Recent reviews by Wolly

One of the best things to come out of 2021, and one of my new faves. This game really feels like one of those 3D platformers from the PS2, but bigger and better. A lot of the level geometry is more level this time around, unlike the first one which had really unstable and crooked floors, and the artstyle is more polished than grimy like it was in the first one. I like how they used a lot of tardis portals, juxed-to-position shots, and non euclidean geometry. Really wish more games could play with those ideas. Some of the platforming feels buggy like it did back in the PS2 days, but now you can tell it's just because of unreal engine jank, but the good kind. The story is amazing too, maybe a few too many extra characters, but none of them feel forced at all.

Just a quick foreword, I've played all the Souls games before. Bloodborne, DS 1 and 3, and Sekiro. I even played Jedi Fallen Order just cause my friend strongarmed me into getting it. This is probably the worst out of all of them. I heard most people said this was the worst one but that some few still regarded it as their favorite. I thought this might be secretly good and people just didn't like it because it changed too much but it really is bad.
None of the areas in this game are fun to explore because every single area has some weird gimmick that makes it inconvenient to explore, like poison swamps, or rooms with way too many enemies that back you into corners, or narrow halls where your weapons bounce off the walls, or enemies on ledges that fire projectiles at you so you can't even focus on what you're doing. That one's a favorite of their's apparently, since there are so many areas where I'd be looking through the pause menu for items and I'd randomly take damage because there was a sniper two areas behind me hitting me with arrows. On top of that, none of the areas even looked that cool. You don't get any of the pretty vistas off into other areas of the maps, or areas where an NPC might be curiously scratching at an item in the corner, or anything to draw your eye very well, just stone corridors. Most of the enemies in this game that weren't the flimsy walking corpses or humanoids could take out more than half of my health even at 30 vigor, and my poise was too weak so I'd just get stunned to death after rolling away. Rolling is really broken in this game because there will be times where you manage to roll away but the tip of an enemy's spear will still get you and you'll still lose health without any stagger or noise or other indication. Most enemies, including the unarmed corpses, could reach me and do damage from the same distance as my spears or halberds or greatswords. The lock-on system is completely busted because I'd swing at an enemy and miss because I was aimed slightly too far to the left or because even when you are locked on your character will still attack in the direction of where you hold the movement stick, which completely defeats the purpose of locking on. The movement stick also has deadzones, so if you hold up and slightly to the left you still go perfectly straight, which can mess up jumps. Most of the weapons drained stamina after 3 swings, and you'd think "just upgrade endurance casual," but after END 18 it only goes up by 1 so I'd have to grind 20 soul levels just to have an extra swing or a chance to roll away. All the bosses were way too easy, I beat most of them on just the second attempt. All of this combined makes the game feel less rewarding and more like a chore list so I just quit and uninstalled.

EDIT: I tried playing NG+ for DS1 and immediately changed my mind. The old formula deserved to be improved on. I can see why this one is easily a favorite or a miss, despite its flaws. This one is way more of a grand mysterious adventure than the other games, but it does that thing where it doesn't get really good until way late in like Sekiro or other modern games.

No amount of Rick and Morty could've prepared me for this ♥♥♥♥.

This is a really well crafted game! It's like a mix of Hitman and Doom with a lot of cool meta puzzles and secret mechanics. It's always cool to find games like these that look like color splurge because no matter how crazy things start to get, you can always find a good baseline and start to decipher the poetry.

Really cool combat platformer, but insanely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. A lot of stuff doesn't feel smoothed over enough so you have to wait and just die if you mess up a particularly hard section because they made recovery next to impossible. I like the checkpoint system though, adds a lot more control to how you play each level.

The combat is really cool for the first major part of the game, but it quickly gets tedious after a while when the only payoff to the story seems to constantly be "Are robots humans too???" I never like these stories about the moral implications behind AI being people because you can make comparisons all day long all you like, but you still end up ignoring a lot of obvious discrepancies between wind-up toys and humans. The story will never get to the point here, it's just a constant slog of japanese poetry. I'm still not sure if I got to the end. I liked how the upgrade chips worked like allocated ram and the second-wind sprinting.

The original PS2 version was way more atmospheric and actually spooky. This just replaces the whole game with GTA cutscenes.

I remember beating this once when my wifi was down which ended up being like ultra-hard mode since some clues require the game to open up microsoft edge of all things. The atmosphere is perfect for a horror game, but the story makes no sense to me besides "girl was murdered." I'm still not sure who White Face is exactly or what his character is besides a jump scare, which is weird considering all the visual story telling stuff. The convenience store is a good example, cool environment and puzzle, but the story doesn't add up to anything and it feels like a waste of time cause there are no scares there besides the ending bits.

I've only played for about 5 minutes and this is already one of my favorite most stylistic games. I love when the colors fill the screen and my eyeballs!!!

You die a bit fast though for my taste, might need some getting used to.

I don't like how they made a remake of just the first one, it wasn't even the best one compared to others. It would have been better just to make a new entry to the series with new weapons and everything. But since they didn't do that, I'd be almost expectant of them to remake the others too.The graphics also kinda suck. Everything is super saturated with bloom and god rays (which I turned off later in the .ini files) and the new models for characters are kinda sucky. Crypto himself looks more like a celebrity recast with a facelift, which might be a good bit of irony, but he still had way more character on the PS2 because the jagged angles complemented his iconic evil smile, while here you can't even tell what he's thinking with that glossed over glare. The other humans were given a more cartoony caricature look too, which I think they did later on to make them fit into the higher resolution environment. They might have overdone it a bit though. The animation in cutscenes sucks, a lot of it was smoothed over to try to make it feel more 'natural' I guess but everyone just moves at the same speed no matter what emotion is being portrayed. In the PS2 version, you actually see Crypto have an angry breakdown in front of pox in the intro cutscene. Here, he just turns his head like he's pacing and the camera cuts a lot to make you think he's moving. One last final bit, a lot of audio was just taken out of the original game, so that also hurts the cruddy animation a bit, but they also had to bring Invader Zim himself back for more bonus mission dialogue, so you'll have some weird shifts in fidelity. He also sounds a bit old or tired to be doing the iconic voice anymore, so sometimes he'd do the flamboyant emphasis but squeak it out and it just made me feel kinda bad for him and want to give him a break. No disrespect to his career of course, he still did a decent job.So in terms of graphics, it's a pretty bad remake, but with gameplay, it's actually a pretty good upgrade from the original. Moving Crypto around in PS2 Land was like dragging around a garbage bag while drunk, and you could only ever fire your weapon and move at the most. Here Crypto gets to do all the cool dynamic movement and jumping he really deserved, and you can pick up a guy with TK and toss him at a tank while firing and ridding your jetpack through the air all at once and it's amazing, as it should be. A lot of weapons were reworked to be better but worse in parts though. The Zap-o-matic gets a huge upgrade, but it's now the only weapon I'd use half the time as it just became a DPS lazer with infinite ammo, and the Disintegrator ray just became this thing that shot heat seeking fireballs (how even) as opposed to the cool plasma gun from Doom 16 type thing it was. The Probe should have been removed all together, that's all. I think the Ion Detonator got nerfed, but I can't remember what it was originally like. Now it's this weird charge up distance thing that only goes half as far as it did, but you can still manually detonate it so that's cool. The saucer weapons are worse. The death ray is pretty much just the Zap-o-matic taped to the front of the Saucer, so it ends up being more flashy than it is an actual DEATH RAY. Neither the death ray or the Sonic Boom can take down a building any quicker than like 10 seconds, even with full upgrades, so you can't level half the town anymore in a few minutes like you could on the PS2. There's also way more stuff that attacks you in the saucer, like missiles which are nearly impossible to reflect in time given the game's default crappy FOV. I also don't get why they didn't add in the cloak for your saucer, just to give you a break from all the missiles.Either way, it's still a fun game. Go kill em all!