+10 because every game could be a 10
The general consensus about this game seemed to be that it is more of the same, up to the point where
The general consensus about this game seemed to be that it is more of the same, up to the point where there is no real reason to put a 2 in the name. And I was just in the mood for more of the same, so
-1 because it certainly wasn’t. I had a great time with mouse and keyboard controls the first time around, while even with assistance I found myself stumbling and bumbling through the levels…
-1 exactly the same levels, with exactly the same story, BUT: a new character. Me. And this is definitely not my story, I actually don’t have a story except that I have a diary which only shows: Yes, I have absolutely no life to speak of, except for being a soldier and trying to impress people from the manga and anime. For example by going places and then
-2 watching cutscenes in the middle of a battle. From the first game. That most of the time have nothing to do w0ith anything I was doing there. It’s like having sex, and at some arbitrary point your partner shoves you off the bed and watches an old videotape with a badly aged porno.
+1 Well, at the very least it shows that they’ve worked successfully on the overall presentation. But unfortunately
-1 not on the in-game-menus. They are still multi-layered, obtuse things that you have to shake and mangle to spit out the information you are actually looking for, or achieve the thing you want to do, like selling or crafting, with half a dozen UI-designs, and each one is terrible.
-0.5 while the levels look better, they still have all the detail and especially the destruction physics from two console generations ago. It has gone from retro-charme to feeling awfully dated by now.
-2 missions are pure chaos, and unfortunately mostly because of design failures. Tutorial windows pop in hours into the game, hints lurk on the screen, fighting for your attention with subtitles that try to keep up with all the screaming around you, missions and icons are all over the place, and each enemy is showered in circles and targets and symbols and arrows. And over that you have other soldiers dialogue, smoke signals, building points and spawn points and recharge points and a small, overcrowded minimap with another heap of information, and just when you are getting into the rythm and are halfway oriented, you can bet that one of the aforementioned cutscenes kicks in.
I have watched the first two seasons of the anime, and I played the first game. I should know what’s going on, and I had to look up stuff because the narration is a disaster. If you haven’t had any contact with this franchise, go and buy the first game, or you will have no idea what is happening half of the time. It slaughters the pacing and perspective while trying really hard to pretend that your charater matters, but how could she – or he? The whole storymode felt like an ongoing tutorial, and at the same time like joining a multiplayer game where you are just one of 60 people that have never met and will never see each other again.
Overall pretty much everything about this was a terrible idea trying to suck as much money out of the fandom as possible, running after every trend and every hot thing in gaming back then and drowning in bad design choices because of it. It kills a great story while doing so, and slightly better visuals make it somehow worse since they feel wasted on this mess.
-0.5 it also crashes regularly for no reason, sometimes repeatedly, and since this is not a new game, it will never be fixed, so again: If you want a game like this, buy the first one.
Reading: Attack on Titan 2
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