I played the first one for a few hours when it first came out. I thought seemed fun and something right up my alley but also felt it was a bit overwhelming. For whatever reason I just never picked it up and finished it. Recently I've been having a perpetual itch for platinum trophies again and apparently 2 is a much easier and obtainable plat than the first so I decided to play it. And in this era the sequel usually improves on mechanics and gameplay and adds just a bit of polish so I'm guessing I haven't missed much with the first.

And yeah this franchise is right up my alley. It's the best Venom/Carnage game that we're never going to get. I love that it's like this Resident Evil type world with these giant grotesque gooey zombie monsters while you play as symbiote type anti-hero character straight out of a Spider-Man story. This game largely plays like a ps3 era open world Spidey game. It's like Web of Shadows if you got to play as Venom or Carnage the whole time. So that's awesome and right up my alley and I would have loved the emo edgy protagonist from the first back in 09-12. Now it's kinda corny and laughable.

So I really like the concept here. And the gameplay for the main character is mostly really well done. All of your playable character's mechanics play really well and feel fleshed out. It feels like the bulk of the work and a lot of care was dedicated to figuring this out. I like his diverse arsenal of goo and blade powers. I like the locomotion in this game. It felt very intuitive and was fun to explore and wasn't a chore getting from point A to point B. He plays well, but where the game falls short is in the overall game design, enemy AI, and script and story. I wanted to rate this game higher because it was a fun enough play through and the type of game and world that really appeals to my tastes, but it just wasn't quite good enough to warrant a higher rating.

This is a 3rd person open world superhero game. You fight a variety of different zombie like monsters and other super powered soldiers and the occasional tank or helicopter. It's fun enough to bash your way thru them and you have a lot of options on how to do so at your disposal. But where the game fails is that it never really feels like you ever have to switch it up. You don't have to change your style or approach for any of the enemies. You can just basically pick your favorite weapon and button mash your way thru the entire game. It's sort of a let down as it's never a challenge and becomes quite repetitive quite quickly. The enemies are diverse in appearance only. They give the illusion of variety, but really their play style is also to just basically do their version of button mash at you. Since their AI isn't great and doesn't force you to change your approach, it allows to do just mash away at them.

Thru 2 playthroughs, one on easy and one on hard, I think I only died once and failed a mission 2 other times (which were only failed because I didnt pay attention to the mission directions, not because it was actually challenging) until the final boss fight on hard which I died another 3 times. The final boss fight has 3 stages and then a final QTE to finish him off and beat the game. I died once during each of the initial 3 phases, so even that you figure out pretty quick. Easy difficulty is incredibly easy and once you've beaten that and acquired all your upgrades, hard difficulty feels just as easy. It's never a challenge.

Not only does the gameplay get repetitive by simply just button mashing, but the game design and mission objectives are incredibly repetitive too. Most of this game is just sneak into an area, stealth consume a person to acquire their identity, discover information, destroy a thing, rinse and repeat. Sometimes the order of those steps is switched but it's so much of just finding a person to consume them which gives you information on where to go to kill or destroy a thing. Boring. And the sneaking logic is pretty silly and laughable. It's got the GTA logic where if you're wanted you need a reskin to get the authorities off your tail and it'll work even if the cops see you pull into the car wash. It's not exactly like that, but there are plenty of moments akin to that in this game. Between that and the enemy AI I could see this making for a good Dunkey video.

And I largely played this game on mute while listening to podcasts but I'd tune into the cutscenes and dialog and story every once in a while. I think the voice actor for the main character Heller did a fine job and I'm sure the voice acting is solid for the most part, but the dialog and writing and overall story beats in the final confrontation was the nail in the coffin for this game only getting a 3 star review from me. It's very cliche and simple and empty and a bit too much "been there, done that." The story at large is basically protagonist wants to get revenge on someone who he blames for the deaths of his family. Antagonist wants to infect the whole world to give them super powers and be the next step in evolution. They fight. Good guy wins and gets his revenge. Nothing too deep or moving there. It's just basic. And the cinematic cgi cutscenes look pretty solid here, but the in game rendered ones largely don't. It's also a victim of its time where it's another one of those gross ugly brown/green ps3 games where the environment all looks so murky and bland.

Overall I'd say if you like open world superhero games from this era like Infamous or some of the Spider-Man games then you'll probably like this. I really liked the power set and the locomotion. I liked bashing my way thru enemies and feeling like a God until I suddenly didn't. Finding the collectibles was a bit of fun and not a pain in the ass at all. You don't even need a guide. I always liked the finishing animations. It was always fun to see Heller rip thru baddies in the most gnarly way. I want to say this game was good enough for 2012 but maybe it doesn't quite hold the test of time now, but the fact they never made a 3rd one tells me maybe it wasn't quite good enough for 2012 either. Anyways a decent game that I enjoyed getting the platinum for.

Sorry for the long review. I wanted to get back to my review style from my metacritic days where I'd write lengthy reviews and touch on each little aspect in detail. No one's reading this anyways lol

I cannot tell you how much I loved this world. It's like a weird surreal David Lynchian world full of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. It's Panos Cosmatos meets Stephen King. It's esoteric. It's anachronistic. It's paranormal. It's sci-fi. It's so beautifully creepy and unique that I just absolutely loved the setting and atmosphere. The bland brutalistic government building paired with the highly stylized extradimensional threats mixes well to create this highly unsettling world. It's a bit The Void, it's a bit Stranger Things, and they even managed to cram in some Last of Us style fungus based zombies. Brilliant.

As far as gameplay goes this is so incredibly right up my alley. I love 3rd person shooter games with superpowers. Things like the Infamous franchise come to mind, as well as Dark Sector, and Deadpool. The latter of which I platinumed on Ps3 and Ps4 because I liked it so much. It's possibly my favorite type of gameplay for action adventure games. I love horror and I love superheroes. They are probably my 2 favorite genres right now. And Control was able to perfectly blend the 2 genres in a way that a big budget movie has failed to ever really do for me.

Poor navigation and some technical issues are what kept me from giving this game a perfect score. I'm glad I stuck with this game. I loved this world so much it really makes me want to play Alan Wake.

I finally finished this after dabbling with it on and off for nearly a year.

I really enjoyed this game. When it was first announced or I first saw a trailer I was annoyed that it looks so close to the movie versions without just being the movie versions. Same thing with the Avengers game I never played that everyone hates. But over the course of this game I really came to appreciate these versions of the characters. They retain all the core qualities of the characters while doing enough to differentiate themselves from the movie versions and warranting their existence. I also like the little references to other Marvel properties we haven't seen in the MCU yet like Dazzler and Darkhawk. These little things helped it feel like it was it's own proper expanded marvel universe and not just the movie one.

The gameplay, especially the combat, can feel a bit chaotic, but once you've figured it out it's a lot of fun. The AI is done really well and your teammates never feel like they drag you down or like you have to do a lot of hand holding. That's a hard thing to get down with one AI character for one small portion of a game let alone an entire 20 hour game with several characters.

You only play as Star Lord and you give orders to other guardians and i thought this would get stale only ever playing as the one character but it works really well. The story was a really good blend of a solid video game and solid comic book story while retaining that James Gunn emotional core like the movies. The cinematics are incredibly well done and the final confrontation with Nikki at the birthday party legitimately had me tearing up. The graphics and facial animations are movie quality.

The story has a bunch of fun references and cameos. I really liked the inclusion of Adam Warlock and Mantis. This is a very Guardians type story. The gameplay is fun throughout but could have maybe used a bit more puzzles with some actual challenge. Not just "hey drax move that stone there." The only bugs I found were sometimes the audio was delayed. Like a character would say "hey open that door" after I already opened it. Not necessarily a bug but an annoyance that affects immersion. I had one crash. Sometimes thered be some objects clipping through others. Little teeny tiny things that aren't complete gamebreakers or ones that entirely ruined my experience.

The collectibles look annoying to get as they didn't do a great job of tracking them for you or giving you an easy way to free roam to pick them up. At the start I wasn't looking forward to going back through this a 2nd time to get them all but by the end I've had such a fun time playing it and now I feel like I finally really understand the combat and level design that I'm really looking forward to getting the platinum trophy for this.

I love the guardians and this was a great way to spend some time with them in the lead up to volume 3 this May.