ImJTHM

XCOM 2 is a serviceable sequel that has a single major misstep that winds up nearly destroying the entire game around itself. Namely, a majority of the missions are on a turn limit. Remember those missions in Enemy Unknown that involved moving a train in a certain number of completely arbitrary turns? Yeah, that's the entire game now. Nearly every mission is complete and utter frustration as you try to savescum your way through the map to find where you need to go. The tactics in the game are just as solid as before, but with this completely forced speed on every level, I never felt comfortable actually trying the new stealth or ambush mechanics, because they took longer to complete than just sprinting around the map, trying to avoid the instant game over time limit. Once there's a mod to remove this, I'll get it. Until then, they've turned the game into a frustrating slog.

I tried so hard to like this game. I really did. But, I'm going to explain what's wrong with it, and I am going to ignore all of the game breaking bugs. First off, the world has no life, whatsoever. Nearly every single mission available feels like a waste of time. Combat has been revamped, and by revamped, I mean it's extremely similar but you have less health. Importance has been placed on stealth, and by that I mean that the game's AI is inconsistent and will sometimes see you from several blocks away because you quietly stabbed a sniper, and other times won't see you from ten feet away under an identical situation. The story is garbage, with character motivations randomly changing for really no reason. The character of Arno begins as a cocky aristocrat (like another famous assassin), but as soon as he joins the Assassins, all personality is **** from him and he becomes yet another growling Batman clone. Other nitpicks include chests on the overworld that require REAL MONEY to open, other chests that require some kind of confusing companion smartphone game to open, voice acting that ranges from terrible to decent, extreme amounts of pop-in regarding crowds and textures, and a control scheme that seems like it was designed for someone whose recently gone blind and their hands are number and can't feel the buttons. On top of all of this, the controls have been "improved" from previous entries in the series. You know how in all of the AC games, you'd occasionally grab onto things you didn't want to? Yeah, that happens ALL THE TIME now, nearly constantly, leading to an extremely frustrating experience. If you want a next-gen game, get Dragon Age or Dying Light. This game is terrible on almost every single front. Ubisoft should be ashamed with how the treated this game. The ideas are there, like the clothing you wear affecting how you play, but every single one is improperly done, leading to a game that just plain isn't fun. Avoid at all costs, whether you are a new player or returning fan.

A load of wasted potential, but with solid mechanics, Destiny is representative of an industry with no ideas and more of a focus on spectacle than mechanics. Examples of poorly designed mechanics are loot, none of which is exciting. When a new gun is found in Borderlands, it could fire swords or arcing lightning blasts. In Destiny, the bullets could glow red. There are only a handful of gun types, and the few variations to that gun play nearly identically, making it seem more like a traditional first person shooter than an extended RPG. The RPG elements are terrible and barebones. Rather than getting a series of points to put into many skills, creating your own unique character and way to play, all of the classes (all three of them) will play identically to someone playing as the same class, the only difference being the skills they have equipped, which can be changed at any time, undermining the entire RPG aspect as a whole. The map is massive, but there isn't really much to do in it. It's sort of like if you put tootise rolls on the corners of a football field. Yeah, there are caves and respawning monsters, but the maps have an MMO feel and, in a fast paced shooter, it just comes across as a pointless waste of space, and an excuse to have vehicles. Speaking of vehicles, the game has almost no consequences for failure. If your vehicle explodes, you can just summon another one. No money, experience, or level required. If you die, you respawn a short distance away, once again, with no repercussions, unless you are in a "dark zone" for raid purposes, which show up entirely at random within missions and make them more aggravating than fun, just because of how randomly they're sprinkled around. This lack of feedback to the player causes the game to feel old very quickly, because there isn't a sense of accomplishment. You can just bash your head against any boss until you win, regardless of level or personal skill. Combine this with the face that many enemies are simply damage sponges and this makes for a lot of tedium very quickly. The story is meh. It's visually interesting in its design, but what starts off as an interesting idea quickly devolves into every single sci-fi cliche in history. Not much to say, it serves its purpose, but brings nothing new to the table. And, simply put, the multiplayer deathmatches are garbage. They remind me of the most recent Call of Duty, but even more broken. Prepare to die at complete random. As for the good, the game is gorgeous. Landscapes are meticulously designed, and you can tell the world-designers really care for their craft. The voice acting is also great, except for, curiously, Peter Dinklage. He occasionally comes off as flat and bored with everything that is going on, and when he does, it will **** you right out of even the most emotional scenes. Also, the driving mechanics are smooth as better, and are quite possibly some of the best that I've ever played. However, all of these things can't make up for the fact that Destiny is just a mediocre Borderlands clone at its core, but where Borderlands succeeded through a dark sense of humor and weapons that were so ridiculous, it was a joy to find a new one, as well as solid RPG mechanics, Destiny wants to appeal to shooter fans. The lack of interesting guns, Diablo 3 RPG mechanics, slightly awkward story and repetitive gameplay ruin Destiny. This game was absolutely destined for greatness, but they played it entirely too safe, and now it's just another meh shooter.

Okay, first I would like to dispel some rumors. This game does not take 30 minutes to complete. That is an out-and-out lie. Now, I'm sure SOME people managed to beat it on the first try in 30 minutes. The main mission anyway. Out of eight. So they completed around 1/8th of the game in 30 minutes. Now that that's out of the way, let me explain the game. Metal Gear Solid 5 has taken a page out of Far Cry 3's book and has made a somewhat open world stealth game, complete with tagging enemies. While this works for the most part, when AI is left to roam in a base, naturally, you're going to get seen by accident by someone who turned a corner at the wrong time. MGS5 attempts to fix this problem by adding the "Reflex System". Essentially, when seen, you have about 5 seconds of slowed time to kill or knock out the offending person before he manages to shout for help. This issue here is that you don't always have the ability to control this. All bullets have drop (including your tranq pistol that all MGS fans will know from memory), so aiming at anyone more than ten feet away is annoying and unreliable. On top of this, shooting enemies with the tranq pistol doesn't seem to affect them nearly as much as in any other MGS game. It one point, it took FIVE shots to the chest to incapacitate a guard. Realistic? Maybe. However, MGS rules have always shown that one dart can knock a guard out, it just takes a few seconds. If this is true, then it takes entirely too long for this particular affect to work. Knocking enemies out as opposed to tranquilizing them seems to have been nerfed. In all of the other MGS games, there was a loading screen between every level. Therefore, if you were moving quickly, knocking guards out in close combat or with sleeper holds was an economical alternative to tranquilizing them with a finite amount of darts. However, because the game no longer has loading screens, knocking guards out seems to cause more harm than good. They get up after only a few minutes at most (and the main mission took me about an hour to get through). When they get up an alert is sounded instantly, for obvious reasons. This leads to another change that I dislike: the entire Alert system of MGS has been altered. Rather than the Caution (enemies are scared, but aren't sure if you're even there), Evasion (Enemies know you're there and are actively trying to find you) and Alert (you have been seen and are under fire), now there is Caution, Combat, and Alert. Alert has essentially taken the place of Evasion, which was never properly explained to me. Also, this is no longer expressed by color or by a HUD element, but is given by a small subtitle at the bottom of the screen with no timer, meaning that strategizing around your Alert ending is difficult. Combine this with longer enemy sight lines and reflex mode that seems to be actively attempting to infuriate you at times, and you have a recipe for "are you freaking serious" moments. The game also has added a positively infuriating rating system at the end of each mission, that confused me more than it improved my experience. I managed to sneak through a level, killing no one, never raising an alarm, and performing every single side objective, and it gave me a B ranking. Meanwhile, my friend, who had never played it, killed every single enemy he saw with an unsilenced rifle for an identical ranking. Your rank also goes down if you ever go back to a checkpoint for any reason. On top of this, the game makes you unlock more missions by performing well in previous ones. For a game as short as this to lock out content in such an aggravating way is ridiculous and should have never made it passed the drawing board. I'm all for ranking system in games, but this game seems to go out of its way to irritate and frustrate, and I hope that it doesn't make it into Phantom Pain. Now the game isn't all bad! Not by any means! The graphics are awesome, the writing is good (if a bit goofy, but it's also Japanese), grabbing enemies now gives instructions on how to perform actions (as opposed to MGS3 and MGS4, where performing CQC, cutting throats, interrogation, etc, were never explained and required memorization for their somewhat complex inputs), performing complicated plans such as hiding in the bed of a truck to sneak into an area you want to go to is freeform and feels amazing when you pull it off, and the controls are...serviceable, let's say. If it wasn't for the mostly-open map, adherence to realism, insulting ranking system, and reuse of content, Ground Zeroes would have been excellent. However, it's only about 5-8 hours total, and only about half of the missions are even fun, for various reasons such as "destroy the tank, but we won't tell you where the explosives are". If you want to wet your whistle for Phantom Pain, I can recommend it. However, some of you aren't going to like the changes, for sure. Wait for a sale before you buy, and try to keep an open mind.

About as tedious as actually working in an immigration office, Papers, Please offers a unique story that is told in a wonderful way, but somewhere along the line, the programmers forgot that sometimes games are supposed to be FUN and have challenge. The gameplay of the game consists entirely of examining documents given to you by immigrants and attempting to figure out if they are lying about their information, forged, their documents, etc. This means looking at tiny numbers, comparing them to other numbers, comparing the person and their mugshot (which may or may not look the same, but the game considers the same person), and occasionally dealing with situations that dramatically alter the story of the game, which is actually quite good. This novelty is fun for the first few levels, when you are just cycling through numbers, comparing weights, heights, hairstyles, etc. However, the game quickly becomes unreasonable in what it asks. You see, this isn't a puzzler. You don't have your own time to figure these out. Your character is essentially paid on commission, and for every person that goes through, he gets money. For every character that goes through and shouldn't, or ones that should go through but you turn away, you are issued a citation and fined. This means that you can't buy upgrades and you can't take your money home to your family. Mess up enough times, and your family is put to death by the government. This completely asinine ticking clock mechanics makes the game extremely stressful in a not fun way, as you cycle through person after person, trying to match up upwards of 10 sets of rules (needs specific symbol on password, needs three forms of ID if native, two if immigrant, heights match, dates match, diplomats don't require ID, etc), which gets massively tedious incredibly quickly. I am a guy who loves a good story, and the story of this game really gripped me. However, the gameplay is shallow, boring, and literally just irritating. You can call it meta or whatever you want, but at the end of the day, this is a tedious game with irritating rules and a great story.

Monaco is an odd little gem ****. Essentially, is a multiplayer, top down, class-based stealth game, in which you play as a group of ragtag thieves trying to hightail it out of Monaco while the gettings good. The part about Monaco that just gets me is the fact that the game seems designed around the fact that you're going to be seen. **** catches you, ragtime music plays as you are chased around the level Benny Hill style, which puts a smile on my face even a year after the game has been released. The unfortunate thing though, is that the game is nigh unplayable without friends. You CAN play the entire game single player, but the odds on you succeeding past the first act are slim to none. If you want a tough game that will challenge friendships, but always leave someone laughing, get some buddies together and pick this guy up off of Steam. If you like your games brown, serious, and fast paced, you might want to look somewhere else.

A nice idea for a game, ruined by balance issues, terrible map design, and a fetishistic obsession with cosmetic microtransactions. The huge draw of Loadout is the ability to make your own weapons, which is simple to do using the in game currency used for simply playing the game, and the process can be sped up by the use of real money. The issue is that there is very little point in making anything but something with shotgun spread or an assault rifle. Like most games nowadays, the fast paced confusion of Loadout means that you either want to take out an opponent in one shot at close quarters, or spray and pray to land as many hits as possible. Because of this, it boils down to everyone essentially using the same four guns in order to win. The same is true for the grenades, which are not customized outside of their initial ability. For example, the fire grenade does the damage of a regular grenade, but also sets the target on fire, which may or may not go out as the target rolls. This is never adequately explained, and many times I found myself rolling around like an idiot as I slowly burned to death, and seemingly couldn't stop it. Another issue is that the level design is all over the place. Many levels force plays to huddle into small areas the size of a pack of gum, obviously trying to make the grenades in the game useful. Unfortunately, this leads to frustrating deaths as someone's grenade destroys your entire team, and there is very little you can actually do to stop them. Other levels are so large that they take MINUTES to traverse, and they are capture the flag maps, leading to stalemates as the games just drag on and on. There are three playable characters, which are entirely cosmetic. This is fine. However, in order to customize them, huge amounts of real-word money must be used. This leads to characters either all looking the exact same (and using the same taunt, which plays extremely irritating music), or someone with a 30 dollar character looking so ugly that your eyes burn. On the plus side, this game is funny most of the time. Most of the jokes gave me a snicker the first time, and watching my character bounce around with a colossal hole in his chest, with his heart and organs jiggling around inside of his torso gave me a dark chuckle. Unfortunately, watching a fat woman twerk is only funny the first time, and very quickly grates on your nerves from the constant chaos and unavoidable deaths. The graphics, as a whole, are fun and appealing, even if they seem like something concocted from a Team Fortress 2 fever dream. The music is appealing, the game is pretty, and it is even fun for short sprints. However, the horrendous balance, appalling level design which seems to be trying to invoke the chaotic energy of 90s FPSs (including all of the worst parts), and repetitive fart-humor began to ware on my nerves very quickly. If these things get patched out, the game might hover around a 7 or so. Until then, I have to give Loadout a 4.

Telltale games is a one trick pony. Basically all they know how to do at this point is write a mediocre story, stretch it out over the course of about five hours, then nickel and dime you for every episode. Trust me, you're better off just looking up this entire "game" on youtube, rather than paying good money for what will amount to an hour long, poorly written movie.

I adore Metal Gear Solid, and I love Bayonetta. Why not combine the two? Well, because it will be filled to the brim with poor design choices! The first issue is the camera. More of the time, the camera stays where it needs to be. However, when fighting multiple enemies or enemies with ranged attacks, I was regularly blindsided by missiles and heavy attacks from offscreen, causing my death on more than one occasion. This is especially prominent during any boss fight in which the boss summons minions. As you fight them, the boss is offscreen, charging its super-death attack, to take down 75% of your health and you have no way to stop them or see it coming. The second big issue is the lack of feedback the game gives you. The tutorial takes about a minute to explain what is going on, but then abruptly ends, almost like it was unfinished. Then, the game just sorts of throws you into the game with no explanation. Stealth is not explained (and is extremely poorly implemented, almost to say "SEE, THIS IS METAL GEAR, YOU CAN BACKSTAB ENEMIES"), and neither is the game's main selling point: The "Zandetsu". Essentially, you can line up and quickly cut enemies to bits exactly where you want to cut them. Unfortunately, this seems completely pointless, as a single cut using this skill (which operates on a meter, which also was no explained in the tutorial) will kill most enemies. On top of this, the game counts the pieces you cut the enemies into, but I still have no idea if this affects literally any aspect of the game. Another rather strange problem I had was that the game had no dodge function, and in order to block enemy attacks, you had to essentially be standing still, or had to flick the analog stick in the direction of the attack enemy, then press the attack button. This led to a lot of accidental missteps, as I was sprinting around, trying not to be shot, before being **** because I couldn't block at the same time quickly. I THINK the game has some sort of dodge move, because it's listed in the store, but even after I bought and equipped it, I wasn't told how to use it. Another major issue is the story, which is absolutely abysmal. I assumed that, this being a Metal Gear game, the story would be at least serviceable, but this is absolute trash. They treat is as though it is a sequel to something I should already be completely familiar with, and don't particularly explain who all these people giving me missions are, why they're important, why Raiden teamed up with them, or what exactly he's doing. For the first several hours of the game, I visited Africa, Mexico, and Russia, and had no idea why I was there or who the characters were, despite my best efforts to understand even the basics of the plot. It is absolute goofy gibberish, and is an excuse at best. So, I really don't understand the love for this game. It is a mediocre-at-best Bayonetta knock-off that is wearing a mask that looks vaguely like Metal Gear Solid. The controls are tight, but the mechanics make little to no sense, the Zandatsu is there basically for eye candy and little else, the plot is nonsensical and pointless and lacks 100% of the intrigue of previous games, and it just feels cheap and aggravating to play, due to being constantly pummeled from just off screen. Save your money, buy the MGS Collection instead.

I apologize, but I just don't understand how this game is dubbed a "classic". I was turned onto this game by a friend of mine, who referred to it as "Nintendo Hard". Great! I thought, because I tend to really enjoy games to challenge me. However, after playing this game for around 30 minutes, I wanted to shove my fist through my screen. Before I get to that, I just want to praise this game's presentation. It is GORGEOUS. The game is just oozing gorgeous little details, the sense of humor is dark and spot-on, and Abe, as a character, is just such a sweetie that you just want to give him a big hug. However, for me, the major breakdown is in the gameplay. First off, as mentioned before, this game is HARD, and I do not say that lightly. This game is unreasonably difficult with absolutely nothing to make it less frustrating. Abe can only take a single hit from any source before dying, checkpoints are extremely far apart at times, and there is nothing worse than dying, being impatient, then sprinting back onto the screen that killed you, only to trip and fall onto a landmine or into the path of a hungry Slog. This particular aspect is made 10 times worse by the lack of an autosave. Another aspect of this game is its abuse of secrets. Now, I love secrets, but these ones are more or less mandatory for getting the game's "Good" ending, and are even more difficult than the rest of the game. Once again, this problem is compounded by the irritatingly unclear checkpoint system. Also, these secret areas are not just off the beaten path and hidden just offscreen. They are hidden in places that literally nobody in their right mind would ever attempt to look, and some require extremely complex commands to access, such as killing an enemy with an object in a strange way to destroy an anti-chant device to possess another enemy to crouch behind a barrel,which opens the door somewhere else. At times, they are literally that complicated, and due to the uncontrollably awkward checkpoints, if you accidentally kill the enemy to possess, you will never get another chance, because the game has autosaved. Anyway, back to the massive difficulty. Abe's control doesn't feel tight; in fact, it feels like Abe is just a bit hungover as he walks. Bump into a wall while sprinting? Likely just caused instant death by whatever monster is chasing you. Forget to manually uncrouch before moving? Abe will roll extremely quickly, likely into the enemy you were attempting to avoid. Deaths like this account for much of my frustration with the game, because I never felt like they were my fault. I felt like Abe was ignoring what I said, or that I couldn't see the edge of a platform clearly, while I was running from instant death enemies, and had exactly 0.4 seconds of reaction time for Abe to jump. I know it sounds like I'm complaining a lot, and I really am, but this game is one of the most unreasonably frustrating games I have ever played. I adore Abe's Exodus and Munch's Oddysee, but this game is just too difficult to recommend for anything other than someone who doesn't mind grinding their teeth to splinters or just playing trial-and-error until the game is finished. Trust me, if you can help yourself, just look up the cutscenes online and go straight to Abe's Exodus, and you might save yourself a few gray hairs.

Now, I'm not one of those guys who has a mild dislike of something, so he gives it a low score. No, I pride myself on seeing what is good in something. The Good: The environments and sound design are spot on. The areas in the game are lush, the models are well done, the physics engine and amusing and absolutely glorious to see in action. The Bad: Literally everything else. The voice acting is terrible, the plot is full of holes, you must be online 100% of the time, even to play the single player (and believe me, you don't notice how often your internet goes out until a game will kick you off the second it cuts out), the entire game lacks any sort of challenge, there is only a linear progression along a fix skill "road", rather than the skill tree that made Diablo 2 such a pleasure to play. You cannot allocate points to anything relating to your character. Everything RPG related is totally fixed, and the only thing you can do to affect a character's effectiveness in combat is to buy a new weapon that puts points into your character's "primary skill", which is to say, the only skill that will ever matter to you. So, lets say you are a Barbarian that has reached the maximum allowed level. You are 100% identical to every other Barbarian at your level. The only differences you have are the abilities that you have equipped, which you can swap out at literally any time, and the weapon that you are holding. Due to this asinine lack of character customization, you must use a new feature that I honestly didn't think would affect the game. I was, unfortunately, wrong. I am talking about the Auction House. In game, the weapons that you find are worth around 50 gold. In the online auction house, you can sell your items to other players for hundreds of times that price. What happens to the game is this: You get frustrated, and because leveling up will not affect your build or character, you go to the auction house, buy a new weapon, beat the bad guy. Repeat ad nauseum until you finish the game. The bosses are visually impressive, but pathetically easy. I honestly don't even know what happens if you die, and I finished the game on the "hard mode" equivalent. This is easily the worst sequel I have ever played. This game felt more like a halfway thought out mod for a better game than a full fledged sequel to what was arguably the greatest dungeon crawler of all time. I cannot recommend this. Not even after a year's worth of patching is this game even 1/10th of Diablo 2. Not only is it a terrible sequel, it is a terrible game, and Blizzard should be ashamed for tarnishing this once wonderful franchise this this abomination of poor game design. If you have a love for Diablo 2, I beg of you, stay faaaaaar away. If you have never played Diablo 2, go buy that instead. It's a third of the price and 10000% better.

I recalled greatly enjoying MDK2 on the Dreamcast, so I was absolutely delighted to hear that it received an HD rerelease on Steam. Naturally, I picked it up. My god, I have never seen controls this mangled. They are positively terrible, and are nearly impossible to change. Mouse control feels extremely restrictive to the point where it took me a few seconds to snipe an object less than ten feet in front of my face (after going into the scope by pressing space, for some reason). Really, that is my only gripe with the port: The controls are so utterly disgusting, awful, and sluggish that I could barely play it. Every battle was a complete chore, as my mouse and keyboard fought against me the entire way. The buttons seem to be space entirely at random around the keyboard, and the devs seem to have no idea that using the ARROW KEYS to move in a shooter that requires the mouse is horrible and uncomfortable. There is another control list, which is slightly better, moving everything to WASD, but jump is still right mouse (which I never found a way to manually change), scope is still space, and move through your inventory was still some strange combination of letter keys that I honestly couldn't memorize. I can tell that the game is good under the surface, but unless you don't mind struggling with these disgusting controls, I honestly can't give this game a recommendation.