SkipTheCutscene

Hard to review - after about twenty attempts, still unable to get into a game. I don't mind single player, but this game doesn't have single player, so... Bottom line, you'll probably have more fun grabbing a shovel and just burying sixty bucks in your yard.

Gorgeous visuals, BUT... as one of the other reviewers pointed out, the movement is very disorienting. It's like they're using a weird focal lens, and it becomes extremely uncomfortable to watch after a short time. It's even more pronounced when using the special "Witcher Sense" ability, which is almost headache inducing. Also, be prepared for lots of cut scenes. Lots. Lots, lots, lots, lots. You can skip them, but there are so many, even skipping them takes a long time, because you'll be doing lots and lots of skipping. It's almost like an interactive novel with intermittent action. This is probably my own personal taste, but when I tried to embrace the cutscenes and enjoy it like a movie, it was kind of a letdown too, because ultimately the characters seem like animatrons, and the voiceovers feel very samey, especially relentlessly monotonous lead dude. It's clear the scenes were recorded by individual actors without interacting with each other. In other words, don't expect "acting," or to experience an emotional response... it's just endless exposition. Bottom line, BORING cutscenes. And lots of 'em. IF you're willing to deal with all that, it has fantastic fighting and spell mechanics (way better than Dragon Age) and pretty visuals (albeit presented in a borderline headache inducing way.) I will probably stop playing and wait for a patch to fix the strange and irritating visuals.

When I first reviewed this game I was overly harsh. I don't even remember what my problem was - I think I was annoyed at constantly being attacked by birds. I've come around though, and this is now one of my favorite games. It's gorgeous, there's always a bagillion missions to go on, and even though the story is not it's strong point, you kinda forget about it and create your own narrative - the strategy becomes which missions you choose, based on what upgrades and tools you're looking to acquire.

Probably the most fun to be had on a next gen console. This game gets everything right. The graphics may not have the resolution and fidelity as Destiny, but the art direction is better. The acting and voice overs in Borderlands blow every other game out of the water (especially Peter Dinklage's monotonous droning on in Destiny.) Didn't realize this was gonna be an anti-Destiny rant when I started - and frankly, I LIKE Destiny... but Borderlands is better in just about every way. It's easier to get into a multiplayer game unlike certain aspects of Destiny which just don't work for lone wolf types looking to get into a game with strangers. Overall, there's just way more creativity involved in Borderlands; the art, the writing, the acting, the guns - oh, man, the guns! Overall, an absolutely essential title for every next gen console owner.

I actually prefer these maps to the ones in the base game. Definitely a worthy expansion, and I don't understand all the criticism this game gets in general - I still find Call Of Duty:AW to be the most fun multiplayer experience available. Side note: Playing the very meh Battlefield: Hardline just made me want to fire up COD:AW.

Review of multiplayer: I was on the fence about BF:Hardline due to the mixed reviews, but went for it after reading a few that said it was a more infantry focused Battlefield, and small infantry only maps are pretty much all I play in Battlefield 4, my favorite map being Operation Locker. I was hoping hardline would have more maps like that, but unfortunately in Hardline even the smaller ones seem way too chaotic. More so even than COD:A! There is very little tactical gameplay in Hardline, and I'm not even talking about utilizing specialties and teamwork; I mean just navigating the map - everyone's kind of everywhere - utilizing the environment is often meaningless because you have no sense of where the enemy might be coming from for more than a few moments. I find myself making a lot of lucky kills by spawning literally right behind enemies, and getting frustrated when the same happens to me. I would be shocked if the death toll in this game weren't way higher than average shooters, and hey, that's okay, I'm not looking for deep strategy, but sadly, this feels even more shallow than COD:AW because ultimately the chaos feels... random. Random deaths, random kills. And the wait time to re-spawn is frustratingly long for this kind of game. It's not awful; as many others have said it feels kind of like an expansion pack (albeit a major one) for BF4, but I think Operation Locker and every map in COD:AW does this kind of gameplay better. I actually think PayDay 2 also does it better, even though the enemies are always AI. At least the scale and scope of the battles in PD2 kind of work to support the cops & robbers theme. Put it this way - if you're looking for multiplayer shooter version of Heat, Payday does it better, even with it's AI cops. And for full on multiplayer, Operation Locker in Battlefield 4 doesn't have the theme, but feels way more immersive and tactical. Okay, so those are my criticisms: onto the good stuff: I don't get people's gripes with the graphics - they seem to be the same quality as BF4. Maybe it's because I had read about Hardline and knew it would use the same engine, so I wasn't expecting any better, but it certainly doesn't seem worse. I think the graphics are good, definitely stomps anything on last gen. The stuff the cops and robbers shout out is more fun than BF4, especially the robbers (obviously.) In fact, it's the verbal cues more than anything that make you feel like it's a crime thing rather than a war thing. And the criminals are bad-asses, so playing as one is pretty cool. The hit detection shows you which body part was struck when you died. For all I know, it just picks a random body part because... how would you know? One second you're standing there, next you're dead.. which brings me back to my original criticism, most of the time you never see it coming. Still, I'm giving the game the benefit of the doubt and saying the hit detection is better. The maps that have you stealing money from a vault have a cool mechanism; basically, in the middle of a battle you can stuff money in your pockets, but it leaves you totally vulnerable. The longer you stand there at the vault, the more money you get, but the bigger risk you take. It's can be cool and thrilling, but again, my criticism from earlier still dampens the coolness factor since it basically just seems like random chance whether you'll survive at any point. It's pretty disappointing that all the negative reviews I'd been reading actually led me to think this game might be just what I was looking for - I guess you could say my grail game would be a half-step up in tactical gameplay than COD, but Hardline feels, oddly enough, even more chaotic, and not in a good way. Again, it's not awful, but unless they come out with better balanced maps in the future I probably won't stick with it for long. I have no thoughts on single player, since I have no interest in it.

The beginning is great, and I was immediately blown away by the art design, but after a while, the constant checking every prop in the game, every crate, cabinet, and desk (God the desks, so many desks rooms filled with desks. Desks on top of desks...) looking for coins becomes... a... grind. You spend half the game pointing at every piece of furniture, and if it glows you press the x button. Woo-hoo! I think the game took me about ten hours. That's roughly five hours of looking and pointing at furniture. Bioshock? How about Interior Decorator shock? "Furniture: Infinity." But money is scarce, and upgrades are expensive, and the thought of screwing up and having to wade through another molasses paced in-game cutscene kept me motivated to always be checking for loose change. And there are so. many. desks. to check. If the intention was to force players to slow down and take in the incredible architecture/lighting/design, I confess it worked. At first. After awhile though, it had the opposite effect. I started just running past all the crates/cabinets/desks to get the checking done so I could get back to the fun stuff. But this gave me the worst possible vantage point to take in the scenery; just skimming, flush along the furniture, spamming the search button to grab loose change or sometimes cake or pineapple. Why so many decrepit desks seemed to have edible cake or pineapple in them was perhaps explained in an audio log I failed to listen to. Maybe that same audio log explained why I could eat fruit out of an old decrepit desk but often lost the ability to eat fruit that was sitting on a fruit stand. Anyway, yeah, I spent much of the game pressed up against stuff looking for change and fruit, and speeding past textures that probably look better a few steps back. Here's the thing: when I started the game, I vowed to take it slow. I was gonna look at all the in-game movies and listen to all the audio logs. The movies were the first thing I gave up on. They were mostly redundant anyway. But eventually I stopped caring about the audio logs too. I had desks to check! I started to rationalize, "Let me get my desk checking done and I'll go back and listen to the logs", but nah, never got around to it. I never cared enough about the story. The best thing about the game is the concept, an alternate 1912, combined with genius art direction. The plot points and dialogue, in true video game fashion, were all kind of meh. Trite. Derivative. A medley of various cliches, except not done as well as the films and novels it borrows from. The best thing about the relationship of the two leads is that she throws you stuff during battle. It's a neat effect that never gets old. Everything else, her backstory, your backstory, the "emotional" stuff... as I said... meh. I never cared. But clearly the designers cared, because they slowed me down so I could listen to her wax on about her past and the mystery ahead. I hate games that do that one minute you're playing the game, the next, your character slows down like he's stuck in a tractor beam of boring exposition as an NPC fills you in on the "plot". If I were really part of the story my dialogue would have been, "Move! Can't you move! Why are you walking so slow?! I don't care about your relationship with your parents! I want to attack things with my magic birds but I'm stuck here listening to you! Do you have any idea how many desks need to be checked before I can get back to my birds?! Shut up already!" A word about the sky-hook. I know people are saying it's the best thing in the game, so this might just be me, but, yeah, no. There were two kinds of sky-hook events: area travel, and arena fighting. During area travel, my sky-hook experience went like this, "Wait, am I going the right way? Should I stop? Did I pass it? I'm going the wrong way, aren't I? I should've stopped. I passed it." I did not enjoy sky-hook travel. During my arena fighting, my sky-hook went more like, "Wait, where is everybody? Where are the bad guys? Am I going the right way? There they are! I'm shooting, I'm shooting! Where'd they go? Wait, where is everybody?" The sky-hook had it's moments, but mostly it was frustrating, discombobulating, and not to my liking. Every once and a while I managed to time a button press that had me automatically hurl myself off the rail onto an enemy, but way more often I just sort of fell off onto a roof somewhere and tried to get my bearings and get back into the game. I'm giving the game a five, because when I wasn't slogging through the boring parts the spells were fun, though fighting in general was less tactical than I expected. Should I use lightning or fire? Eh, either is fine. Should I have the girl warp in some cover or set up a turret? Eh, either. It all kinda plays out like a chaotic Borderlands 2 style mess. Which is fun I love that kind of thing. But at least Borderlands had the decency to leave out an additional five hours of furniture browsing.

THE most underrated shooter of all time. I'm convinced that if the "steady cam" camera mode were set to "enabled" at start, the average review for this would be much, much, higher. Like others have mentioned, the shaky camera thing that is on by default was a giant mistake. Had I myself not already seen a review with a tip about turning it off, I probably would have stopped playing after about ten minutes, and subsequently missed out on what I believe to be one of the most immersive, thematic, well acted, richly evocative, and just plain fun action games of the decade. Bear in mind, I'm talking strictly about single-player here it's now 2013 and the multiplayer game has totally dried up. The other reason I think this game gets lower reviews than it deserves: the lead characters are morally ambiguous criminals. And we're not talking about lovable anti-heros like the guys from Oceans Eleven or Heat (although the action sequences from that film were definitely an influence here, which is a great thing..) I can totally understand how the Gears of War crowd might find it challenging to assume the role of a desperate, balding, impulsive, mid-level crook. The world of Gears of War is downright antiseptic compared to the characters, setting, story, and visual aesthetic of Kane and Lynch. In this game, killing innocents who get in your way comes with no penalty. There is no good/bad meter. The game leaves that stuff all up to you. And if you want to fully enjoy this game, you really can't sit in judgement of the characters, you have to embrace them in all their un-redeeming glory. Several times while playing, I had to remind myself that it was okay to be bad, because it is after all, just a game. So I am not surprised that many gamers reacted so harshly to the prospect of playing as someone who is just ugly, physically and morally. I will say that when I did open myself up to what the game challenges you to explore, it was one of the most enthralling experiences I've had sitting in front of a TV. That said, Kane and Lynch are not completely unsympathetic I wont go into story stuff here... suffice it to say, I had a much, MUCH deeper emotional connection to them than anyone in Gears, Halo, Far Cry, whatever... Regarding the story it was so refreshing to not have to sit through tons of exposition. I find it ironic that people complain about the length of the single player campaign here, because where are the complaints for the tons of padding in so many games that have you sit through a deluge of expositional recordings and tedious backstory that doesn't forward the plot or connect you to the plight of the characters in a meaningful way? Even everyone's beloved Bioshock, which I played concurrently with K&L the entire story takes place in the past it doesn't drive the action so much as vary the pace of the game with dialogue that is admittedly less dry than the typical "data discs" or "ancient tomes" scattered throughout most modern video games, but let's face it, the thing that makes Bioshock great is the environment and the overall concept. I can't stress enough how much I dislike having to listen to or read long stretches of exposition in leu of actual forward moving story structure. In K&L the story takes place in the present. No boring cutscenes talking about their past. The story elements happen DURING THE ACTION. Perfect. And the performances are AMAZING. What is the downside to minimal cutscenes and zero expositional text/audio? The game is shorter. Because it figuratively and literally cuts to the chase. As for the reviewer who claimed there is no story... I don't even know how to address that... I can only guess that they are so used to the the trite, overwrought, highly expositional nonsense one finds in most games that they don't recognize good storytelling when they see it. Good storytelling is simple, visceral, and hopefully, invisible. I consider the storytelling in this game masterful. For me it was one of the most cinematic gameplay experiences I've had. To any potential future players, let me say this... when you play through this game, at a certain point you wind up taking refuge in a television store... when that scene happens, think back on what I'm talking about here, and ask yourself is there a story? I think you will agree, the answer is yes. And it is FAR more engaging than your typical shooter. Finally, regarding the hit detection. I don't get people's complaints here when you hit the enemies, little x's appear right where you hit them, so you get a very acurate sense of the spread of bullets. If they're not taking hits, it means their cover is too high and you need to think tactically and try to flank. This is not a flaw, this is good gameplay. Clearly this game isn't for everybody. But for those willing to go where this game wants to take you, all I can say is... buckle up.