation details, colors and interesting different situation. That overall gives an impression of never ending party.

But the crucial point is that the game tries to be a serious platformer. The first 5 star level that you get in, just screams: I want to be like Celeste.

Yes, the mario was always like that. But it is 2023 and they still have not comfortable controls. If you compare the level layout with hard levels from Super Meat Boy or Hollow Knight, you might be surprised that the level is easy. But it is incredibly hard because of not really user friendly controls

Since:
- the inertia
- the way how hero jumps of the wall
- Y being action and speeding up at the same time
- down stick immediately triggers jump down, even if you using hat for gliding

…is still here in yet another mario game, I have a feeling it is not bug but a feature. But I don’t like that feature.

I finished Super Meat Boy, Hollow Knight, Celeste, The End is Nigh, but probably will never finish Mario Wonder “Climb to Beat” level 🤷‍♂️

P.S.: I also think that either this game should not try to be a serious platformer, or revise it platforming mechanics, as I had not problem with all other levels so far (4 star levels are super easy, and one 5 star I completed with 3 tries, but with this one I spent 2 hours, and nothing)

In general it is good, I liked the graphics and atmosphere, but this is not enough for praising.

This is a puzzler and for me personally puzzles are the crucial part. In my opinion they are shallow and mostly boring in the first 80% of the game. Only sometimes you will be using another world for the solutions, but mostly each phase is basically isolated world.

Only in the very end, when you have all worlds collected, you going to see the full game potential. And even then I would like to have one step further and more deep puzzles.

If you remove first 50% of the game and add more clever puzzles in the end, the the game would be much better and stand out.

But if you are fan of puzzles like Return to the Obra Dinn, Talos Principle, Outer Wilds and similar then probably you can skip it

I've people super praising this game and decided to give it a try.

The idea with time management is brilliant as not much similar games are here with similar concept (we don't take Harvest Moon that was a base game for this one). I can name something like Persona and even there there is no live-time, but just fixed periods like Morning/Afternoon/Evening.

The first year was ideal, as you learn the game, get to know basics, start growing your small farm bit by bit, try to fulfill the community center and etc.

With the second year it is becoming bigger, as now I have lots of sprinklers, a pond with sturgeons (black caviar), and lots of more things discovered, like truffles, etc.

But then after summer year 2 I start feeling bored, as to proceed, I need iridium and to farm it I needed to go deep inside Skull Cave, which is not easy. And stairs either cost stones (and farming them is the most boring task) or Jades, that you can farm with Crystalarium that costs... guess what... iridium.

You can not buy lots of Omni Geodes (main part of farming Artifacts). So you need to grind them. The Ginger Island? Grind. The daily routine? Grind.

Yes, it is a farming simulator, but some things that were entertaining the first 1.5 years, now are just boring. And you want to automate them, to concentrate on other aspects, and you can't.

Understand that the game is about "small granddad's farm", not how to build a freaking factory. I guess it is a dead end then.

At some point, the game that has some content to explore doesn't have entertainment along the way. So it is better to drop instead of suffer and come to a smaller rating later.

Usually, the "good" sequel is just the first game with "more" on almost everything.

But I would say that TotK is not just a good second part, but excellent as it not only improves most of the aspects but also introduces new and fun gameplay mechanics, that basically affect most of the game.

So it not only gives you "more" world, and "more" weapons/armor, but changes the core part, and basically gives you the pretty much same feeling of exploration as BotW did before.

I personally think that a good open-world game should encourage you to explore its surroundings. And the excellent open-world game should also give you a new feeling of doing that.

And for me personally, TotK definitely does it.

The game is great. I was too scared in a school to play the original one and now I'm super happy that I got a second chance to play it with updated visuals.

The game is so much better compare to Calisto. More enemies and more tension. The when the new type of enemy arrives sometimes you don't know what to expect. Will it blow up produce a lot of tiny creatures? Will it disintegrate in different movable parts which can kill you?

Kinesis is also works. And I mean it. You can cut of the bomding hand from one enemy and then grab it with Kinesis and through it in a group of enemies. This is just freaking fun.

I like how game plays with the player. There was no minute that I felt relaxed. I couldn't play more than hour because of the atmosphere. You always expecting something around the corner, but game play a lot of tricks with you and you not get often what you expect :) For instance, you might remember that there are kind of safe zones, where you can safe and do upgrades. Until the time, when you come back there and suddenly Infector appears and start raising new Necromorphs.

I really appreciate that I finally could play this game.
The plot is okaish.

TBH, seriously taking plot into account here, is like taking Doom's story seriously. Those games are sharpened on the gameplay and have story as a small relaxing addition.

The gameplay here is mindblowing for me. Just because someone took the speedrun technics and built the whole game about it. And it worked perfectly for me.

I would never try to speedrun DMC or RE4 or any longer games, just because the probability of error is high, and the cost of it raises as the game progresses drastically.

Here you have small levels, the cost is not super high. But moreover the game turning into some puzzle. In order to progress with Ace medals on PS5 I almost never felt tight in time (maybe in the end sometimes). Because you just need to find&use shortcuts (instead of speendrunning 100+hours trying to gain -1 millisecond to your record time)

When I started to play I didn't even consider to do Hell Rush (when you need to beat the whole game in one go without death). But eventually the game is designed so well, that after I obtained all ace medals, gifts (and sometimes red/dev medals), I felt that I know everything there to try out. Seems not too hard.

Tbh I thought of putting solid 4 (again, the plot is not the best that could be and it adds/removes some value from the final rating). But when I started (and finished) playing hell rush I understood that this game is definitly 5 star only.

And the reason because the whole game teach you to play in one way, and then on a Hell Rush your usual rushes are you enemy. If you will rush as usual (because you have repeat button, there is no problem if you'll make a mistake), you will fail. And fail a lot.

And you start playing slowly. You basically learned a lot of things in the game and know you need to through half of them away and quickly re-teach your brain to play know strategically/tactically instead of be on time.

And this is super clever. The game eventually (if you try to do Platinum) gives you so many emotions and this is where you realize that the graphics is just a candy wrapping. It can be stunning with all the bells and whistles but inside you may find something unpleasant to taste.

And yes, the OST is just magnificent. I'll wait for the Vinyl for sure!