BaronVonTang

Had this been the first ever 3d Sonic game to come out it would have been a revelation. This certainly feels the most like a classic Genesis Sonic game was translated to a 3d environment, much more so then any of the other attempts at this, but therein lies the problem. You see, there has been other 3d Sonic games; and while they've suffered from some harsh criticism, I've enjoyed most of them (with some exceptions). And what I enjoyed most is how they explored the different things you could do with a speed based character in a 3d enviroment, things you couldn't do with 2d; and, although, some of those experiments didn't produce the greatest results I always got the feeling that they were cultivating a formula with each game being a bit better then the last (with some exceptions); but with this game they've achieved this more classic approach to Sonic through a method of subtraction. This may not necessarily be a bad thing, but in some areas it's very frustrating. Now I'm not just upset that we're not getting another Generations or Unleashed, I was sure of that from the trailers before I bought this. I did enjoy the Super Speed approach to Generations and Unleashed though, with the fun of the game coming from level memorization, the reward being getting through the whole level without letting go of the boost button, but I know that's a very limited style of game play and doesn't appeal to everyone, and it would get tired fast if a whole franchise were built around those mechanics. But even coming off of Colors or Secret Rings the capabilities of the eponymous Hedgehog in this title are severely limited. Just some examples, if I covered everything we'd be here all day: Sonic can no longer increase or decrease speed while grinding, he also can't quick switch rails; there's no slide ability; no ring dash; Sonic can still execute a stomp, of sorts, but when and where you can execute it is a bit strange, like, you can't execute it coming off a rail (which would have been useful) and you can't execute it coming off of springs...Anyway, just a few examples here. There are some added features, however; I guess in an attempt to supplement all that they took out: there's now a wall run, a kick attack, multiple lock ons, and they brought back the spin attack, I guess in an attempt to make it more like classic Sonic. But the thing is, these new features weren't implemented well. The wall run doesn't add anything, it's useless, anytime you use it a simple wall jump could suffice just fine. The kick is an interesting idea, it adds a bit more variety to combat so it's not just lock on and press jump twice everytime, it reminds me a bit of Sonic Heroes, but it's not as well implemented: in Heroes it's very clear what enemies can and can not be hurt with a lock on jump, they'd have a shield or an electric bubble or something, here it's trial and error; you jump into an enemy, lose your rings, and then you know you have to kick that enemy first. The multiple lock-on is another good idea, that could add variety to combat, but it's so hard to control: locking on to a single enemy multiple times does extra damage, but you initiate this by getting close to the enemy and waiting for the lock on's to activate, but, by the time they do, another enemy may have come into view, and jumping into position to hit the first enemy may switch the lock on to this new enemy, it's very frustrating. And then there's the spin dash, which is completely useless; there's a reason it was taken out of most 3d sonic games, it's just a wasted button; it can hurt some enemies, but the times it will hurt enemies or the enemies will hurt you while using it seems to be completely random, on a side note, it's the same thing with the standard jump attack, you know, without locking on. Sometimes just jumping on an enemies head will take them out just fine, and sometimes it doesn't; added to this frustration, alot of the enemies that appear in this game are ripped directly from classic Sonic games, and I remember those games, I remember I could just spin dash through them or jump on their head and take them out, but in this game you gotta kick first, or you just can't kill them at all (like the tree monkeys); so, what? Did Sonic just get weaker over time? This isn't a bad game, I don't want to give that impression; it's extremely fun, and they did a lot of things right! Like, it's all Sonic levels, no Tails in a mech or Werehog **** and, just in general, no filler levels; The Wisp powers are integrated into a lot of boss battles (something, very much, lacking in Colors); and, shockingly, the Red Rings actually do something in this game! Instead of just netting you a trophy. But being such a long time fan of the series, I can't help but feel they threw the baby out with the bath water a bit with this one. Last complaint: DON'T MAKE ME BEAT THE GAME TO UNLOCK HARD! Have that **** available at game start, normal's sooooo easy in this game

Probably my favorite game on the 3ds so far, not counting ports (counting ports the award goes to Star Fox). It seems to do everything right, and it actually may be my favorite in the series too. It's just the right amount of difficulty; it's got a great game length with tons of unlockable missions; it offers an amazingly deep combat system for a 2d sidescroller, with a point multiplier system that gives the player incentive to take advantage of the combat system; the levels are nice and long and usually provide some kind of on-rail segment that adds a lot of variety, something previous installments did but not in the quantities this game provides. There's also a lot more emphasis on platforming then in previous installments and it's done very well making it a bit less tedious then previous games. And, actually, one of the features: the new and improved parry system. Now this seems to be the biggest complaint about the game, people are upset that they can't hold in the block like in some of the previous games, instead you have to time your blocks; but I like this better, it presents more of a challenge and is, thus, more rewarding when you do it right; of course this means you do have to memorize enemy patterns, but, you're probably going to have to do that anyway to effectively beat this game. And speaking of memorizing enemy patterns, my second favorite feature: all of the bosses present a window to do some kind of special grab attack; you can beat the bosses without doing this, but it's a cool feature to provide, and its a lot of fun to figure how you can pull off the grab attack for each different boss. Now this game doesn't get a ten for a couple of reasons, just a few small complaints. Firstly, this game would have been greatly improved with some kind of dash or fast run option; most of the time you'll be fighting and jumping, so it's not too noticeable, but the times when you're just going from point a to point b, it's really jarring how slow Musashi moves; like, your attacks and jumps are so fast, but then you walk slower then Mario in quick sand, it just seems weird; you would think that given the emphasis on speed presented in the two PS2 Shinobi games that this game would embrace that a bit more, but this seems like a bit of a step back from those, as far as that aspect is concerned. Secondly, though the bosses are great, and a lot of fun to fight, they lack the ridiculousness of former games in the series. I mean, one or two are pretty over the top, like a giant mutant shark, but for the most part the bosses are pretty standard ninja action game bosses. And, lastly, this game isn't very impressive graphically; I mean, the 3d works fine, but the sprites and backgrounds just aren't very developed; like, this could have been released on the DS1, easily. I get that they were probably going for a bit more of a stylized, slightly cartoonish, look, (at parts it actually kind of reminds me of Bruce Timm cartoons, especially Batman Beyond), but the end result is that everything looks kind of blocky and poorly defined, and given how amazing a lot of the games coming out on the 3ds look, this is kind of inexcusable; like, it looks like this was an eShop game rather then a catridge/store release. My last complaint, the **** ing maze level! They brought it back! And it's just as long, (if not longer), just as tedious and it's just not fun, at all. If it just weren't for those couple of minor things this game would be perfect. I highly recommend it. It's too bad it flew so low under most peoples radar, I was hoping it would garner some attention for this series again because I'd love to see another major console released 3d Shinobi game.

I wasn't excited when this game was announced; no Igarashi and none of that beautiful promo art by Ayami Kojima. On top of that the only other game Mercury made before this was the abysmal Jericho; and the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, it's another **** ing reboot! I still played the game on release with an open mind...after all, it is Castlevania; but, sadly, my initial doubts about the title were confirmed. The most common complaint I hear about this game is that it's a God of War clone. This is frustrating as it is the least legitimate complaint. Yes, the combat is similar, but the combat in GoW is also very similar to Rygar and Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, both of which came out long before GoW. So I think a more apt. comparison for combat would be to Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, which makes sense. So, if the 'rip-off' label is irrelevant then what are the real pitfalls? Well, why don't we start with the combat. The actual combat system is an interesting idea; two magic gauges, light and dark, one does more damage to enemies, one refills your health and filling the combo meter drops orbs that refill **** interesting thing about this is that you don't get any health restoring drops or items, so when you're in the heat of battle and your health and light magic's empty you'll have to fill up your combo meter to ****'s a system that could really put alot of pressure on the player; however, where it falls short is the games difficulty. Rarely are the battles so hard that your health and light magic will be drained. Another issue I had: many of the bosses are multi-part battles; and between each part there's a cut scene or quick time event (so sick of these things) and these serve to transition you to the next phase. So, on the few bosses that were actually difficult enough to drain my health and light magic I would bet one of their forms and then all the orbs they'd drop would vanish before I could collect them between when the cutscene or quicktime event kicked in and the next form started. Actually, the game is filled with tiny little unnecessary cut scenes during combat. For example: there's these skeleton enemies and after you kill them you have to destroy their remains or they reform; the thing is that every time they die the game stops and the camera zooms in on the remains to show them twitching about (hint, hint); this is extremely annoying when you're fighting swarms of these things, because it does it for every single one. That's just one example, but there's tons of things like that in this game; it really slows down the pace of combat. On the plus side; there are a lot of moves and upgrades available, but, like I said, the game's so easy you'll never really need em'. I wish there had been more secondary weapons available too; you only get four, and two of them are summons; I also don't know why there's only two summons; I've never heard **** that had summons, but only two of them, you can't level them up either; it's weird, like they had an idea to put summons in the game but gave up a fourth of the way through. There's some puzzle and platforming to this game as well, and I would like to commend the designers for including so many dungeon puzzles, because I miss those things. They're not, particularly, complex, but they add some variety. Also, a lot of the puzzle sequences require you to ride some kind of creature to solve them, and that was cool. It's unfortunate that these are only used for solving puzzles and you don't get to stay on them for very long or use them in battle. The platforming, on the other hand, is abyssmal. It feels like they took a game that was primarily meant to be a combat intensive action game and forced a bunch of platforming in it without really thinking it through. Gabriel always does the same tiny leap, and there's no way to control how high, short, or long it is, the only way to do a long jump is to double tap forward, which makes him run, then jump; this gets very irritating when trying to do it on narrow platforms. Couple this with a terrible fixed camera and it's ridiculous; sometimes the camera will automatically change right before you make a jump, or even mid jump; and this happens a lot. Sometimes you'll have to do a long jump or a charged dash in a specific direction but the camera's pulled back so far that you can't even see what direction the characters facing. This isn't the N64, this game came out in 2011, the camera shouldn't be the biggest enemy in the game anymore! I know this review is nitpicking a bit; but I've come to expect a lot from this franchise and this game just doesn't live up to it's predecessors. I wouldn't say it's a bad game, especially for a studios second game, but would I recommend this game? Not really. Castlevania fans will find it disappointing, and new comers to the series would be better off playing any other game in the franchise Lastly, where's all that iconic music?

Okay, so I'm usually against giving 0 scores, very few games deserve it, but this is one of the few. Now, I'm not basing this on the games thematic content, at least, not entirely. There's plenty of games whose content, characters and/or settings I find objectionable, but who's game play makes up for it; examples being Bayonetta and Jet Set Radio: the oversexualization of Bayonetta seemed like it was pandering to under sexed nerds and Jet Set Radio revolved around a bunch of taggers and graffiti "artist", that being a medium I despise and seems to only attract the scummiest people; but both those games exhibited amazing and addictive **** I really can't say no to them. DmC, however, does not have good gameplay. I was even kind of excited about this game when I first heard Ninja Theory was doing it; of course I didn't like the **** look of Ninja Theories Dante, and I certainly didn't like the Combichrist on the soundtrack (you know, that band that people working at the Hot Topic think is industrial) but I had played Heavenly Sword, and the first half of Odyssey To The West and my general view was that both these games ran out of budget, and could have been great, given they had the time and money to finish them; so naturally, I thought "oh, but now they're getting a Capcom budget, so they'll have the time and the money". Sadly, as events unfolded, and the director got the spot light on him and more was revealed about his "philsophy" of game-making it became apparent that the flaws in these games were not due to circumstance, but were, in fact deliberate. They're one of those studios that buy into that accesible/cinematic/character driven form of game making, which I think is completely asinine, because, you know, just make a **** move if you want to do that **** So the combos aren't shallow in their games because they didn't have time to make a better fighting system, the platforming isn't easy and obvious because they didn't have the budget to develop it more, and the level design is bland because "they don't want to detract from their characters personality by making the world the focal point". And they brought that exact philosophy to DmC. It's easy, it's boring and it's simple, exactly like all Ninja Theory's games, and now they don't have that budge/time excuse to fall back on. Sure it looks nice, graphically (not so much design wise), but what's that thing people say about form without substance? The most horrific thing about this though is that this the polar opposite of what Devil May Cry was, and what fans really wanted; just how different is almost unfathomable. All the styles, and the moves and the huge arsenal, they're all non-existent, or reduced to a fraction, in this game; and why not? This games so god damn easy that you'd never need to use any of that, which is also a serious departure from Devil May Cry. Also, the frame rate has been halved from the last game, and it's a different engine (unreal), which means you can expect textures popping in and out all over the place. And, of course, I do have to talk about the characterizations and story a little bit; it's just so stupid and juvenile. Dante has no flair, or style and is completely unlikable as a character; he looks like one of those white kids you see begging for change in Berkeley California, you know, the ones that are just rebelling against their rich parents. And, actually, everyone in this game is pretty unlikable; it's like they took all the characters from the original series and intentionally made them their polar opposites. And that's probably kind of what they did. The director had no problem telling people he didn't like the Devil May Cry series for its gameplay or it's content, so he had no problem **** it and inserting what he thinks is "cool", because, you know, he knows best, obviously; and what's cool is, apparently, juvenile and asinine behavior from man-babies. It's actually kind of funny, if you look at a picture of this guy you'll see how big his ego is; his Dante is, essentially, an exaggerated version of himself, from the clothes to the haircut. I just can't understand Capcoms decision to hand this franchise over to such a young company that had no love for the series. There's an episode of South Park about the fourth Indiana Jones movie, you know, the one we pretend never happened. In the episode Stan, I think, has a nightmare where Lucas and Spielberg corner Indiana Jones and, literally, **** **** that's what this game is: it's a eurotrash director who listens to bad contemporary industrial music and has a stupid haircut taking Dante, bending him over and **** him; **** him til' he's angst-ridden and obnoxious.

This, and probably Velocity, were the two games for this generation of console I could not put down, in the category of network released games, and store released too, honestly. People just weren't making the type of games that I wanted to play for this generation, but then this came out, and I played nothing but this game for, like, 2 months straight. The fact that Konami choose not to put the Contra label on this game is a bit perplexing, especially since they've been so hard up to revitalize this franchise; I mean, it plays like a Contra game; it takes place in the Contra continuity and it solves all the criticism people had of 4 and Rebirth, which was that those two entries didn't bring anything new to the franchise. And boy does this bring something new. You can play this game like old school Contra, just run and gun, or you can play it in Rising mode, where you can enable all kinds of cool abilities, like a triple air dash, wall run or the especially cool feature to hit enemy bullets back at them with perfect timing; it adds a lot of variety to gameplay; it almost makes it feel like some kind of Contra/Megaman X hybrid; which is awesome, because those are, like, two of the greatest game series ever made. My complaints about this game are few: firstly, if you died enough times, and trust me, you will, you get infinite continues on Rising and Arcade mode; even if you're a Contra master and you almost never take a hit, you replay this game enough times you're gonna get those infinite continues eventually, whether you like it or not. Granted, the checkpoints where you respawn if you die are few and far between (usually only 2 per level, and the levels are pretty long), so it's not like this feature completely kills the challenge, but it still feels kind of cheap, it definitely makes this feel like one of the easiest Contras. I mean, all the powers you can get in rising can, certainly, make the game easier, but you can turn those off, you can't turn the infinite continues off, or, at least, I haven't figure out how. Lastly, and this is a small gripe; all additional charactes are paid DLC, nothing unlocks in-game, like in Rebirth, or the original Contra Hard Corps; it seems like they could have had at least one of the 3 dlc characters unlock in game. But, that being said, you will definitely want to shell out the couple of bucks to download Sayuri. She uses a sword, rather then a gun and it's like a completely different game playing as her. But all in all this is an amazing game; probably my favorite on the Playstation Network. So much variety of gameplay and replayability. I've probably beaten this game, at least 50 times and I always find a new excuse to play it. Currently I'm trying to play through every level with all action chips enabled getting from start to boss without taking a hit or letting go of the dash-run button.

It's a little short, and a bit easy, but it's ridiculously addictive. Hard mode unlocks after a play through too (wish it were available from the start) and that ads a bit more of a challenge; besides a lot of the fun of this game comes from, not making it through the level, but doing it well and with style, using all your special skills, bouncing off enemies heads and air dashing into another enemy, trying to bet bosses without taking a hit. There's also a pretty good variety of spells to unlock and upgrades to receive, although since the drops are randomized you will have to grind a lot to get the better skills, and how to unlock new moves isn't particularly clear in game, but, the game plays fun enough that the grinding isn't too much of a choir. All in all this is an incredibly under rated game, and worth getting, especially considering how cheap it goes for these days.

I honestly didn't like this game at first. It had a lot working against it: The terrible wuss-rock soundtrack that seemed to come on every single time things started to get interesting and completely killed the mood (at least you can turn the music off in settings); the forced stealth sections which completely break the flow of the game and which don't really give you any clear idea what's going to send an enemy into alert, and the combat was just so-so, at least I thought, and as funny as hacking people up in slowmo and taking out there spine was, it got real old real fast. So, I played the first couple of stages and then it went back on my shelf, where it sat gathering dust while I contemplated selling it back for a pathetic fraction of what I paid for it on release. But then I gave the game another try, this time I began to better understand the parry system, which the game does a baffling poor job of explaining to you considering how many tutorials you have to wade through at the beginning. Parrying adds an exhilarating element to combat; it becomes all about perfect reaction timing and less about stringing together the same combo chains whenever you see an opening like so many other current hack'n'slash titles. Now I can't stop playing this game. It still has its flaws; it's waaaaay too short, main campaign is only about 5-6 hours; the additional VR missions aren't very fun and don't play to the games strengths; again, the music is terrible and doesn't match the feel of the game at all; those forced stealth sections are extremely annoying and unnecessary; waaay too many quick time events (can that **** just stop being in games), and if you miss your window for them they're often gone immediately, nothings more frustrating then effectively parrying and stunning an enemy, then having your figure slip and putting in 1 extra hit and missing your opportunity for an instant take down. But the good out weighs the bad, and the combat is just so addictive. It's not as good as, let's say, Devil May Cry 3, but seeing as there's been such a dearth of well made games like this lately, it's s certainly a step in the right direction. Here's hoping there's a sequel!