- Joined
- Dec 23, 2020
Finally got around to it. I expected some disposable AAA weekend distraction type shit you forget about immediately but I was surprised how much I liked it.
In terms of design it's kinda... retro? Like, the levels are mostly linear, but huge and some of them end up pretty interconnected and vertical, and if you see some shit that looks like you can jump on it you almost certainly can. See something that looks like a side path before a checkpoint and there's probably a whole bunch of shit there, you won't fall through the girder you're trying to jump to.
Exploration is rewarded, there's thingies worth collecting everywhere, and it never once hit me with that "oh okay fuck me I guess they wanted me to go left first instead of right" shit.
All this is true until the last two levels anyway which start having invisible walls and basically turn into a modern game. Which is fairly understandable because they're open places with a lot of wrecked architecture of the type older games would just put a bunch of kill walls around anyway. But it's also where the story turns lame and anime (it's good up until that point, but mostly because they shut the fuck up and let you wonder about more interesting ideas that don't develop).
The combat's eventually great. It starts off too easy but ramps way up. Seems like I judged correctly by guessing this wouldn't be a good KB+M game, on a controller it works.
There's a lot of enemy types, they're all varied and add significant complexity to mixed encounters, and there are actual bosses and they actually fucking kick ass to fight. I even did all the optional VR mission things; I usually hate those.
You can nuke shit with your special weapons and hacking node thingies, but you usually want to save them and the way they handle this is cool: they effectively become obstacles you want to avoid while hacking, but they're worth keeping equipped, so you pay with constant extra complexity and decisions re whether it's worth cutting through one.
I never used em though. I went with a heat build (but with the handgun) and the thing that makes heat executions do splash damage. That way the fat guys are usually nearly dead by the time you clean up all the little ones (plus executions are always a good way to keep your gun charged) and it still works well on bosses without changing anything.
In terms of design it's kinda... retro? Like, the levels are mostly linear, but huge and some of them end up pretty interconnected and vertical, and if you see some shit that looks like you can jump on it you almost certainly can. See something that looks like a side path before a checkpoint and there's probably a whole bunch of shit there, you won't fall through the girder you're trying to jump to.
Exploration is rewarded, there's thingies worth collecting everywhere, and it never once hit me with that "oh okay fuck me I guess they wanted me to go left first instead of right" shit.
All this is true until the last two levels anyway which start having invisible walls and basically turn into a modern game. Which is fairly understandable because they're open places with a lot of wrecked architecture of the type older games would just put a bunch of kill walls around anyway. But it's also where the story turns lame and anime (it's good up until that point, but mostly because they shut the fuck up and let you wonder about more interesting ideas that don't develop).
The combat's eventually great. It starts off too easy but ramps way up. Seems like I judged correctly by guessing this wouldn't be a good KB+M game, on a controller it works.
There's a lot of enemy types, they're all varied and add significant complexity to mixed encounters, and there are actual bosses and they actually fucking kick ass to fight. I even did all the optional VR mission things; I usually hate those.
You can nuke shit with your special weapons and hacking node thingies, but you usually want to save them and the way they handle this is cool: they effectively become obstacles you want to avoid while hacking, but they're worth keeping equipped, so you pay with constant extra complexity and decisions re whether it's worth cutting through one.
Man she does say "oh I wish we had something equipped that shrinks grids" every time you lock onto an enemy with a big grid.
I never used em though. I went with a heat build (but with the handgun) and the thing that makes heat executions do splash damage. That way the fat guys are usually nearly dead by the time you clean up all the little ones (plus executions are always a good way to keep your gun charged) and it still works well on bosses without changing anything.