I absolutely love Japanese survival horror games. Even the worst ones usually nail the atmosphere and scare factor and this goes all the way back to the PS1 era which is where they pretty much became mainstream. From the best ones like Silent Hill 3 to some of the worst each title is unique in its own way. I collect survival horror games because of the unique factors in each game. Some may have terrible visuals, voice acting, controls, or obtuse puzzles, but they usually always scare and have great monster designs and a great atmosphere.
Ikai only got my attention due to its physical release. I usually don’t pay attention to digital-only survival horrors as most are pretty bad, and rarely nail even the atmosphere. Ikai does struggle in some departments such as the story, characters, and visuals, but it’s really creepy and has a haunting atmosphere. You play as Naoko who lives in an ancient Japanese village. You are a priestess whose uncle leaves the village and leaves you in charge. Yokais take over and it’s your job to rid them before they take over the shrine, and there’s something about a wedding and an abusive fiancée. Yeah, it’s not clear and even the game’s description doesn’t say much about the story. There’s a mechanic in which you can draw Japanese symbols on paper to make seals to rid of the Yokai, but once you get to the library tables you have to stop every 5-10 seconds as they will pop up and kill you. It helps add a sense of urgency and dread.
Like most games that take less than two hours to complete you don’t get a chance to develop characters or stories. Your main goal is breaking four Yokai seals via puzzles and exploration. Naoko is defenseless so you can’t fight, but just run and hide. Most of the game is easy to figure out minus a few obtuse and obscure puzzles. The village itself is really small so it’s hard to get lost, but you usually have to find context hidden within. Bloody footprints, opening the right door to trigger an event – that kind of thing. The few puzzles involved are slider puzzles and putting objects in the right place. Some more frustrating exploration bits were being lost at the bottom of a well and having to find bamboo to use as climbing posts amongst tons of bones. I spend 45 minutes running around examining every inch of bone until I found them all.
Some events have you hiding from Yokai which wasn’t too bad. They are really creepy designs and can pop up at you out of nowhere. Ikai really gets the sound design down. Creaking floorboards, moans, whispering wind, and bumps that come out of nowhere can make you jump. The game is intense all the way through. It’s just too bad the Switch version suffers from serious graphical issues such as incredibly blurry visuals due to resolution downgrade. It also runs less than 30FPS a lot of the time, but it doesn’t look bad other than this. There’s lots of detail, great lighting effects, and good-looking textures otherwise.
Despite the visual downgrade the game still sounds great, and I can only recommend it if you find it on sale. The $35 physical price tag might be a bit steep for a two-hour game, but anyone who loves classic PS1/PS2-era Japanese survival horror games will find something to like here. I do have to knock it for it’s an almost non-existent and incoherent story and obtuse puzzles, but playing this in the dark with the lights off and headphones on could make for a fun and scary evening.
Bright Memorywas an impressive tech demo that was in Steam Early Access a couple of years ago. It had a scantily clad female protagonist (which doesn’t do anything for the game honestly) and a mix of sword and gunplay in the first person which felt fast-paced and punchy. Infinite is the fully released game, and it’s basically a much longer tech demo. You can finish the game in 90 minutes and this leaves nothing for story or character development which is almost non-existent. All I gathered is that there’s a black hole forming near-Earth and you must stop an evil military guy from taking some sort of artifact that will bring Earth back to Feudal Japan? I’m honestly not even sure.
The best part about the game is the gunplay. The swordplay kind of takes a back seat and is only needed in certain situations. You get a standard arsenal of four weapons. Automatic pistol, auto-shotgun, assault rifle, and sniper rifle. Each weapon has an alternate ammo type that’s usually explosive and does massive damage which is best saved for larger enemies and bosses. The weapons feel heavy and punchy, and they are fun to shoot and use. The gunplay was so good that it kept me wanting more from the game. It had a AAA budget quality to it that’s not seen in many indie shooters. The swordplay consists of mashing a single button or launching enemies into the air. There’s a tacked-on afterthought of a skill tree that lets you unlock abilities and upgrade your alternate ammo firepower, but in 90 minutes you upgrade almost everything pretty quickly so it feels trivial.
There is a grapple line for traversing long distances which are scripted, and you can wall run. These ninja acrobatics feels a bit stiff and not as refined as the actual gunplay. In fact, all of the animations feel stiff and like they were hand done. The faces almost don’t animate and thankfully there are less than 10 minutes of total screen time where the camera shows any faces. Your main character, Shelia, is questionable in the sexy department since you hardly ever see her and there are DLC costumes that seem pointless due to the short run time. You can go through the game again on higher difficulties, but I don’t see the point.
The issue with a short game like this is there is no incentive to come back. There are no modes, no multiplayer, and hardly anything to aim for. The visuals in the game are fantastic with great use of ray-tracing, but again the animations are weird. There’s a short scene where you drive a car and it feels really janky and half-baked. Overall, the boss fights are fun, but there are literally only four types of enemies in the whole game so it gets repetitive quickly. At a sale price, this could be a fun evening, but that’s about it.
Gimmicks that use various types of hardware are nothing new since the days of the Wii made that mainstream, but very few games use your camera outside of a home console for gameplay. While it’s wholly gimmicky and can be played with a controller, the game uses your webcam to see your eyes blinking to determine when to change scenes in the game or interact with objects. Not often does the gimmick feel like it’s influencing something important, but when it does it works well.
You play as a boy named Benjamin Brynn floating along the river of death in a boat with a wolf as a ferryman. He’s to be taken to a being in a large tower whom he has to sell his life story so he can pass on and the ferryman can be paid. You start out as a child and you eventually learn your mother is an accountant and failed music composer and wants you to follow in her footsteps. Each scene is full of mostly black with just what you can remember being in view. Sometimes an eye will appear on objects for you to blink at and interact with. When a metronome appears you can blink and jump to the next scene or try to hold your eyes open and see the scene to the end. Most of the time I couldn’t do it (it’s very dry where I’m at here in the summer).
You slowly progress through the story only to find out that you need to retell the story correctly. I won’t spoil anything as to how or why, but the only times the blinking gimmick felt right was when you had to close your eyes to focus on someone talking. With headphones on this is a great effect. The game does a great job detecting your eyes even in low light, and I was using a laptop webcam which isn’t that great. There isn’t much else to this game. It’s an interactive adventure with interesting visuals. The whole game reminded me a lot of That Dragon, Cancer, but I can’t connect to this game as much as it’s shorter and at the time I was expecting my first child so that game hit home quite a bit. A big fear is your child being born with some sort of debilitating disease.
You’ll most likely not really feel the game’s impact until the last 20 minutes when things get really dark and sad. It didn’t make me tear up, but it was really sad for sure. You can finish the game in about 90 minutes, but I did connect with the character to an extent, but not wholly. The scenes rush by too fast and you’re meant to understand the moral of the story more than connect with the characters and get behind their motives and feelings. I feel a game like this misses the mark due to its short run time, but the gimmick would get tiring for more than 90 minutes.
Overall, Before Your Eyes is a charming game with a lot of heart and a fun gimmick that works well when it wants to. It’s a very short game and doesn’t let you really connect with the characters enough. It’s forgettable in the end, and not as memorable as some other short adventure titles I’ve played in the past, but it’s fun and worth a look.
I’m not the biggest Postal fan as I didn’t grow up with it. With Postal 4being another turd in the series, I can easily say this is the best game in the whole series despite being a spin-off. It takes the meta-humor, gore, and whacky character designs of the main series, puts them into a Doom clone, and does it quite well. You are put into the shoes of the main protagonist who falls asleep on this couch and end up playing the levels of his nightmares. There are plenty of locales, fun weapons, and tons of enemies.
You start the game out like you do in the main games. You are in a lively neighborhood and go, postal because your TV is broken. The game ramps up the difficulty quite nicely as this first level has simple enemies like redneck shotgun MAGA hat-wearing enemies, dogs, and innocent people to slaughter. These people give you Wal-Mart bags that give you health. Later on, you run into floating fat enemies that chuck McDonald’s burgers and cups at you. Mind you they don’t use the actual names in the game, but you can easily tell what they’re making fun of.
Later levels bring on various enemies and there are three main bosses in the game. There are three different campaigns to play in. You eventually go through the desert, asylum, sewer, forest, and swap levels to eventually get to the F4 Expo campaign to take on Leon Dusk (har har) and his space program. Each level consists of mostly linear hallways to shoot through but there are many blocked doors that require certain items or colored keys. Finding these can sometimes be a bit of a pain as the levels can be quite long and labyrinthine and the level design overall isn’t the best among these Doom clones. I honestly felt a lot of the time that the pacing was off with arenas being way too large for the loadout you get (you frequently lose your entire arsenal and have to gain it back again) and it can sometimes feel overwhelming just in terms of getting your bearings. The enemy designs are well done as you know what enemies are weak against what types of weapons. You have enemies that mob you, strong enemies that stand back, and some with long-range weapons.
The humor in this game is a bit different from the main entries as it stays meta and makes fun of current global issues. Coronavirus (it’s literally a boss), various memes like Elon Musk, the toilet paper shortage, and various one-liners that poke fun at what’s been going on for the last five years globally. No racism, sexism, chauvinism, or anything like that is needed to be a fun game. The game pokes fun at things rather than promoting them. Anyone saying “Twitter will end this game” is just creating fake outrage. It’s funny no matter who you are and isn’t offensive. The developers got with the times and actually had to make an effort to be humorous. What a crazy idea right?
With that aside, the game does get really repetitive after the first campaign is over. Previous enemies cycle in, the same 8 weapons can only do so much, and most of them are pretty basic weapons, but a few are unique like the Pussy Blower that shoots cats out and you can recall them to do damage on the way back. Most other weapons are just clever or funny renditions of normal weapons with alt-fire modes. You do get items to use such as slowing down time, refilling a weapon’s ammo, and refilling health, and you also get a piss button. Peeing on things is useless unless you have fire or nitrogen bottles to burn or freeze enemies with your pee. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. There is also an Akimbo item which is probably the most valuable in the game.
Overall,Brain Damaged has excellent art direction and retro visuals that harken back to the 64-bit era of games like Quake II and Unreal Tournament. The controls are great, the game is fast-paced, the weapons and enemy designs are awesome, there is varied level design, and the humor is actually funny and not offensive just to be offensive. There are plenty of nods to video games, gaming culture, and world events from the last five years that everyone can relate to. If you can get past the repetitious design and so-so-level design problems then you will have a great 5-6 hours on your hands.
Shadow Warrior has been a series that’s just all over the place. The first game in this new reboot was really great. well-balanced weapons, enemies, and great visuals. The second game took a nose dive, adding too much to the game, and Shadow Warrior 3 strips it too far back. Flying Wild Hog just can’t find a good balance for this series. This can almost be a reboot within the trilogy itself. It’s nothing like the first two games at all. It feels more arcade-like. Gone are all the pointless upgrades, chi abilities, and huge arsenals of weapons. The series takes a cue from the first game by giving us a set of six weapons, just a simple chi-blast (that ends up mostly being useless), and more story than ever before.
Lo Wang has hit rock bottom and has lost his ninja mojo because a giant ice dragon god defeated him. The story is told mostly through pre-rendered cutscenes and banter from Lo Wang, Hoji, and Zilla. The cast is really small this time around, and also gone are the hub world and open-level mission structure. This game is incredibly linear and only consists of two gameplay loops. Combat arenas and tons of platforming This consists of grapple swinging, wall running, and jump dashes across chasms. It’s pretty fun if it’s too simple and overused. Some levels are over half of just this. The levels are pretty nice, with a fun new cartoon-like art style that pretty much just sticks with ancient Japanese architecture and demons. With the weapons cut back to just six, you get a varied arsenal and can really get to know them. Yes, there are upgrades, but each weapon gets three upgrades, which adds a menial upgrade to each weapon. The first upgrade increases all ammo by a little bit, and the second upgrade adds some sort of elemental upgrade, while the third is usually the best, but you won’t ever access the third upgrade by the end of the game. It’s just too short.
During combat arenas, you can run around and blast enemies away, but each unique enemy has a finisher. This is a Mortal Kombat-style Fatality, but it gives you a temporary weapon you can use to devastate enemies. This is a really neat system and the best part of the game. You need to fill your meter, as each enemy type requires a certain amount of chunks of your meter. Some weapons vary from melee, explosives, giant machine guns, or a passive portal that sucks everyone into one spot. There’s still not as much of a strategic element to the weapons and enemies in a game like DOOM, but it’s way better than the last game. At least I know what enemies die fastest with what weapon, and smaller enemies can just be hacked away with a sword. It’s faster-paced, and even though the shooting doesn’t have the weight of the last two games, this really feels more arcade-like. It’s like how Ninja Gaiden 3 was compared to the first two games. more arcade-like, more cinematic, and simplistic, but still fun.
That’s all there is to this game. You just platform your way to the next arena, where there are maybe five or so on each level. There are only two boss fights in the entire game, so it does get repetitive super quick, and there just aren’t a lot of enemy types either. The game can be finished in about 4–5 hours. I finished it in two sittings. Each level looks pretty good, despite the visuals not being mind-blowing or anything on a technical scale. The departure from the RPG stuff from the last game makes this one more enjoyable. This game felt like popcorn. I enjoyed it while it was there, but I won’t think about it tomorrow. It’s great as a cheap sale and a weekend gore fest. Lo Wang’s jokes are still pretty lame, but the writing is a bit better than the last game as well. I did get a couple of chuckles out. At this point, the series needs another complete reboot with maybe a different developer.
The first Shadow Warrior was a lot of mindless fun that brought back the craziness of the original DOS game. It did a good job with great visuals, crazy monster designs, cool weapons, and that fast-paced feeling of classic FPS action. Shadow Warrior 2 really sets the series back by trying to do too much and not doing any of it very well. First off, the story is just stupid and pointless. You are once again doing jobs for the Chinese mafia, and you end up stuck in some sort of family drama about a woman’s soul getting trapped in your head, and you must reunite her with her body. It’s pretty dumb and uninteresting, including the barely passable voice acting and lame jokes.
After DOOM came out in 2016, it set the standard pretty high for rebooting classic 90s FPS games. Shadow Warrior 2 misses the mark in almost every way. One thing it does get right is the awesome monster and enemy designs and cool levels, as well as plenty of interesting weapons, but less is more, and Shadow Warrior 2 doesn’t implement this practice. For starters, the game is incredibly repetitive and poorly balanced. You repeat the same themed levels just to meet different objectives. A couple of levels were literally repeated twice over, and I just hated it. There are three different themes at play here. There’s Hell with demons and monsters, the real world with assassins and ninjas, and then a weird cyber world with robots, drones, and mechs. The monster designs are pretty awesome, but there’s no strategy for each enemy like in DOOM. In that game, you know what weapons work well against each enemy and can strategize on the fly, but here you just empty all your weapons as fast as you can, starting with the most powerful.
I really hate this, as it leads to more useless filler, such as weapon upgrades. These are just mindless stats that boost weapons, and there’s no strategy here either. There are so many of them, and I literally just equipped the highest-level ones and got rid of the rest. It honestly never mattered. Some enemies are immune to or weak to certain elements, but I didn’t bother with this either. I’m not going to sit and sort through dozens upon dozens of upgrades for different enemy types. DOOM did this right with just a couple of weapon upgrades per weapon, and you knew how you wanted to use these. Less is more. Then there are just an insane amount of weapons. There are different styles that match each area, such as demon, real-world, and cyber weapons. Sure, they look cool, but they all mostly felt the same. They had no personality or uniqueness to them. I just picked the most powerful ones and spaced out my arsenal with one of each type. Then there are the pointless powers. I rarely ever used these, as I was so busy mowing down enemies and trying not to get killed. They’re not even useful. spikes to hold a single enemy down, and it doesn’t work on larger enemies? Invisibility? Why?
So combat is pretty mindless, there’s no strategy here, and the story is pretty silly and pointless. This leads to the fact that you get side quests and trials. I didn’t even bother with these. The game starts feeling like a chore less than halfway through the game. The thing is, I started this game back when it came out and shelved it for years because it was just so boring and monotonous after the first few missions. I had it installed on my PC this entire time, and I finally just plowed through the story in about 7 hours, and I didn’t have a lot of fun. Sure, sometimes when you get the right weapon and kill a group of enemies, it’s pretty satisfying. The bosses are pretty cool and felt good to take down, but these are little bites in a giant cake that just don’t taste very good. The developers should have stuck with a more linear design and fewer weapons and upgrades. Other than that, the visuals are really good, and the art style is great.
I love Lovecraftian horror, but video games have really struggled to bring these myths to life. Most of the games get the atmosphere and monster design down but can’t nail a good gameplay loop or decent story. By far the best game for this is still Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. While its gameplay is clunky, it has great storytelling that’s somewhat memorable. The Sinking City does a great job nailing the twisted town of Oakmont with great visuals, but that’s about it. No single gameplay element or loop comes together to create anything interesting or worthwhile enough to make you want to stick around outside of the main story.
Unlike most other Lovecraftian games, this one doesn’t take place in Innsmouth, but it is mentioned that many are fleeing from that town. You play Charles Reed, who is a private eye investigator searching to end his visions. That’s about it, as far as the entire story goes. You bounce around from case-to-case-solving problems of townsfolk in the form of favors to get one step closer to where you need to go. This is where things start falling apart. Not a single character is interesting, including Reed; the dialogue is drab and boring despite the voice work being pretty decent. There are small little stories for each case you can unravel, but I didn’t care about any of them. I just wanted to progress further and hoped there was some cool twist, but that never came.
When you are inside investigation areas, you can examine items and look at objects. There are key evidence items to progress the story and bonus items to complete all evidence for achievements. This is mostly uninteresting, and there are dozens and dozens of these with you just wandering and looking at everything to find any object you can examine. Once you examine everything, you are given clues to advance the case, but nothing is marked on your map for you. You are given a district and then cross streets and have to pin that yourself. I found this kind of interesting until I found out that all of the main story cases are almost always right near fast travel points.
Speaking of fast travel, it’s so necessary because the town of Oakmont is boring and lifeless. Sure, there are people wandering around, but they are just animations to fill space. They don’t make any sound or have any dialog, and there are no stores or anything like that. It’s just linear streets that look pretty broken up with water-logged streets that require a motorboat to navigate. Some areas are sectioned off as infested areas full of monsters and aren’t worth going into for any reason outside of a few side cases that require it.
That gets us into combat, which is another half-baked idea. The game is trying to be a survival horror game by making ammo scarce, but you can craft ammo and health! Sure, but you will literally be scrounging bullets, and some areas have tons of monsters. I got lucky, but usually went down to my last bullet, and aiming carefully is a must. There are five different weapons, including throwables and traps, but honestly, you just start with your weakest gun and work your way up until you’re spent. There’s no strategy to this, all the weapons feel the same and don’t have any weight to them, and there is no cover system. Like any Lovecraftian game, there is a sanity meter, and as this drops, you hallucinate wylebeasts, and they will attack you unless you take psych meds.
There are some underwater levels in which you walk around in a diving suit and avoid hot air vents and a couple of monsters, but it’s slow-paced and even duller as they are all pretty much the same, just with different layouts and an excuse to maybe add filler. You can shoot a harpoon gun to slow the monsters down, but there was no challenge in these six or so underwater areas. There’s a single boss fight, and you occasionally attack humans, which are easy but usually come in large numbers. Part of the appeal of this game is story choice. Choosing who lives and dies doesn’t really affect much except what endings you can choose, which are uninteresting and unfulfilling.
There’s literally nothing else to do in the game. I desperately just tried to find all the fast travel points. I don’t understand making this open-world if it’s so boring and uninteresting to explore and feels so lifeless. The same loop of investigating cases, fighting some monsters, fast-traveling around to the next case, and listening to the dialog is so dull, and I only kept playing because of my love for the lore. If you don’t care about Lovecraftian mythos, then I wouldn’t even bother with this game. I also didn’t bother with any side cases, as the main story takes around 12 hours and drained me. I couldn’t spend another minute in this game.
Overall, The Sinking City is another barely passable Lovecraft-inspired game that gets the atmosphere and looks right but can’t nail any gameplay elements. While none of them are broken or bad, they are just boring and could have been greatly expanded upon. The main story doesn’t really go anywhere; there are no interesting characters, the dialogue is drab, and the bullet scrounging gets tiring because of the number of monsters that get thrown at you. Not to mention
I love Japanese horror as it has such exciting mythology and creatures that are great for video games. Ghostwire does a great job making an entire game focused on Japanese folklore and mythology while also mixing it with the modern world of Tokyo. Ghostwire has great visuals and art direction, as well as fantastic monster designs, but it falls flat in more ways than I wish it did.
You play as a man named Akito who finds himself awake in the Tokyo streets, apparently dead, and being possessed by a spirit named KK who is trying to stop a demon named Hannya. And that’s about as far as it gets. Sure, there’s a side plot of Akito wanting to bring his dead sister Mari back to life, and Haanya wants her to seemingly become queen of the underworld. I don’t know or care. The story is so underbaked and doesn’t really go anywhere, and that’s no thanks to the story only lasting about 6 hours or so. It’s incredibly short compared to the rest of the repetitive and mostly boring filler throughout the game.
Let’s just start out with the combat, because Ghostwire is pretty exciting during the first two chapters of the game, and then that quickly fizzles out. You get three elemental attacks that are thrown out with your hands. A speedy green wind gust, which is your main weapon, a more powerful fire-piercing attack, and a wider-range water attack Think of it as a shotgun. You can charge these up and do more damage, and then there’s a super ability that lets you do extra damage. You can manage your health with food items, and you acquire “ammo” by destroying enemies or ghost-like objects scattered all over the place. One of the gimmicks of the combat is destroying the cores with a cool animation of Akito using his hands to pull their soul out with a wire (thus the title of the game!). The animation looks cool, but it’s fleeting at best. This becomes incredibly repetitive early on, as you’re just spamming attacks and using each weapon depending on whether you have a tougher enemy or not.
That leads to enemies. They are super cool-looking. They reflect Japanese mythology and folklore, such as the Students of Pain and Misery, which are headless schoolchildren who were either bullied or had some other issue in real life. These are fast-moving enemies. There are Rain Walkers who look like slender men who are salary men or women in real life. They block with umbrellas and are slower-moving. These enemies all look cool, but in the end, there are only half a dozen kids with different variants of them. They aren’t all that challenging in the end, as you just spam all your weapons until you run out of ammo, essentially. Despite all these cool visuals and monster designs, there just aren’t that many.
That leads to the open-world filler, which many games unnecessarily think they need to do these days. Ghostwire would have been a really great 8–10 single-player linear adventure, so more focus could be had on the story and enemies and deeper combat. While Tokyo seems big, it all looks the same. The same empty streets with nothing on the outside of groups of enemies you can walk into. There are various tasks here, such as cleansing trees, finding Jito statues to max out your ammo, and cleansing Tori gates to clear the deadly fog that opens up more of the world. You can find coins and food spread throughout, and you can give animals food for money too. There are various collectibles you can find and outfits to deck out Akito, but once you finish the story, you never see his body again, so I feel this is pointless. Most of your cash will be used to buy more paper dolls to capture spirits, but again, this is another large task that felt like it wasn’t worth doing. There are hundreds of spirits throughout the area, and most side quests give you more spirits to capture.
You can cash in spirits at payphones to empty your paper dolls and get some XP. This leads to the most useless ability tree that takes pretty much getting 100% completion to unlock, but once the story is finished, there aren’t any tough bosses or anything anymore, so why would you continue to unlock more stuff? You could argue it’s for a new game plus, but that’s also pointless as the story isn’t worth revisiting as it’s so shallow and underdeveloped. You’re left with this huge, empty, boring world with stuff to do that leads to basically nothing outside of 100% completion. Games like God of War make you want to find everything thanks to challenges you can complete that still require further upgrades beyond what the story can give you, and Ghostwire just completely fails here.
There’s also a vertical element to Ghostwire in which you can grapple up to demons that are flying and jump around rooftops, but platforming in this game is quite annoying. You can glide around a bit, but it requires upgrades to glide longer. But, with all that said, Ghostwire is a shallow game that tries to be bigger than it needs to be. It’s another victim of trying to cram a pointless open world when there’s so much great mythology and art to make a solid single-player experience, and it’s just squandered.
I do have to mention that you need to complete at least a couple dozen side quests to upgrade enough to make the game not super difficult. Getting more health, max ammo, and some abilities really help, but things like sneaking and your bow are totally useless outside of specific story scenes. It’s clear that this was meant to be a single-player linear adventure that was crammed and stretched out into an open-world game that no one asked for. It looks cool enough and plays well enough to warrant maybe 15 hours inside this world (I clocked in 12 and I explored quite a bit and nearly unlocked).
Assassin’s Creed II is by far one of the biggest sequels in video game history. When it came out, everyone was blown away by the scope and ambition put into this game. It made the first game feel like a concept demo. It felt like just the core of the first game was present, and so much was built on top of that game. The world was five times as big; there were new mission types, cinematic story missions, and tons of overall additions and improvements; however, the game did suffer on its own for various reasons.
This game starts the epic saga of Ezio Auditore de Firenze. one of the most iconic video game characters of all time. It was a surprise that Ubisoft scrapped Altair and his story so quickly, but we are greeted with 15th-century Italy and various historical characters that appeared during that time, such as Catarina Sforza, Leonardo Di Vinci, and Machiavelli. The story itself is fairly easy to follow and has a few twists, but most of all, it has a really surprising ending. Ezio works his way up as an assassin, knocking down templars, to retrieve the apple of Eden and keep it from the templar’s hands. The main villain, Rodrigo Borgia, is a nasty snake, and overall, all the characters are well written, and I wound up really liking most of them.
First off, the overall way you maneuver has been improved slightly, but more things have been added. While you can swan dive into haystacks and climb ladders, the entire game has been built with parkour free-running in mind. You can climb every building and stay off the streets by staying on the rooftops. Overall, the system was impressive back in the day, but it has a lot of quality-of-life issues. The overall parkouring feels too sticky. Ezio will jump around like a rabbit sometimes, so fine-tuning your turns makes it difficult to forget any type of mid-jump change. Once you get close to a wall or object, Ezio will climb, and quick button presses just aren’t responsive. I would start climbing a wall and then try to tap the descent button, but instead, he would just fall to the ground. Other instances had guards chasing me while I was trying to round a corner, and Ezio would cling to the wall and get stuck or jump onto the wall or object nearby instead. This can get incredibly frustrating as the system just doesn’t allow fine tuning or sudden changes.
That’s not to say the parkour system is bad. When you have a good line of sight, it works well, or you just want to climb broadly over a building. There were other instances in which precise jumping became a chore during Assassin’s Tomb missions. There is a fast walk button, and holding down the run button together allows Ezio to scale things quickly. If you are holding that run button after each jump, Ezio will just go in that direction, whether there’s something to grab on to or not. For small jumps across beams, I had to let go of the run button after each jump to re-align myself for the next jump. Quickly parkouring around just isn’t possible due to this finicky system.
Some other frustrations stem from combat. Firstly, the system is mostly the same as the first game, as it can be easy due to the whole system being a parry-fest. You can whack away at enemies, but instead, just hold the block button and parry when enemies strike, and it’s a one-hit-kill city. Once I acquired my wrist blades, I didn’t even use my sword anymore and never once used my secondary dagger weapons. This is a flaw in the combat itself and needs serious overhauling. It makes open combat boring and sometimes too easy. What is challenging and annoying is trying to lose guards and become anonymous. Sure, you can blend into crowds, benches, and haystacks, and you can now hire prostitutes or mercenaries to distract guards and get them off your tail, but the combat and finicky parkour system make losing guards incredibly frustrating. You have to lose their line of sight by rounding corners or jumping off buildings, and if you can get far enough away, it will create a search radius. You can hide in that radius or continue escaping. There is an anonymity meter, and once it’s solid red, every guard will recognize you, and it’s a frustrating mess to find a town crier to bribe and take 50% of the meter away.
With those two major things out of the way, that leaves content itself. The sad thing about all this new content is that it’s meaningless in the end. There are no rewards for any of it except for achievements or completion’s sake. There are 73 viewpoints to find that are actually fun, as most of them are climbing puzzles on their own. Now it does still feel like overkill, as each viewpoint only reveals the surrounding buildings and not much else. I felt there were just too many. There are races, assassin contracts, courier missions, and fights. These are boring and pointless, and they are just there to add filler. You can really tell this is where the Ubisoft plague of too much crap to do in a game starts. The only rewarding side content is The Truth Puzzles. There are 20 hidden glyphs throughout the game, and finding them will grant you puzzles to solve. These get increasingly hard—absurdly hard, in fact—in which the clues become obtuse and impossible to decipher. However, what’s revealed is a cool video.
The story missions themselves are mostly varied, with various tasks such as assassinations, tailing, fights, horseback riding, and the occasional scripted mission. I really liked the story and characters enough to stick around and wound up completing all viewpoints, The Truth puzzles, and finding all the codex pages that max out your health. I do need to mention the various gadgets you get, which are mostly useless. Poison darts can make enemies go berserk and attack each other, but you also have smoke bombs, throwing knives, and a pistol, and that’s about it. I mostly used the throwing knives to take out rooftop guards, and smoke bombs were great to get away from large groups of enemies and become anonymous. In fact, they’re required to reduce frustration.
The visual upgrade for the Ezio Collection is minimal. There aren’t any actual improvements outside of some draw distance gain, anti-aliasing, and texture filtering. The lighting is slightly improved as well, but not by much. The game runs incredibly well with no slowdown, but I did run into a few crashes and glitches. I wish we got a full remaster or remake, but what’s here is fine. It’s crazy how well this plays so many years later and just shows how far ahead the game was at the time. There are a lot of quality-of-life improvements that need to be made, and most of the core mechanics have frustrations you will need to forgive or work around, but the story and characters are worth sticking around for. There is also a lot of bloated side content that has no meaning or rewards, including fully upgrading your villa, which literally just generates more income and isn’t used for anything besides dying armor, buying weapons, and armor itself. The assassin and templar tombs are a lot of fun as well.
Even if you aren’t a fan of the movies, I want to say right now that the game is based more on the comics and original takes on the characters. I’m actually glad Eidos Montreal went this route. The game features a new story, and even if you don’t like Guardians of the Galaxy, you should enjoy this game as just a pure action-adventure romp. The game is chock-full of humor, clever writing, a great story, and fantastic visuals.
You play solely as Star-Lord, the leader of the Guardians. The game’s length is something I want to mention first, as it’s fairly long. running for at least 15 hours, and there’s honestly not much in terms of venturing off with side quests or anything. This is a very linear game with small side paths that lead to components for upgrades or extra skins, but that’s about it. You start off the game with a story-heavy intro. There’s tons of licensed 80’s rock music, and right away you can see there’s a lot of care and detail put into this game. Fantastic voice work, great sound effects, and tons of great artwork The game consists of two main parts. Exploring planets on a linear path that includes light puzzle elements—well, barely that, to be honest—and some platforming Then there’s the combat, which this game relies heavily upon and uses as filler.
Let’s just get the combat out of the way here. As I stated earlier, you only play as Star-Lord, and you can order your other three teammates around. When you start out, you slowly acquire up to four different abilities for each member, including yourself, and these are acquired with ability points earned through combat. I feel this is meaningless in the end and feel tacked on as there’s not much strategy involved in combat. You can shoot your pistols until your heat meter fills up, and then time the gauge in the green to offload the heat for a burst shot. Then you can mash a melee button as well. Honestly. Star-Lord is fairly weak by himself, and I heavily relied on spamming the abilities of my teammates. Even my own abilities were fairly weak in comparison. Drax is a heavy tank, while Gemora is like a ninja and can jump around, slicing enemies. Groot is eventually upgraded as a healer towards the end of the game, but in the meantime, he can hold enemies in place. Rocket uses explosives and focuses on AOE damage.
This all sounds fine on paper, but in the heat of combat, the different abilities don’t do enough, which is different enough to mean much. I usually just relied on a couple of abilities from each member, mostly AoE-type abilities for maximum damage, and stuck with those through the entire game. I only really used my own pistol barrage ability, as it was the most useful. Enemies come in usually only three varieties. Easy to kill, medium damage and health, and larger enemies with multiple health bars The enemies mostly repeat on their respective planets, and then there are the same Promise enemies over and over again. There are a few boss fights thrown in, but they aren’t anything unique or special.
It’s sad that the combat is a dance of spamming the same abilities from your teammates and running around to stay alive. The fact that you yourself do so little damage is really odd. There are a few other contexts thrown in, like a bar under the larger enemies’ health bar that determines when they are weak. If you spam enough attacks in a row, you can then do an instant kill. There are also a few environmental items that you can order teammates to toss around, but they’re very underdeveloped and rely too heavily on these fundamentally useless abilities. The fact that there is so much combat in the game can make it feel like it’s dragging on far too long and is just there for filler. I much preferred the story elements and more exploration areas than the combat.
The exploration is mostly just running around and listening to the banter of the Guardians, but also light puzzles in which you must match the correct teammate’s ability with the right obstacle. Gemora can slice things open, Drax can punch through walls, Groot can create bridges, and Rocket can hack panels. There are four weapon elements you acquire, such as lightning, ice, fire, and a grapple ability, that are used here as well, but it’s not rocket science. Again, another idea that is undercooked and feels like filler. I mostly enjoyed the choices you have to make during the story, which determine which allies help you during the final events of the game, and the overall voice work and writing are clever, sharp, and really funny. I just wish the rest of the game had the same care attached to it.
That’s not to say it’s downright bad. The controls are responsive, the animations are smooth and look great, and the combat does work. It’s not clunky or a chore to use; it’s just full of underwhelming features. The various planets you explore are fantastic-looking, really draw you in, and make you feel like you’re in the comics. There are intermissions in between in which you are on the Milano ship and can walk around and explore. There are also Easter eggs and lore scattered throughout the game for hardcore fans too. However, the biggest element of all is: is this enough to warrant sitting through 15–17 hours? If you aren’t a huge Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy, or comic book hero fan, then no. I feel like almost 5 hours could have been cut with less combat thrown in, and the story does go on and on. It’s supposed to, as you get a solid beginning, middle, and end. There’s enough run time here to really get you to connect with each character. I didn’t finish the game and have no clue about anyone or care about anything, like most video game stories these days. It was daring for Eidos Montreal to really push the story through and allow you to grow with these characters, and it paid off.
Overall, with weak and repetitive combat, mostly useless abilities that don’t allow for any type of strategy, and a weak attempt at environmental puzzle-solving, the only saving graces here are the visuals, story, characters, and voice acting. I played this game all the way through because I wanted to see and hear more. It was highly entertaining, but every time I went through a chapter full of nothing but combat, I grumbled and just wanted these parts over with. I then enjoyed exploring various planets but got annoyed with the poor attempt at puzzles. If the
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…