kirrwed

Warlocks 2 is a 2D platformer with some metroidvania elements. This review is based on a Kheera playthrough on normal. The game is fun enough. Some of the movement takes a little getting used to, but not much. For instance, holding down the jump button will let you pogo-stick around, which is very handy for battles and boss fights. The story is humorous and very much “go here” “now go here” based. There’s not a whole lot of enemy variety. And the difficulty is relatively low, with the exception of the squid-looking boss and final boss. There are some “broken” parts of the game. For instance, at one point I fell into a “pit” where there was no escape but to teleport back to base. You could “dash” through the wall down there, but then you’d be out of bounds and have to quit too. One of the missions had no marker on Tonny when you had to bring a letter to him (he’s one of the unmarked guys among the village crowd.). The aiming system is handy when it works, but it would often target someone far away and switching targets worked sometimes and other times not. The least enjoyable part of the game was the squid boss fight and the checkpoint. If you get killed during that fight, you go all the way back to the start of the level. Which is ludicrous. AND any resources you used during the fight don't come back. So the fight only gets harder. All in all, a decent indy game worth a play through. The physical is $30, but it’s a redartgames limited run, so could have collectible value.

The single best feature of this game is that there are a number of quality puzzles to be solved with the arsenal of tools at your disposal. The controls and movement are also relatively tight. But after a few short hours of amusing gameplay, the game steadily got more tedious and unintuitive. So many of the enemies, especially at the end, just follow the same unintuitive pattern. You don’t know which one of your weapons will do damage to them and at what point in the fight those weapons will do damage to them. So it’s like use weapon A when the boss is in position Z and then you can stun the boss, at which time you have to use charged up weapon B, etc…. It’s all random and tedious trial and error. SOME BOSS SPOILERS IN FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH: Like one fight has robot worm attacking you and you can only hurt it if you electric charge into it and when it isn’t shooting its bombs and you have to have grabbed this random sword that’s there for some reason. Another fight that looks like some aztec clown you have to hit a button, then swittch to another character to move a slider, then switch to the other and hit a lever and the clown moves over and only then is it vulnerable. There’s one place in the tower where a large electric sphere can’t be charged even though you are plenty close to it - they want to make you wait to get the shooting electric upgrade so it apparently doesn’t work earlier for that reason even though all the other same size spheres would have from that distance. The “mother” fight was ludicrous. She has at least 6 different attacks including jump, bullet hell of 3 projectiles, small boulder attack, medium boulder attack from Royal (which can only be stopped by rapid mashing of your original gun attack because you’ll find out through trial that hitting royal while he controls the boulder does nothing, no matter what weapon), large boulder attack, tail attack. Different tactics counter these. You can only damage her during the 3 projectile attack and THEN only after you first hit her “cat” twice in the mouth with bombs, and THEN you have to do a teleport switch with her, and THEN you have to run back to where she landed and get in a few hits. The fight is simply ridiculous. All of this takes tons of trial and error to figure out not only dodge timing, but which weapon will have any affect at which time, etc.. In the impact zone at the end, the ghosts can float out of the playing area where you can’t finish them off with the wrench spin. So you sit there waiting for them to float back into the field of play. END OF SPOILERS There is also way too much interruption with long sequences of dialogue. And finally, the villains are all religious fanatics foolishly thinking they are divine or whatever according to the game. The religious fanatic villain must be the most overused villain trope in gaming.

The Company Man is an entertaining 2D platformer that will resonate with many who have worked in the business world. Some of the decisions the game has you make are not the most ethical, however, the game is not all that serious. The characters are whimsical businessfolk that provide fun personalities. The gameplay is responsive and fluid. The visuals, animations, and style are very polished as well. The game is a little short, but the difficulty level is consistent throughout. A great game for fans of 2D platformers looking for a game that can be finished in a night or two.

Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, despite suffering from a title that is unnecessarily difficult to remember, is a good metroidvania with classic style graphics, music, and gameplay. It delivers for those looking for a fun rpg fraught with powerups, skillups, some weapon and bow variety, as well as a fair number of special attacks that can be collected. The gameplay style is most similar to Castlevania and similar to, but not quite as polished as, Bloodstained. The graphics style is a good throwback to classic games. The hitboxes are satisfying. The enemy variety is solid. The biggest downside that prevented this game from a higher score was the difficulty spike in the final level. You encounter a forced boss rush, which not only will deplete resources, but since you don’t know how many stages it will go, it makes resource use trial and error. It can result in 5-10 minutes or more of plowing through boss after boss, only to be killed because of lack of resources (or stunlocked by at least one boss). That’s a recipe for aggravation, not fun. The same goes for at least one other fight with multiple phases *that also have* multiple HP bars, which are impossible to anticipate. So not only do late bosses devolve into long pattern/attack lessons but at least initially, guessing games for how to use resources.

Elden Ring is a well-polished open-world adventure. Much of it is customizable to player preferences. From character design to which way to explore first, and more. The weapons and armaments are many. The game encourages various builds in concert with fight styles, from melee, to range, to a mix. The game is known for difficulty, yet—despite the tendency of some to confuse difficulty with excellence—it offers the player a couple different ways to succeed. The first is obviously to develop skill, and for many players, this means much trial and error, learning boss patterns, and eventually finding a rhythm by which to win. A second method includes some of the first but also includes levelling-up before returning to a difficult boss or area. This is a great option that make it open to a larger variety of skill levels without flipping an “easy” switch per se. Much of the visuals, environments, and boss appearances are intricate and cinematic. Exploration is encouraged and rewarding, finding new places, new save points, new caves, new powerups, etc. The game does well to follow the 30-second rule of filling its world with enough intrigue to never really get boring. The exploration and variety of NPCs, quests, powerups, places, etc. is the strength of this game. The experience is largely driven by where the player wants to go, with a main questline available at all times. Despite all the adventurous and customizable positives in this game, it is far from perfect, despite such reviews. What makes many of the boss fights difficult is a “one hit kill” move. A player may often methodically maneuver through a fight for several minutes and then fall to an “instant kill” only to lose all that time and effort for what amounts to a “cheap” move that often can only be anticipated by trial and error. Sometimes, the blow might come so out of nowhere, you won’t even know why you died, such as with the second phase of the Radahn fight if you happened to have the camera in the wrong direction during a mid-fight breather. Most fights have minimal cerebral solutions. Many don’t feel like they beat you in an even fight. They only beat you because of a knockout punch, including ones that put you (or your horse) in stunlock to then finish you with additional follow-ups. At the end of the day, “pattern” based bosses with the “one-hit” are rather cheap designs. It’s almost an illusion of difficulty, where a fight seems somewhat fair and a good rumble until they get in the “cheap shot” and that’s often the only thing that consistenly makes them difficult. Also, too many games, including Elden Ring, create difficulty in part by forbidding “cancellation” of a move. Part of the game’s challenge is anticipating your melee or magic “wind up” time and delivery. This can last up to several seconds. It leaves your character vulnerable if hit meanwhile. And you can’t cancel out of it if you, the player, actually sees the interruption in time and has the reflexes to cancel. The controller will actually be impotent until the animation is complete. This mechanic doesn’t feel natural, as a real person would be able to cancel their own punch. Another feature in some boss fights that is poor is the bosses that have a second phase that is independent from the first phase’s HP meter. Unless you want to scout out a fight by watching spoiler videos, there is no way to know how much pacing of resources you want to use in a given fight because most of the time, the HP meter you see represents the opponent’s total HP, not some surprise new “refilled” HP bar from a second phase. Things like this just make gameplay aggravating and unfun. There are many consumable items, like greases or crab meat, that can be crafted or purchased and used as buffs. These last for a period of time. However, if you are killed, these are lost forever. They are not like runes you can at least have a chance to recover after you are killed. It made 1-time use items overly precious. Your inventory doesn’t return to what it was before a fight or last save. And with so many of the fights being trial and error, it’s very easy to burn through many such items for naught. Few tutorials seem to utilize these, either. The game simply doesn’t encourage them because of it’s loyalty to difficulty and unforgiving gameplay. As a side note, the game creates a fictional world of peculiar, amorality. It helps to be a spiritually knowledgable or careful person when playing the game. Because in Elden Ring, it seems the lines between good and evil are often quite blurred, to the point where NPCs ask strangely worded things like “will you serve the witch?” which in base reality would be clearly unwise to assuage. But the game seems to blur or alter the meaning of things like witches, blasphemy, and other spiritual terms, while yet insisting on borrowing from traditional spiritual language.

This could be the most over-rated game of all-time. Just about every annoying feature in gaming is collected in this single game. It seems to thrive on a popularity of difficulty, but difficulty does not a good game make. The boss fights are overrated. They all have high difficulty, some especially. Basically, they are bullet sponges with different patterns. Some of them move off-screen during the fight because the camera is too tight. Enemy hitboxes are bad. I have vidcaps of "missing" an enemy through whom my nail clearly intersected. Some bosses spawn **** mid-air…even AFTER you jump in the air a projectile could spawn in your path that wasn’t there WHEN YOU JUMPED. Some say the fights are hard but fair, but some are very cheap. I didn’t find any of them that creative. It all makes for tedious, repetitive, trial-and-error fights for anyone less than A-grade skill who likes reflex tests and has the controls down as 2nd nature. Unfortunately for my average skills, I played multiple boss fights 10x and more. There was little sense of accomplishment. I only won because I grinded out muscle memory. I got gud but it still wasn't fun. The save benches are too far between. Poor design. Forcing players to replay long tedious sections **** is a bad way to get a player back in the action. It rips the player out of the flow. And it removes the player from the section where the last death occurred, making it needlessly more difficult to remember whatever dumb pattern you were just beginning to learn to get past a certain section. Other games avoid distant checkpoints, such as Metroid Dread or Bloodstained. Bad checkpoint design is a feature of Hollow Knight. Jumpnastics sections—part of what makes the bench distances even worse is some of the game has ridiculous jump dash gymnastic sections requiring precise timing and motions. There are sections that involve bouncing off the top of rubber mushrooms or whatever, and you have to do a downward slash as you land to get the extra vertical height off the bounce—sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. I would swing down while landing and he wouldn’t do it. The window for precision is too narrow. Tedious, tedious, tedious. This screws up the timing of the dash you are supposed to make right after bouncing, and thus a trip to an acid bath below. Elsewhere, a single miss results in collision with thorny growth and a full notch of damage (because the protagonist is a pitiful weakling). And then the game removes the opportunity to replay these jumpnastic sections by sending the player back to a bench several minutes away. This is garbage design. The only workaround to these sections is getting the hiveblood charm—which I didn’t know about until way late. You can somewhat cheese the jumnastics by waiting 12 seconds for your last mask to heal thanks to the hiveblood. This allows you to redo jumps again fairly quick, with same number of masks, instead of getting killed and plodding your way back. The hero is incredibly weak. Everything gives costs him a mask, even bumping toes with an enemy. You’ll take a hit but the enemy won’t. His offense is awful too. It takes forever to level up his weapon. Most bosses are mid to upper hundreds in HP or over 1000, so even his maxed out nail will need to get in like 30 hits to win. So basically he just gets killed all the time until he can do fights with no/low damage, sneaking in heals when trial and error teaches you when. The game is mostly just not fun. ​ When you die, you lose your geo coin things. To get them back, you have to re-kill your own shadow ghost in the death area. If you die before reaching it, you lose all geo and possibly hours of collecting in the process. This refusal to let the player keep his progress is garbage. Sometimes the ghost appears farther in a section than the player made it before, making it easy to get killed before reaching the ghost again, and losing all geo. The ghost location is garbage. You can overcome this shortcoming by paying a grub to teleport your ghost, but that wouldn’t be so needed without the goofy ghost spawn positioning. Some say geo doesn’t matter late in the game but this isn’t true, especially if you’ve lost geo due to the 2x kill trap. To update the fragile charms, you need a combined 36,000 geo. Even the map is a tedious affair, and unnecessarily so. You want a map of the environment? You gotta buy it. You want benches marked on the map? Gotta buy that too. You want fast travel locations marked on the map? Yes, you have to buy that separately also. Can this "hero" just mark anything he wants with the “quill” he supposedly has and be done with it? You want to see where you are on the map? Gotta use a charm slot. The game is an utter hassle to navigate. I can scarcely think of a redeeming quality to this game other than perhaps it didn’t crash and there is some decent scenery

This is a fairly good game with some clever tactical options. For those looking for stealth type games, it's probably worth a playthrough. The teleportation and foresight mechanics are probably the funnest part of the game. They can be used not only to find goodies, but to escape been seen quickly, and get to areas otherwise locked away. The game does seem wanting of being in the 3rd person. For a stealth game especially, it's important to know one's position better than a 1st person can show you. Games like Styx or Splinter Cell Blacklist were much better in this regard and made the overall gameplay funner. In 1st person you're just more prone to being discovered when you think you are hidden or you could fall in a hole because you weren't specifically looking at your feet - which is resolved in 3rd person or real life because of peripheral vision. Another grievance against this game is a particular Contract where you have to execute every enemy on a level (except one specific guy). I never found everyone no matter how many times I combed it over. And I played the mission twice just to finish that contract. I've seen this same problem on a number of forums. The game doesn't tell you how many are left or where they are. A glitch of an enemy never spawning is a possibility with such prevalence of the problem. It's a very frustrating aspect of game design when the player is left not knowing what to do or obviously if the game is glitching.

Carrion is a unique metroidvania. You play as a tangle of tentacles shimmying around laboratories and underground passages, hiding in vent shafts or in walls. Fans of stealth will enjoy sneaking up on unsuspecting enemies. The most glaring problem with this game is there is no map. Obviously metroidvanias have much backtracking and this can get dizzying as more and more areas open up, and you have no map. It's a little bit linear in that the only open route is the one that progresses the game, but not always. And this is not the case for getting all the secret stuff either. The other problem is the sensitivity of the monster's motion. Sometimes you can barely push him around the corner and he will go flying out into the open amidst a bunch of armed guards. It felt inconsistent at times for when he would go springing off like that. As a result, much damage and missed passages were had because of overshooting. All in all, a good atmospheric 2-D platformer with stealth. Not a long game either, for those that enjoy one you can complete in a night or two.

This game was probably an 8 or 9 for at least half of it, but it slowly dwindled. PROS: The game does produce a decent atmosphere of an abandoned planet, and indoor corridors, often claustrophobic. Some of the controls are very fluid (see the CONS for the bad controls). Jumping, dashing, sliding are all intuitive and responsive, and the animations correspond well to where you are trying to move. The upgrades were also fun and did give a sense of getting stronger and better. The metroidvania style of getting abilities to go back and reach new areas were there (although some traveling was too long as described below). The map, although a little daunting for it’s size, did reveal with gradients into emptiness areas where you knew the map extended - which helped give you a sense of where to go. I was only unsure where to go maybe once, despite hearing this was a problem for other players. The map development and upgrades all worked together to provide a key element to any video game - progression. The map also marks key items which is very helpful, especially when backtracking is required. The early EMMI encounters are good, atmospheric, and feel like a good stealth opportunity that invoked tension. CONS: Some of the controls are poor. At the top of this list is the shinespark mechanic, which is just atrocious. First, the game does not tell you multiple ways this feature can be used - such as extending the spark by wall bouncing or hitting a slope at the right angle. Another way is doing it in middair. You can look up online how to do these, but the mechanic is still vague to decipher. For instance, you can extend a spark by hitting a spark that is sloped - but not a slope against a wall, as she will end the spark as soon as she hits the wall. The whole thing is unclear, the controls are convoluted and unintuitive, and really soured that feature and any attempt at 100% completion. Even the games instructed method of using shinespark involves depressing L3 in tandem with moving that same stick in a direction. It’s a terribly unnecessary combo requirement that can lead to unwanted results. Related to that, the slide motion and morph ball motion are almost the same (L2 and diagonal down vs L2 and down). I know I and many others have experienced going into ball or slide when we wanted the other. Again, it's an unnecessary setup. QTEs - how these remain common in games is vexing. Multiple bosses - and even some of the regular creatures like the worm door guard things early on - need QTEs to beat. The feature remains an unimmersive fault in games and is very prevalent in Metroid Dread. Multiple boss fights slip into a cinematic sequence. Most of the time, you have no control over how this unfolds. But at least one fight requires you to continue shooting as part of an on-the-rails cinematic sequence. Of course, the game doesn’t tell you when. Furthermore, there is a fight where one of your weapons doesn’t work during an interactive cinematic - but your other weapons do. So if you tried the non-working weapon first, you could think it was a non-interactive cinematic. Which would result in confusion as to what to do or extend the fight to be finished way longer than necessary. The later EMMI encounters pretty much lose stealth as a viable option. You’re better off just bolting to the next area on the map and not care if you’re spotted. They lost their mystique here. And the game trains you early to avail yourself of stealth to succeed at these. Getting around also becomes a chore as the map expands. Teleporters and transports can take minutes to get to if you haven’t memorized routes. Eventually, the teleporters all unlock interchangeably, but late in the game. Most of the time, it’s just tedious to get around. Also, the game tells you that a blinking section of the map indicates hidden item. But, early on, there was a spot where you couldn't advance unless you started randomly shooting everywhere (but the map wasn't blinking to indicate anything hidden) to reveal a hidden passage. There is never any instruction about hidden pathways, which you would expect since they told you this with "items." So either passages should be included among hidden “items” or given a similar in-game instruction as “items.” Either way, the game communicated hidden passage rules poorly. For even a decent B-level gamer, the boss fights will require much trial and error to learn a “pattern.” And eventually, they can become easy as a result. Although some are just bullet sponges. Some gamers may find this an appropriate part of a challenge. But others will find it redundant, and boring—like learning a deck of memory cards over and over. Thus the “difficulty” is less about the flow of the fight itself, but merely learning a pattern. ____ All in all, the game was largely enjoyable, but largely hurt by unclarity and some bad mechanics

Resident Evil 3 remake is underrated. The starts a bit on the rails but quickly gets into the open city. The controls are fluid and refined—some of the best controls in an RE game or otherwise. One of the best added features is the dodge mechanic. It's similar to the dodge in the the RE Revelations series but it actually works. Another great addition are the "coin" boosts. You can really customize your play style if you are willing to sacrifice a storage spot. So, even beyond normal, hard, and even harder modes, you can tweak the difficulty from within there with the coins. Jill and Carlos' characters are generally well done, neither too invincible, too weak, too arrogant, nor too obnoxious as are characters in many modern games. The Mikhail villain is a bit overly one-dimensional, though. The upgrades and rewards systems are likewise actually attainable without being ultra-expert level player (like RE2R required) nor playing for a million hours. With moderate to generous repeated gameplay, you can achieve enough weapon kills and other reward points to unlock funner stuff — including the RE trademark infinite weapons which always make for a fun playthrough. There's also a very fun fire knife called Hot Dogger that won't ever break and will set enemies ablaze briefly with every strike.

A video game whose main goal is to be fun with a cartoonish aesthetic that fits. The controls are solid and the open world feel makes it fun. You can travel back to certain areas before you complete the game too. Finding the collectibles and doing the various challenges are possibly one of the best features in the game. Although, finding drones, for instance, is going to require a web tutorial unless one wants to scour every inch of every level. At least one level has 50 drones to find. The difficulty level was solid also - with the exception of at least one of the challenges and the Silhouette boss fight which was just a ridiculously disproportionately more difficult fight compared to anything leading up to it. The game could have scored higher if not for those kinds of cheesy difficulty aberrations. The upgrades are attainable and the weapon variety gives each battle or stealth mission a degree of freedom in how to approach, which makes it fun and replayable. The visuals are nice and the terrains and settings are large and fitting. The humans and government are a little stereotypically dumb, but in a way, that fits with the silliness of the game. I also do have a preference for games with recharging energy and health, and this game delivers. It can be a little crass at times, but nothing compared to some of the foul-mouthed and worse obscene games out there.

Retro Machina is one of the most refreshingly good games I've played in a while. Right off the bat, the art style and aesthetic is excellent. It captures a retro technology aesthetic from old science fiction of the 1940s-50s superbly. Many of the collectible posters and occasionally some of the screens are wallpaper worthy. The controls are generally sound. The protagonist robot moves fluidly and has a handy dodge. One gripe with the attack is the same I've had with other games, He's sort of in a "stunned" mode after certain swings, like he's still in the follow-through of the swing that leaves him unable to dodge or swing again, and this interval is not natural and a little long. There isn't a lot of jump-timing like a lot of "simpler" platform games utilize, so that was a relief too. This is isometric and there is some platform crossing, but nothing like trial and error obnoxious jump timing stuff. The variety of robot enemies is excellent and they each have unique attacks and movements. This also plays into the puzzle-aspect of the game, which is probably more prevalent than the battles. One of the cleverest parts of the game is deciding how to get past an area by remotely hijacking an enemy robot and having him cooperate with you to open gates, hit switches, or reach otherwise inaccessible areas. It makes for a large variety of puzzle combinations that a challenging but not ridiculous. Even within multi-enemy fights, there is some strategy required if you want to just attack and dodge everyone, or if you want to hijack one of them to fight along with you - and who you pick to hijack affects the fight. For instance, there are "healing" robots you might want to hijack first so he heals you instead of them. Or you might want to hijack a projectile enemy because the protagonist has no projectile attack. Another minor gripe is the map. It can get convoluted at times, particularly with the many levels and sublevels, and sometimes it's hard to tell which parts of the map are actual path or just walls or treelines because they made it all green. Also, the map doesn't precisely show you where you are - it places the icon in the "section" of the map where you are, but not which platform. It does add a bit to the challenge, but because the icon is so large, it also obscures parts of the map you want to see. Ultimately, once you decipher where you are, the game doesn't really leave you with no clue where to go. The only times I got confused are when I just missed where a keycard or door was marked on the map. You do need to zoom in all around it. One clever part of the map is that you can find some of the secret corridors or platforms only in the map and then in the game, you'll know to take a leap of faith off a ledge in a certain direction to find hidden loot. All in all, a great game. I think gamers who enjoy apocalyptic themes, puzzle solving, and even some of the 2-D scroller hits like Axiom Verge will much enjoy this.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

This game is just too mundane for an open world Spider-man. One problem with some comic book adaptations is the lack of an artistic comic style that is part of the comic's brand. This game tries so hard to make everything and everyone realistic, it loses comic flavor. The characters are so ordinary and plain looking to the point that it makes everything stiff. It tries to blend all this realism in a world with a literal Spider-man and superheroes that's a breach of brand and style. It doesn't work. The missions are also mundane. Especially some of the side missions, like the one where you literally go around to different spots of a harbor or spots in the air to clean the water and air because of environmentalism or something. The fighting just turns into a bunch of button mashing or overly complex combos like most other games. And it suffers from Spider-man being way too weak, similar to how in Batman games he will get beaten up by the average thug if you don't hit the right combo. You don't feel like a superhero as a result. It's even worse with Spider-man who is supposed to have super-human strength. Ultimately, the whole thing falls flat. Webbing around town for a bit was fun but limited in long-term gameplay. Other than that, if one likes the realistic characters or nice architecture like the nice cathedrals in town, then that's about the only appeal.

This game was very fun for a while. The music and especially the art style and animation are enjoyable. The theology is quite fictional even though it borrows imagery from Mexico's Dia de los Muertos. At least the monk was a good guy and featured crucifixes positively. For fans of Axiom Verge type games, there is a system of going back to parts of the map to reach collectibles and powerups once you've acquired certain skills. That part was enjoyable as well. For the most part, even the fighting worked well and incorporated certain punch styles and strategies against certain enemies. There was a degree of intellect involved. However, where this game derails is in some of the ridiculous platforming jump sequences that really are just trial and error, I would think, for most gamers. There are so many occasions, especially toward the end, where you have to complete long sequences, ridiculous, precise button clicks at the right moment. That's just not enjoyable. It's a memorization exercise. Some of the boss fights get like this as well, where you just have to keep playing until you learn a pattern. It isn't so much intellectual as another tedious memorization exercise. Sometimes you can get stuck in stun-lock during a fight because the main character takes a couple seconds to recover whenever he gets hit. Some of the bosses can pin you to a wall and hit you multiple times and you can try to jump out of the way all day but you're stuck in "stunned" mode over and over. Also, he even if you try to jump or move *in time* of an opponent attack, he still has to finish his prior attack animation instead of just stopping it. It all results in having to replay the same sections over and over until you get it right. It resulted in just wanting the game to be over - which is not what a game should ever do.

Good action and a number of fun puzzles and even some good fights. But here are the main problems. The story is okay but very predictable. The big reveals were either - yeah, we saw that coming, or ho hum. There are a gazillion times when you have to fight a big crowd of enemies. It's like an AR battle royal challenge over and over and over and over again. Plus, when an enemy flashes red you're supposed to leave or aim at him and hit him quick with a electric or batarang or grapple. But this probably doesn't work half the time. Sometimes, he will fire the bolt off just to the side of the enemy - why would the program ever even aim there? Fights like that are more designed for side challenges, not constant every mission. And I swear the disruptor doesn't always work, or at least it's unclear when you've disarmed someone. I still take shocks even after disrupting shock stick guys. So what's the point if one of the big thugs can generate electricity with his hands anyway. Batman's reaction time stinks too - sometimes you'll hit counter in time but he's still finishing some other animation and still takes a new hit. The whole fighting thing is a mess of button mashing. And, as in other Batman games - he is just so so weak. And that's on normal mode. He needs multiple punches to hurt anybody - the game is constantly reminding you how tough he is or how high-tech his vehicle is but he can't even knock out a random thug in the street shy of 3 punches and a bigger guy over 8 or more. He has just about nothing that can take out multiple enemies at once - which isn't necessarily a bad feature, except that's ALL Batman ever finds himself needing to do and he has no gadget for it. The ice thing doesn't work half the time. You aren't always able to do the dive drop shock. It's just so ridiculous that he would not have some sort of grapple spin move or a stun grenade when he finds himself in a situation like that a hundred times a day. When he sneaks behind one of the "tough" tanks, he has to wait for a lock ring to zoom in on a weak point - this takes forever - so long that much of the time, the tank simply turns around where you are vulnerable but have no choice but to be because otherwise the lock doesn't zoom. Can he not invest in a lock mechanism that works farther than 20 yards? Side characters were boasting how high-tech the batmobile is. When actually in many ways, it's actually quite archaic. At no point do you ever feel very powerful or anything resembling a superhero. It seems any random thug given access to his arsenal would do just as well. Then there are the races - these aren't fun. Too many times the race depends on some timing or simply learning the route after getting killed over and over like a 1990 NES game. That's not intuitive. The load times between deaths are way too long to mess around with a learn-the-route-and-die trial. And sometimes the car just spins wildly out of control if you graze some walls, but not others, and it's hard to tell which ones he will bash through and which ones will send him spinning. It's all a recipe for a lot of long sighs while waiting for the death load screen to end over and over. There are way too many riddler trophies, some which take a number of minutes to mess with - so they never should have prevented you from fighting riddler based on such a long and tedious task. And some of them you're simply not told what you are supposed to do. Like one I steered a robot to get a riddle for me and he just stood there without picking it up. So I had to look online. Apparently I didn't steer him "close" enough to the riddle even though he was on top of it, so I assumed I did it wrong, but I wouldn't know that because they don't tell you what you are supposed to do - or at least you don't have the option of toggling some sort of "what am I supposed to do button" in such cases - instead of stopping the game and doing a web search. Some of the puzzles are clever and you can figure them out without too much impossibility, as long as you're patient. But requiring hundreds of these to advance in a riddler mission is just ridiculous. The stealth mechanic is probably the best part of the game. You actually can combine your fighting with some actual thinking instead of tap, tap, tap X-O-Triangle-X-O-L2 blah blah square blah like a madman. Dividing and conquering the enemy is challenging but not overly difficult (on normal mode). It's not as good as the stealth in Styx or Blacklist, but not bad. His arsenal of gadgets to solve puzzles is also fun to cycle through while trying to solve this or that puzzle. Sort of a - which tool will work best to solve this.

The graphics are nice and the controls are somewhat intuitive. There is nice scenery and some intuitive puzzle solving throughout that utilizes Knack's nature. Those things give the game a few points. However, there are far more flaws as follows: • Very redundant. Levels go on forever with repeated mini fights against the same enemies over and over. • The aim of the special attack can be sketchy and will sometimes target some breakable object off-screen instead of the enemies on the screen. • Knack's toughness and strength are frustrating because they are not consistent. He can pick up cars or tanks and throw them at enemies. And yet it takes him up to 3 hits to defeat a beetle. As well, later in the game there are times when the prompt to pick up cars or tanks simply doesn't appear. • On a related frustrating note, he can do amazing things in cutscenes that he cannot do in gameplay, such as scale bare walls, fences, or jump tremendous distances. • The game is very on the rails, which isn't necessarily bad, but it suffers from no option to rotate camera in some areas where you can't see enemies or paths off-screen that are affecting the moment. There are times when you think hitting attack will make Knack zero-in on the nearest enemy but because the camera angle is so awkward or far away, he will sometimes punch air and be left in a vulnerable position because his swing motion leaves him in stunlock for a second every time. • Closing gates that prevent backtracking - what's the point of this, especially in a game where there are treasure pieces to collect. Once I came upon a fork and wasn't sure which was a path to a hidden item and which was the continue path. I chose the latter and a gate immediately closed, so I wasn't able to explore the other path even though it was only a few feet back. • Treasure collecting is nearly useless unless you plan to play over and over. It takes forever to complete a set and get the powerup. I got one powerup on first playthrough at the very end and I found a ton of secret items besides. • From a story perspective, the characters act highly irrational multiple times and some of the dialogue and decisions are laughable.