Tormented Souls

 

Being a big fan of classic Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and general oldschool survival Horror games, coming across Tormented Souls on Steam I knew I had to pick it up when I saw them proudly state their influences on their sleeve in the description. I didn't look too much else into it, just a few glances at the trailer, seeing the static cameras angles, and nice looking graphics was enough to convince me to buy it eventually.

There are no difficulty options or really any gameplay adjustments of any kind. What you see is what you get. Which means it should be a well balanced and tested experience. The game sets the plot up by starting off with the main character, Caroline, getting a strange letter in the mail of a picture of twins and a creepy message. Investigating this letter, she goes to this dual Mansion/Hospital location. Then theres a cutscene where shes naked in a bathtub with a tube shoved down her throat, in a dimly lit creepy room. Now you have control of the character. Thats as much setup as the game gets. Its pretty great and sets a mysterious and scary tone. You got kidnapped, put in a bathtub (nudity included) for some nefarious reason, now you must figure out whats going on. It also turns out, that your eyeball is missing! You investigate a mirror in the room and get a cutscene revealing that your eye is gone, further adding to the mystique.

The game is heavy on puzzles, like classic Survival Horror fashion. Even the first room has a puzzle you must solve before you can leave. Surprisingly, the game even has sort of Point & Click elements to its puzzle solving and object collection interfaces. Instead of other games where you simply press Use on an item with something else, in Tormented Souls you get this pointing finger cursor you can move around the screen and dynamically play with things in the environment once you get a close up of them or even when examining owned items. This can be anything from changing the code on a padlock, hovering the cursor over a button on a pocket watch you're examining, hover over a gas can lid to open it, moving the slider on a floppy disk by hovering and pressing in the right spot, and so on. It adds a new element to the Survival Horror genre and brings in some of the more Point & Click elements of the old era as well, and it works really nicely! It's genius to combine them both into one game. I never really found that there were any points where it was too obscure to point at some place I'm supposed to, it all made sense and was intuitive. The general interface of the game works well, too. You have an inventory screen, where everything is laid out in a grid. You can't drop items, nor is there a storage box like Resident Evil, however, they made the odd decision to simply give you seemingly infinite inventory space. That's right. A Survival Horror game where you don't have to worry about inventory space. As you pickup more and more items, your inventory just scrolls down to accommodate. Now, this takes away a big element from other Survival Horror games, namely, having to treck back and forth to safe rooms to deposit unneeded items and only make these tough choices to carry the bare essentials. However, do I miss it here in Tormented Souls? Well, maybe. I'm not sure. On the one hand it was nice to not have to worry about it, but kinda the whole point of the genre is to MAKE you worry about things. It can make the game feel a little too comfortable without having to care about inventory space. But overall, as a choice, its not here nor there. It has pros and cons. The game isn't necessarily better or worse with or without infinite inventory space, which is something that surprised me to realize , coming from other Survival Horror games.

The game does retain many mechanics and standard gameplay practices found from other classics in the genre, though. Namely the save system. It amazed me to see this modern title use a limited saves mechanic. Just like Classic Resident Evil, you can only save at designated save machines. In RE, it was Typewriters and Ink Ribbons. In Tormented Souls, its Voice Recorders and Tape Reels. A subtle, but clever implementation. The choice to stick with this classic save system, and limit saves, is the right one for sure. It really adds an extra element of tension and unease when even saving is a precious resource. With infinite saves, you always feel safe. You're not worried about losing progress, so you can play recklessly. But with infinite saves, you treat your life as precious. You really, really dont want to die. It makes you tip-toe around the game. It makes you care about your resources, it makes you watch your health. Your life is meaningful. At first I was worried the game would be really stingy with these saves, though. But after playing conservatively for a little while, avoiding saving a few times instead to keep pushing on to just make a little bit more progress to make the most of my Tape Reels, I found myself with an abundance of extra saves, for most of the game I had over 5+ saves in my inventory at any point. So its not like the game is cruel with its limitation of saves, it hits a good balance of creating tension but also not being downright frustrating with too little saves.

  I'm probably going to keep contrasting this game with the classics because it takes so much influence from them and wears it on its sleeve. It wants to be them. The game also makes the choice to utilize static camera angles for the most part. This means that you cannot freely rotate the games camera around to get a good look at the environment, or what lurks around each corner. This system is perfect for Survival Horror because it adds even further tension and stress by creating fear from the unknown. Since you can't just peek around the corner with the camera, or at times you cant even see whats in front of you (!) , it makes you often rely on other senses than just your sight. You enter a room, and depending on the camera angle, you may have to instead focus on Audio and your hearing. Listen for creepy noises, listen for footsteps, or anything that may lie in wait. It creates this suffocating atmosphere, and makes the whole experience feel very cinematic and immersive. I feel like modern Horror titles lose an aspect of this when they switched to free camera controls. I'm glad Tormented Souls stuck to its roots and doubled down on some of these older style mechanics. The controls also are a mix of both old and new. The default Controller scheme, has the analog stick moving a more modern style, with pressure sensitive movement, move the stick slowly to walk and move fast to run, turn the stick in any direction to move freely. So it's not actually tank controls. However, you can also use the Dpad to get the exact oldschool Tank controls. Now, I kind of wished they just forced Tank controls on the player without any ability for the more modern controls, because of the same reasons I mentioned earlier about the other mechanics. It adds another dimension of uneasiness and makes the player not as nimble which can add to the tension. I think they didn't do this because it might alienate too many modern players. Its not really a gripe or anything, I myself used the Stick controls the whole game, but I suspect if it was forced upon me, I would of liked tank controls even more as a strict gameplay choice. But the controls work, and are good regardless. Its very basic, theres no sprint button or anything. You can just move around, and once you get weapons you can aim, and then fire. But you cannot walk while aiming! which I'm very glad for. They got that right. Survival Horror games where you can walk and fire make the character too nimble, it makes the enemies not very threatening, which can ruin the whole tone of the game. Items are easy to miss in the game, only a few items will put off a glint or sparkle to make you aware of their presence, you have to be diligent in scraping the rooms for items, walking by everything and looking for a button prompt. They're usually in sensible spots, but sometimes are cleverly hidden. Still, I never really missed anything too crucial and was able to intuitively find everything I need.

   At first, you start off in the Hospital wing of this giant building complex, but as you progress you learn the Hospital is actually just hastily tacked onto a bigger mansion, and you gain access to this mansion too. The graphics, detail, atmosphere, and ambiance of the game is just amazing. At times the game is beautiful, then dreadful, melancholic, horrific, Nostalgic, to heart pumping action scenes. It goes through the whole emotional spectrum. The aesthetic of the game is fantastic, the Mansion and Hospital are wonderfully designed, with incredible famous works of art on the walls, Medieval and Victorian decoration everywhere, the rooms look like these old 18th century style buildings for the most part, which have this air of lost romanticism about them, coupled with urban decay and neglect, creates an elegant but haunted tone. There are all sorts of religious overtones in the narrative and especially the environment, creepy statues, ornaments of Jesus on a cross hung in dark abandoned cellars, which can really make things even more disturbing. The graphical effects the game uses are fantastic too. The shadows, lighting, especially the light that comes off your Lighter and later on Flashlight cast these creepy shadows from objects onto the walls, the whole presentation of the game is just great. Except maybe a few small details: The general character models look....a bit out of place. Like they belong in a different game or something. They're noticeably lower fidelity and more, almost cartoonish compared to the rest of the details in the game. I'm not sure how to put my finger on it, they just look a bit off. And the second nitpick with the presentation is the voice acting. Yes, I know, this genre is famous for terrible corny voice acting, but here it sounds so obviously amateur its a bit distracting. Like it just sounds like the main developer just got his wife to talk into a microphone one day or something. The subtitles hardly even line up with the words being spoken most of the time, its jarring. So the game definitely shows its indie side, and can be rough around the areas. The voice acting and writing isn't awful or anything, it works to engross you into the plot, theres nothing too stupid or corny, its just the delivery is a bit weak acting and can give off some reading off a piece of paper impressions.

   And one last thing about the presentation: The soundtrack is just incredible. Seriously, this is one of the best soundtracks I've heard in a long time. A lot of it is this sombre, echoing sad piano music, that play haunting melodies throughout the whole experience. In particular the Main Hall theme , and a few of the themes that play inside the more Office / children's areas of the game are so good. But even the claustrophobic areas of the game like the Sewers and the tight hallways of the Hospital have incredibly unnerving ambient soundscapes and disturbing horror songs playing in the background which really adds stress on top of an already stressful experience. The soundtrack is pretty much flawless in my eyes.

So onto the real bulk of the game and general playthrough experience.
At times I could only play the game for about 2 hours at a time, because it felt so claustrophobic and oppressive that I had to take a break. That's actually a good thing, the horror experience is working. It should make you feel stressed and worn down, wanting to return to the safety of real life. The game its self doesn't feel like a safe place, its an on the edge of your seat roller coaster, it makes sense that it can exhaust you. The first moments of this is shortly into the start of the game you have to go to the basement to turn on the generator because the Hospital is pitch black. Then you realize that if you stand in the darkness, you'll quickly get a cutscene where you get hauled away and die. To prevent this, you need a light source. So equip the lighter, and then I found the first enemy encounter. You might think the enemies in this game are just your standard Zombies, but no, they do a clever change of the formula. The enemies are instead these medical patients twisted into monsters by these wicked medical experiments. The first monsters have no legs, but kind of crawl around on their knife arms after you. Then in the basement you see a monster in a Wheelchair, as the game progresses you come across more and more creepy monsters. There's even these startling times of monsters chained to a wall that doesn't chase after you, but moreso acts as a jump scare as you crawl around in the dark with your lighter only to have the camera slowly turn to reveal these creatures right infront of you. They block the path, attacking you if you walk near, you can kill them to reveal the blocked path. But, like I said previously, if you stand in darkness you die. So sometimes its impossible to put your lighter away to equip a weapon to kill them, until later in the game when you get a new piece of equipment, the Flashlight. The monsters are downright frightening and startling, every time I encountered one it got my heartrate up a bit. In the first half of the game the monsters are generally legless, meaning they're pretty slow. But later on in the game you come across fully fledged walking monsters that are downright terrifying. Not only do the monsters melee attack you, but some of them even spit ranged attacks at you. A particularly staggering monster that shows up late into the game, is this flat bloblike balding ghost thing that chases you around, and no matter how much you shoot it, it wont die. The music that accompanies this thing is hectic, and the game has its share of "Just run!" moments, which keeps you on the edge of your seat. So as youre progressing through new rooms in the Mansion, theres rarely a dull moment.

The plot keeps you engaged the whole time too, usually I don't pay that much attention to Diaries or random Notes or bits of lore in games, but here its very gripping. The general idea of the plot is that you're looking for these twins in this weird mansion, but as you uncover more and more diaries and notes you realize theres a whole subplot about Maternity, Birth, Parenthood, and tragic loss and death of babies. Theres even a handful of moments where you walk through Mirrors or VHS tape Projector screens to warp back into the past like time traveling to further reveal more plot points and also to do time travel puzzles, like having to put acid on a metal lock in the past, which takes many days to actually melt, and then go back to the present day to find the lock has been destroyed because of your past action. Its clever, well done, and fleshes out the plot in a satisfying manner. The writing on the Diaries is often times grim, introspective, insightful, and interesting. I found myself wanting to read all of them. Even the UI for managing the Diaries and flipping through them is immersive, you get to see little illustrations and extra information as you're physically examining the books. You even frequently run across a friendly NPC, the Priest, where you have these bizarre conversations with and he acts nefarious and pretends like he has no idea whats going on, which was always fun to see.

There are a lot of little mini puzzles which you find items, go back through the mansion to find the corresponding place to use the item, and theres a huge variety of interesting things you pickup. A scalpel, hammer, Plastic hearts, Limbs, VHS tapes, Coins, acid bottles, Blood bags, batteries..I would frequently think "Huh, what the hell am I gonna use that for?" but eventually the answer usually came into place. There is something that can really suck about these kinds of games, though. It can happen that since you dont know what to do, you can waste hours backtracking through the entire game trying to see if theres some tiny detail or item you missed. I only got this feeling a few times, and not wanting to fall into that trap, I looked up a few small hints where I'm to use an item. One of these was towards the end of the game where you get this key item and I had absolutely no clue what it was for. I wasnt about to go through the entire game looking for the one spot I'd missed. I looked it up it and it was sort of nearby, towards the office area, in a little "Childrens Room" which I had completely missed the first time around, because its an area where you are chased by the invincible Ghost monster so I got out of there as fast as possible.

Not everything is great, though. The game has heavy emphasis on puzzles. And they can be...hit or miss. Some of them feel incredibly satisfying and rewarding to solve, not too obtuse or cryptic, but actually demanding you use your brain and problem solving skills to figure out the riddles. Some examples of puzzles that I liked was the skeleton puzzle, its a skeleton with a bunch of buttons all over it with an accompanying plaque giving riddles which correspond to what order you must press the buttons. I liked the elevator puzzle, which made you find a replacement for a Fuse, by giving a hint in a diary "The fuse is blown, I just need to find anything conductive" meaning any piece of metal would do, and thats what you use the Metal bolt for. Then you go through the elevator downstairs, and block the elevator door with a shelf because the button is broken, to retrieve the metal bolt, go back up the elevator, and use the bolt again on a 2nd fuse box to open another locked door. I also liked the Clock puzzle, which you set the date and time on the clock, which corresponds to riddles written on nearby paintings. A few more notable puzzles I found satisfying was the TV dial puzzle, where you turn the dial of a TV as if it was a safe, and the Infinite Room puzzle where is a series of endless rooms and a changing plaque upon each right answer, giving vague clues and hints as to which is the right door to enter. I liked the vinyl puzzle, this one is a simple one where you have to repeat the musical nodes on nearby switches.

One puzzle that was just "OK" was the Door knocker one. In this one, you knock on the door according to the rhythm of someones heartbeat. The clue says "Knock on the door using the heartbeat of this persons Creation"  Me, seeing "Creation" I thought it was referring to the Doctors crazy monsters all over the place. A A wall monster right by the puzzle even twitches after hes dead, showing a sort of rhythm. So I thought I had to study this monsters heartbeat and put the rhythm to the door. Nope, thats it not. You actually have to backtrack way back to some Statue and use a Stethoscope on the Statue to reveal a heartbeat...What? I mean, its kind of cool, but the hint almost deliberately confused me. It could have been worded better. Later in the game you get a key with various shapes on it that you can turn around. Then you find doors to use this key on, with mini puzzles. Some of them made almost no sense to me, like one door showing a Broken vase diagram turning into a full vase and shapes. You have to somehow interpret these shapes into the basic shapes on the key, and it was hard to figure out. Theres another one which shows a Tetris diagram that was lost on me. Another one with numbers, which I realized correspond to the number of lines on the shape, but one of them has "8" which actually means Infinity, or the number "0" for Circle... which took quite a long time to realize,  these key combination puzzles werent awful, but more obtuse than they needed to be. Worst of all, sadly not all the puzzles were rewarding to solve. Some of them are just downright incomprehensible, frustrating, and annoying. Usually in games like this, I try really hard not to look anything up. I give myself maybe 1 hour to figure out a puzzle, If I can't get it after that, then OK its probably unfair bullshit. I even had another person look over and use their brainpower to solve some of the puzzles, but on the same ones we were both stumped. The cash register puzzle was one such thing. You have to enter a number into the register, and nearby the only clue is these drawings of two cubes on the wall with dots in different places , saying =2 and =3. I tried for awhile to figure out what the code was, but I couldnt get it. Eventually I looked it up and its the number of intersecting lines on the dot. I don't know if I would of ever figured that out. Another one was the floppy disk puzzle. You put a disk into the computer and it asks for a code. The code is something to do with the names written on the label, and I even found the hidden hint underneath the head, but I still struggled to make sense of it for a good 30+ minutes and looked it up. Another puzzle that I just hated was the Key Dial puzzle. You have to put an item into a slot, but match up the indents perfectly. You do this by examining the item and rotating the different pieces. The thing is, it seems like every time you close the examination window, it resets, making it incredibly annoying and exhausting to do. I had to look up a screenshot of the solution after like an hour of messing with it, I couldnt be bothered anymore, I was fed up.

Another puzzle that made no sense to my brain or my onlookers brain was towards the end of the game the Gas valve puzzle. Its this giant grid of valves and pipes and you have to redirect the gas, I read the instructions over and over, Left valve = closed, Down valve = open. Followed the pipes over and over for 1+ hour, using the 3 screws to block the gaps, but neither of us could get it to work. Eventually I looked up the solution, and it looked almost completely different to what I was doing. Apparently I didn't understand how it works, at all. And even people in the comments are saying it makes no logical sense. Another questionable puzzle was the monkey one. You have a bunch of riddles about a Judge and court, and you have to try to match up what the clues mean to the monkey picture. I picked up that the judge is blind, which corresponds to the monkey cover his eyes pictures, but some of the other riddles and clues were so obscure that upon a dozen tries I couldn't quite get it. Had to look that one up too, sadly. I'm not sure if this one is necessarily bad, or If I'm too dumb, or what, but again, me and another person both used our brain and couldnt figure out the riddles. They are just very, very vague, moreso than probably any classic Resident Evil or Silent Hill puzzle.

Theres a couple just shocking egregious examples of bullshit, though. Like one point where you go look through a window and see a guy walking in circles around an operating table, and you have a conversation with the Priest about some ancient tribe. I was stuck here, it turns out you have to backtrack to another run and literally WALK IN CIRCLES around some table, in JUST THE RIGHT WAY, to progress the game. Just wow. I don't think I would have ever figured it out. I tried for a good 30+ minutes to find someway to progress, couldn't spot it. Had to look it up. Maybe in hindsight the clue was obvious, but I Just dont expect stuff like that to be a puzzle in games like this. Just cryptic as hell, not in a rewarding way.

Another gripe is the actual weapons in the game. There is a total of Two ranged weapons. A nailgun, and a makeshift pipe shotgun. Not the most badass tactical weapons, are they? I would of really liked to find a Beretta pistol, a real shotgun, a magnum, etc, in the game but they don't exist. You get these shoddy Home Hardware tools. Like its fine, it works, I get what they were going for. It would just feel a bit more cool to me to find actual guns. The only melee weapons is a crowbar, and an Electric Lance, which I really sadly missed. I kept finding batteries for the Lance, but never the actual thing. I saw it through a locked fence, once, but didn't find how to actually get it. After beating the game I looked up how to actually get it, and to find the Electric Lance, you have to go through a time warp mirror, to a dark hallway with a Wall monster, and the only way to bypass it is to have the Flashlight lamp so you can equip a weapon and not be in the darkness, because the Lamp gets used while you hold a weapon unlike the lighter. After you have the lamp, go back here, kill the wall monster, you unlock the door in the past and upon going to the future its open and you get the lance. Well I just totally forgot, or missed the Wall monster in that area, so I never found it.

 That brings me to talk about the actual resources in the game. Survival Horror is known for its limited ammo and tight resources, so how is it done here? Well its pretty forgiving, all things considered. I didn't die a single time playing the game. Well, technically, I died a few times on purpose, but this is in my "experimentation phase". The "experimentation phase" as I like to call it, in this genre, is right after I've saved and I'm feeling safe, I run around wildly like a madman exploring new territory, with the knowledge that I've JUST saved, so I can die and not lose anything. I use this opportunity to get my bearings and figure out what I have to do next in the most efficient way. You might call this cheap, or cheating or whatever, but I don't think so. I take any inch I can get with these kinds of games. So anyway, I havn't **really** died, so the resources are quite forgiving. Most of the time I had multiple health items, and for probably 3/4 of the game I had plenty ammo to kill every single enemy I came across. I wasn't even conserving ammo that much, I was wasting shotgun shots when I could of shot Once and then used the crowbar, or used the Nailgun after one shot, I wasnt being perfectly efficient. There still wasnt an abundance of ammo, though, I was always comfortably hovering around a dozen or two shots. Sometimes, though, especially towards later in the game, I would quite literally be down to my last handful of shots at any given time. Feeling really stretched thin for ammo, a few times I had to just opt to run by enemies, which was nerve racking. At least I was feeling comfortable with the amount of Tape Reels the game gives you, so towards the end of the game instead of being conservative about my saves, I would start being liberal and saving after almost every bit of progress, which felt good. I suspect the fact that I missed the Electric Lance probably had to do with my ammo shortages around the end of the game, being that the game was balanced around you having it. Still, I never felt stuck or like I'd screwed my save, unlike other games in the genre where thats very possible. I actually entered the last two boss encounters with virtually no ammo. The second last boss phase is a group of these cult members wielding swords and I had like 2 shotgun shots and 10 nailgun shots. Luckily in the room is a few more bullets, and I had JUST enough ammo to get past it. Like down to my last bullet. I actually think if I shot one more shot somewhere else in the game I may have just bricked my save file. So maybe it is possible to ruin your save, because this fight was really sketchy. I don't think its possible to do it with a crowbar, but maybe? That was the only really sketchy part in the game where I felt like I may have ruined my save. As for the last boss, I actually entered it with ZERO bullets. Thankfully the last boss isnt too difficult, its this gigantic stationary creature on a crucified on a cross, where you have to shoot it a few times and then go around hitting these vines which reveal a button on a machine you have to hit at the right time. Do this to 3 machines and you beat the game. The good thing is theres enough ammo scattered around the boss area to make you be able to beat it, even if you entered for 0 bullets. This is good because even if I wanted to backtrack at this point, its impossible, its barred off.
 So overall the I'd say the resource management is well balanced. I never felt TOO comfortable like I just had an abundance of heals and ammo, I was always kept on my toes and being careful with what I shot. But it wasn't like this annoying frustrating experience where I didn't have enough resources to fight back. Its just a shame of the lack of weapon variety and real weapons, though.

 The last area of the game is has a real suffocating atmosphere. The sewers is distressing, full of walking monsters and even a Ghost chase part. Theres even a saferoom in the sewers where you enter the mirror going back to your own childhood bedroom with the aforementioned TV puzzle. Then you drain the water and reveal the big bunker doors, to open them it needs two eye scanners. This is a nice twist in the plot, where its revealed you are the one that cut out your own eyeball! To use with the other eyescanner. So you even get an item in your inventory of your own eyeball, which was creepy but awesome. Then you enter the final bunker, its this pitch black series of underground bunkers which is pretty scary. Theres cult members in here wearing suits of armor that swing swords, but frankly they look a little comical more than horrifying. But still this area was dreadful (in a good way) to explore. Before the final boss you find the Ghost creature chained up, and its another plot twist. The deformed ghost creature is actually your twin sister, the postcard in the beginning of the game is about you and your twin sister. Shes deformed by the Preists wicked experiments and lust for his sacred rituals or whatever. Theres 3 endings here, I chose to use a scalpel on her and kill her. But it turns out if you ignore her entirely, you get a different ending. And if you did the Infinite room before this, and managed to pickup the Syringe, you can save her and get another good ending. I got the neutral ending because I didn't have the Syringe. I found the syringe on an earlier save, but only because I was "experimenting" and took a bunch of damage by the crowd of monsters before the syringe room, and decided to reload and not grab the syringe until I found  a use for it. Well, by the time I realized the use it was too late, and I'm not reloading and losing like an hour of progress. Still, the twists and turns in the plot here are exciting and a spectacle to behold. Even the damn preist morphs into that gigantic end boss.

 After beating the boss you simply return to the mansion, use the new key item on the front door and walk outside the mansion to a bright sunny day, getting one of three endings. Despite the few gripes I had with the game, and some of the puzzles being disappointing, I'd still say this is a modern gem. Overall I loved my time with the game, and I could even see myself playing it again at some point, maybe sharing the experience with a friend. I'm happy to see that there is a sequel announced, I'm excited to get that now. It takes most of the greatest things about classic Survival Horror and implements them perfectly, the atmosphere and plot are stellar, the monsters frightening. It's a must play for any fan of Survival Horror.

 8/10

Mafia 3

 

Being a fan of Mafia 1 (Original) Mafia 2, and Mafia 1 (Remake), I've been excited to get around to playing Mafia 3 at some point. Although I had seen trailers and advertisements for the game, and heard many people badmouthing it, it put me off a bit because the idea of a Mafia game set in the 1960s where you play as an African American just seemed kind of out of place? I wasn't sure what they were going for. But I reserved judgement until I played through it myself. Finally I got it on a discount and installed it and played through it recently.

There are no difficulty selections, infact the first time you boot up the game it doesn't even give you a main menu, it just shoots you straight into a series of cutscenes and then the game, something I didnt appreciate as I wanted to change the volume, graphics settings, resolution etc. The game sets its self up swiftly , showing that the main character Lincoln is a tall, hulking Vietnam Soldier recently returning home in New Orleans,  gets greeted and picked up by his friend that works in a local crime family/Mafia. Interlaced between this slow start are flashbacks or...flashforwards? To combat scenarios of you robbing banks, and all sorts various exciting scenes to kind of spice up the intro, which works well to keep the pacing. Ultimately, after these introductions, all of your Mobster friend and family gets betrayed and gunned down right before your eyes, you even get shot in the head yourself yet somehow miraculously survive. From there the game opens up where you're set on this plan to get revenge on those who did this to you. Its a good setup, its simple, easy to follow, and the characters are memorable and interesting.

The writing and narrative of the game doesn't shy away from politics, or even dare I say call the whole narrative of the game almost Leftist propaganda, which isn't nessesarily a good or bad thing. Games can have political agendas and try to forward a political message, as long as its to the service of the gameplay and overall narrative, and not just shoved in there for easy mass appeal. The game has a heavy focus on 1960's racism and Civil rights movements. Constantly you will have White characters saying racial slurs, calling you and your friends the N word, theres mature themes of slavery, the KKK, Confederate supremecist rednecks, and so on. More than anything, its just amusing how overblown and absurd it all is. If a genuine Conservative was playing this game, I'm sure they would think its all a strawman and big fake caricature of their side. But theres nothing wrong with a little satire in media, I found it all entertaining, amusing, funny, and kept me engaged in the story, characters, plot, etc. I did scoff a few times at how overtly it felt like the game was trying to push this leftist politics at me, as if like every White man in the 60's was an evil neo-nazi or something, but the gameplay and characters were engaging enough that it didn't really bother me. Now, I've heard people say they hate this game, it has like a 50% rating on steam, I was wondering why do people hate this game? Is it just because of the politics? I kept asking myself that question the whole time I was playing the game, waiting for the answer to reveal its self.

The general progression of the game is that you open the map, find a Story mission and drive to it. There is no fast travel! I think it was like this in the previous Mafia games, too. So you have to get accustomed to driving everywhere, everytime. I don't really mind it, really. When games like this have fast travel it almost makes the open world seem pointless. Why have this big open world if its more convenient to bypass most of it? Instead, in the Mafia games, they force you to live in this world and drive around and get familiar with the sights and sounds. Maybe its tolerable in part because of the Radio and soundtrack in the game. There are three radio stations, and since the game takes place in the 1960s Vietnam era, its a lot of Rolling Stones, those familliar almost cliche songs that play during any Vietnam themed media, such as Fortunate Son, Rock music, but also theres a decent amount of softer pop music like Sam Cooke, The Searchers, Roy Orbison, and stuff like Johnny Cash, and so on. The soundtrack kept the driving entertaining, just going through the various places in the detailed world, the game world has a lot of variety. Theres a section thats all swamps and Bayou, theres a Downtown section with all the city life, and skyscrapers, theres the more ghetto areas, its a fairly big map and often to drive to the next objective it will make you drive 2000+ meters and it takes a good 10+ minutes to get there. These long drives are also aided by the general high graphical fidelity of the game as well, the game is very colorful, the weather is dynamic, sometimes its dark and rainy, other times very bright, green sunny day.  The reflections on the ground when its wet out looks really good, with all the colors popping off the screen. The cars drive very weighty, almost every car accelerates slowly from 0-60, maybe because the game takes place in 60's so even by then a lot of the cars people are driving are older 30s,40s,50s cars. So most of the cars in the game are relatively slow to modern standards. If you get in a car crash at high speed, you even lose lots of health, further adding to the atmosphere and immersion.  Everytime you steal a car or do a crime, if anyone sees you it will say "Witness is calling cops" , but usually its OK because if you just leave the arena soon enough, you'll be outside the searching bubble and it wont be an issue. Just another detail to add to the living feeling of the world. There is a funny civilian behavior, where it seems like they dive far too often in front of your car. Something about their AI makes them frequently leap in front of your car, when they should be leaping the other way. Just thought that was amusing.

More about choosing story missions from the map screen: Its annoying how the DLC missions show up as "Story missions" that you can do anytime. It doesn't even indicate to you that they are optional DLC missions, or DLC at all! So I accidentally did one or two of these DLC missions without realizing. I don't like to do DLC stuff until I get the main campaign out of the way, I want to see what the developers released and were working on at release date, not stuff that was added way later. I just want to see the core experience first. So it was annoying and frustrating having to figure out how to avoid the DLC. Its because the HUD in general isn't designed very well.
Its bloated, ugly, hard to read, grey text on dark grey backgrounds, tiny fonts, too many bars upon bars, and still somehow has missing indicators. Like, where is my sprint bar? I beat the damn game and I still cant figure out how much stamina I have at any given moment. Theres a rear view car camera on the top when you drive...but whats the point, you can already press a button to look behind you. Immersion I guess? Well it breaks immersion having so much shit all over the screen. Theres a speedometer at the bottom, then a bunch of other bars ontop of it that I don't even know what its showing. Going across the bottom left is this little tiny bar trying to show you wallet money, bank money, grenades, etc. But again, the fonts and colors suck and are barely legible. The minimap is either too big or too small, it depends on resolution. The entire hud is a mess, and really needed some kind of option for adjusting the size or something.

As for the actual main missions themselves, theres a cycle to it. Actually not that many "Main missions" are unique events in themselves. Usually you just drive to some location, talk to someone, and then it starts up this Racket operation in the general area where it gives you a HUD indicator of "Damage remaining $$$"  and you have to go around the district and do these  reoccurring mini-missions to kill enemy gangs, destroy their various equipments, steal their money, and generally just do damage to their operations to make this HUD money indicator to go down to $0, at which point you go talk to a person and it opens up the actual unique main mission, usually just involving going to some mob bosses headquarters and killing him. Then, you own the location and have to decide which of your 3 companions to give it to. For the first handful of hours, I didn't even notice you could give it to other companions. It would just say something like "Location complete, press A to award to Cassandra" and show me a list of possible perks that doing this would unlock. I didnt notice that if you press a direction, you can award it to other companions. This whole empire asset management aspect of the game felt weird and sort of pointless? or incomplete. Like they wanted you to get the feeling you were becoming the Main Mafia boss, rewarding assets to people, but it felt a bit shallow. I get the impression the devs wanted you to care about this stuff a lot, but I barely noticed or cared. Each of the 3 companions has a different list of perks that get unlocked, if you keep giving these assets to them, Cassandra is stuff I found stupid and pointless, like these voodoo grenades? With extra smoke perks? but one of her main perks was more Rifle ammo, so I eventually got that from her, then stopped caring. Vito was obviously the best perk set, his was stuff like More maximum health, Fater health regen, and even being able to call in Hit squads at any time, which is a squad of a bunch of allied NPC's that gun down anyone you're fighting, at any time. These guys were super powerful, although I didn't use them much, the times I did use them proved to be very useful. Vito even has perks which make these squads stronger, ontop of his health boosting perks. The last companions perks seemed almost useless to me, just small things to temporarily get cops away from searching for you, but ONLY if they're in the blue circle phase, not when they're actively chasing you. Even the lowest tier of perks from Burke gets you this ability, his other perks just enhance it, make it last longer, or are perks related to vehicles that I didn't care much for. Theres all sorts of other stats about the assets, like how much money they're making, how much money each Companion is raking in, but I didn't really see the point of caring about any of it? I couldn't tell what it was changing. It wasn't like there was any turf wars that made you keep ontop of protecting your rackets, I never saw anything like that. They want you to care about this so much, that every now and again after completing enough main missions, you have a little sit down cutscene at your headquarters with all the companions, and you have to decide which district to give to which person. And they get really mad at you and talk shit if you ignore or neglect one of them. But in doing so, you can lose perks, like if Cassandra is bitching at me because I didn't give her a district enough times, the only way to make her stop is to give her a district, but in doing so, I'd temporarily lose for instance, my Maximum health perk from Vito, until I give him another racket. So obviously I care most about the Max health perk, not pleasing Cassandra, so I'd ignore her or Burk a few times -- well in doing so, she got so pissed at me and said "You ignored me three times now, I quit!"  or something to that effect - meaning I'd permanently lost her for the rest of the game, and unlocking anymore of her perks, infact I had to go do a side mission to kill her in order to even get back the ammo van ability, and keep the perks I'd already unlocked! I was kinda pissed about this and felt like I'd ruined my save, you cant load or go back or anything. I think there should of been some meter, or visual indication of how close I am to ruining her relationship, I was clueless what exactly was going to happen and it all happened abruptly. But it wasnt so bad afterall, just a minor setback. Luckily I already had all the perks I wanted from her anyway.

Now anyway, back onto the main missions and pacing of the game. Like I said previously, the game actually doesn't have an abundance of actual unique main missions. Its mostly this gameplay cycle and routine of going to a new arena, having to do these mini-quests where most of the time I'd just drive to a location, snipe one guy, and leave instantly. Or have to interrogate some guy, by beating on him and then he gives you more of these copy paste mini quests to progress by making the "Money Remaining $$$" damage meter on the HUD to go down. Since I heard that people hate this game, I'm wondering is this the reason why? They just hated how repetitive and lazy this style of progression is? Well yeah, it is repetitive, and yes it does seem lazy. But to me it wasn't that big of a deal. The gunplay is fun enough, the general gameplay is fun to engage with, I didn't mind all that much. Yes, a few times I was like "Ugh, this AGAIN?" like I was expecting something more, but I realized thats really what most of this game is. And I kind of just accepted it. The gameplay loop is what it is, unfortunately it doesn't have an abundance of extravagant, scripted, unique locations and missions, but the game isn't terrible in spite of that. Because its just a good Third person shooter, breaking into these enemy headquarters and either sneaking around or trying to figure out how to damage their stuff, assassinate the bosses, or whatever, is just kind of fun to do in general.
That's not to say the game doesn't have any unique scripted missions, it definitely does. They're just few and far between, and usually only after you do some major progression or plot point in the game, usually one after each time you've successfully damaged enough property on a turf and made the money go down to $0. One of the highlights of these unique missions was the Boat mission. This is a level Commando style you cause a giant explosion which disrupts this party Yacht where politicians and powerful influential people are, because you're hunting down the Uncle of the games Antagonist. This mission has the boat shaking all around, tossing the character around as he engages in combat, pedestrians falling off the boat and into the water like Titanic style, its just a fun mission thats a spectacle to behold. Another mission has you in a defense against waves of enemies, using a sniper, to eventually kill the Butcher, which was just a fine holdout style mission.  Another mission you have to assassinate a politician before he gets into his car, you can go into Slow-motion though so I sniped him through the window, then you have to get away from the cops. There's another mission where you go to a damn KKK rally and have to assassinate the main Klansman. And a few missions where you break into various places and rescue someone and have to get them out safely. So it does have exciting interesting moments in the main missions, but yeah for the most part you'll be doing a lot of almost copy+paste grinding in the districts doing these mini-quests to get to them. I was never bored or pissed at the game, though, really, I was pretty much entertained the whole time.

The gameplay has a surprising amount of mechanics. First and foremost its a Third Person Shooter. There is tons of combat in this game, moreso than most other Open world GTA games I've played. This is a very good thing to me! And the best part, is that the guns and combat is actually really fun. The graphics, and especially physics, are at times just amazing. Getting into gunfights is visceral, intense, and fun! Even the audio design: enemies are constantly yelling stuff at you, talking to eachother, saying their plans, its exciting hearing all the stuff they're saying. The combat is brutal, when you shoot the enemies, they have dramatic reactions where you can see the force of the bullets impact into their bodies a dynamic physics system takes over, its satisfying to engage in combat in this game, the physicality and brutality of the physics systems, gunplay, and enemy reactions is awesome. Most of the time if you shoot them once, they wont just keep fighting. They'll be staggered, stunned, holding their wound and muttering in pain, but they can recover after a handful of seconds. Often times if you shoot them and they go down, they'll be writhing around on the ground in pain bleeding out, the combat is disturbing, realistic, and shocking at times. Some of the death sounds and screaming sound effects get your blood pumping in the heat of combat, seeing  people all over the floor crying to their death, asking for their moma's and stuff like that. The only other game with such graphic, brutal combat and dramatic physics is maybe Max Payne 3. The guns feel good to use, they have a real punch of recoil and good sound effects. You can only carry two guns, a main gun, and a sidearm. And ammo is limited, only a couple dozen bullets for each. Which is a good thing, it turns into this calculated Risk/reward situation where you have to wonder if you have enough ammo to take them all out, if you should try Stealth (which is very powerful, but not overpowered, and the stealth has insane kill animations that alone is fun to watch) or should you go in guns blazing and pickup the enemies guns and ammo instead of dropping your main gun. Because you can find a gun you really like, but if you drop it, you might not get it back for many hours. Shortly into the game you unlock additional characters you work with, such as Cassandra, Vito, Thomas, and they give you additional perks and abilities. Such as in your weapon selection wheel, you can now call in extra services. One of these services is to call a van to your position (that arrives very quickly and conveniently) where you can refill ammo and buy new guns which get unlocked permanently to equip yourself with. But they cost a lot of money, so I had to pick carefully. I found that using Rifles was the best choice most of the time. So for basically the entire game, except the very beginning, I was using these single shot rifles, which I found really fun and effective. I don't mind the two weapon limit, it makes sense realistically to make the combat more grounded, and it adds to the immersion and intensity. I liked being forced to pickup subpar guns off the ground sometimes, when I was in a dire situation.

As for the health system, it uses regenerating health, except only regenerates each bracket. At first I think you have two health bars, if the second depletes it only regenerates the first one. Later on, you can unlock more health, up to a maximum of 5. I think thats a great way to handle regenerating health. The usual modern gaming standard of letting your health regenerate all the way is just too overpowered and easy. This bracket system, which I guess Halo introduced? Is a clever way to have some of the benefits but without making it too strong. To fully restore all your health bars, you have to use Adrenaline Shots,  basically health kits. You can find these in healthkit stations around the map, or you can buy them from the ammo van, which then these Adrenaline shots get stored on you until you press a button to use them. At first I think you can only hold two of them, but by the end of the game I had gotten so many perks I could hold 6 of them!

With this almost unforgiving health system in place, it adds even more to the intensity of the combat engagements. You can die very quickly, the enemy AI isn't stupid, either. They will frequently flank you, run straight up to you, do unpredictable things, toss Molotov's and grenades at you, snipe at you, coordinate flanks with their buddies, try to break your cover, etc. The game uses a Cover system, where you press a button to hide behind any piece of possible cover, and it works surprisingly well. Way better than other games I've played recently (Watch Dogs 2), this cover system is snappy, reliable, and fluid. You can blind fire, which is surprisingly helpful. You shoot over cover and since the enemies get stunned and react realistically by even just a stray bullet nipping them, it gives you some time to plan to jump to the next piece of cover if they're advancing towards you. The stealth system is quite basic, you just press a button to crouch, and as you move around you see little indicators of how much the enemy can see you, and if you get close enough you can press a button to instakill the enemy with a short but brutal animation. You can even pull them over objects, pull them behind walls, its quite dynamic and impressive the amount of ways you can get litle unique takedown animations. The stealth is quite forgiving too, almost too much, but it was fun to use sometimes so I actually bothered to use it besides just going guns blazing everytime.

Something the combat mechanics have that I've noticed other similar modern games share, is this Reinforcements ability that some enemies have. In this game they are called Sentry guards. They have a little icon above their head, and if you trigger them a big message pops up on screen "Sentry alerted" , now in other games (again..Watch Dogs 2) this can tend to suck, because in other games as soon as these guys hear you or see you, theyre calling endless waves of reinforcements, making combat in those games just downright annoying and almost pointless. However, in Mafia 3, its handled perfectly. When you alert a sentry, he has to actually run to a phone, dial it, and talk to someone. It gives you lots of time to track him down and take him out before he actually calls them in. This makes the whole mechanic a welcome and exciting addition, rather than a detriment. And when he does call in reinforcements, its only just one wave, not infinite waves like other games. So I'm happy this aspect of the combat was done right, and actually enhanced the gameplay rather than made it frustrating.

Not everything is designed mechanically great, though. The police for instance leaves something to be desired. For instance, as soon as the cops are after you, I found myself just letting them kill me most of the time instead of trying to take sometimes 10+ minutes trying to lose them. Why bother? Well, the reason is because the penalty for dying in this game is losing half of your held cash. But the thing is, as soon as the cops came after me, I would just press the button to bring the Bank car to me to deposit my cash, so now there was no penalty for death. So almost everytime the cops are after me, I instantly deposit my cash and let them kill me. Theres multiple reasons why I found the cop chases just a waste of time and annoying. For one, they pop your tires way too damn frequently. 9 out of 10 times youre in a cop chase, within the first 60 seconds almost all of your tires are popped! Its so stupid! Only until near the end of the game I actually noticed there was a perk you can get from the ammo van "Bullet proof tires" ...but I don't know, its still too frequent by default. And additionally, its just kind of too hard to lose the cops. I still don't know if theres any way to tell what 'Wanted level' I have. There doesnt seem to be anything on the HUD indicating what strength the cops are at? Its like all or nothing? I dont know. So even a cop watching me steal a random car, felt like the same force as cops after me on a murder spree - Or I couldn't tell the exact strength so I was left wondering how long this escape would take. And it seems like if you stay on the main roads, the cops will just always keep up with you. Its like the only way to actually lose them is to try to pop their tires in return, which obviously driving and shooting should be clunky, but theres this weird lockon system that I kind of fumble with where you can lock onto their tires , which sometimes works, but most of all I just didnt want to bother. The only other option is to try to go off road or go on foot in some back alleys, but who knows how long this could take. Again, why go through all this instead of just deposit my cash and let them kill me, then respawn nearby. Only a couple missions in the game had mandatory cop chases where you have to escape to finish the mission, most of the times I got caught by police was when I was just freeroaming in the world trying to do things to progress to the next main mission.


The game is easy to play for long stretches, I don't know if its due to the atmosphere, music, the lack of free travel, the general gameplay cycle, sometimes I could play it for 5 hours! it just sucks you in, I guess. I actually was engaged in the main plotline, the characters like Donovan, which is this CIA agent that was your buddy in Vietnam (I think?) that helps you throughout the whole game, he always has wacky antics happening in his cutscenes, constantly chainsmoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, hes just like a reliable buddy the whole game which you turn to for more information on what to do next. Then you have Father James, this Priest character thats supposed to be like this figure of moral authority and righteousness in the narrative, but I found him kind of annoying and does nothing but act sentimental, mope, and say trite platitudes the whole game. Still, it was fun to watch his antics. Interspliced through these narratives you have the 3 underbosses and their dramas, the Irish Burke being a hard ass, having a fucked up knee waddling around, you have the main antagonists constantly saying all sorts of racist stuff, just the general things said and done in the game is a curosity. Hate it or not, being sent on missions where you're facing off against stereotypical rednecks sometimes wearing fucking bags on their heads, scribbling White power graffiti on the walls, with rebel flags - its just not dull. I found it easy to be entertained by the game, even if its absurd. I appreciated how mature the whole game felt, it doen't feel like something kids should be playing. I even liked the main character, hes stoic, doesn't fuck around, isn't all emotional or pissy, he just gets shit down and the whole game it feels like you're on a damn mission, just like Vietnam. He has that Veteran mentality about him, even wearing this cool Army outfit as his default look. I was curious whenever a cutscene played, I genuinely didn't want to miss any bits of story or dialogue, I found it pretty enjoyable and fun to keep up with.

The main gripes I have with the game is the lack of unique main missions, the copy pasted repetitive mini-missions, the bad HUD, sometimes it can be hard and ambiguous to figure out what the next main mission is, theres not really any coherent structure of the pacing of the game, you kind of just go to an area on the map do stuff there. At one point I realized I'm doing content for a part of the map that probably should be happening at a way later stage, it was kind of hard to figure out what to do next sometimes. The DLC showing up on the main map as any other story mission without any indication that its DLC didn't add to that. More gripes is some of the police stuff with the shooting tires too much, the sub-par design choices with the money and annoyingly having to call in this bank car every 5 minutes to preserve your cash, Something I didn't figure out until many hours into the game. It could of been explained better to the player. But besides that I didn't really have many complaints. Maybe I would of liked if there was a way to fast travel, SOME way, maybe having to drive to a train station and take you halfway there? I don't know, probably half of the game is spent driving to and from places, its quite arduous sometimes. The game is very forgiving with checkpoints and stuff, so I wasn't very frustrated that much, and usually when I died it was completely my fault for playing stupid and trying to speedrun past a section or something.

So I'm still left wondering, why does this game have such a bad reputation? Is it really just people crying about how "SJW" the narrative is? Its not that big of a deal, just enjoy it for what it is, take it as satire if you want, I liked the gameplay enough to not be bothered, and despite the politician overtones, I still enjoyed the narrative and the characters. If its not the politics, then do people hate the game for the repetitive mini-missions? I didn't mind it either, because the game has awesome gunplay. Some other open world games you barely even get in shootouts. Like Mafia 1 doesnt actually have that many fighting sections, this game actually barely had any vehicle chases. Maybe thats another gripe, theres not enough vechile exclusive missions. Theres hardly any vehicle chases in Mafia 3, it really is just a straight up Third Person Shooter, I like that kind of thing, I was actually really happy to find out this game has such a big focus on the shooting , because they nailed it with the gameplay in that department. So its like they went all in on one aspect, and kind of ignored some of the other ones like Vehicle sections, but its fine to me. Still, I had a pretty fun time with Mafia 3, it wasnt that long or worn out its welcome, I didn't really do a single Optional mission, I just stuck to the main story and it took me 20 hours to complete,  which is perfect to me for an Open world game like this. I had a good time, I don't know what everyone elses problem is with this game. Underrated.

7/10

Journey to the Savage Planet

 

Looking for a new co-op game, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find something to play. Was looking around at deals, and came across this game, Journey to the Savage Planet. I had seen it before a few times, but from the few screenshots and little information I had, it wasnt too appealing. It has this cartoony, childish look to it that was off putting, but still it was cheap on Steam so me and my buddy picked it up.

Right from the main menu it has a co-op option, which instantly got me and my friend joined up together and starting the game instantly. Which some co-op games mess up, and make it a pain in the ass to actually play with eachother. Thankfully its very smooth and seamless here. Then you get introduced with two modes, Normal mode, and some Classic mode where it seems like when you die it deletes all your game progress? Yeah, no thanks. So we went with normal mode and off into the game we went. It starts off inside some ship lobby area with TV's playing videos at you, giving you an overview of whats going on. You're some astronauts exploring this obscure planet looking for various materials, lifeforms, and ultimately fuel to send your ship back to Earth. The games cutscenes and tone has a mildly enjoyable element of comedy to it, it does give me Borderlands vibes, but its toned down compared to that game. The various random commercials that play on the ship TV's are actually enjoyable and funny enough to watch and listen to. They have real people acting, and its just silly little videos and commercials about various space aged technology like Glob, this weird sort of mush of food that tastes like anything you want it to, but its just a glob of purple goop. I can go on about the little commercials, but I'm just pointing out that they were probably a highlight of the game.

Then we set off into the various stages of the game. Its a pseudo open world game, meaning you can select different stages of the map to teleport to, but the maps are big and open enough where its not very linear and they are very vertical with lots of climbing and exploration to be had. From here we just looked at the main objective marker and followed it around kind of aimlessly. The games graphics are very colorful, cartoony, inoffensive,it kind of does feel like a kids game. It runs on the Unreal Engine, which more often than not for me is a bad thing as I find it allows the devs to be lazy in their game mechanics and I find lots of Unreal games have the same sort of feel and control to them, which I also felt here, like the movement, jumping, and platforming is satisfying enough, but it doesn't standout enough from the crowd of other low budget Unreal engine games. Soon enough we came across all sorts of different creatures roaming around the planet, and the vast majority of them arent threatening. They kind of just walk around and ignore you. Rarely, some of them will spit globs of shit at you, but its mostly nonthreatening and not a challenge. Its not really a shooter game at all. I'd say its a platformer exploration game. Mostly all you're doing is staring at the compass going towards the next main objective, and figuring out the right path to platform there. At first, you don't have any upgrades so traversing is quite limited. But as part of the main progression it forces you to get more than half of the upgrades in the game anyway, so if you just stick to the main quests you'll end up getting the things you need to traverse to the next progress point. The game...feels really hollow. Like, theres not much to it at all. There are resources you collect, like you can shoot the creatures roam around and the drop various resources, Silicon, Aluminum, and a few others I forget. But it feels largely pointless, Lke I barely gave a shit. When you die, you drop all your resources on the ground and have you go back and pick it up like a bloodstain in a Souls game or something, which I thought was a bizarre and stupid design choice. But once you go back to your ship via fast travel locations, it deposits what youve collected. But still, I never really cared about how many resources I had, or losing them, the few times  we didnt have enough resources to craft the mandatory upgrades we needed, we just went around and explored for 5 minutes and got them fine. In co-op, you also share resources, so its an even smaller deal. So the entire resource collection and upgrade system in the game feels meaningless, because you end up having to get half of it anyway.

So, what else is even in the game? Well, you also have this scanner ability. You press a button and it goes into this scanning mode which various things in the environment highlight and you can scan it for a box that gives more details about it. I'm not really sure what the point of this mechanic even was? They tried to make it this big deal, almost like its Pokemon and you can scan the various creatures to collect a little card and it puts it in your Pokedex basically, but who gives a shit? It doesn't seem to actually give you anything tangible. A few times you scan things and it gives little hints about how to open a 'chest' or how to move past some obstacle, but even these hints are few and far between. So the whole scanning mechanic feels pointless as well.. Thats two mechanics that feel worthless in the game, in a game that already barely has any gameplay. Not good. What else is there? Well yes, you do get yourself a Handgun type weapon. You hold this gun in your right hand, and your left hand just holds various utility items which are finite that you pick up around the world. Stuff like Bait cans, Bombs, Poison bomb things, Stun shock things, this thing that you throw at certain walls to grapple onto...basically the entire left hand mechanic is lame and I barely cared about any of it, only used it for the mandatory points. The whole mechanic feels like juggling useless bits of junk the whole game. And the controls for it suck, too. The right handgun is barely used. Yes, you can go around shooting passive creatures for resources, but like I said, I barely cared about the resources. There are, however, like 3 boss fights in the game. Complete with health bars on the top of the screen. However, these were piss easy and a joke. The first one is this Lobster monster that just stands still and shoots balls of shit at you and does a few worthless attacks. You just shoot some glowing yellow thing and he goes down. The next one, is called Floopsnoot and it actually reminds me of the last boss of Half life 1. This boss is a little more interesting, although hes still stationary, hes this big tenticle monster thing where you have to jump grapple around the arena to shoot the various yellow bits. At least its more engaging than the first one. Then you just have the last boss, which is visually stunning and exciting, but gameplay wise theres not much to it .Hes just this big ugly frog thing that again, is stationary, and shoots a few globs at you, but you just have to shoot the yellow balls again a few times and then you win.

 There are a few smaller enemies that you have to kill to progress, like this time where there are these spinning dragon type enemies that are kind of hard to kill, you have to wait until they stop spinning and shoot the glowing bits. But the handgun is just not fun to use at all. First of all, its lame, it looks lame, and sounds lame. It has this annoying reload animation, and its the only gun in the game. The other mandatory enemy is this like frog animal that you have to shoot a certain spot in its back. Thats basically all the combat in the game. The game took is 7 hours to beat, and any real combat I'd say only lasted 10 minutes out of those 7 hours.  So, not really a shooter game at all. These small fights were not very fun or exciting , either. Just compared to how dull the rest of the game is, it was a bit amusing. At least you can instantly pick up your co-op partner as soon as he goes down, but if you both die you just respawn at the ship. There's not really any penalty for dying other than dropping some of your resources.


 So what else is there to the game? Thats it, really. You go around following the main marker, to collect random objects and resources, go back to the ship to get mandatory upgrades, first this double jump ability, second this mega jump ability if you hold a button, then last the grapple ability to grapple onto various 'rails' around the levels and grind almost like Tony Hawks or something, then the game just turns into a big first person platformer game more than anything. The game is frequently frustrating with its objectives and pacing, too. Like the objective will be vague and the marker will actively point you at the wrong thing, confusing us. A few times the objective marker would point us at something, and I'd use the scanner to get some hints, but the hint it would give me was only for a section later on in the mission, not relevant to the part I'm at right now, further confusing and frustrating us. It's just poorly designed. You can find these plants which give permanent health upgrades, but whats the point of caring about health upgrades in a game with virtually no challenge or combat? I only picked them up when I stumbled infront of one.

 I don't know what else to say, really. The game is dull as fuck. If I could define it in one word its just Boring. The game is boring. You don't do anything. There's nothing TO do in the game. Theres no mechanics or gameplay. The bulk of the game is just figuring out what rocks to climb or what place to grapple to reach the next waypoint. Like, the platforming isnt terrible, the controls are fine, it's just the game doesn't have anything else in it to have such dull platforming sections. Theres a narrator AI woman thats talking in your ear half the time, with the same sort of wacky sarcastic ironic humor as the Borderlands games, and infact a few times when you complete certain objects a little robot that looks almost like Claptrap shows up, this game takes the worst aspects of Borderlands, doesn't even retain the tiny bits of fun that shit game has (Like atleast some figure of combat) and it also takes the worst aspects of first person platforming, without anything to make up for it. I don't even get why the game is called "Journey to the Savage Planet"  What the hell is so "savage" about this game? It has some of the most docile, nonthreatening, pointless creatures in almost any game I've seen! Should be called Journey to the Timid Planet.

 There's just a bunch of little annoyances that build up, like the fact you cant see where the fast travel locations are on the compass, so if you lose sight of it, youre fucked and you just wander around aimlessly. The stupid pacing where it will suddenly prevent you from doing the main quest unless you stand around doing side "Research" missions and reach "Level 2"  so you can suddenly craft new things? Stupid shit like "fall 50 feet and save yourself with a double jump!"  "Use the Live scanner on these random enemies!"  "Kick this creature into 5 other creatures" Like why do I have to do this menial busywork just to complete the story? It sucks. The annoying sound effects, the game is clearly trying to be whimsical , hilarious, cute or whatever, but its just grating and annoying. Why are there creatures farting all the time? Shut the fuck up! These little sections where you have to fumble with all your left hand throwing items to find the one required for the next obstacle, like one time we got stuck at this Grappling seed part because we didnt have any Grappling seeds and backtracked like 15 minutes, because we didn't realize you can get more seeds from these random nests on some trees.

The last area of the game was especially terrible. We were excited to be at the end of the game, thinking it was almost over. Well no, the last section is this gauntlet of bullshit where you go through this deep cave arena and you have to run around in circles which took us over an hour , staring at walls trying to find various yellow blobs to shoot just to progress...I mean what the fuck? This isn't fun. Tedious annoying labour. We finally found all the blobs, which I admit we had to Google some. And we reach the last boss, which like I mentioned before, sucked and was trivial and more lazy stationary blob shooting. The real kicker is when we beat the last boss, the end credits played. Ok, great! I can uninstall! - Nope. Turns out to actually "beat" the game you have to collect 5 fuel sources which could be ANYWHERE on the fucking map, meaning we'd basically have to go right back to level 1 and replay the entire game over searching every nook and cranny for these fuel sources to actually beat the game. You can also get an upgrade which helps you detect these fuel sources, but thats also locked behind probably hours of grinding tedious garbage. We just said fuck it, and looked up the exact location of the last 4 fuel sources on YouTube, speedran to them and grabbed them all in like 20 minutes and finally finished the damn game. Gave us some cutscene about us returning to Earth, but then the presenter guy starting laughing manically like a villain, meaning we didn't get the "true" ending because we also didn't 100% every single optional thing in the game to unlock it. Yeah, that's NEVER going to happen. This game was shit, period. We got the end credits, I don't care about your "true ending". I reluctantly bought this game not expecting it was gonna be great or anything, but it somehow even let me down and was worse than I thought it was going to be.

 4/10

The Crew 2

 

I usually dont play many racing games, but this one caught my eye for two reasons. It was $1. And it is co-op. You can play the whole story mode together with a friend. Despite the fact that its made by Ubisoft, which I generally tend to avoid nowadays, we picked it up and played through it. The Crew is almost notorious now for sparking this "Stop killing games" controversy campaign, because The Crew 1 shut down its live services preventing players from playing anymore. So we cant even play The Crew 1 if we wanted to. I don't mind much about that, I'm just curious to play a co-op racing campaign.

The game doesn't really have much of a story, though. It starts off showing you this overview of a map of America. And to my surprise, one of the first things I saw is that if you zoom in, it will just keep zooming all the way, going from a map view to a full 3D view just like if you were playing the game. So this means anywhere in America basically you can go from a like Google maps view, to zoom all the way in to the real view which I thought was really cool and one of the most definining features of the game for me. Now, when I say the game doesn't have much of a story I mean there isn't really a clear route to progress the game. It's an open world game, on the map you have all sorts of dozens of icons showing you different races you can do. It wasnt until a dozen hours or so into the game we even figured out exactly what we were doing and how to progress the game. There isn't really a coherent main narrative that blends the whole experience together. Its kind of like, you just pick random races, that all more or less feel like copy paste derivitive almost Side missions, do these short races enough times and you get a cutscene here or there telling you that you're making progress. Frankly the entire progression path and getting a sense that you're actually accomplishing anything in this game is terrible and was one of the most frustrating parts about it. Even after Googling stuff we couldn't exactly figure out what we have to do to get through the main campaign mode. To say its a "campaign" is probably overselling the idea. Its more like a bunch of , what would be in other games , side missions, and when you do enough of them you unlock a final boss race and then the category is finished and you move onto the next one.

The game doesn't just feature street races, which might be what the developer tried to set its self apart with. Instead, there are four categories of races. Street race, pro race, Off road, and Freestyle. Within these cateogries there are also Sub-categories. For instance, Street race has typical street races, but also has Drag races, and Drift races. And Off road races can have the sub categories of Motocross, Rallycross, and Rally raid, and so on. Now the confusing part is every single one of these sub-categories also requires its own specific category of vehicle. So at first we were going to save up money and buy a car we thought was really cool, but that would be a massive mistake because we'd blow all our money on a single category out of like 20, and be screwed for the rest of the races. So instead you're forced to holdon to the money you make and save it until you come across a category of races that is particularly challenging to spend the money on a vechile to help you progress in that category. This was sort of disappointing , but also I guess makes sense. Theres just too many categories and too many sub-genres of vehicles. Like why do I need a separate car for Drift racing and Street racing? Why cant I just tweak my Street race car for the Drift category temporarily or something? To make matters worse, you cant sell cars. It costs a lot of money to buy a car, say, 500k, and you only get around 15k-20k per race, and the car you buy might turn out to be totally useless or you might not even enjoy doing that kind of race, so its a big gamble. I know theres a Test drive ability, but that doesnt really tell you what you need to know it doesnt give you a racing context. Just the fact you cant sell vehicles, even back at half price, makes this whole thing stupid. And even worse, is the prices for buying cars doesn't make any damn sense most of the times. The cars work by something called Perf level. And it seems like simply the higher perf level, the better, faster, more successful the car will be. So all it turns into is buying a car at the cheapest price with the highest perf level, that you can tolerate looking at. This was stupid because frequently I would find 300k cars with way higher perf levels than cars that cost 1.3million. I don't understand? Why would I buy the million dollar ones? Just because I like how it looks? Well this game doesn't reward you for playing the cars you enjoy looking at. Its almost a psuedo-rpg. Cars have different loot parts you pickup, and you have to keep upgrading your cars gear with the new loot you pickup. The loot even has different color schemes according to how good it is, almost like Diablo or some shit. Every time you put on new better loot, your Perf level goes up. So its just this simplistic brainless thing of staring at the Perf number and putting on gear to increase it. Many times I would be kicking my friends ass in races, or vice versa, but it wasnt due to skill, just simply I had better "stats" on my vehicle and thats that. Kind of takes some of the fun out of it that the stats matter so much its almost a damn RPG. And even worse, the co-op part of racing isn't very well done or matters that much. For instance, if your co-op partner is in First place, it doesnt really give you any incentive to try to overtake him or do good yourself. You can come in last place the whole game while your co-op friend is in first, and you'll still win the race with him, but more importantly, it wont even adjust your rewards accordingly. You get the exact same rewards if youre in first place, or last place, what sense does that make? It just seems lazy. Like atleast give me some incentive to play good if my friend is playing good, more money, or something!

Hows the actual racing gameplay, then? Well its pretty damn satisfying. For the most part. Like I said, the game doesn't only focus on car racing. Theres dozens of different categories, some are wacky and insane like Monster trucks, theres even airplane flying trick missions like Tony hawks or something, with a points system. Motocross uses this too. But the pure on road street racing feels satisfying and fun. The sense of speed is exhilarating, you'll be driving cars that go upwards of 250mph at times, which can be exciting to control well. Its enahnced by the graphical fidelity of the game is visually appealing at many times. Like for instance the game has a very popping color scheme that is just nice to look at. The reflections on the cars, especially the Rain and water reflections , look very good too and add to the chill, zone out vibe of the races. The basic gist of the racing is as you'd expect, you step on the gas, use your break as little as possible just around corners, theres a handbreak button but I found more often than not it would screw you over than help you, so I kept it to a minimum. You press the A button for a Nitro boost, and this refills automatically. I found a little trick that if you just tap A the whole time for slight nitros boosts, it seems to be better than waiting for it to refill. Maybe this is placebo, maybe not, but it sure seemed to help me come in first place a lot of the time. The game has multiple camera angles you can drive from, including a behind the wheel view which was immersive and fun to play with at times. The graphics are rough around the edges, though, like you can't hit any civillians they just sort of glitch out of the way, if you zoom in on things they reveal very low quality janky aspects to them like NPC faces, or buildings and random objects around the world. Some vehicles around the world are stragenly static and smashing into them doesnt move them, others will move. Some vehicles even spawn halfway into a houses wall, just glitchy weird stuff. Sure, its to be expected in a racing game, but has to be said.

The game has multiple different radio stations, a few electronica based ones, a Country station, Classical station, Rock station, Rap station, Basically everything except the two electronic stations were terrible. Rap station full of literal "who?" nobodies, Rock station with terribly cliche, annoying music, etc. The two electronica stations BPM and Ambient were atleast tolerable to listen to, and definitely hyped up the game and made it easier to get in the zone of racing while listening to these. I even enjoyed listening to these stations and without it, the game wouldnt be as comfy.

So the gist of the game is just doing these random side mission esque races, going back to the map, and selecting the next one. This was fun, for the first handful of hours. But the game is LONG. By the time we finished the whole story, we had played almost 30 hours! I don't know about you, but I don't think theres a single racing game out there that I could enjoy for 40 hours to completion. What the fuck were they thinking? Its an absolute bloated mess of incoherent routes to progress. And yeah, I was having fun for maybe 6-12 hours. But by the halfway mark I was pretty miserable and just longing for this shit to end. At one point I was hype because I thought we were nearing the end, doing these "Live Xtreme" races, but it turns out after you complete these, you still have to complete atleast 50% of each of the four categories to unlock each of the category bosses. Then after beating each cateogires boss, you unlock the Grand Finale. Well after realizing that, I was pretty pissed. The game already wore out its welcome by that point, now I was sick of it and almost considered dropping it. But we pushed on, grinding out the same copy paste generic looking races and getting it finished. The core gameplay of the racing is fine enough, just everything around that fact sucks. Like the UI, oh man, the UI is terrible. Theres like 4 different buttons for bringing up menus. You have the Y button that brings up this menu for Aborting, restarting, quitting the game, and the radio. Then you have Select which brnigs up the Map. Then you have the Start button which brings up your Player and vehicles, then you have Dpad left which brings up this camera mode. Then you have another button that brings up this Emoji mode. Like what the fuck!? Navigating the menus was a real pain in the ass like why is it done like this? Just put everything under the damn start button! What the fuck are you doing! Can't tell you how many times I pressed one button only to bringup a handful of menus I didn't mean to bring up. Clunky annoying shit.  And while the driving is fun, like I said, the grindy, incoherent routes to progress makes it feel like you're not even accomplishing anything most of the time. Or it leaves you clueless as to what the purpose of what youre doing is. I had to search Google and Youtube to try to figure out what the game wants us to do to progress. I was worried that slamming out dozens of these random side missions was even doing anything at all. I had no clue. The game just does a terrible job of explaining its self to you how to actually go through its main mode, it just assumes you want to sit there and grind meaningless copy paste content for hundreds of hours. I don't. I want to see what the main thing you're offering, and if I enjoy it, in a very extremely rare chance I might play all the optional stuff, but If I'm not over the moon about it, I'll take the main course and leave thank you. But no, they want to draw it out as much as possible, making you grind, probably hoping that you get sick of grinding and just spend your real hard earned money in their microtransaction shop to buy all the fastest cars to get through the game easier.


Too much of the game feels like generic copy pasted races with no unique content behind them. There are a few rare moments where its like "Oh yeah, I havn't seen this before. This is unique, this is a main mission" but these are few and far between. Some of the Points based missions has these unique explosive arenas and setpieces, some of the boat races have some unique courses and setpieces too, but for the most part the races almost feel auto-generated, making the grind feel even more meaningless beyond the satisfaction of controlling the cars.
Not all of the categories of races are enjoyable, either. I rather liked Street racing, All the motorcycle stuff was fun, theres a Destruction derby mode which was one of the most unique modes that had its own branch of gameplay mechanics which was fun, but far too short lived. Only like 10 short missions for it! The monser truck mode was pretty terrible and as barebones as it gets. Drops you into a generic skatepark where you do backflips and pickup some point tokens and not much else. The boat races were fine, but I didn't love how you have to hold Back on the stick to go faster, its kind of arduous and annoying to play like that. The Grand Prix races werent very fun, the cars turn weird and if you go off the road for a split second you go slow as hell. The drag races are strange, in that its more about timing these button presses than actually driving. You just go in a straight line and press the bumper at the correct time to shift gears, not much to it, but I guess a decent change of pace. The airplane missions are...meh. You have a list of tricks to perform and it tells you how to perform them, but the problem is I found that the tricks just dont register when they should. Like doing the Loops in the airplane I would keep doing the loops but it just wouldnt register unless I was aligned exactly perfectly. No visual representation or anything, just annoying to play. So while the game does have a variety of gameplay content, probably half of it isn't really that great. So you know what, its like the game is a jack of all trades but master of none. I think the game would of been better if they just honed in on one vehicle type and really tried to hand-craft unique setpieces and races for every single race, had way less races, but more memorable ones. Oh wait, its an Open world Ubisoft game, we cant have unique interesting locations , gameplay, or set pieces, we just need dull, generic copy paste shit so you can grind for hundreds of hours and hoopefully get enticed to spend money in our microtransaction live service shop. Oh yeah.

The game does have cutscenes not infreqeuntly, but they're very, very dull, safe, devoid of character or personality. Its just some cliche racing nobodies telling you drivel about how much they love racing or how cool certain races are. Like sure, they serve their purpose to give you the concepts of the different racing categories, but how did they manage to make characters so uninteresting? I bet I couldn't make characters so boring if I tried.Oh wait, Ubisoft.

What else is there to say? Well, The Crew 2 atleast sparked my interest in racing games, as like I said, the core driving is pretty fun and well polished, just everything around that is done poorly. The game drags on far too long, I was happy when it was finally over. Theres no end credits or anything either, you just do the Grand Finale, do a series of short races which was oddly very easy, then it ends and thats the end of the "story" content in the game. Then you can just drive around griding out the rest of the content, unlocking cars, whatever. But no thanks, I'm good.

5/10

Watch Dogs 2

 

I had finished Watch Dogs 1 a few years ago, and most of all I liked the concept of a Grand Theft Auto style game with a twist: being a covert hacker using gadgets and smartphones in the modern age messing with people. The first game is a fairly standard open world GTA clone, you played as this sort of edgy guy that wears baseball caps and trenchcoats, using your phone to hack almost anything electronic. I didn't think it was like an amazing game, but it was tolerable enough and had fun moments and a good premise. I had no idea what to expect with Watch Dogs 2, I just had my eye on it for a few years, and waited until the price was right to pick it up for cheap.

Watch Dogs 2 has you playing the part of Marcus a young, hipstery college type black man who soon meets up with the rest of the jolly band of hacktivists in the game. Before long you'll be watching these corny, forced wholesome cutscenes of this band of friends drinking beers on the beach and hanging out, talking about their plans to take down the big bad government tech overlords. And frankly none of the characters are appealing or resepctable, the whole tone of the game has this air of overbearing friendliness and almost like toxic niceness. The narrative also feels like its trying hard to push some political agenda, trying its damndest to send this message about how great diversity is, which sure can be fine, but its so forced here it feels like the only purpose the characters and dialogue serves is to further this agenda.
Though, I must admit, the cutscenes and dialogue is sort of entertaining to watch, in a like bad B-movie kind of way, it is almost 'comfy' to keep going back to your hacker base and seeing all your friends standing around hanging out and watching the cutscenes of whats new that day, its a predicable yet entertaining setup. The games progressive politics are just cringe inducing at many turns, though. Frequently you'll have these narratives how the black guys need to band together because "blacks are brothers" , and even at one point saying "Cracker" as a racial slur, I thought that was odd, like why are racial slurs suddenly acceptable when its against a specific race? The game plasters pride flags all over the place, the game has the narrative of government evil, capitalism evil, etc. I wouldn't care about any of this if it was weaved well into a unique story, but instead it feels like everything in the game is first and foremost to serve Ubisofts political agenda, rather than making a game with its own in-universe politics. I'm not really a big politics person, or do I care, but its clear to see when a games developers forcefully inserts their own values into the entire narrative, and its embarrasing that thats most of what the plot is here.

The narrative cutscenes and visual style of the game also has its own distinct hacker artstyle, with all these graffiti, internet memes, and programmer symbols all over the place, which helps to give the game more identity. Cutscenes and narrative feels like its trying to be the 4Chan "We are anonymous. We do not forget. We do not forgive" kind of thing. With these psuedo threatening messages and hacker propaganda cutscenes that play. Its fun to watch, but it is really lame, but its fun in a more way of wondering what kinds of things the developers will steal from current day social media to put into their game.

The game, like the first one, is a standard open world GTA clone, the twist is that you also use your cellphone and hacker abilities to interfere with anything electronic. You hold a button to ready for phone, and theres an icon on anything interatable which lets you then popup a phone menu to pick an option to mess with the object in various ways. Usually this is stuff like open door, hack to obtain a password or key, disable alarm, steal money from someones phone, or more entertaining stuff like place a fake police bounty on someone,  blow up water pumps around town, stop traffic lights, take control of cameras and remote vehicles, read peoples text messages, and so on. Though, frankly, I never found many of these hacker abilties useful or even fun. More than anything I was annoyed by the menu for them and how it only shows a tiny icon , but no text saying what it does. So it took awhile to even figure out what all the icons corresponded to, and additionally the controls for it is just clunky as hell and not fun to interact with. Its sad how the whole game is centered around the hacker abilities but I just didnt really use them that much, outside of mandatory mission moments. Even the multiple skill trees I found completely unappealing and boring. None of the skills looked fun or interesting to me. Theres like 8 skill trees and its just stuff like ,Vehicle hacking, Remote control RC toys, Botnet power (basically energy), Weapon skilltree, Social control abilities, and a few others. Even the weapon tree seems like it would be useful, but theres barely anything in it, just a few upgrades for reloading assault rifles faster, stungun abilities, and not much else. Even then half of your skilltrees are locked behind optional pickups that you have to pickup around the world, so I just didnt even bother that much. I did upgrade all the stuff I could, but at a certain point all of it was so boring to me I just blinded upgrade whatever to spend my points and didnt even care to look at what I was getting.

The basic mission structure of the game is actually kinda confusing at first. You have this phone menu, where it pulls up a little miniture phone screen on the bottom right of your screen, and you have to navigate around this shitty little phone interface of a bunch of different apps to find what might help you progress. Theres an app which I guess is dedicated to main story progress called DedSec app, but I never used it much. Instead, theres an additional menu for the map screen. So you look at the map screen, and just find "Main Operation" and try to do all those. On the map theres all sorts of other icons, Side Activities, Online Activities, random little coffee shops and clothing stores, but I didn't care for any of the optional stuff, as (spoiler) I wasn't really enjoying the main game that much, why would I do the optional stuff? I did go into a few clothing stores to buy some clothes to make my character look as stupid as possible, to aptly suit the stupid narrative of the game, I couldnt seriously immerse myself as this main character, so instead I made him look as dumb as possible. Once I selected "Main operation" from the map screen, you cant fast travel to the mission directly. You can however, fast travel to shops and locations nearby, for whatever reason, even without ever going there first. So I just select a Main operation, then find the closest fast travel point, then start the mission. This usually is a fast process thankfully, so going mission to mission is quite seamless unlike other open world games that force you to drive around for minutes at a time until you get to then next mission.

Well how are the main operations then?  sadly, not very fun. Almost every mission in the game is basically a stealth mission. I mean the intended, main route is to sneak around, use your hacker abilities to usually hack cameras and float around in these camera views for 5 minutes hacking things to get passwords and open doors, which is extremely boring and just visually annoying to deal with. Then once you get the passwords or open doors from the camera views, you need to sneak around past all the enemies, usually going inside some facility or base , find the main target, usually some computer or device, and plant a hack on it or pick something up, then leave. Thats the basic structure for most of the missions in the game. If you get detected or caught, the mission is usually fucked, because the enemies have this abiltiy where they can infinitely call in reinforcements and spawn waves at you, plus the cops show up which is more infinite respawning enemies. Ontop of this, the game loves to use this shitty puzzle mechanic where you have a grid of these lines and you have to turn these pipes to match the lines up. Its like a bad iPhone minigame you would play on the toilet or something , but no, in Watch Dogs 2 its one of the main mechanics. This is the best kind of hacker mini-game they could come up with? This thing is so boring, so tedious, so annoying, every single time they made me do it, I let out a sigh or groaned in annoyance. Sometimes they even make it a timer to add to the boredom and frustration. This minigame just sucked, most of the gameplay honestly just sucks. And you know what? I was so bored most of the time doing the almost mandatory stealth route that I just said fuck it, and frequently I would just go in guns blazing shooting everything. This did work most of the time, for multiple reasons: One, you have an ability where you click a button and your screen turns into this See-through walls hackerview. Its ugly as sin, it makes the game an eyesore, but you get to see enemies through walls easily. So for most of the damn gameplay I would be in this shitty view, making the game look awful. The combat uses a generic cover based system, where you press a button to snap to cover. Sadly the control are terrible and more often than not I would snap to some random object nearby rathr than the piece of cover I was intending to go behind. You also cant blindfire, so its a very limited cover system. You die in like 3 bullets, and sometimes checkpoints arent very forgiving making you replay the whole mission from the start. To further add to annoyance, later on in the game you start coming across enemies that wear hulking suits of body armor that are just massive bullet sponges that are near impossible to kill, further emphesizing that they do not want you to play non-stealth routes. Still, the majority of the time I carried on doing non-stealth, just because Its a style of gameplay I prefer, and the stealth in this game is stupid and boring. For one thing, even if you try to be quiet and do the melee takedowns to put down the enemies, you usually get punished for it because AI almost instantly hears you or spots you, or spots the dead body. Secondly, if you use the stun gun, same thing. So you dont even have any option to really stealth takedown the enemies, its futile, you'll get spotted. You need to just painstakingly sneak past everyone and after 10 mins of sneaking around you get caught, and you might as well just let them kill you and start over. So yeah I usally said fuck the stealth and just tried to kill them as soon as possible before they call reinforcements, using that stupid see through walls hackervision ability.

The shooting is standard fare. Theres all sorts of different guns you can obtain, even at the main hacker base headquarters theres a 3d Gun printer where you can get specific DedSec guns, but they're all super expensive so I never bothered to get one. I just used the basic 'Goblin' Assault rifle the entire game. No joke. I tried using other guns, Shotguns, snipers, random guns off the ground. They were all terrible. This assault rifle did the job and took down all the enemies easily wherever I was, why bother with anything else. So it made the combat even more boring and trivial. Basically my whole strategy for every mission is to just hide behind some piece of cover where they cant get behind me, and bait them all to me one by one, then once they're all dead progess to the objective. The missions arent that varied in scope and location, at least half of them are just what I described. Infiltrate some building, plant a hack or pickup some object, then leave, usually on the way out alarms are going off and reinforcements are called in. Some notable locations include infiltrating the Nudle headquarters, a clear Google joke, infiltrating the Invite headquarters, a clear Facebook joke, infiltrating some government buildings, infiltrating the FBI, and I can't really remember more off the top of my head.

The controls in this game are basically just awful. Nothing feels good or fluid. The movement is janky and weird, you can hold a button do to this sort of psuedo parkour movement where you instantly jump over anything almost like Assassin's Creed style, but this thing is shitty too. Sometimes he'll be doing backflips over boxes when you want to just climb up on it. The phone controls suck and are clunky to use, frequently I'll accidentally use my phone on some random thing in the enviornment instead of what I wanted to use it on. The combat control are terrible, you have to hold Dpad UP to open the weapon wheel, and if you dare press Dpad left or right you're totally fucked, you throw some RC toy instead of switching guns like you would probably expect. This screwed me over multiple times. The driving even sucks, some of the weirdest driving I've seen in an open world game. The cars all have this floaty, slippery feeling to them that feels worse than silly arcade racing it just feels broken sometimes. Like driving offroad your car bounces around like its in a bouncy castle, its just awful. The physics are crap. The cars radio stations arent much to talk about either, no really standout songs or stations, maybe one song here and there is mildly familliar or entertaining but it has no heavy hitters like other open world game radio's have. Even basic controls like picking up some object off a table is clunky as hell, he takes ages to pick it up, like that time when you have to retrieve the mask, I guess because the devs dont want you to just run in and grab the object instantly and leave, but it feels artificial and terrible the way they've done it. Just frustrating gameplay and controls all around.

The whole game feels like a bad stealth puzzle game. Trial and error bullshit, like having to fail the first few times to see what the intended stealth route is supposed to be. Theres hardly any racing missions, and the few that are here are basically just escape from the cops, which also has its annoyances. Overuse of helicoptors making it a tedious chore to get away from the cops, it uses the modern GTA 4 police system where you have to get outside the cops bubble on the radar and hide for long enough to "Vanish". The over reliance on these shitty little puzzle 'hacking' minigames, the bad controls, the cringy characters, dialogue, forced identity politics narrative, doesn't make for a very appealing package. Towards the end of the game I was honestly pretty pained trying to reach the end. Lots of times I would be failing checkpoints over and over because of the shitty stealth or dying almost instantly because you have such low health engaging in headon combat is almost not-viable, but still it was more fun than slogging through another dull 20 minute stealth section going through all these awful remote control camera segments. Towards the end of the game you go on these missions to take down this big bad evil corporate guy in a manbun, you break into his main headquarters and blow up his mainframes or something, another terrible, big stealth section, tons of guards with bulletsponge body armor, then end cutscene he gets arrested and everyone rejoices and drinks beer together (again) and everyone is happy hacker wholesome frienderinos. I was really expecting someone on your team to betray you or be working for the enemy, but nope, no plot twist. Just pretty much dull the whole way.

I remember liking the first game a fair bit, I don't think it has many of the problems that this game has, though its been awhile so its not super clear to me. But I really didn't enjoy my time with Wactch Dogs 2, and was just relieved when the end credits rolled

4/10