[XBOX 360] Mindjack

 

 

 

Mindjack is a little known third person shooter from 2011
This game has an awful reputation and many people call it one of the worst games ever, if not the worst, ON metacritic it has a score of 1.1 out of 150 reviews.

I went into it thinking it would be really bad but something stupid to laugh at.
Luckily, the co-op still works so I played the whole thing with a buddy.

The premise is something like you're these agents in control of technology that allows you to hack into peoples brains and turn into them for a period.
I'm not too sure exactly what the story is, there are frequent cutscenes, and its actually kind of entertaining to watch with some decent voice acting and writing, but it was kind of in one ear out the other.

So its kind of a typical third person shooter of the era, its got some controls once again copied from Gears of War, like holding A to go into that running mode that controls like a car, A to snap into cover, blind firing, the whole lot. What it does unique is the hacking ability.
The way this works, is you can press a button to snap out of your current main character body, and you can go into any civililian body or captured enemy body. The main reason to do this, as far as I can tell, is to save your main character whenever they go down.

It has a revive mechanic similar to all the other third person games, once you go down, your buddy has to help you up. Well, you can help yourself up, by hacking into pedestrians and playing as them for a minute.
Its not really feasble to keep playing as other characters besdies the main characters, because the game will fail if both characters go down and are not revived within 10 seconds, so hacking into other bodies is only useful for saving the main characters when they go down.

You can also hack into any enemy you shoot at.
The enemies dont have health bars or anything, and if you shoot them too much they'll die
But if you shoot them just enough to get them into a downed state, where you can then press X to instantly from a certain distance 'mindslav' them into fighting on your side. And you can do this to as many enemies as you want, and they fight on your side indefinitely until the 'scene clears' and you move onto the next battle. This is a pretty entertaining mechanic, and feels overpowered at first, and like the game has no challenge, but soon enough the game starts to be pretty challenging because of all the bosses thrown at you that require you to shoot them with explosives/rockets while it just keeps spawning these regular enemies.

and there is a decent variety of enemies. You got standard soldiers, snipers, these weird spider mutants that are more a goofy annoyance than a real threat, flying robots that shoot rockets at you, giant mechs, etc.

The game is pretty generic, but at the same time its got tons of quirks of its own.
Like how it shows a kill log, as if youre playing a PVP deathmatch, but it shows the kill messages for every enemy you take down. Which is pretty damn satisfying and I prefer if more games had that.
And the fact that theres a psuedo leveling system, but it really does nothing at all. It unlocks these perks you can equip in 2 slots, and you can only equip them in the main menu, so you have to quit out of the game to even equip them.  stuff like more health, more accuracy, or strangely making your character twice as big.
Theres also these 'rules' you can unlock which is very odd, it like changes how the game plays, the 'rules' you can unlock basically just change the difficulty. But you can oddly only change 'difficulties' at certain levels, so we never touched this weird mechanic.

It also has this baffling mechanic of being able to drop in and out of any multiplayer game and choose your 'team' which means playing co-op or playing AGAINST the player and becoming an enemy. Who would want to do this? its like the game expects you to play through the campaign multiple times making it hard on yourself by allowing real players to become the enemies? i dont  understand how anyone would want to do that. So you have to explicitely make sure you select 'blue team' which is co-op whenever you join.

Its got other quirks like everytime you defeat a wave of enemies it will say ' Winner!'  and then force the co-op partner outside of whatever body they possessed, and turn into a floating camera just floating around until you wait for the scripted event to stop, then you press the bumpers to snap to the main character again and become them again. This happens frequently and just takes you outside of the game needlessly.

The length of the levels is strange too. They're called 'scenes' and a typical level will last less than 5 minutes. Its kind of a fun way to break up the game, it was more a funny thing than something good or bad.

The actual combat its self is pretty barebones. Theres really not that many guns, two different assault rifles, one full auto, the other burst, a few pistols, a sniper, a shotgun. Basically used the three round burst gun the whole game, except for this other odd quirk where every time you win a level/section you start the next one with only a pistol. So had to use the pistol a bit here and there.

The graphics arent anything amazing, all the locations look pretty samey and generic, just fighting on streets or in between lots of buildings, most of the game takes place outside or inside some office complexes, the game looks OK theres nothing really glaringly bad about the visuals though.

The controls are fine theres no major complaints, its responsive enough, the cover system is minimal gears of war influenced, it works but is clearly not very deep. Theres no way to crouch so you just have to press A to snap into cover.  Theres a roll mechanic where you can spam A to keep rolling like a maniac which helps getting yourself out of sticky situations.

The game is pretty short and we finished it in just two sessions. There was a boss part here and there which gave us some trouble and annoyance, some weird places where you'll get a checkpoint every 30 seconds, but then another section where you wont see a checkpoint for almost 15 minutes. Some boss fights like the giant mech where it isnt made clear how to take it down while waves of enemies keep respawning, but overall the game is nowhere near as bad as its reputation says.
Its a mindless co-op campaign shooter with campy voice acting, some funny one liners, a cheesy high-tech conspiracy story, and some kinda enjoyable shooting mechanics especially with the kill log  and trying to mindslave all the enemies into fighting on your side.
The game at first can be pretty confusing to figure out how it all works, "why do i keep turning into a floating camera this is stupid"  yeah, but once you figure out how it works the game is pretty painless and actually kinda fun. I dont know why everyone thinks this is like the worst game in the world, far from it, dont get me wrong its not a great game or anything, but its nowhere near a horrible one especially considering you can finish it easily in a weekend with a buddy.

6/10

[XBOX 360] Army of Two: 40th Day

 

 

 In the second Army of Two game, 'The 40th hour' this time things a little weirder.
The mechanics are a lot changed up from the first game.
No longer do enemies have those bars and icons over them,
All the controls are 'updated' to play more like Gears of War
You hold A to sprint just like Gears, you tap A to snap into cover, so many things feel like they abandoned a lot of what made the first game unique to try to become another clone of the era.
A lot of the original mechanics are still there, you can still take cover in the old way too, and the cover shooting acts mostly the same, but theres a lot of odd features and additions.
The 'select button' feature remains, telling you where to go, but it looks pretty ugly now like some stupid visor, and it highlights enemies and other weird shit.

Like in the first game, suppressing enemies and flanking them was a huge deal, but in this game it isn't as emphesized and is more like a mindless shooter. And in the first game there were tons of enemies that you could only kill by sneaking behind them , but in this game its kind of few and far between.

In the first game, the online co-op is permanently broken and disabled because of EA
But, fortunately, for some reason, in 'The 40th Hour' the online co-op works, but it seems like it shouldnt. It says the servers are offline, but then it allows you to host anyway.
So its a good thing I was able to play this whole game with a co-op buddy, cause this game has some serious flaws that make it much less enjoyable than the first one.

Though, are some good new features, like the Shop, which can strangely but thankfully be used at any time by holding Y.  You can buy weapons and attachments whenever you want. This is a big improvement over the first game where it awkwardly asked you in the beginning of the mission for upgrades, and then at random points in the levels, but if you accidentally skipped it or something you were shit out of luck. This game has the same quirk of the first one where it seems to give you way too much money and nothing to spend on it. Theres no real incentive to try out all sorts of different guns, besides if you're like a gun nut and have a hardon for that kind of thing or something. They all kind of feel the same and you end up slamming so many attachments on it anyway boosting the stats it doesnt really matter.
Also, you can pickup enemy weapns in this game, but you cant in the first.
So theres a few small additions that are actually improvmement,
However:

Most of the game is a massive janky, clunky, techincal disaster, and broken mess, and downgrade of the first game.
Where do I even start...

1) Theres no subtitles

2) Theres no audio controls for volume mixing. The audio is so awful and broken you cant hear ANY voices for 90% of the game. The music is way louder than everything else.

3) Because of this, we baiscally had no idea what the plot is about or most of the dialogue in the game. Just completely insane how they let this slide.

4) Worst of all, THE CONTROLS are some of the worst I maybe have ever seen.
Everything has an awful input lag where it feels like everything you press has a 1.5 second delay after it. Aiming becomes near impossible, it feels like you're streaming the game over a crappy internet connection and trying to 'remote' play it, its just that bad.

5) The game has severe framerate problems , most of the time it feels like its running at 15fps, frequently dropping to what feels like 10fps. This coupled with the awful controls leaves a dreadful experience

6) All the 'gears of war' influenced controls are just a clumsy mess, half the time when you want to snap into cover, you accidentally vault over walls, half the time when you want to pickup your friend, you accidentally vault over a wall, half the time when you want to NOT pickup your friend, you pick him up instead, it just goes on and on. None of the controls feel intuitive or good.
Even something as basic as using your weapon scope is some awkward Y+LB combination and the controls are so delayed and shit you accidentally end up switching weapons instead.
I could write a novel about how broken and clunky the controls are but i'll just say they're god awful.

7) And  the critical blow is that the game is completely a bug ridden glitchy mess. A significant portion of the time the checkpoints would just glitch out and would stop working. A few times we had checkpoints say "Eliminate all the enemies in the area'  and there were no enemies left, but it wouldnt progress. Turns out an enemy is stuck in the enviorment somewhere and you have to search around and kill his bugged AI.
Other times, the controls would completely break. One time it was like "press A to pretend to surrender" and then afterwards we were suppose to be able to shoot, but we were unable to use our guns and just got shot to death. This happened two times in a row, but miraculously fixed its self when I started sprinting and spamming buttons. Even the achievements are buggy and I didn't even get one for completing a chapter when I should have.

The difficulty curve of the game is pretty bonkers to. For the first half or so it was mildly challenging, we only had to restart a few checkpoints here and there, the game was almost even enjoyable, but then from missions 5-7(ending) the difficulty just got stupid. Almost every checkpoint in the second half we had to repeat 5-10 times. The game starts throwing dozens upon dozens of bullet sponge enemies at you, frequently doing bullshit things like spawning them behind you, ontop of you, or multiple RPG guys that one shot you before you can blink an eye. It starts to become a real slog and we got pretty damn frustrated at this point. Its almost like its not even challenging, but its moreso we were constantly fighting against the delayed laggy shit controls and abysmal framerate to be able to aim properly more than anything. To compensate for this, we end up buying 100 round magazines and basically just spray & praying the rest of the game because trying to aim properly was hopeless.

Some of the checkpoints in this game could give you nightmares. One of the levels towards the last half we played the same checkpoint over and over for literally an hour & a half. Inching our way towards hopefully seeing a new 'saving...' but getting one shot to RPG's or other bullshit or bad controls fucking us over. Then ontop of it once we actually did progress to the next part, we ran into the afforementioned 'fake surrender' bug and had to start all over again.
The whole game takes place in China and the locations are pretty generic and forgettable. ITs just apartment buildings/office buildings/streets the whole game. Though, there is one highlight level where you fight through a Zoo full of dead animals and elephants and stuff, that was kinda cool. Probably the best level in the game.

The whole game is a mess and seems like it was rushed or barely finished.
For example, youll be watching a cutscene then randomly you'll instead start watching a slideshow of some lazy deviantart comic book anime strips, what? The first game had pretty entertaining action packed high budget cutscenes, in this you get a bunch of awkward stupid looking comic pictures that looks like it was made by a 17 year old highschool girl.

This ontop of the fact that we had no idea what the fking story is about because of the broken audio, no subtitles, and extremely quiet dialogue just made for an awkward experience. I have no idea what the story was about.
This is made even worse by the fact that there are 'morality choices' where sometimes youl be confronted with Option A or B  (usually just something shallow like good or bad) and most of the time we didnt even know the context of what was going on. I dont really know what impact the morality stuff has, if any at all, but I guess it made for a funny brief discussion with my co-op buddy.


It's so dissapointing because with a little more effort, this game could be pretty damn good.
If this had a PC port, with 60fps, fixed control latency, slightly tweaked control mapping, a few major bug fixes, subtitles, fixed audio, audio sliders, it could be a solid game. But no, as it stands on the 360, it quickly became a headache to play. Heres to hoping the third game is better?

5/10

[XBOX 360] Gears of War 3

 

 

Gears of war 3 continues the story of course right off from 2,
The main differences in gears 3 is that it introduces many new enemy types
For the first few hours of the game you're fighting 'glowies' a new enemy type, its this mutated weird monster that glow brightly and you shoot the yellow part and they always explode. For the first bit of the game theres not much enemy variation, its just one 'glowie' soldier and some spiders. I wondered if the whole game would be like this.

Well thankfully as you progress through the game it introduces a lot more enemies. You do fight the classic Locust, quite a lot, but there is a lot of these annoying glowie enemies too. A lot of enemies in this game also have one-shot abilities, theres this guy that throws huge balls of goo at you that one hits you which can be more annoying than anything. You also have this weird tree that constantly spawns enemies unless you go around and pop all the balls on it.

Towards the end of the game you even fight some generic zombies for a bit, which just felt pretty shoe-horned in due to the times.


The guns noticably feel different in this game compared to 2. The Hammerburst even has ironsights and barely has any recoil, unlike 2 where it has a ton. The guns feel good and arent drastically different but it does seem like they were trying to make it more accessible to newcomers.


The game definitely has less filler on rails levels compared to 2 thankfully. 95% of the time you are doing what you want to do;  medium to big size battles in arenas shooting enemies. There a few sections here and there where you're on a turret on controlling some mech , and some weird underwater on rails level, but other than that its few and far between. Unlike gears 2, which had constant gimmicky vehicle sections.

The levels are also noticbly varied and more outside.
Most of the game is spent outside, not inside locations, unlike 2 which felt like you're just in  a cave the whole game.
You go through a lot of city locations , bridges, a sand level that has giant ants that come out of the ground like the antlions in half life 2, and towards the  end of the game some seriously impressive grand castles and palaces.


The characters this time around a bit puzzling, half the game you're playing as the classic team marcus, dom, baird, cole,  but then the other half you have these two females or some random guy named Jace, just seemed unnessesary and they werent as interesting as the original guys. you constantly have 2 AI partners with you the whole time, even while playing co-op. So 4 people on your team. Because of this, whenever you go down you can usually get revived pretty fast. The game is still quite challenging on the second hardest difficulty, its harder than 2.
Because a lot of the enemy types, the one hit mechanics especially from the glowies, and towards the end of the game this new enemy type that you cant damage unless you use explosives on him, it can be a challenging game.

Theres a few boss fights and one in particular is really hard, its this arena where a giant boss charges around at you , one hitting you, and in the second phase he makes lava wherever he runs which also one hits you.
Well the first time we did this I could not see the lava trails due to a glitch, this made us fail for like 2 hours straight which was incredibly annoying. We eventually restarted the whole chapter and did the boss fine, but wtf was not expecting glitches like that in a console game.

It's just another solid Gears game, its better than 2 as far as im concerned because of the greater level variety, not as many turret on rails sections, and fun gameplay. The game has some bad weaknesses at parts, mostly down to the new enemy types, the glowies arent especially thrilling to fight and are more annoying than anything, and theres a chunk of the game towards the middle where you fight boring zombies for an hour or two. The game ties up the gears story well and its got a lot of twists and turns and good cutscenes and funny dialogue between the characters, the last boss is a giant ant where you just shoot the yellow thing basically but still a decently fun fight.

7/10

[XBOX 360] Army of Two

 

 

 

Army of Two is a game that came out around the mid 2000s craze of third person cover based shooters, but this one has a sort of twist where its heavily focused around co-op, as per the name.

Unfortunately, EA shut down the online server sometime in 2011 so you can only play Single player with an AI co-op partner, oddly enough the second and third game in the series still works online though, so I just beat this first one solo.

The single player AI co-op partner isn't even bad though. You use the Dpad to tell him simple actions, left makes him follow you, right makes him hold position, Up makes him charge towards the objectives/enemys. You double tap the dpad  on each of these to change him from 'defense/gain health'  or 'be aggressive'. You can see your partners health bar in the corner which helps you determine when to put him in defensive or aggressive mode.

The co-op partner aint no slouch in combat, hes almost better than myself, when you tell him to Advance he just mows down enemies with precision, when you tell him to be defensive and regain health it usually works good. The only quirk is when you go down the AI partner has some issue with when to revive you / when to drag you into cover. And another issue where sometimes you'll tell him to 'advance' to the objective, but he stands around in odd places that make no sense, leaving you to try to figure out what to do. Its fine, the co-op AI is impressive and fun to interact with.

Theres 6 campaign missions, that take about an hour each
At the beginning of every mission you have an Upgrades shop, where you can buy a dozen or so different weapons, and do some attachments.
This system is pretty awkward and underdeveloped, though. You can only access this shop once at the beginning of a mission, and once or twice at select programmed places in the mission where it flashes on screen  "Would you like to go into Mid-mission shopping? "  other than those, you cant access this shop. It would have been better if there were armouries around the levels where I can access the shop, similar to Rainbow six vegas or something.

While the shop is a neat inclusion, it kinda feels like they were just copying the trend of the time, as its not that useful or deep honestly. Theres a money system and various objectives during a mission, but you get so much money that you stop caring because within a few missions you can already buy almost everything you want in the game. Strangely, there are 3 different 'armor upgrades' but you dont actually buy the upgrades at all, it just slowly unlocks the different armors and automatically equips them as you progress through the campaign.

 I basically only used the Ak47 the entire game, and decked it out with full upgrades, as I saw the statistics of the AK grow to almost maximum, i found no need to experiment with the other weapns, and since I only get a handful of opportunities to interact with the shop in the entire game, I didnt want to be stuck with using something crap for an hour on end. You also cannot pickup guns from enemies or anywhere in the maps.
Theres a primary sniper weapon, and a secondary pistol/SMG. The snipers feel really awkward and the aiming sucks so I never used it, and the secondary pistol or SMG is really only needed when you run out of ammo for your primary, which never really happens because the enemies drop bags of ammo which give you 200+ bullets at a time.

The combat is pretty unique though, its got all these odd little mechanics, like all the enemies have healthbars and different color icons to demonstrate how challenging they are, they all constantly take cover or try to flank you, their AI is pretty entertaining. Theres a suppression mechanic where if you just blindfire towards enemies it works to suppress them, you can tell your AI partner to hold position and just aggro them while you flank around corners to surprise them, this is actually crucical as there are some heavy armored enemies that can Only be killed from behind, and the best way to do this is have your AI partner distract them while you flank behind and take them out, its pretty fun.

Thats the main loop of the game, its a lot of cover based wack-a-mole gameplay, but between the ability to command your partner, and the satisfying gun combat, its a decent game overall.
Theres only 6 levels, and the obviously half assed filler levels are towards the end. Theres multiple hovercraft sections where you drive this awful hovercraft through the water with terrible controls, stopping in places and getting out to flip switches, like something stolen straight out of Half life 2, those sections were really shit and poorly developed, as you dont even know where you can get out of your hovercraft without looking at this weird Select screen that highlights the whole enviorment and you drive the hovercraft into the green highlighted place and it just slides into place, its just medicore.

Besides those few hovercraft sections the levels overall are pretty decent, theres a few places here and there where you cant figure out how to progress because of some switch in the enviorment (really, really bad during the hovercraft levels),  but other than that its pretty straight foward, and usually whenever youre stuck you can just hit Select and follow some arrows to the next place to progress, or tell your AI partner to Advance and he usually goes towards where to go.

The best level in the game is the aircraft carrier probably, graphics are decent for the time, I like the controls and the linear constant combat of the game, the 'story' / dialogue is pretty entertaining, its just two 'dude bros' just being hired mercenaries only in it for the money. They're always cracking jokes and talking about how they dont care about anything besides making their pay, its funny and entertaining.

I'm not sure how much different the experience would have been with actual online co-op, it would probably be better, but the mechanic to control your AI partner is pretty fun too surprisingly.
Atleast I finished the first one, now I can play 2 and 3 with actual online co-op, its strange how EA shut down the online for the first game but it remains for 2 and 3.


7/10

[XBOX 360] Castlevania: Harmony of Despair

 

 

 

Harmony of Despair is a game in the long line of Castlevania games, its very similar to the classic Symphony of the Night but this game has a unique twist where its specifically focused on co-op multiplayer

Theres 6 levels of gigantic maze maps where the goal is to find the boss and kill it. Theres also chests all around which give you new items , because the game has RPG mechanics as well.

You start off on level one going around collecting chests to find new equipment, you're pretty weak in the beginning and items play a significant role in how well you do. Before every stage, you have an intermission screen where you can buy new weapons and armor , you play the stages collecting gold to be able to upgrade yourself.

The game has a good first impression, the graphics and spritework is very impressive and visually appealing, the controls are great and its one of the few co-op sidescrolling platformer RPG type games, and I think the only co-op Castlevania game. The enemy designs and variety is just amazing theres so many different monsters and their animations and sprites are great

However the game has critical flaws which almost ruin the fun for me.
Level one alone took us more than an hour of just dying over and over and going back to the store to buy items, we had to grind.

Thats ok, but the real problem is the other levels.
The level design is pretty awful. Its like those paper maze maps where you draw a line to the end of the maze.
The levels start to be gigantic, with hundreds of different possible routes and rooms. And theres only one specific route which you need to take to the boss.
The bulk of the game is just spent wandering around from room to room trying to figure out what the correct path is to take to the boss, long after all the enemies are dead.
"Where the fuck do we go" is the main gameplay.
On all the levels except stage 1 and 6 you start off separated from your teammates which is strange, but we managed to meetup.
But just the level design ruined a lot of fun in this game.
Level 4 in particular was the worst level in the game, having all of these paintings you can jump into, which teleport you around the map at seemingly random, which wasted so much of our time. We would get so close to the boss, not know what to do next, jump into one of the teleport paintings, and get sent across the map to wander around some more. Just really boring.

The bosses are also really trial and error, its unlikely youll ever finish it on first attempt, you need to learn the moves and exactly what to do. We had to look up how to beat the boss of level 3, because it turns out you have to hit a switch somewhere and go stand on a bridge instead of fighting him at the first part.
We also could not beat the final boss and had to open a public lobby for some overpowered pro to come in and finish it for us.

So while all the mechanics of the game are great, the platforming, controls, its fun to collect gold and buy new items, its fun to get chests and get new gear, the enemys are cool and maps look good, unfortunately the level design ruins it with too much "Where do i go" moments.

5/10

[XBOX 360] Gears of War 2

 

 

 

Everyone knows Gears of War, the first game was revolutionary and a classic. and a much wanted sequel followed

In Gears of war 2 its a continuation of everything in the first game, theres a few new features and mechanics like meat shields and chainsaw duels among others.

Its the same game as GOW1, all the shooting and cover based mechanics are very much unchanged, its really just more levels and continuation of story.
Though, a ton of new enemy types have been added which are awesome.

Theres four difficulties, three are unlocked by default and the hardest you need to finish the campaign atleast once.
Of course, I played in cooperative mode on the 2nd hardest difficulty (hardest avalible by default)

So the levels can be actually hit and miss.
And honestly the first half of the campaign is underwhelming
You have a lot of the standard in the streets/apartment buildings levels which are decent, but a significant chunk of the campaign is these 'filler' levels. There is atleast 6 entire vehicle levels, be it flying these alien monsters, driving tanks, vehicles ,
Then you have another handful of boring levels where you just sit on a turret and mow enemies down for 15 minutes, or stand on a moving platform like a train. Theres a lot of that crap in the first half of the campaign and it just feels like filler.

Besides those moments, you have some really memorable and amazing segments, mostly and especially in the second half of the game, lots of weird alien caverns, and places that look like they belong in Quake 1 or something, some really crazy bosses like the sea monster and another level which takes place inside of the guts of some huge monster.

One of the greatest things about the game is the gigantic variety in monsters. It seems every 30 minutes you're always coming across some new variety of enemy to fight, they all look awesome and menancing and are engaging too. You got these ticking time bomb little crawling monsters, giant guys with flails/swords/shields, standard grunt soldiers,  sniper guys, Commanders with exploding crossbows, the list goes on.

A lot of the game is spent in dimly lit caves or city streets, which is fine, but it does lack a some exciting locations from time to time.

Sometimes you have these options in co-op to pick a path where you and your IRL partner split up , but usally theres another AI teammate to help you if you go down. These parts are decent for mixing it up, but sometimes the way to progress can be annoying and unobvious like tiny switches hidden on the walls in huge rooms.

A lot of the love for this game I think comes from the story and dialogue. The writing is genuinely entertaining and has a lot of hilarious parts and funny voice acting , just tough guys saying macho shit and being snarky. Its also a very emotive story, looking for loved ones and some crazy dark cutscenes like the one where the guy gets his brain warped and then commits suicide.

The difficulty felt just right and definitely a good game for co-op teamwork, the classic 'downed' mechanic where you crawl around and your buddy can pick you back up causes a lot of high tension moments.

The gunplay of course is very similar to gears 1, its unique and a lot of weapon variety, but it can feel like the enemies are bullet sponges while youre dumping magazines into them just for them to hide behind cover and regain health, not really a negative more a nuance of the gameplay, the enemies are almost as tough as the players.

So the first half of the game is a lot of crawling around generic looking caverns, dark apartment buildings, city streets, some turret/train sections though it has one unique level inside the monsters belly, so the first half could be a bit dull. But the second half of the game it started to pick up, except for the vehicle sections like the tanks and the flying monsters crap, filler filler.

The levels in the section have are very other worldly and nautical, and it has a few boss fights which really helped out the experience. You start to get introduced to more and more enemy types , and it gets more challenging and levels more interesting.
Like you start to experience levels that are like big open medevial castles and creepy palaces, deep into the enemy hive. The arenas start opening up, and you have these places where you can lower or raise cover to hide behind with switches. These parts were the highlight of the game as it had a lot of expansive combat opportunitys and large scale battle without the filler.

The graphics are also very impressive for a 2008 game and a lot of the models and draw distance and enviorments are great, especially the monster designs and that insane water boss, it just looks incredible no matter what the release date is.
Theres a few other bosses, like the one where the guy knocks down the pillars and goes into chainsaw battles with you, pretty high tension thrilling cooperative action there as well.

Then the last hour or so of the game is spent on this stupid flying monster vehicle which again, just felt like lame filler. These sections are even more boring in co-op because the co-op partner barely does anything just shoots the turret. After that you fight through the streets some more, then get into yet another vehicle section some giant mech, which felt like more filler, then you see the "final boss" where you shoot him for 10 seconds then the game ends.

Its a great co-op game, a decent Gears game, but personally I think some of the level design was under whelming and had a bit too much filler in my opinion to call a 'masterpiece' like a lot of other people seem to think it is. Its a classic gears game, the controls are great (albeit with some hiccups like accidentally snapping to cover instead of rolling out of danger, a problem in all gears games for me) graphics are very impressive, and the story, characters, and dialogue are engaging and fun.

7/10

[XBOX 360] Crackdown

 

 Crackdown is an exclusive for xbox 360 and the first game by the developer, it has one of the developrs of GTA 1 and 2 and its one of the few games in existence for open world campaign CO-Op , i played it a lot when I was little but that was almost 15 years ago so lets see how it holds up

The premise is simple, youre a 'peace keeper' aka police, to clean up the city from criminals. Theres 3 gangs, and they are in 3 different areas sorted by colors. All you do is spawn into the game, roam around the map until you find a boss, infilitrate the boss HQ and take out soldiers and then kill boss, then move onto the next. Theres 20 something in total. Its got a skill upgrade system where you level up different areas like guns, melee/health, jumping ability (which makes you jump really high), cars, etc.

On paper the game sounds pretty cool, like a relaxing game to jump into some mindless co-op with your buddy and roam around open world killing bosses. Unfortunately, its got some massive flaws that hinder almost all enjoyment.

First of all you might think the idea of the skill system could feel rewarding and fun, but unfortunately it probably just makes the game worse. For example, the health is tied to the Melee stat, so the only way to get more health is by awkwardly using melee to kill the enemies. This becomes a big deal because when you get further the enemies can kill you super quick and if you didnt spend tedious amounts of time grinding melee kills your health will be tiny and you wont survive. So then we had to just spend time going around grinding melee kills which just felt stupid. The melee in general is worthless and only valuable because its tied to health. So thats strike one.

The other stats like Agility, are probably the biggest part of the game. Theres these orbs all over the city which actually are cleverly designed to entice you to actually spend time exploring and jumping all around the city to collect them, because collecting them makes you level up the Jump/run speed ability which is integral to success. So it is pretty fun just jumping around rooftops collecting these orbs, however it has a sort of fatal design flaw of making the Driving ability pretty much completely worthless. I maybe spent 10 minutes total driving a car in this whole game, the running/jumping ability just makes it have no purpose.
The other skills arent worth mentioning, shooting skill is self-explainatory, and you level up by killing guys, explosives is shit, driving worthless.

Another major annoying flaw is the 'checkpoints' in this game operate by safehouses you find throughout the map. Usually to access these safehouses you have to do this guessing game of how to awkwardly climb up these gigantic buildings, jumping on window ledges, climbing up poles, its just not that fun. Maybe the first few times, but time and time again having to put aside 10+ minutes just trying to climb up a stupid building to unlock a safe house just becomes tedious more than enjoyable.

And finally the worst flaw of all: The only way to figure out how to progress is by just roaming around the map mindlessly until you come across a boss. This means a significant amount of time is spent as 'downtime' where you're not even doing anything just wondering "Where the fuck is the next boss" and walking / jumping around the map like an idiot trying to find them. All they had to do was show you all the boss locations by default on the map and the game would have been atleast significantly better. But no, the pacing sucks and you kill one boss, then you spent 20-30 minutes walking around doing NOTHING looking for the next one. Theres just no direction, it feels half assed. Its also extremely glitchy in co-op and sometimes boss events/enemies wont even spawn in until you restart the game.

Theres not much to speak of a story, theres barely any cutscenes and they only happen in the form of short radio intermissions, which is kind of a positive actually, but theres just not much to the game. As a premise it could be really fun, but its got way too many flaws and bad design choices.
Some of the shooting can be pretty fun when you get into the groove, its got this lockon system where you can aim at individual body parts and then wait for the crosshair to become small to consistently hit them, but thats about all there is to the shooting mechanics. Just lock on and wait for the crosshair to become small then hold down the trigger. And theres basically only one viable weapon in the whole game, the LMG, its just so overpowered i dont know why any other gun sucks so much compared to it but they do.

The graphics can be impressive at times, its got a lot of color and character sort of cell shaded around the edges , its got some impressive draw distance, but its rough around the edges. The HUD looks like it was made in MS paint, and the AI is pretty dumb.
 
-Bad clunky controls, aiming system is janky accidentally targeting bodies on ground, wrong targets, you punch walls by holding the shoot button all the time, bad controls

-General game deisgn promising but ruined execution by hiding bosses behind randomly roaming around

-Only one gun is actually good, LMG, rest feel like crap.

- Shooting can be fun , seeing orbs pop out of enemies can be rewarding, but the lack of depth or viable weapons makes it too repetitive

- Glitchy in co op, when both partners die the bosses glitch out and just dont spawn anymore until you restart the console

- Annoying climbing buildings with awkward platforming floaty controls every 'checkpoint' spawn point is by climbing buildings high up awkwardly trying to figure out the route to get up its just not that fun and tedious

- Level design is arbitrary and just random BS that doesnt make sense, stuff slapped together with abrupt dead ends, large open spaces, nonsense archetecture, most of the bosses you have to climb super high skyscrapers with no clear pathway up


5/10

Battlefield V

 

 I played this right after I finished BF1
And BF5 is very much the same game.
Like BF1, you have these "war stories" for the campaign. These are individual little detached segments about a few select soldiers and their squads.

This time its set in WW2, and the battlefield naming schemes are pretty stupid and awkward. Like BF1 is set in WW2, but BF5 is set in WW2. Dunno.
To be honest between Bf1 (ww1) and Bf5(ww2) theres not much difference in the actual setting! its a lot of the same bolt actions/sub machine guns. I thought the jump would be more drastic between times.

There are four difficulties, Easy,normal,hard,and hardcore. I played on Hard

There are 5 individual 'war stories' .
The first one is just a very short 5 minute intro, so really only 4.
Each of these are about 1 hour long, so its a really short game.

First of all its very much worth noting that the major problem I had with BF1 campaign is fixed here. In bf1, atleast half, if not more of the game was spent inside vehicles or aircraft. In BF5, almost the entire game is spent doing engang on-ground combat, with only the very last mission having some tank combat. This  alone makes it the superior game for me.

Second, its also worth noting the graphical fidelity and sheer polish of the visuals. It really shows that its a multi-million dollar production and this alone is worth the price of admission almost. (I only paid $10).

The individual war stories do have decently memorable characters and settings, in one of them you play as a failed bank robber which has been recruited instead to fight in the army and the two of you have some humorous moments like singing songs while mowing down waves of enemies.
The gameplay feels open world at times where you never really are being handheld and forced to follow a npc down a strict path, but it gives this big world and usually gives you multiple objectives to deal with as you please. Usually trivial things like "Go to one of these places and blow up/destroy this"  There are cars you can get and drive in between these places and it does feel like a big sandbox at times.

Most outposts in the game have alarms which quickly becomes the #1 priority (and starts to feel like a modern Ubisoft far cry game or something)  as theres basically no point to bother trying to shoot enemies until you take out the alarm cause they'll just keep coming. So it becomes this mad sprint to try to disable the alarm as fast as possible.

On the 2nd hardest difficulty, the game is quite hard and challenging, but not really stupidly frustrating or awful. The health regen is very slow and I spent a lot of time just faceplanted on the ground desperately waiting for my health to regen. The guns also have a fair amount of recoil and challenge to accurately hitting shots too, but they all look and feel incredible with a lot of details and great animations. Though I dont like that a lot of the guns have these weird psuedo-modern sights and scopes on them, seems a bit out of place.

Theres a couple of these segments where you have to do dashes back and forth between turrets/anti air missile launchers as youre getting bombarded with enemy missiles that can be pretty awkward and frustrating but other than that the challenge was just right.

PRobably the highlight of these 4 war stories is the Norwegian one where you play as a female scout in the winter forests going around with bolt action rifles /silenced pistols taking out german outposts and the atmosphere is just great. The bolt action guns are real fun to use in this game. Its more of the same gameplay, psuedo-free roam world, find an outpost, Disable the alarm, go to objective destroy/press interact button, Repeat. its a decent loop cause the gunplay is so good and the graphics are awesome.
The norway chapter progresses from night time to day time, where you can even use a mechanic to pull out your skis and traverse through the winter landscape and ice, the graphics are very impressive on these parts and  great atmosphere/sounds. The story of the mother/daughter team is interesting enough the whole time.

The stories are engaging enough and memorable (albeit flawed characters suffering from obvious 'woke' agenda)  like the norwegian segment you're playing as a mother/daughter team which singlehandedly destroys the entire german army and is solely responsible for saving the world basically, its a bit emphasizing the role of women and minorities , not that its good or bad really, its just obvious to tell the agenda/'woke politics' happening in the story. Like the other campaign where you play as african americans doing all these incredible achievements, and at the end you take a photograph with the commander, and then it plays a cutscene of the black people being 'erased' from the photograph to rewrite history. These bits of the story do feel heavily political agenda . Its entertaining nonetheless.

 Then you have another chapter where you play as french african americans in the french countryside hillside taking out bunkers and repelling forces in waves, this chapter is decent and memorable too. Lots of different weapons to try. This one is a bit more linear and has you fighting along side many AI partners doing standard objectives like blow up AA equipment / take over bunkers / Defend yourself and position from waves. fighting through autumn forest with sub machine guns and stuff its decent.

And then right at the end of the game the last chapter you play as the Germans surprisingly enough,  this chapter is mostly spent inside a tank which makes it the only required vehicle segment in the game. Its a typical city streets tank segment where you just fight your way through streets blowing up enemy tanks, the controls are decent and like BF1 it has a button to repair your tank although you cant get out anymore. The tank mechanics are more fleshed out in this though theres a lot of swaying and reticle movement where you aim you tank feels more polished.

So for most of this chapter you just go around blowing stuff up, playing as a German tank commander, teaching young naive recruits the ways of war, but then some points you get outside of your tank and fight Americans on foot. they're pretty tough , hardest enemies in the game which I found interesting. then you spend a bit singlehandedly killing dozens of americans as a german officier, blow up another AA gun, get back in the tank for a final massive standoff against dozens of enemy tanks, then the game ends with a cutscene of you (the germans) surrendering and the young naive kid killing you and your friend because you once told him that "germans dont surrender and kill all traitors/deserters"

So the campaign is decent, its better than BF1 just because most of the time is spent on foot rather than inside vehicles. Graphics are great and highly polished multi million dollar AAA game. Story is memorable enough albeit flawed with an obvious bias/agenda at times.

7/10

A Way Out

 

 

 

 

A Way Out is a unique co-op only experience where the boastful developer claimed "Its impossible to not like this game" while introducing it at E3. Does his claim hold up?

The premise of A Way Out is a good one, and one we always kind of want. At the foundation is that you and your partner are sent to prisoner for alleged crimes Theft/murder and you've both been set up by a guy named Harvey. shortly after arriving at prison you meetup with eachother and become accomplishes.

The game is unique in a few ways, first of all its always Split-screen so you can always see what your partner is doing, second of all because only one person has to buy the game and can invite anyone to download and play the whole game with them without having to buy it first.

The split screen is one of the most entertaining things about the game as its always useful and fun to able to see what your partner is doing, from talking to people to what hes looking at in the enviorment.


While the premise and unique mechanics are interesting, unfortunately the game has some pacing issues which makes a lot of it pretty underwhelming.

For example, in the beginning has you escaping prison, but the whole prison escape is quite underwhelming and almost easy to miss. You go around trying to collect tools to unscrew the toilet in your cell to climb out into the matience tunnels, but in between doing that you have to do all these menial prison jobs and mini-games. Like showing up to work, mopping the floor,talking to inmates/guards and you do this stuff for quite a long time and its not all that exciting.

Theres plenty of cutscenes and dialogue and the game has some pretty funny writing and joke cracking, but for the most part its kind of barren of engaging mechanics, you're mostly just walking around and talking to people or puzzle solving things in the enviorment. And during the prison escape theres not really a sense of urgency or thrill because of it. Theres a lot of these 'spam X' parts of 'Press X at the same time as your partner' parts and those make up the bulk of the 'engaging' mechanics.

Like in the middle of escaping prison you crawl through some tunnels, only to show up at a prison job where you have to smuggle a wrench into your cell but spend a lot of time doing insignificant tasks and dumb mini games.

After you escape prison its a nice change of pace where you're running around through the forests and trees where you really start to get to know eachothers characters. Theres some decent character building going on here where you eventually go visit Leo's family and the hardships they endure, how both of you guys were framed by the evil Harvey villian, how Vincents wife is having a baby so you have to go to the prison to meet her...but all of these things can start to be a bit boring when theres no real oppression or mechanics to deal with, its still all the same walking around and puzzle solving things in the enviorment.

Theres a few choices you can make that either go like 'Violent path' or 'Stealthy path'  like one place where you are trying to find new clothes/a vehicle so you find a couple on a remote farm where you can tie them up or sneak past them. We tied them up and then had to search around for a bit to try to repair the truck in the barn which was more of just mindlessly searching the enviroment for the object to hit X on and other sorts of minigames.

Then you have multiple vehicle sections which control hilariously and arent that hard, but its not anything all that thrilling. Just standard chase scenes with narrow paths, theres a rowboat part which was a good change of pace and something different, but still more of the same trivial tap X stuff.

Theres another part where you play basketball with your son and thats what I mean, all the major 'gameplay' elements are just these trivial little interaction events where you do mini games to progress. Theres no real engaging main gameplay element. Its not much of an action game its like a slow, sleepy, story puzzle solver.


Things like this go on for half the game, car chases, walking around talking to people, spam X moments, quicktime events, cutscenes, dialogues, its all OK and the story is decent enough just when you've been playing for hours it can get pretty sleepy.

Like how theres yet another part where you go to a construction site and just walk around talking to workers, but atleast you track down one of the main badguys henchmen, and go on some big rooftop hunt but its not anything besides a handholding platformer. It was exciting  chasing this guy across rooftops and theres a funny interrogation scene with him ontop as well.

Then you get attacked by a hitman, which was pretty cool, but you dont do any shooting back you just engage with linear scripted press X events to eventually get rid of him. Then you go to a hospital which is a lot of more just walking around talking to people.

Also a lot of the dialogue is just strange or doesnt make sense, like you're at a hospital rushing to find your wife whos having a child, but you can talk to random pedestrians about small talk about trivial BS, or play connect four. Its funny, yeah, its just a little awkward and often theres a lot of parts which doesnt make sense if you want them to.

In between some of this the game finally asks you to choose some guns, you try them out for a minute, but then you never get to use the guns until the last hour or so of the 10+ hour campaign.

The last part of the game is the best and most engaging, you go on a plane to Mexico to track down the bad guy and you can parachute onto his island, then one of your parachutes break and the other guy has to save you.
Then when you land, it turns into a third person shooter and the shooting mechanics are actually pretty good. The guns have a good recoil mechanic and crosshair, hitmarkrs, and the game starts to be pretty fun now. Finally some action to break up the mundane walking and talking and puzzle solving.
Unfortunately, you only get to shoot a couple handfuls of bad guys for less than an hour, find the bad guy an take him out, then return back to USA for whatever reason even though you're a wanted fugitive.

Then the game reveals its plot twist, that Vincent was just a cop in disguise, only helping you in order to get his revenge on the bad guy for killing his brother.

This is the games ending and where the narrative gets a bit awkward and messy, now instead of it being a co-op game, its this weird split screen thing where its both partners against eachother. Its awkward because its like, why do we care about whos more skillful at 'defeating' the other guy? we want to do the thing that has the coolest outcome.
So theres one part where the cop player has to shoot at the prisoner player whos driving a boat, but its like, "wait man, it would be more interesting if the prisoner escaped, dont shoot at me" so the cop just sits there awkwardly doing nothing. Its strange.
Then theres a gun fight part between both players, the cop betrayer VS the escaped inmate, and again, we thought it would be more interesting if the prisoner actually escaped, so its like "Ok just let me kill you" it was just a weird way to handle the ending because its so awkward as a 2 player game.

They made it out to be as if its just some deathmatch, but we just cared about what would have the more interesting ending, so the 'deathmatching' didnt matter.

So then the game wraps up, one of you dies, the survivng one puts a letter on the widows door, end credits.

Overall the game tends to be a little underwhelming and boring due to lack of mechanics, the narrative and premise is good, but its like if the game is just a movie, it has to be a really good movie, and it was just a typical prison escape espionage revenge on the bad guy movie type thing. So then the mechanics had to be really good as well, but they kinda werent even there for the most part. If even half of the game had more shooting that would of really helped a lot. Its a unique game, and will be memorable, but even while we were playing it we said a lot "this is kinda boring" so that gives an idea of the pacing issues.. Its got decent graphics as well, but nothing jaw dropping or super state of the art graphics, maybe if the graphics were breathtakingly amazing it would of helped a bit too, but they were just kinda 2018 standard with some weirdly cartoonish characters visuals.

6/10

Battlefield 1

 

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Battlefield was never really known for its single player but still they're fun high budget triple A campaigns with state of the art modern graphics and polish and the main competition for Call of duty so worth checking out.

This time in Battlefield 1 the campaign is separated off into six short different mini-stories where each one you play a different character. These little episodes only last about 30 minutes to an hour each, and while the characters are decent and suit the role of drawing you in, you never stick around long enough to really get any real development of them as any sort of plot device or narrative. The story (or lack thereof) is just some typical situations six different soldiers would encounter.

Three or four of these campaign episodes take place mostly inside vehicles, be it airplanes or tanks. This alone is kind of a negative for me as its not my preferred gameplay I just want boots on ground action shooting. So right off the bat basically half the game is already dissatisfying for me personally. While these vehicle sections are fine, and done as good as they can be, its just not as engaging as first person ground combat. At least during the tank mission its premised in such a way where you get to feel like you really are crammed up in a tank with some guys and they must become your best friends you get that sense of actually living out of this tank the way the cut scenes and narrative weaves its self.

Something thats odd is the pacing of the campaign. It starts you on an overview map of all the 6 different episodes, in numeral order. So if you play it starting from Mission 1 up to 6, oddly enough the first few missions are inside vehicles. So right out of the gate 2 or 3 hours in you've already spent most of the time driving or flying around which I found an awkward way to start the game off.

The moments and missions where its primarily gun combat are pretty good. The movement in particular feels fantastic and its great to jump and sprint and duck and pop out of cover all over the place the movement mechanics and controls in general feel very good and polished. Theres lots of different guns to find as well with all sorts of crates everywhere to always discover new weapons or attachments. Since it takes place in WW1 its a breath of fresh air to use these old archaic weapons its a lot of things like bolt action rifles and semi auto carbines, funny enough I thought ww1 didnt have that many machine guns but theres quite a few to choose from and all the weapons are quite satisfying to use with good impact hit markers with a chunky sound when you connect and the marker turns red when its a kill which makes the gameplay feel satisfying and full of weight. A lot of the guns have really punchy sound effects too. You have the mechanic of spamming the Q button to tag enemies which gives them an outline and you can see them through walls, which is a little cheap and classic symptom of modern gaming.

Probably the best thing about this game which makes it superior to many call of duty campaigns is the fact that during missions theres rarely if ever any NPC which you have to slowly follow around and do exactly what he says. Theres no waiting around for NPCS to do their scripts every 20 seconds, walking around in extremely linear movements waiting for your NPC commander like on COD etc. Most of the objectives have you in a huge enviorment where the game just tells you to "Do X" and you run around to approach and do it however you please. Usually you just go into an area and on the minimap theres a big circle and you just have to search the area to find the objective. Its mostly a good thing, but its also sort of negative in that compared to COD there isn't as many crazy scripted things that happen and most objectives feel repetitive and the same even though the game is so short.

Theres 3 difficulties and on the 2nd one it feels just right. You can die really quick if youre not being careful but its also not super easy

Really the worst problem is that half of the campaign is in vehicles or that one mission where you're a guy in a giant suit of armor where you walk around like a human tank carrying a machine gun mowing down waves of enemies, that was kind of odd. All I wanted was more typical soldier missions, but they're too limited here. Out of the 5 hours spent playing the campaign maybe only 2 of them were really truly doing the typical WW1 soldier combat. Just when the game starts to feel really good and the campaign picks up, giving you more diverse locations such as the desert and even a taste of an 'open world' where it gives you 3 locations to capture at will, and then just like that its over. Theres no coherent narrative or story to wrap it up, it just kind of says some tidbits about WW1 and the soldiers involved and thats it.
The campaign feels like a tutorial for the multiplayer mode more than anything, just trying to introduce as many mechanics as it can as fast as possible to prepare you for MP.

The game could of been twice as long and in the extended parts just had way more in the trenches boots on ground combat, but it doesn't. Its a 5 hour long game and its sad to say its too short because the mechanics and controls, graphics and atmosphere are all an amazing framework but it ultimately just feels like a missed opportunity because of how short it is and how half of it is spent in vehicles

 

6/10

Call of Duty: Ghosts

 

 

Ghosts has you playing as some supersoldier of some sort, in the sense that youre a part of this highly special ops task force capible of extreme feats. Not many people can become a 'ghost' and it has you undergoing typical military escapades, betrayals, and the like

The first thing I notice is that the weapons look pretty cool and all have good and satisfying animations. All the models are nice and you have a good variety of weapons you can pick off the ground. Some of them sound pretty chunky and have a good weight and feel to them.

Quickly throughout the campaign a reoccuring trend happens over and over. Its what I call these sort of gimmick levels and mechanics. Like for example early on in the campaign you're forced to play as a dog and do these odd stealth sections for awhile, then other parts in the campaign youre flying a very boring lazily done helicoptor, then other segments in the campaign you're controlling a drone lazily clicking on big red squares to blow them up...this sort of gimmicky mechanic/feature crops up on almost every single level and it just takes away from the experience. I come to the cod games for viseral boots on ground shooting action, thats it. I dont need any of this other lazy half-assed attempts at doing something new, they all just feel like a shitty mobile game or something.

Entire levels can be based around these awkward gimmicks, like in the middle of the campaign you have an entire underwater swimming level where you engage in underwater combat with a single water gun and it doesnt really add to the experience it just takes away. Theres another level towards the end of the game in a similar fasion, except this time youre floating around in space. Another level where you're driving around in a tank and it feels so uninspired and shoe-horned in like I said it feels like a generic mobile game or something, whats the point? At least half of the campaign has these dull gimmick levels/features its not all that impressive. When the campaign does have you doing the standard boots on ground shooting combat, its decent, but honestly the lack of hitmarkers does make the combat a bit less satisfying and it never really feels like youre actually doing all that much, instead youre just following around NPC's waiting for them to trigger the next script. A level towards the end of the game you're on a train where the 'gimmick' is that the train is shaking so furiously that you can barely aim down your sights without flying all over the place. Sometimes I just want an entire campaign where I'm left by myself to do what I want to progress the objectives, to actually feel like I'm doing something, without constantly having to engage in all these worthless one-time event things. The pacing is pretty dull overall because of this. Its like they just ran out of ideas for interesting standard gameplay so they threw a bunch of 'innovative' things at the wall and see what sticks. I never liked much of that kind of stuff.

Another glaring flaw for me is the fact that the entire campaign it basically just feels on-rails. Theres not a single moment where you're left to your own devices to wander around by yourself and figure out what to do. In the first quarter of the game I was wondering "is there ever going to be a point where I'm not being bossed around to follow some NPC's script?" Unfortunately, that point never came. The entire campaign is hand-holding you following around an NPC. Being told what to do, what to shoot, where to move, the entire time! it barely feels like I'm even playing a video game, I'm just re-enacting a script. This has always been a crucial flaw for cod games but this one in particular is just egreiously hand-holding.

Besides that stuff what else is there to say? the story is not at all engaging, its generic military jargon campaign #9987, the characters and 'ghosts' stuff , the villian, as cookie cutter as it gets. Its not horrible or anything, its just not much to write about. Imagine any typical military plot and its this. I appreciate the fact that the game tried to do a bunch of different things, its not the first time cod does stuff like this, but in this campaign in particular so much of it is just following NPC's around, or doing these shitty gimmicky parts. The game is OK enough just for the shooting mechanics, short length, and tripple A budget action, but it's hard to call this one of the better cod games.
 

5/10

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3

 

 

 

Black Ops 3 has a co op campaign so that alone makes it unique and stand out. Only two COD games have that, World at war and this one.
So right off the bat we jump in and things are odd, the premise is about a far future technologically advanced world where computers take over peoples brains and transhumanism and Deus Ex type stuff, its interesting enough at first but also gives some fears for bad things to come. I dont really come to call of duty games for super high tech fantasy things,but we'll see...

Since its co-op, we played on Veteran difficulty. It has the standard co op system of picking your friend up everytime they go down so its not super challenging or anything.
The first little bit has you going around watching a lot of cutscenes and scripted things, having the story told to you, via an NPC partner that always follows you around yelling and talking to you, then you get a first taste of the combat. Everything appears to be in order so far, its standard call of duty fighting waves of heavily armed soldiers. Right off the bat though, you'll notice that you can no longer carry two of any weapon you want. You can only carry a primary weapon, and a pistol or rocket launcher, which is not an exciting design as no longer can you constantly try out  new weapons while keeping your 'main' one, it feels limiting and makes the gunplay boring as you use the same gun for most of the game.

After a lengthy introduction you arrive at the hub world where you learn this game has all sorts of crazy mechanics. First, you have a weapons bench where you can create your classic COD class system. Theres really not a great variety of weapons in the game, a couple standard categories like shotguns, SMG, assault rifle, sniper, and you'll notice right away that the guns don't look like any real counter part. It's all very blocky high tech fantasy weapons and honestly none of them look that cool or fun to use. After picking one, you can put attachments on it of course, but you have no attachments at first and the more you use the weapon, the more it levels up which unlocks more attachments. These attachments (and later on unlocking stronger weapons) really matter, because the game has a sort of RPG feel to it where in the beginning of the game you do very shit damage because your weapons/attachments suck, but towards the middle/end of the game you start to get great gear which makes you do way more damage and you no longer struggle as much against some of the enemies.
The create a class also has some perks, but nothing like multiplayer cod. The perks are very uninteresting and limited, things like "take less damage from grenades"  "use another attachment on weapon"   "carry another grenade"  - There is one perk that stands out, and its the ability to wall run/use a jetpack, which can be kind of fun but like, what game am I playing again? you'll be asking yourself that a lot.  Its also curious how you need to pick a perk just to be able to pickup enemy guns on the ground.

Also in the hub world is this 'Create  your own weapon' mechanic where you can start from scratch to build a weapon, I tried to do it but It seemed like I could not really create anything different? it was just the standard guns and attachments? I was probably doing something wrong, but I didnt care enough to really try more.

And then in the hub world you have the Unlocks system. Now this is where the game takes a real "what the fuck" turn. You have three of these skill tree abilities with all sorts of jargon and skills. You press a button in game which opens up this big 'skill wheel'  where you pick different abilites on the fly like a fking MOBA game or world of warcraft or something,  and then you press another button to use your ability which has a cooldown. You can unlock dozens of these things from the skill tree, but truth be told I never found any of these appealing or even worth engaging with. No one has the time to be in the middle of a battle, hold a button, stare at this big skill wheel and read a ton of descriptions on what they do. Because the things they do are so asinine and pointless it doesnt matter. Its all stuff like "corrupt enemy robot gun temporarily"  or like "Run super fast for a short time"  "make enemies fight against eachother"  I dont know, none of them were very useful except one: Theres a cloak which makes you go invisible, which as you can imagine makes it much easier to pickup your  friend everytime he goes down. I eventually unlocked all of the skills on all the different skill trees, but the cloak is the only one I actually cared to use.

So thats the main mechanics in the hub world, from there you hit 'Deploy' and it takes you to the next mission. Its kind of nice that after every mission it takes you to this hub world where you can take a break/get a coffee/prepare yourself for the next mission.

So, on Veteran difficulty the challenge is just right. Playing co-op makes it so you do not fail when only one of you goes down, so being able to revive eachother makes Veteran an actual fun challenge. You dont go down in one bullet, but like 5 or 6.
Now, the thing that sets this apart from other call of duty games, which makes you ask what game you're playing, is the enemies.
You have all sorts of enemies, you have standard soldiers, you have super heavily half-robot, half-human soldiers, you have giant mechs, you have flying drones, you have even bigger mech tanks, you have robots...

Well in the first half of the game some of these enemies are a massive pain in the ass to fight, especially the robots. You'll be dumping two clips into these guys and they'll still be walking around. Your weak weapons and bad attachments early on mean these guys are just bullet sponges and it does not feel great. Youll frequently encounter rooms of these guys where you and your partner just dump magazine after magazine into them while they're still standing walking towards you. Other similarly tedious enemies are these giant mech tanks where you have to unload first into them with assault rifles, then stun it to where you can shoot rockets at it. This takes quite awhile to actually put it down, it isnt challenging or anything just a little tedious.
While these guys are really annoying in the first half of the campaign, in the second half you unlock guns like the Man o War, with 4+ attachments, which now you can take these guys out in 10 seconds as opposed to previously 45+ seconds. Its just a strange progression in difficulty. It gets easier the more the game goes on. But still, probably the most engaging part of the game was that the challenge wasn't too hard, and wasnt too easy. It keeps us on our toes, but also never really gets frustrating or annoying as the checkpoint system is very generous and having to pick eachother up enables some fun co-op and strategic plays.

What this turns out as, is that I really only used 3 guns for the entire campaign. In the first half I used some AK type gun. and breifly a sniper which was kind of useful, but then when you unlock some stronger guns we just used the Man o War the whole game which is like a really powerful slow shooting assault rifle. For a call of duty game, this is a bad flaw. Call of duty for me is all about using fun guns, constantly changing it up with new exciting weapons , but I didnt feel much of this in black ops 3. Being limited to only one primary weapon is a bad flaw and I kept wondering when I could carry a second one to be able to experiment, but it never happened. There are stations where you can change your loadout mid mission, but you cant create a class or swap out attachments or new  weapons, so I never used it much.

The game has so many mechanics that it starts to be kind of a mess. For example you can press 1 to go into night vision thermal mode,  you press 2 to open up all your different abilites, you press 3 to enable some visor hud which allows you to endlessly see through walls and enemy health bars and icons, which is pretty shocking, being able to see enemies through walls constantly like its Borderlands or something felt pretty antithetical to the call of duty experience. More "what game am I playing again?" moments. This mechanic alone sort of trivializes the combat, no longer do you have to make really strategic moves to try to pinpoint your enemy location and try to keep track of where they are, now you can just endlessly see their exact location through walls.

Theres really not much to say on the level design or objectives. A lot of levels are just generic city street battles, warehouse buildings, everything looks the same and the  graphics honestly are not that impressive, even earlier cod games had more impressive visuals. Everything has a flat dull yellow/brown tone and filled with all the robots and flying drones and multi-colored futuristic gadgets you really forget its a CoD game.  Some notable level locations is this one area where its like a brain simulation, and you look up into the sky and the whole village is in the sky turned on its side and you cant tell if you're down or the place in the sky is, its really trippy and surreal. Theres other areas where you go through dream states in some frozen mountian area fighting WW2 soldiers (?) this was an odd but welcome variation to mix things up. But yeah other than some things like that theres really nothing memorable or exciting going on with the objectives.  All the objectives are simply go to this next area/press F on this thing/blow this up. Thats it really.

In standard COD fasion there is a ton of scripted events, people talking to you, cutscenes, a lot of handholding and exposition. But unfortunately the story is not that interesting or even makes any sense. The story quickly becomes into this super fantastical high-tech nonsense where people turn into flying fairies and angels, controlling simulations, I don't really know what the story was. Theres this woman that talks to you the whole game and you're not sure if shes on your side or not? that was kind of interesting. I really dont know what to say about the story other than it was a convuluted mess that quickly made no sense and went way too 'beyond fiction' fantasy world stuff.  Though I will say that they really do shock you with tons of gore and vile scenes, people having their face burned off, limbs cut off, being exploded into bits, eyes poked out, they really dont hold back on the random gore in the cutscenes which is really strange because the actual gameplay is not very gorey at all. In combat, the enemies dont have viseral reactions to being shot or having limbs come off or giving big blood sprays, they are pretty tame in reaction.

Since its one of the only cod games with a co-op campaign, at 10 hours long, that really helped it. If it wasn't co-op, it might be one of the worst cod games. But being able to play a cod campaign with a friend made it pretty OK. The combat is decent, but it sucks that you dont use that many weapons, or that none of them are that interesting to use, the levels are totally forgettable and the story is asinine, but the challenge felt just right and kept us engaged.

6/10
 

Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition

 Not being a huge fan of the franchise I still figured its worth it to play DMC4, I know the series increasingly gets more goofy and 'anime' but these games are decent action combat games so what the hell why not.

Right off the bat the tone in DMC4 is very much over the top generic japanese anime/manga/overly melodramatic goofy. All the characters and cutscenes in the game are increasingly more and more teenage 'badass' soap opera cliche love story than ever before. The story is pretty awful and embarrasing the most generic 'damsel in distress'   "Badass savior"  etc etc.. suffice to say ive not enjoyed any cutscene or piece of dialogue in the whole game, every cutscene left me cringing or rolling my eyes or just feeling second hand embarrassment.

The first half of the game you play as this teenage looking  boy called Nero, it plays simiilar to previous DMC games mostly, but theres a bunch new mechanics. You lock onto enemies, which admitteedly the lockon system and controls are awkward and its hard to lock onto the exact enemy you want. This becomes an annoyance later on in the bosses but its not that big of a deal. As Nero, you have this mechanic where you can 'charge up' your sword and I never really got it. Some of the mechanics arent very clearly explained, but honestly it doesnt matter much if you miss a few of them. The game isn't all that hard or challenging. I played on normal difficulty and only the first half of the game posed any genuine frustrating challenging moments.  Besides the addition of all sorts of new equipment as the campaign progresses, the standard gameplay loop is like a standard fair Beat 'Em Up, where you go from area to area, then appears an invisible wall and you Must defeat all the enemys to progress. This is the standard loop of DMC4. The enemy designs are nonsensical to say the least, but its standard DMC stuff. Weird japanese dolls and bizarre creatures, its fine for the most part. However, towards the middle/end part of the game half of the enemies have these huge shields and they're just a pain in the ass to fight , you either have to get behind them and grapple them or they're just huge sponges.

Theres the typical DMC upgrade system where before every mission you have the option to enter a shop and purcahse various new moves and combos like Mortal kombat, i never found any of this style of gameplay appealing as I hate memorizing button combinations and stuff like that. Theres an option to 'auto level up'  which I kind of found more confusing than anything. The upgrade system isnt a big deal as you can respec at any time with no loss of currency, and you can eventually get every upgrade anyway.

Theres secret missions you can find and complete which usually give you more health but these use gimmicky 'minigame' style mechanics and I found them mostly way too annoying or frustrating/time wasting to bother doing for the most part. Such as one where you have to figure out a way to protect one enemy from this giant swarm of enemys and if he gets hit once you fail, its just too much of a chore to finish these. Theres another secret mission where you have tip toe across falling platforms while avoiding these annoying flying enemies constantly knocking you off, also too annoying.

You can buy infinite healing items and instant revives so that helps a lot in making the game not difficult when you dont want it to be.

The level variation is decent you go from city streets, snowy mountians, resident evil style medevial mansions complete with torture rooms ETC, the locations are probably best thing about the game.
However, at a few points the pacing is open ended and you're not quite sure where to go, and the game allows you to pointlessly backtrack far enough to the point where I get stressed out wondering if I'm just pointlessly running back to the beginning of the game or not, that was pretty annoying.

There are these stupid sections where you have to hit these spintop things around the enviorment to break obsticles to progress which is just pretty dull as a mechanic.

You have other bizarre mechanics required to progress like a 'hookshot' where you have to zip around the enviorment on hookpoints using the lockon system and I just found this more tedious and annoying than anything. Its clear they tried to break up the repetitive 'beat em up sections but I never found any of the alternatives very entertaining.

And then you have a handful of boss fights, such as this giant frog, this weird insect guy, giant fire demon, and eventually fighting dante (the guy from original DMC).  These boss fights are pretty cool and probably best part of the game, certainly the most engaging, they arent all too challenging or frustrating but not too easy either. Unfortunately, theres not that many of them, and now brings me to probably the worst part of the game.

Well it is said that the development for this game got cut short they either ran out of funds or time, and thus the second half of the game is a total rehash. You switch characters, and play through the whole game again, from end to beginning, fighting the same bosses, same monsters basically, doing all the same things, its so obvious they just ran out of time and needed more content in the game so they just used this as filler.  Its not all awful, because playing as Dante is a fun change of pace complete with his own mechanics and swap abilities, but still it wasnt that entertaining fighting the same boss over and over. On one of the last levels theres even a 'boss rush' where you just fight every boss in the game in one level, its kind of cool, but at the same time its more tedious and just like "This, again? I'm bored of doing this again"  

The combat can be intense and engaging, the last boss was a genuine challene but here is where the camera and lock on system showed its annoyances.  Its hard to lockonto the boss instead of his stupid flying balls so yeahits just bad. The camera for many parts of the game is total crap too where you cant even pan around and examine the area to figure out where the hell you're trying to go/do.

So thats really it for DMC4. It feels like half a finished game, with the second half being filler. With really stupid/embarrasing story, dialogue, cutscenes, over the top rediculous anime crap which im not a fan of, but the combat is Decent albeit a bit too beat 'em up button mash for me. None of the weapns or equipment or even the combat visually looks that appealing it just all looks so over the top and anime that I cant get that into it. Its OK for what it is, some of the enviorments are cool but also they can be irritating to navigate, but for me its just an alright game. I dont think anything will top DMC1 as its just the coolest looking game of the franchise and has less of the over the top anime drivel plastered all over it.

6/10

Mafia

 

Mafia is an interesting game because it began development before even Grand theft auto 3. It started development in 1998, whereas GTA 3 started development around late 1999-2000. Mafia is infact one of, if not the first 'open world' crime sandbox formula of being a gangster and taking missions, driving cars, or on foot engaging in third person combat.
 
From the beginning of the game you'll already be exposed to its many quirks. The very beginning of the game throws you into a fast pased car chase, but you're in this really slow rickety dump of a car. The difficulty and challenge of Mafia in general is represented right from the intro. You get thrown into this car escape mission where you struggle to learn how the car behaves, and its extremely slow. After failing a few times and finally moving on, its a taste of some of the challenge to come.

For the first bit of the game, maybe first quater, you'll wonder what game you're playing. Because the first 5 or 6 missions you're just some generic taxi driver, doing incredibly mundane missions which involve picking up people and driving them around town, thats it. Here is when more of the games mechanics prop themselves up.
Much of Mafia is spent driving around in the car, infact, this game originally was intended to not even have on-foot segments, as the developers have stated it initially started as some sort of Driver clone, driving game. And it shows. Because there is A LOT of driving in this game.

 Maybe 75%. The afformentioned quirks and mechanics start showing up, such as having to use a Speed limiter at 40 miles per hour, or else the cops will constantly be coming after you, and its just not worth dealing with them. So not only does much of the game experience involve driving from point A to point B, with nothing exciting in between, ontop of that, you have to do it at an extremely slow pace of 40mph. This can both be a positive and negative. On the upside, it helps immerse you into this realistic feeling 1930s world where you just cruise around and enjoy the sights and sounds, but on the negative side it does get to be incredibly boring having to once again slowly drive from point A to point B. Ontop of this, the game forces you to make frequent use of a map by holding TAB button, and you have to constantly plan your route ahead because you frequently need to take bridges to cross onto the next segment to your objective.

 There is a compass which points where you need to go, but I find it harms more than it helps if you just stare at it. So much of the game is just spent staring at the map, driving slowly with a 40mph speed limit, and planning a route to cross onto bridges. I found myself really wishing for a 'fast travel' or "Skip to objective' feature, because it would really cut out a lot of the boring pacing issue with all the constant driving.

After the first round of missions as a Taxi driver, then you find yourself being recruited by the Mob. This is of course where the game picks up and shows its true colors. You go from driving a taxi around, to now being sent around by the Don as a mobster beating up peoples cars, and beating people up using melee. Well I'm glad the melee is only really used in the first quarter of the game, because the melee combat is horrendous. Theres a mission early in the game where you and your partner gets sent into an area with only a baseball bat, and you have to kill a dozen guys using melee, and the melee controls and combat is so clunky and awkward it just results down to you spinning around in a circle while spamming the attack button, desperately hoping your partner does not die.  

That's another frequent mechanic in Mafia. For many of the missions, you will have a parter, or multiple, and they get a healthbar on your hud. Not only do you have to check your health, you almost more importantly, have to keep checking your partners health and desperately try to avoid your partners taking damage. Which can feel clumsy and awkward since their AI doesn't have much self preservation and they will just stand in open or sprint head first into the enemy attacks.

Now is a good time to mention the save system. Mafia does not operate like a typical early 2000s action game. You cannot save anytime you want, there is no quick save. It  operates more like a modern game. Every few segments during a mission you will see 'Game saved' on the bottom left of your screen, usually after a loading screen. This is fine, and almost a welcome challenge, but things can be extremely tense and tedious because Mafia is not exactly an easy game. It is very easy to lose health, and you cannot regain health back unless finding a stationary healthkit. Problem is, these things are extremely rare. You might only find one of them per 20 minute bouts. So you can get yourself in a very stressful and annoying position of the game saving right after you find yourself with 10 health and no nearby healthkits. This can happen, but thankfully I didn't find myself having too much of a problm with it.

The mission structure and pacing makes it so you can easily hop into the game and play 1-2 missions and then quit for awhile the autosave system tells you which mission youre on in the main menu so I found it enjoyable and easy to just play in short 1-2 mission sessions.


From this point onward, after the taxi mission early game, and a few clunky and lackluster introduction mobster missions such as: Drive here, pick this up, drive back. Drive here, attack these vehicles with a bat, drive back. Drive here, attack these guys with a bat, drive back. Drive here, escort this girl, now attack these guys with a bat, drive back.
There are 23 missions in total, maybe a dozen of them are mundane or not even noteworthy, just driving back and forth, or doing trivial things. But the other half are quite enjoyable.
 
 After the first handful lackluster missions you start to get some pretty fun and awesome
 missions. Some noteworthy ones are things like:

-The whore
 Hotel hit where you carefully track down someone eating dinner and pop him right in front of everyone, then track down a woman to kill, but let her live, then fight your way out. Though, there is a clumsy rooftop section where its hard to tell exactly where you must go, and theres a very clunky jump/clumb mechanic (the default keybinds are insane like Numpad 0 to jump, what?)

- Right after, is 'The Priest'
where you invade an enemy mobsters funeral and kill everyone attending inside of a church. This mission is a great example of action packed third person shooting, and its quite challenging, but not to the point of frustration. When arriving at objectives, you must not have any police after you, and the police mechanics in this game are slightly frustrating and obtuse. To lose the police, the easiest way is to just kill them and reinforcements wont really arrive. Other than that, you just have to take as many turns as possible and then hide in some alleyway as the wanted meter goes down.

-Fairplay
Theres an infamous race car mission in the early part of the game which is apparently notorious for being extremely hard and annoying. Well in the Steam version I have, it presents options for how hard you want the race to be. After failing a few times I just put it on the easiest settings and passed it without much trouble, so its not so bad. Worth mentioning for how notorious it is.

-A trip to the country, where you go to some remote farm location in the night and rain, great atmosphere, and save your friend while shooting a bunch of bad guys. One of the coolest and most fun missions, total classic mobster stuff.

-Omerta.
You invade an airport and just bust into the main office shooting all the enemy mobsters, but this mission can be a bit annoying. Because theres this gigantic airport, and the objective just says 'Find this guy' and you just walk around this huge airport checking every corner for dozens of minutes until you find him, things like this can happen often and it does kind of ruin the pacing, not knowing where to go. Other than that its a pretty cool mission.

-'Visiting Rich People'
Now, this mission isnt good, but its worth mentioning. Its a super frustrating STEALTH mission where you have to use melee kills and crawl around some mansion backyard trying to figure out how to get past all the guards. Its really stupid actually because the AI is rediculous they spot you from the most obnoxious places. I ended up just saying fuck it on the stealth and awkwardly sat in a corner trying to kill every guard, this naturally took atleast 20+ attempts because for some reason they were massive bullet sponges. definitely one of the frustrating clunker ones

-Great Deal
This mission involves you going to a parking garage to collect a truck full of liquor, then you get ambushed and the entire parking garage turns into a massive shootout. Definitely a highlight of the action packed shooting part of the game. Theres a stupid part is where the AI has a scripted event to toss a grenade at a stairwell, and without knowing the first time you or your AI team mates will likely die. Trial and error stuff. And for some reason, the 'escape home' part was extremely fucking hard. I had a dozen enemy mafia cars chase me the whole time, and they go way faster than you and ram you off the road. You can shoot out your car window, but the controls are so bad and awkward its not even worth trying. I'd get to the ending objective multiple times just to have an enemy show up and kill me. This one was way harder than it should of, I later found out you can just kill the enemies BEFORE you try to escape and barely anyone will ever come after you. A lot of failed attempts on this.

- Bon Appetit
You take the Don to dinner, but surprise surprise its an ambush and the resturant turns into a massive gunfight .This one is pretty fun and straight forward.

- Happy Birthday
This mission has you infiltrating a cruise ship with the objective to assassinate a politician. It involves some meandering petty tasks like roaming around the ship looking for the bathroom, then its locked, then you have to roam around trying to figure out how to unlock it, talk to some sailor, then just walk up to the politican as hes giving his speech and shoot him in the face, then escape from a boat on the side. Not a great mission, barely anything to it, atleast the concept is cool, but this one is more annoying to figure out than anything

-You Lucky Bastard
This mission is probably the longest in the game and involves a ton of driving. Youre trying to assassinate this guy and you drive from point A to B atleast 3 times and he always manages to survive. Its just a lot of boring driving. Then you eventually get to a spot where its a car chase and the objective simply says "KILL HIM"  Well, thats fucking bullshit cause the game lies to you. This horrible issue pops up multiple times during the game. Where the games objective will LIE to you. It says "KILL HIM" during the car chase, but you really just have to follow him until he reaches a destination and it triggers a cutscene/next event. If you actually manage to catch up and kill him, the game either glitches out or just says you failed. REALLY stupid and I wasted multiple attempts on this because I just thought I was too slow or something, but nope, the game was just lying to me. This same issue of the objectives lying happens multiple times and its one of the worst flaws of this game.
After this, youre in this gigantic shipyard and it says "KILL HIM" still. So you just go around killing dozens of enemies, including some snipers in towers which seem to take next to zero damage from far away. Their body reacts, but they just wont die, until I got closer. This was pretty annoying and made me fail multiple times. After you finally kill everyone, I still cant figure out WTF im suppose to do. "Kill him"  ok, everyones dead. So this is again where the games lack of direction and 'lying' objectives come up again. What you have to do is somehow know to interact with this explosive train cart and move it pushed against a warehouse door, Not only that, but you also have to know to walk in a specific spot where only then it will trigger the cutscene to progress.
 I was able to figure out moving the train cart thing alone, but then I tried throwing grenades at it, blowing it up, nothing worked. Then I looked it up and found out I just had to stand closer to it for it to trigger a cutscene. Really stupid.  Definitely not one of the better missions in the game, just a more exercise in frustration and patience.

-Crème De La Crème
This mission comes right after You Lucky Bastard and are probably the most challenging ones in the game, back to back. But its almost only challenging becuase once again, the objectives lie. The objective says 'CHASE AND KILL MORELLO' Which I tried feverently multiple times, I even blew his car up once and killed him like it told me, but nope! 'Mission failed'  ...Once again its a bullshit example of the objective lying to you, you have to just follow him until he triggers the next loading point/mission progression. Then it reuses the airport segment where you have to shoot down his plane,  first few attempts I didnt know where to shoot and failed, then figured out you have to shoot the engines.


-Election Campaign
Another mission where you assassinate a politician almost JFK style. You go to some big abandoned warhouse and shoot your way to the top floor and then use a sniper to kill politician giving speech then make your escape. The only annoying part of this mission is not knowing where to go. The first time you enter, you go through a manhole, but while youre escaping, you can no longer use the manhole and have to find some other exit. This was stupid and confusing and caused 15 mins of walking in circles after everyone was dead until I found the way to leave. Decent mission despie this flaw.

-Just For Relaxation
This mission is another example of reusing of levels. This simply re-uses the shipyard level from a few back. This is probably one of the dumbest and most obtuse stupid missions in the game. It tells you to go to the shipyard, then wait for the truck to exit so you can steal it. Well sometimes the scripting just glitches out and the truck doesnt even move. If youre lucky and the truck moves, then it tells you to follow it until you can steal it at a good location. So I follow the truck and it drives into a warehouse and stops, then I kill the few guards. Then another glitch? The truck is just driving in place and I cant steal it. Tried loading multiple times, same thing happens everytime. So this mission is just really bugged and stupid. Ended up stealing the truck on the main road then it worked. Either its glitched, or just really dumb.
 Then you drive the truck back into the afformeentioned ship yard from previous levels where the objectively simply says "Load the truck full of these crates"
Well the problem is its a gigantic shipyard and I could be driving around for an hour trying to figure out WTF it means. I searched for a good 20 mins but couldnt figure it out. Looked it up and you have to known to park your truck in a very specific place with very specific crates. Then you just load the truck up until some guy comes and gets the guards after you. At this point everyone is shooting at you and its hard as fuck because you have no guns. So I failed and just found it easier to kill everyone from the start, clear out the level, then load the truck up and make an easy escape. That worked. But its another example of trial and error, almost impossible to complete on the first attempt mission design.

-Moonlighting
This is a standard classic bank heist. Nothing too challenging or crazy here. The only really fucking stupid part is, theres this huge buildup where you go around collecting guns, then it gives you this optional objective to get a fast car. The optional objective involves you going around 30 minutes out of your way meeting up with this guy and protecting him, then another ambiguous objective of stealing a car, but the character in the game tells you to slowly follow him so you dont even know what youre suppose to do. After failing a few times I just pulled him over and stole the car. Well after ALL that buildup, it turns out it doesnt even matter, because at the end of the bank heist when you need to 'escape'  you only need to drive for about 40 seconds! all that effort for nothing. The damn escape location is just a few blocks away from the bank. And to lose the cops all you have to do is kill a few of them then hide in an alley. Besides this stupid crap, the rest of the mission was pretty cool and felt like a classic mobster movie, albeit it had a few trial and error attempts before I could do it properly.

- The Death of Art
This is the last mission in the game and also one of the best kind of. It involves you going to an art gallery and doing this epic huge shootout with tons of enemies, and the art gallery looks amazing. This is another mission where it tells you to do an optional objective of going and collecting some guns. The problem is, it just hints "Alternatively, you can go to this guy and get guns"  but it doesnt even mark it on the map. So you just have NO idea where the hell to go to get the guns. So I ignored the optional objective the first time and continued on.Well then you get to the shootout and find yourself with only 6 bullets and have to kill waves of really hard enemies. I failed a few times, then just decided to reload an earlier checkpoint and actually go do the optional objective to collect the guns. But I had to look up online where the actual guy is, because it wasnt marked on the map. Stupid.  After I got the guns, and went back to the art gallery for the final shootout, it was really intense and awesome and a highlight of the game. This is where the graphics shine and the design of the art gallery with all the paintings on the walls and statues, coupled with this intense Mafia shootout is just iconic video game stuff. Theres a stupid scripted part once again where they throw a grenade AT THE HEALTH STATION so the first time you'll almost certainly die to it. After that, you get to a last boss which is just insane. Atleast it gives a checkpoint. But his accuracy is nuts, he will mow you down in half a second flat. You need to peek out and just stunluck him over and over with your tommy gun. Then he runs away and you chase him then he peeks out of a corner and mows you down again. So this whole boss is just trial and error, theres no way youre doing it on your first attempt. After you learn exactly what he does, its no problem, then the game is over.


Once you understand the shooting mechanics, and the enemy AI, the game isn't that difficult. It just becomes a method of always crouching, carefully positioning yourself on a corner, peeking around corners and spotting the enemies, then either baiting them into a bad position, or sort of exploiting their AI and pick them off. All the classic lineup of 1930s mobster guns, tommy gun, revolvers, colt handgun, shotguns. I found the Tommy gun to be the best in the game, while it has a ton of recoil, its incredibly good if you just shoot slowly and stunlock the enemies. The shooting mechanics are nothing amazing, pretty standard, but I will say the sound effects are quite amazing, such as the sound of your shells hitting the floor depending on surface, your magazines clunking to the ground, all of the visuals of seeing all the blood splatters on the ground and all the shells and magazines etc. It all looks and feels quite visceral and 'hardcore' and realistic, even despite the 2002 graphics. A pet peeve for the gun combat is the camera position. Its positioned exactly behind your character model, so you can barely ever actually see the gun you're wielding. All you see is the back of your characters body most of the time, the gun hes holding completely blocked. I would have much preferred the camera be positioned in a way where you can actually see the gun you're shooting, it would help the combat look better.  Graphically, I would say it still has a certain charm to it. Obviously the textures and polygon count and shaders are not amazing by todays standard, but something about these old games just has a certain visual appeal. Many times I appreciated how the city looked, and a lot of the interiors are impressive still.
The game isn't strictly 'open world' in the common sense. The main campaign is done in a linear way, ever mission instantly goes into the next one, and you always have some objective of where to go. There is an optional 'free roam' mode though. I liked how it has a psuedo-linear campaign one mission into the next.

I will point out that I found it quite strange how the game makes such a big deal with unlocking cars and these optional objectives purely to unlock new cars, but the thing is you basically always have to drive at 40mph or else you have to constantly deal with cops coming after you for speeding. So whats even the point? Everytime you finish a mission it gives you this notification for unlocking cars, despite the whole game I was forced to drive them slowly because its not worth the hassle of dealing with police. Dont really get it.

Now I'm gonna mention the story. I think this is one of the earliest games to really have this modern style of story telling, cutscenes, and checkpoint save system. This seems like the introduction of the modern way of game design. Everything has this cinematic movie like atmosphere and quality to it. Almost every mission starts off inside the resturaunt where your mob resides, and some meeting with the Don and higher ups. Its a classic stereotypical mob story like Goodfellas or The Godfather, told in a video game format. The cast of characters are memorable but also stereotypes. The main character, Tommy is some stern and classic old gentleman, but also witty and has a lot of funny dialogue. Everything is told in this serious and gritty mobster style with full voice acting and cinematics. It really sets the mood and atmosphere and immerses you as one of them. The way every mission starts you at your gangs headquarters, then you go out back and talk to the mechanic to choose a car, then you guys go to your gangs Weapon provider which always talks to you and provides you weapons, it all comes together to immerse you into this experience as a mobster. I think it works quite well. The graphics in the cutscenes are obviously old, its a 2002 game, their faces look pretty funny, but it never really took away from the experience, the old rough graphics almost add to it in a way. I don't usually review stories so Im not gonna say too much, but theres a lot of mature themes and dark scenes, people constantly being assassinated or betrayed, friends turning on eachother, drugs, cars, all that sort of stuff. You have sidekicks for almost all of the game and you start to get to know them and their personality so it never feels too lonely you always feel a part of this gang.

Biggest flaws with the game are being forced to drive 40mph the ENTIRE game, 75% of the game is spent just driving point A to B gets really dull, the control scheme by default is insane like Arrow keys to drive, Numpad 0 to jump, F5 for speed limiter, L to reload etc. Not a big deal but its clear to see how its a product of its time and developed PC first. Other flaws are the objectives literally lying to you sometimes  confusing you and wasting your time, the first quarter of the game is really boring pedestrian busy work...but all the positives in the game are plenty too like decent third person action, intensely challenging but not so bad, some really awesome memorable missions, good story and fun to watch cutscenes, great atmosphere.
The Steam version of the game has the original music removed for whatever music, so I just downloaded it back with a fix online, wasnt a big deal. Steam version also has some weird techincal issues like flickering graphics so had to download a few fixes as well.

The takeaway with Mafia is that its a piece of video game history, developed before GTA 3 and came out only a few months after, its one of the very first games of its kind in the gangster sandbox GTA style , it has its quirks and flaws, but it also has a lot of good things too. It will be pretty interesting to see how the Remake plays out!

7/10