Binary Domain (Sega, 2012)

so let's make a long story short:  if you like the idea of expansive violence towards robots, and can tolerate third-person shooters, then you're gonna fucking love binary domain

I'll be honest.  I fucking love killing robots, to the point that it's a nonsexual fetish for me.  Like most fetishes, this thing can be traced to my childhood.  I had seen roughly 20 hardcore violence horror films before I saw Batman: The Animated Series's "Heart of Steel" (THANKS DAD), but its violence has always stuck through to me.  For those that don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of Batman cartoons (shame on you), the two-parter episode revolved around a HAL facsimile who wanted before logic and order for Gotham and blah blah blah.

What's important is that the evil computer fashioned various duplicates of important citizens, all of whom attack Batman in the climatic confrontation and are gruesomely dispatched.  And by gruesomely I'm not exaggerating, the writers clearly relished getting around cartoon censorship by murdering robots instead of humans: the robots are exploded, violently electrocuted and then exploded, and in the case of a Marylin Monroebot (I wish I was joking), crushed under an elevator, but not before the force of the elevator cracks her neck to a 90 degree angle.

again, this was at a time when a bad guy actually getting a shot off with a (non-laser) gun was considered PUSHING THE LIMITS, so witnessing this on tv did a fair number on my brain.  I started to give extra credence to games that gave me unrestricted robogenocide, even if they were terrible.  I...I once tried to argue that the Terminator 2 arcade game was good.

The point is that like how SOCIALLY ENLIGHTENED game critics will slobber all over a browser clicken on texten game because half of the choices turn you into a transgendered lesbian, I feel like my own personal predilections hamper me from honestly reviewing a game that features more exploding-robot-heads-per-minute than any other.   But the fact that all the reviews I've seen on this game were either the troglodyte "GRAPHICS GOOD FUN" variety or some four-part attempt to talk about how "cyborg queer theory" factors into the game, I have to give this a go.

First off, the plot who cares about the plot.  Binary Domain is basically someone trying to mimic a hideo kojima plot while respecting the player enough to try to do it in five minutes or less cutscene chunks, which is to say it's a massive disaster but at least it's not a boring disaster like kojima's shit.  There's robots everywhere in futureland, you're part of some anti-advanced-robot multinational task force, and oh no someone is making robots that look like humans in neo-neo-tokyo.   Specifically, you're some awful american white dude archetype whose only defining character traits are that he REALLY hates robots and that he has yellow fever.  The supporting characters could have been more, but thanks to the game's laughably bad interaction system (more on that later), most of them are just somewhat creative nationalistic stereotypes, such as Hot Asian Sniper and Butch As Hell British Explosives Lady.  Except for Bo.

Jesus christ, Big Bo.  I found it sort of surreal that someone attempted to do a social justice positive critique of this game, because holy shit I'm sure there are more racist portrayals in video games but I'm having trouble at the moment because jesus look at that name BIG BO BIG BO BIG BO

he also has a permanent bugeye thanks to superior graphics

Big Bo is your second in command, and is probably the most fleshed out character in the game, existing as a mixture of that one horrible stereotype from Gears of War and Barracuda, a primary villain during Garth Ennis's Punisher run.  He is basically every sort of id tendency that a person who has never been around black people would think a black person would have.  He's so horrible, but also probably the only genuine source of humor, even if the source of that humor is straight up racism.  While every other character is trying to give lip service to the plot, Big Bo's contribution is WHOA BOSS THAT SHIT WAS CRAY or WHOA BOSS LOOK AT DEM YELLOW GALS.

But like I said, plot in a game like this doesn't matter, what matters is the gameplay and most of the time it delivers in a way I've only seen in a few games.

85% of non-boss encounters in this game work basically the same way: you and your two chosen comrades versus about eight to twelve robots that look like the soap sculptures with a million vertices from Will Smith's I, Robot.  First off, you tell your comrades to stay the fuck back because friendly AI is unbelievably useless and only good at stumbling into your gunsight while you're firing full auto and using up your limited supply of magical revive packs.  But once your idiot teammates are locked in the attic, the magic begins.

The big thing about Binary Domain's robots is that they feature actual "location based damage."  I know, 99% of the time when games use this word, it means "leg shots do less damage and headshots are lethal," but holy shit what you hit actually matters here.  Shoot a robo-leg enough times, and eventually it explodes so they crawl after you, terminator-like.  Shoot a robo-arm enough times, and it'll have to switch weapons to the OTHER arm!

But the head.  Oh, the head.

what you should be doing the entire game

If you destroy a robot's head, it'll suddenly turn its comrades, who in turn will instantly turn on this headless traitor.  I don't know if it's just me, but the joy of seeing seven other robots immediately stop shooting at you to awkwardly fire at decapatron never ever got old.  The best part is that headless robots will fight each other if there's none left, so most of my fights ended up in a sort of slap fight you'd see in a Tool video, sans 6 video filters.

Occasionally the game tries to "switch up" this winning formula, either by throwing you against some dumb bullet sponge miniboss or asinine vehicle section, but you're never pulled away from the essentials for too long.  It's also nice (and maybe a little sociopathic) to say that at no point does the game decide you have fought enough robots and now have to fight EVIL HUMAN BADDIES.

THIS IS YOUR GOD

The game also throws alot of bosses at you, and this games manages to finally break the "all bosses are boring bullet sponges that you shoot at then roll away from until they stop attacking" curse that a wizard placed on every third-person shooter.  So now only half the bosses are like that, but the other half are genuinely creative multi-stage struggles that are more akin to those white-knuckle "IT'S GONNA BE YOU OR ME ASSHOLE" battles from Smash TV.  The first major boss fight is versus a giant robot spider where you have to slowly whittle down its component parts all the while dodging a steadily increasing tempo of explosions, and it's genuinely one of the best boss fights I've ever experienced.  There's only one genuinely fucking awful boss in all of Binary Domain, and I'm sorry if you play this game based on my review and get to that fucker.

This might sound like faint praise, but I genuinely admire how the game simplifies everything that isn't shooting robots, so you can always go back to shooting robots.  There's a way to upgrade your stats and guns through purchasable nano things, but the game throws so much dosh at you that you never have to choose what to get, it's pathetically easy to min-max upgrades, and even if you're too lazy to do that, the bonuses provided are minimal to the effect on the game.  The guns themselves are either your massively overpowered assault rifle, your infinite ammo pistol that's surprisingly decent, and an assortment of forgettable firearms that you can use up and forget.  You have a trust system with your teammates, but I realized pretty much immediately that the key to maxing trust was just to blindly agree with whatever they asked, and once again the effect of trust has zero effect aside from plot shit (and what do we say to plot, kids).  There's some voice command option, but it's absolute shit so you'll turn it off immediately.  The collectibles are so negligible even I didn't feel obligated to look for them,

No, Binary Domain understands me.  It knows I hated all that decision-making and talking plot garbage from Bioware and "smart FPS games."   It gets that if you can't write a good plot, just make it dumb as possible, that cutscenes exist only to be ludicrous sci-fi watchwords, that when the endgame arrives with the expected twist parade, it should not take pride in its facile surprises and instead just throw a giant robot dog at me.  Binary Domain is good because when you shoot the clunky cylinder-shaped robot transport crafts while the robot is still attached, both the craft and robot will spin in the air a little bit before violently crashing into the earth, and there's nothing preventing you from doing this over and over again.

now take bo's hand, and enter a happier place

Drakengard 3

I had a dream a few nights ago.

I met an old man by a road I had frequently crossed as a child.  He was a kind man, wearing a bomber jacket with a sick dragon on the sleeve.  No, a cool looking dragon, not a physically sick dragon.  I approached him.  What do you want, old man.

Give me your fucked video games.  I blink, and am about to speak, but he interrupts.

No, not edgy.  I don't want your gritty reimaginings, your oh so wacky this girl's a slut but she kicks ass too XD, your boring anti-hero that murders innocent bystanders because of Tragic Event X.

Give me your fucked video games.  I try to speak again, but the dragon comes to life within the jacket, and cuts me off.

No, not surreal.  Too well written, too much symbolism: I read enough thank you, your video game will never compare and it saddens me to see it try.

Give me your fucked up video games.  I raise my hands, my voice a beautiful contralto.

No, not dark.  I fucking hate rainstorms and piano solos.  Why are you showing me that.  Jesus.

---

Fucked up video games are a rare thing.  They are the products of a creative process gone horribly wrong.  They are rarely, if ever, something that would be called "good" in the sense that an average player will actually enjoy playing it in the hopes of a stimulus/response model.  Indeed, good gameplay usually mars the process, allowing the player another avenue of enjoyment rather than "LOOK AT THIS RETARDED SHIT."  They lack any sort of internal consistency, usually consisting of the developer sticking in as much random cool concepts as humanly possible, regardless if any of it makes sense if you take even one step back from the endless sensory overload.  The rareness draws from the fact that very few video game people have genuine creativity, and even fewer have an inability to corral that creativity into manageable form, and even when that happens, most studios have the uncanny ability to kill that psychotic spark so it becomes merely edgy, or dark.

There's only a few real examples of beautiful disasters in games.  Killer 7.  Xenosaga.  Alot of the more recent Modern Warfare games, once you realize that they embody the fever dreams of a million right wing conspiracy theorist, rolled into a deceptive "press X to stab terrorist" pastry.

Of course, the true embodiment of the fucked up video game catastrophe is Drakengard.  Released in the early 2000s, it is a dark fantasy tale about horrible people doing horrible things.  Most of the horrible people are your comrades, defined by "pacts" with various magical creatures that give them great powers at the expense of some human attribute, like "aging," or "sight," or "your womb."  The main character is a humongous asshole whose sister wants to bang him, and forms a pact with a dragon, depriving him of his voice.  Bad things ensue.

I played part of the game in college, but at the time did not make it very far.  The reason for this is that you could charitably describe the gameplay as "Dynasty Warriors 0.2."  Your guy runs around and murders hundreds of dudes in the exact same way.  Sometimes you get on the dragon and shoot fire at those dudes before random bullshit ranged enemies force you to stop using the dragon.  Repeat this for 20 hours.  Hi, I'm Drakengard.

As a result, you're forced to acknowledge everything else in a desperate attempt to justify the money you spent on the game.  In this regard, Drakengard does not disappoint.  The game's plotline was the product of a bunch of different people that clearly had wildly varying ideas of what the ultimate theme was supposed to be, so it's impossible to predict what the hell the game was going to throw your way next, unless your prediction is just "something bad."  This is especially true of the endings, which all fuck your hero over in various hilarious ways, especially the final one, which I won't spoil because your obnoxious hardcore nerd gamer friend probably sent you a youtube video of it five years ago.  It's unfortunate that the Western release of the game cut out the most surreal and 3dgy aspects of the game (such as your boring blind paladin actually being a HUGE PEDO), but honestly, the game we got was still insane enough to get a massive cult following.  This spawned the direct sequels of Drakengard 2, featuring the same awful gameplay and a far less ridiculous story, and Nier, which I haven't played so NO SPOILERS DICK BREATH.

Enter Drakengard 3.

You play the nerd boy fantasy magical girl Zero, a gal with a low cut outfit, uncomfortable fuck me heels, and a mysterious flower in her eye.  Her objective is to kill her five sisters, helpfully named Five through One, with the help of Mikhail, the childlike reincarnation of your previous dragon that was mortally wounded in the prior fight with your sista sistahs.  Unlike the hero of Drakengard, Zero can talk, and talk, and talk, usually about how much she hates everything and how she wants to fuck something.  Mikhail (whose english voice actor was so fucking bad that I had to install the Japanese voice pack) acts as her wacky foil.  Additional wacky foils are found as you murder each sister, in the form of the sisters' male disciples, all of which have one bizarre sexual hangup after another.

As you might assume from this brief summary, Drakengard 3 really really wants to return to old screwed up ways of the original, but one can tell that the various CRAZY TWISTS that happen through the story are less the result of the director and producer just making up shit as it goes along, and more a careful, deliberate attempt to make a game that's just messed up doooooooood!!!  Put another way, if Drakengard was the strange antihero that came out of nowhere and warped the minds of a bunch of nerds, then Drakengard 3 is the shadowy SQUARESOFT organization attempting to genetically engineer a superior version of the original duder.  Unfortunately, as any cheetos encrusted otaku can tell you, the vat-grown mutant clone of a hero might be able to put up a fight, but ultimately it's just gonna melt into a big hunk of goo and bones.

So this, I ask the beings on high:  what made Drakengard 3 melt?

The good news is that the game finally has workable gameplay!  Sort of!  Controls are definitely more responsive and fluid, and there are actual combos and weapon combinations!  You can use a sword, spear, chakram, or PUNCHFIST, and different weapons within each subset have different moves and attributes, so it's actually fun to experiment.  Dragon flying is better, and feels less like being the world's shittiest World War I pilot and more like Star Panzer Dragoon Fox 0.8.  Ranged enemies remain fucking horrible to deal with, and now you have lots more giant monster enemies whose combat patterns consist of "do obvious telegraphed attack, take ten second break."  If you ever get in trouble, you have INTONER MODE, which Drakengard 3's "oh shit" button, where you have ten seconds to mash on all the buttons and do big damage to all the bads around you.  There's a shit ton of boss fights, but mostly boil down to either 1) fighting a giant monster by headbutting them with a dragon until they reveal their weak spot, or 2) fighting an evil woman by cheesing them with whatever overpowered weapon you have at the time.

The biggest issue, gameplay wise, is that despite having enough time to release ~$30 DOLLARS~ worth of DLC, Square-Enix clearly didn't have enough time to release a game that was actually optimized for console.  It's been awhile since I've seen a full-price game with the array of technical problems that Drakengard 3 boasts.  Bizarre game glitches?  Framerate that drags down to the single digits if something more than a swung sword happens?  Cripplingly long loading screens after every major fight?  WE GOT THEM ALL.

There's a bevy of other issues, mostly related to the game's obviously slashed development time, but what really matters here is the story.

As stated above, the developers of Drakengard 3 really wanted to replicate the surreal, car-accident magic that was Drakengard.  And for a little while, it almost works.  The characters are almost entirely horrible, if not right malevolent, people, and there's enough death and destruction of innocents to make me smile.  A little.  There's also a shitload of my favorite meaningless video game feature, "bad guys screaming about how you're gonna wreck their butts."  I was hopeful, I admit it.

But after awhile, you start to realize that what you saw in the opening hours is pretty much all you're going to get.  Zero whines and verbally abuses her dragon, the soldiers yell about how unstoppable you are, a big monster appears and you whine about how much you want to kill it and leave this area.  A large part that made the original Drakengard was a glorious mindfuck in that it subverted your expectations of what the game was going to do next, plot wise.  Drakengard 3 plays a fairly pleasing tone at the start, but aside from a slight wrinkle in how it explains the differing endings, it's all painfully predictable.  Even when the game does a BIG TWIST, it's the sort of twist where you shrug and go "gasp, yeah, I guess."

A good example for this is the disciples.  Each of the four sisters has a male disciple that joins you once you murder them.  Gameplay-wise, they're supposed to be combat helpers, but I am not exaggerating when I think they killed one enemy during the entire playthrough.  So really they exist as an endless source of banter during the game, and at first they're pretty funny.  There's the innocent-looking boy that wants to murder everything, the old perverted guy with a big wang, the pretty boy that's an obnoxious awful idiot, and the good natured dude who also happens to be a complete and total masochist.  This leads to some decent exchanges at first, but ultimately they're so one-note in their motivations and reactions that you just roll your eyes when the boy says for the 500th time that he loves the look of gore on a decapitated head, or the old man says that Zero needs to bathe in the healing light of his cock.  The only character that remains amusing by the end of the game is the masochist, and while yeah it's partially because the Japanese VA's "unnnngh" sound whenever someone threatens to stomp his dick is hilarious, it's also because he reveals other character traits throughout the game besides "I like being hurt," which places him heads and shoulders about the other talking fetishbags in this game.

The diminished returns get worse once you beat the game for the first time, and alternative plot paths start to open up.  The downer alternative endings of Drakengard were the best part of the game, and while the designers clearly wanted to emulate that, the way that they're done is just so limp and unappealing that I had staked all my hopes on the final ending.  The game knew this, of course, forcing me to find all the weapons and suffer through what can only be described as the "Drakengard 3 anime-style beach filler episode" in order to unlock this path.

I'm going to describe this path.  Needless to say, ***big spoilers for both Drakengard 1 and 3***






The true final boss for Drakengard 1 was a two minute rhythm section where you had to nullify white and dark rings of energy coming at you from a lady statue with like colored rings from your dragon.  Needless to say, of course Drakengard 3's true final boss is also a rhythm section/lady statue!

That is seven minutes long!

Which forces you to hit a shit-ton of rings in a half second window of time!

And the camera is constantly obscuring your dragon and/or the lady statue, so you're utterly reliant on a laggy, unintuitive rhythm!

That's bad, because if you fuck up EVEN ONCE, you get to restart things all over again, including the simplistic three minute opening section that you won't have trouble with after passing it the first time, but will still force you to pay attention and boy will your eyeballs and hands hurt!!!!

Oh yeah!~

I forgot to mention that once you manage to get past all of this, the screen fades to black, and there's three more timed prompts you have to hit which have no rhythm market at all, including a final one WHILE YOUR DRAGON IS TALKING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is me at age 14, little did i know i had perfectly anticipated my reaction to this fucking boss fight

The designers no doubt believed they were making a WACKY STATEMENT about the nature of super hard final bosses.  We live in a world of broadband internet and youtube, and so it was so no big surprise a user on Nico Nico immediately released a video that demonstrated each time you needed to hit the button.  With all that in mind, I still feel the need to say "fuck you, that was horrible."  There's nothing iconoclastic about testing your player's patience so far that even the proudest man is forced to get online to figure out how to cope with your bullshit rhythm mechanics.

So what is the TWIZTED reward for this?  For all intents and purposes, this:

I had expected some big cursory "SCREW YOU PLAYER" ending in the form of everyone dying a horrible death like the previous Drakengards, but no, it was basically "yay you saved everyone it's the ULTIMATE HAPPY ENDING ^_______^"  In a sense, it took an entire game to set up the payoff, but Drakengard 3 finally subverted how a vidya game should work, and destroyed everyone's expectations and hopes in the most smug, pug-pissy way possible.

---

Congrats, Drakengard 3.  You're a fucked up game after all.

The old man smiles, and walks into the distance.

Outlast (2013)

At this point in my blog, you may have noticed that a large portion of my cultural interests lie within the spheres of horror movies and vidja gaems.  Perhaps you, the random lurker, wonder why I don't talk about that cross-pollination of horror video game, especially considering that the demand for these titles has exploded in recent years.

It's because these games bore me.

Horror movies rarely, if ever, scare me.  I watch them for imagination, because they're a hotbed for new directorial talent, and boobies.  Horror games rarely tend to have these elements, and focus themselves squarely on the element of GET SCARED.  I'm probably too blase for my own good, but even the apparently TERRIFYING top tier titles like Amnesia were just a boring slog to me.  It doesn't help that the current crop of horror games deny the player any real means of fighting back, ostensibly because this heightens the tension, though any intelligent person could probably guess that it's alot easier for an indie firm to design a game when you don't need to have a balanced combat system.

Still, every so often I want to believe that a hyped horror game might have an effect on me beyond eyerolls and exasperated sighs.  Enter Outlast.

The framework for a million and one jump scares is that you're a journalist who gets a HOT TIP about a creepy sanitarium.  The gimmick for a million and one jump scares is that you have a camera which, provided you have enough battery life, can utilize night vision.  The reason for a million and one jump scares is because we love the scare cam lets plays, right????

Like every other modern horror game, Outlast operates in three different levels.  First, you have the exploration, when you're wandering a spooky area, soaking in ambiance and waiting for a spookum to jump out at you.  Second, you have the scripted "oh no he's after me" section, where a spookum wants to get ya and the only way to escape is by pressing spacebar over ten different desks and open windows!!!  Finally, you have the "find dumb shit" section.

You know this one, right?  Where you enter LAUNDRY ROOM C, and there's a door that won't open because the power is fluctuating?  And the only way to get out is to find the 3 circuit breakers/3 keys/3 light switches?  And while you're stumbling around down all these generic halls, there's a big bad that sometimes appears (STRING CRESCENDO) and you have to hide in a locker/closet/sewer pipe until he gets tired and leaves, unless you're too slow and then you spend two minutes running away, maybe getting hit but that's okay because regenerating health?  Yeah, you know this one.

To be fair, the first two modes on Outlast are decent, relatively speaking.  Unlike the turgid and opening-drawer-obsession of Amnesia, the exploration in Outlast is streamlined.  Almost every jump scare is hilariously telegraphed (OH A NARROW PASSAGEWAY I HAVE TO SCOOT THROUGH NOTHING BAD WILL HAPPEN HERE), and the settings are either dirty metal place or less dirty wooden place (with computers), but you generally know where you need to go and I didn't glitch through a wall, so okay.  Spooky chase mode is at least superficially engaging, by which I mean if you really shut down your brain the experience of pushing 'W' until you run into a thing you need to context-sensitive action over, it's fun for about four times, which is thankfully the number of times the designers put this in.

But the last part?  Christ.  I hated looking for the three buttons in Amnesia, the 45 papers in Slenderman 1-3341, and I still fucking hate it in Outlast.  The big issue is that unless you're some playing to the crowd scarecam baby, these sections are never scary, but always annoying.  Unless you're lucky, finding the trigger mechanisms to be able to leave the monster maze is a boring trial and error.  But oh no, the monster has found you!  What you can do in these situation is like the world's worst Choose Your Own Adventure Book.

You can hide in a locker.  The monster man might lumber in the room, utter one of three threatening lines about "gutting you you pig piggy man."  Early on, he might leave, despite him clearly following you to the room.  Later in the game, he might check the other locker in the room, then get tired and go back to his predetermined patrol routes.  If you're up against a BOSS MONSTER, he'll check both lockers, which means...

You can get hit.  The screen gets red and blurry, but as long as you don't get hit one or two times (depending on the ferocity of your worthy opponent), you can just ignore things, run away, and hopefully find another fucking locker to hide in.  Or....

You can just leave the patrol area.  Most the crazy house scavenger hunts have a starting "safe" area, where you can go but the psycho can't.  Call it not respecting the game's tone if you like, but I quickly learned the fastest way to get through these areas was running straight for the the objective regardless where the enemy was, taking the inevitable stab, then running back to the starting area and rolling your eyes when the psychotic murderer stares at you for five seconds, then shrugs his shoulders and lumbers back.  Repeat x2.

To be clear: I hated this game, but I hated it much less than other horror games I've slogged through.  The camera gimmick is mostly played well, and encourages exploration so you can stay topped off on batteries.  More noteworthy is that the crazy people stalking you are occasionally interesting and written well.

(spoilers for the rest of the review I guess)

The promotional materials for the game said that the backgrounds of the inmates were actually inspired by real psychological cases.  That sounds like bullshit, but some of the encounters are sort of engaging, at least beyond the typical "oh it's a guy and he wants to murder me, okay."  You're going to run into nude Russian twins that are remarkably calm and sarcastic about their desire to eat your liver.  There's a former corporate executive that talks about the invisible hand of capitalism while running around with giant scissors.  Your closest thing to an ally is a guy who was denied fingerpainting therapy, developed a religious obsession, and now draws directions on the wall with blood.  It's not exactly good writing, but for most of the game I could tolerate the shit gameplay to see what the next crazy could be.

So it's a fucking shame that the final act of the game is so mind-melting stupid.  Eventually you discover, in true Resident Evil fashion, that asylum houses a GIANT TECHNO LAB.  What is in the lab is the thing that all the inmates fear, the "Walrider," something that I guess was meant to sound German and intimidating but instead always made me think of something out of a Christian children's programming cartoon, about a magical guy that rides on walls with a magic skateboard and helps prevent masturbation by 11-year-olds.

So in this game that was previously about a guy exploring a hellish asylum filled with murder and madness, what is the Walrider?  It is a nanomachine ghost cloud spawned by the bad dreams of a six-year-old psychic boy.  To say I was a little nonplussed that the eventual payoff for all the crapass gameplay I went through was "Hideaki Anno's Metal Gear Ghostbusters" is a fair observation.

I'm probably not going to get the DLC for this game.

Overthinking Terrible: Kingdoms of Amalur

Ugh.

I tried playing this game once before, but it was at a good time in my life, and that's the worst frame of mind when playing Kingdom of Amalur.  No, you need to be incredibly depressed, worn down, just utterly destroyed to put up with the utter bullshit this game throws at you.  So when I had to deal with one of the worst periods of my life, I knew just the game to play.

The plot of was written by R.A. Salvatore, a dude primarily known for having his dumb fantasy shit clogging the shelves at every used bookstore I've visited.   You're a dude in the middle of some epic war between the mortal races (humans and sexy elves) and the Tuatha Fae, who are evil and have sinister glowing red swords.  The Tuatha are evil perversions of regular Fae, who are plant/human hybrids (not in a cool way like roots growing out of your dick, but like someone painted your face green and glued cardboard flower petals to your shoulders) and basically do nothing the entire game.  The obligatory boring variable that distinguishes this turgid BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL is that apparently everyone has a predestined fate except you, because your dumbass got kilt but was brought back by the WELL OF SOULS (just don't fucking ask).  Needless to say, since this is R.A. Salvatore and not Philip K. Dick, the sole way this plot device is used is your FATELESS HERO blunders into scenarios constantly and changes someone's bad fate to a happy fate.

I don't even want to talk about the sexxxy fanservice elf.

Kingdoms of Amalur was originally designed as an MMO, and it really shows.  In between the long stretches of actual plot advancement, you will run into a million yellow exclamation points denoting various side missions.  There's the big boi "faction missions" which feature your character stumbling into such ORIGINAL groups as a MERCENARY COMPANY, a SCHOOL FOR MAGES, and A THIEVES GUILD, each time going up the corporate ladder faster than a CEO's nephew and saving your incompetent coworkers from certain death.  There's the multiquest location missions which usually involve going into three caves to fight monsters and find a thing, maybe culminating in killing a boss.  There's regular missions which usually involve you going into one cave to find a thing.  There's also tasks, which are repeatable missions, which if you make the mistake of accepting lead to you picking up things that rapidly fill up your inventory for the purpose of getting money, which becomes a total non-issue about five hours into the game.

And let me tell you, inventory space is sacred in Amalur.  Almost everything you pick up takes up a single inventory space.  You get about 100 such spaces which wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't make it so you tripped over a chest every five meters.  You can send items to the trashbox, but it's a blow to whatever fun this game has that you have to manage your inventory every two minutes to dump out the 34 azurite longswords you just picked up.  While it's true that alot of modern rpgs still latch on to this stupid mechanic, at least I could console command ~player.modav carryweightfuvefuckingmillion in most of them

There are other aspects compounding the inventory problem.  If you decide to throw out a bunch of useless potions (oh boy a 10 second minute boost to my fire resistance), the game simply compensates by having those same useless potions appear in every subsequent chest you loot, usually until you have like 11 or 12 of every stupid flavor.  And why yes, the game does manage potion stacks in groups of 10, how did you guess? If you accept quests, you'll tend to gain a bunch of stupid quest items that of course count towards your inventory total, and you can never destroy them no matter how much you want to.  Even better, some of those same items don't actually go away when you finish the quest, so you'll always remember that time someone gave me a useless ring for killing some kobolds.

add to junk?  not in this town, fucko

In between quests, there's...not much to really do in Amalur.  Exploration is pretty dull, especially since the game drills into you early on that any cave or dungeon you see is gonna have a quest attached to it, and believe me you do NOT want to run through any of these dungeons again.  For the sheer amount of precious lifeforce that Amalur demands from you (70 hours, jesus CHRIST), the excitement coming from new discoveries dries up in about five hours.  I'm not a big fan of The Elder Scrolls series, but it succeeds at driving the player forward, always promising one new diversion if you just walk a little further.  The biggest diversion in Amalur is listening to NPCs.

It's frankly terrifying how many voiced lines they stuffed into Amalur.  You will run into at least a half-dozen named dipshits in every vague settlement, and they all have shit to say.  The problem is that most of the shit is the most extraneous boring garbage imaginable.  Every, and I mean EVERY, voiced NPC will have a dialogue option about the area they're living in.  I made a point to actually listen to these both as a fuck-you to the inexorable march of time and because I felt bad for the intern that was obviously tasked with writing all of this horrible crap.  God knows, I would have had a nervous breakdown after my hundredth variation on how qt elf girl feels about Generic Mining Hellhole #342.  After awhile, it was the most hypnotizing and comforting part of this shit game: the knowledge that wherever I went, someone would be there jabbering about their hometown and how "it's got it's bad'uns, but overahl it's a good lot, just wish the giant spiders would go away."  When you play a 80-hour game that requires only a working pulse to beat, you gotta latch onto something.

Despite the fact that everyone admitted that the plot and characterization for this ROLE PLAYING GAME was shit, alot of people still liked the game.  Why?  Generally it came down to graphics and the actually fighting gameplay.  I'll agree that the graphics weren't bad, to the extent that I didn't really notice them one way or another as I stumbled through the game's pre-defined paths.  But gameplay?  No.  All of the people that praised the combat as "incredibly fun combo-based excitement" are either insane or have never played a brawler in their lives.

or they could be a no-talent GAME JOURNALIST RETARD SHITBABY, whatever.

An important part of any third-person combat game is the concept of evasion.  Evading enemy attacks serves a dual purpose: it allows you to to, via player reaction, dodge attacks and thus preserve health; more importantly, it lets you feel like some kung-fu badass.  An important point of any sort of game like KoA is determining how forgiving your evasion options are.  Most of the time, the general rule is that you should be able to evade most attacks unless your character is attempting some sort of ultra dangerous heavy combo, because if you're gonna wield some massive axe you shouldn't really be able to instantly get out of the way right?  A decent player should be able to avoid most damage, and if you get hit, you smack your forehead, darn I shoulda seen that coming, better luck next time me.

Kingdoms of Amalur does not care about such things.  It's completely true that there are very impressive combos in this game.  The problem with this is that once you are a certain point into said combos, you are LOCKED IN SON, and good fucking luck if a monster feels like attacking you.  Every move that isn't the basic "hit button once" attack has at least a second of dead air where you cannot fucking dodge or move cancel or anything.  This is especially a problem because, at least in the hard difficultly, monsters are constantly harassing you with attacks.  These attacks would be easily dodgable if your dumbass avatar wasn't doing a rendition of Swan Lake with his chakrams on some barrels and I AM HITTING THE LEFT SHOULDER BUTTON FUCKING ROLL YOU SACK OF SHIT FUCKING ROLL ROLL ROLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL.  Maybe it's unfair to expect crisp control from a multi-million dollar studio's first game, but jesus, Devil May Cry 3 had like 14 different combat systems that were all amazing, I don't think anyone would have cared if Curt Schilling just ripped one of them off like he did Rhode Island daaaaaaaaaaamn son.

Here's a prime example.  The threat level of enemies is based entirely how quickly they close distance and how often they attacked.  The evil that struck the greatest fear into my heart was not the generic demon monsters or the flakey elf Tuatha, but wolves.  Wolves have a single attack: they run at you, and then dive at you.  There are ALWAYS multiple wolves, and they tended to run at me one after the other.  Amalur's targetting is really fucking shitty, so I usually ended up attacking the wolf that already attacked, so a realistic impression of my hero would be a man bathed in the blood of demons and cruel lords, with several hundred comical wolf-sized holes throughout my body.

pubic enemy number 1

This surreal gameplay oversight completely takes away from any sort of real skill (haha video game skill), forcing you as the player to either plink at enemies with your basic moves or just suck it up and expect to get knocked around every time you want to feel like a badass.  If Kingdoms of Amalur was a difficult game, this would be an incredibly frustrating experience.  Many "goddamnits" would be uttered, controllers would be jerked and screamed at.  It would be shit, but there would still be the barest semblence of being invested in what is happening in Boring Fantasy Land.

Of course, this isn't the case.  Even on the top difficulty, Amalur quickly stops trying to challenge in any sense of the word.  I'm not even talking about the whole crafting issue mentioned in every review, though it's utterly true that spending 15 minutes at a forge will yield you the most boring armor with the most broken stats.  I'm actually okay with that, since it's not like Skyrim didn't have the same issue except that game took 3 hours of your life away so you could craft your god armor and stop pretending to give a shit about its garbage combat.  No, even with self-found armor, the game just completely fails to draw in any sort of interest.

The big problem is that every class has some sort of boring means to ignore the game's shitty combat system.  The rogue can stealth out and OHKO problem enemies because of the stupid amount of crit damage naturally begotten.  The warrior has an ability that straight up gives super armor so you can accomplish all your dumbass combos.  The mage has a heal and spells that are so goddamned broken that it's hilarious.  Hybrid classes are even worse, since now you get TWICE the broken abilities.  I primarily played the rogue/mage class, which in later levels gave me the perk of having my mana refill whenever I landed a critical hit, so battles were a choose your own adventure of zero tension or reward.  This isn't even accounting for the Devil Trigger Reckoning Mode, which makes any combat scenario completely null and void, takes like 3 battles to refill, and can just be refilled via USEABLE ITEMS ARE YOU JOKING.

As a result of all this, Amalur couldn't even muster a shriek of dismay or hatred more than a few times.  When the wolves commenced their strafing run, I'd just roll my eyes and mutter under my breath.

Ugh.

Max Payne 3

I don't want to talk about the gameplay in Max Payne 3.

It's not that I didn't like it, this is a game that made me mostly happy, and Rockstar's take on the third-person shooty shooty slowy slowy concept improved on the problems of Max Payne 2 in every way.  No, it's that every reviewer of this dumb game didn't just settle with "game fun many bullet bang bang" took the opportunity to pretend they were writing for fucking Pitchfork.  Every "serious" review of the game focused on the gameplay in some breathless superlative nonsense, something along the lines of "the bullets are percussion of heart and fury, physics shaking into a kaiju rock concert, the exit wounds never healing but understanding comes anyway."  Suffice to say that the most honest description of Max Payne 3's combat would be "Gears of War except everything has a quarter less health, also pills."

An aside: I've seen you assholes out there.  Yeah you, the ones that despite everything, still bitched about OH GOD NOT COVER MECHANICS MY PRECIOUS OLD SCHOOL ERODED BY THE CASUAL UNWASHED TIDES.  Just...stop.  Have you played the original Max Payne?  Do you remember how most fights eventually ended up in the early game?  That's right, just you and Mr. Pump Shotgun, hiding behind a doorway, your left hand mashing on the A and D button while the right occasionally clicked the left mouse button.  Granted, you could play the game like it was supposed to be played if you were some sort of autoaim mutant or were a savescummer willing to put up with the game's hilarious enemy aim RNG.  But unless you fit into those categories, we sure used that there cover, just without a button to help us out.  I don't even want to talk about Max Payne 2.  Okay, there's not really cover in that game.  That's because fights are either 1) hilarious slaughter fests thanks to the completely unbalanced nature of Max's bullet time, or 2) utterly frustrating pokefests when the enemy is a million floors above or below you and you can't hit them worth shit and godDAMN did that game not age well at all.  Max Payne 3's biggest gameplay sins are some big budget on rails sections that demonstrate that your reactions barely matter almost immediately, and a reallllly fucking obnoxious enemy type that takes a million bullets in the head to kill and also has a minigun and what the hell Rockstar.

I'm also not going to talk about multiplayer, because like every other shooter that isn't less than six months old, the whole experience these days is some sort of pseudo-intellectual indie game indictment of your average MOBA's laning phase.  Please consider funding my Kickstarter for 'You are a Creep," where your confused form lumbers across a field, occasionally trading shots with a slightly differently colored form until a cruel god (that has apparently been playing this game since it came out what the FUCK is wrong with you AssSlicer98) ambles by and puts you out of your misery.

No, what I want to talk about is something that apparently only I noticed: this incarnation of Max Payne is the most bummerdude I have ever seen in a video game.

I don't mean he's angsty, though he's naturally that too.  But there's plenty of video game characters that are mopey, staring sadly into the void and boo-hooing.  But I've never been thrust into the virtual self of a character that is so consistently DOWN on itself.  There is not a single five minute stretch in the game where Max is not saying something to the effect of "wow I'm such a shit dude I can't do anything bodyguard more like shoddyguard."

I get that Max Payne has had a rather hard knock life.  But this level of "NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE THE SAD MAN" was never suggested in the first two games.  Max's personality in the first game was a wildly angry murderdude that occasionally had hallucinations about trying to navigate blood bridges.  His personality in the second game was slightly more complex; now he's a slightly less angry murderdude that treated his love interest like a sack of shit.  Max the Second is a little more philosophical, and the game is a little more explicit that Max has some Problems, but nothing at the end of that game suggests that ten years later Max's new dominant personality trait will be talking like Batman in "The Dark Knight Returns."

The worst part about all this is that Max gets progressively whinier about all this as the game progresses.  At the start of game, Max is just sort of surly and bitchy about his shittiness as a bodyguard.  And while certain events do not go Max's way as the game progresses, his dialogue doesn't really reflect any concern about the problems surrounding his situation.  Instead, it's more "I'm so old I'm so shit lucky old man how did I not die."  Which is a problem, because if we've learned anything from these games, it's that Max is an unstoppable murder god.  It's a silly complaint, but it's sort of weird to be playing a game about a dude that goes into room after room full of bad guys while only a bottle of Oxycontin to keep going, and having said dude act like he's Lester the Unlikely.

As far as I can tell, this is mostly Rockstar's attempt to deconstruct that nature of the American action hero that makes everything right.  "I suck" is Max Payne's new motto, but the runner up is "I am a dumb American dumb dumb."  The game demonstrates this by having Max turn into a complete retard when he wanders into a favela and is mugged by streetwise brown people and having the bad guys in the game yell out "YOU ARE A DUMB AMERICAN ACTION HERO MAX BUT BRUCE WILLIS IS NOT REAL" every fucking time they see him.  Okay, there's actually a little more subtext than that, but you'll forgive me if I'm bitter because in order to bring all that subtext in Rockstar removed pretty much any trace of the series's humor, rip in peace lords and ladies.  I'd like to complain more about that but considering what I saw of Rockstar's humor in GTA 4, perhaps it was for the best they just dumped anything funny about the Max Payne series in favor of more grit.

Ultimately, Max Payne 3 is a really good game in my book, because god knows frenetic shooter games that aren't also slobbering blowjobs to outdated FPS concepts are an almost extinct thing.  Especially towards the end, when the game starts to replace its dumb on rails sections for its more elegant cousin, the bad ass semi-scripted gunfight, there's just a nonstop amount of glorious violence.  It's just a shame that the stay in the game world is within the mind of the world's Gloomiest Gus.

also fuck the final boss fight

DIABLO 3: THE REVIEW OF ALL TIMES (spoilers oh no)

I hate writing reviews for well-known stuff.  It's more fun to present opinions on stuff that hasn't been analyzed to death in endless circlejerks.  In Diablo 3's case, I'll make an exception because I believe my mind has two qualities that are generally mutually exclusive:

1) I am an intelligent, analytical human being.
2) I really really liked Diablo 2.

hey did you check kotaku no because I'm at a gamestop launch party

Alot of things have been endlessly mentioned in criticism of Diablo 3, so who fucking cares about that stuff.  Yes, the graphics are like hot topic brand Vaseline rubbed all over my monitor, my attempt to play through the entire campaign with the music on instead of Drive Like Jehu was an exercise in amazingly bad judgment,  latency is really good at making me never want to play hardcore, etc., etc.  I don't give a shit about the opening day problems, since as I am a normal human being these days I logged on at 6 AM and had no problems aside from achievements not working for a few hours, so whatever.  All I can take from that is that gamers are the most obnoxiously entitled fuckheads in history.

My ultimate verdict of Diablo 3, after getting through Nightmare and watching people play through inferno, would be "fairly tragic."  We have a game that was designed by people that either didn't really understand the full appeal of Diablo 2, or, unfortunately far more likely, are very cynically astute in how dumb gamers operate.

The biggest defense I've seen towards attacks on Diablo 3 are WELL REMEMBER DIABLO 2 VANILLA THAT WAS REALLY BAD TOO.  And they're right, Diablo 2 prior to Lord of Destruction was a complete mess of broken builds and limited item availability.  But here's a problem: Lord of Destruction came out already, but Blizzard apparently thinks you'll never remember that.  We are back at square one, with no charms, runewords, synergies, jewels, so on and so forth.  It's not like these concepts didn't work for LoD, so why the hell are they not in the base game?

I gave this guy sixty dollars

I find it hard to understand why there's so much brain-melting bellyaching over launch day outages, but nothing over the fact that Jay Wilson was either too fucking stupid to come up with any improvements to Diablo so he decided to just sweep LoD under a rug, or so dismissive of you and me that he knew that even after ten years, he could release a game missing a shitload of features the previous Diablo had and it would still be a huge critical success.  Fuck, were the launch day outages planned deliberately for this reason?  I've already muted Diablo 3's music, may as well put on Requiem For a Dream and get carted off to a place where they will inject enough sodium pentathol into my diseased brain that I can treat Diablo 2 as a new game.

And while vanilla D2 had some serious fucking problems, it was at least a massive departure from the original Diablo.  Diablo 3's only gameplay differences from Diablo 2 are that we now have a horrible "link skill damage to weapon damage" system and now there are blinky lights to show you were attacks are coming.  I'm sure it sounded great in Wilson's head: "Now I don't have to worry about people placing a million points in a single skill, you can compare all the skills along a single horizontal line!" The problem is, as has already been found out LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER RELEASE, is that this tends to mean that the only attributes that really matter are your vitality, added damage bonuses, and the attribute for your class that adds bigger numbers to your DPS.  Which means you get shit like this.  And then shit like the comments, where a bunch of mongs go ARE YOU IN INFERNO DIDN'T THINK SO THOUGH THAT HAS ABSOLUTELY NO RELEVANCE TO WHAT IS BEING SAID.

coming soon, skynet automatically arranges your bids by greatest contribution to the doomsday clock!

The upside to this is that if the numbers are right, and rares generally severely outclass legendaries, the real money auction house is going to be completely insane with overlapping markets of people wanting the maxx dps yellows intersecting with the dopey people wanting the pretty unique items, both constantly running into each other until value has no meaning and Blizzard has to shut down the markets at least once a week, like a wall street computer contemplating the ultimate fate of mankind.

Of course, the problem is that the fact remains that uniques, especially worthwhile uniques, are clearly going to exist either for people willing to spend money or the really lucky, so remember those rare but still numerous moments of Diablo 2 when a Ber rune dropped from a zombie or an Ethereal Herald of Zakarum was just chilling in a barrel?  Yeah, expect a closer experience to when you were running The Pit 1500 times and your biggest drop was a 4os Colossus Blade.  That is to say, item hunting is going to be less about the visceral thrill of finding brand name items and instead looking for items that are not hype, but mathematically really strongth.  I'll probably stockholm syndrome myself into dealing with this, but still, what a terrible fucking idea.

Of course, maybe I'll be pleasantly wrong, and Blizzard will realize "oh shit we just made this game into a dumber World of Warcraft let's make these impossible to find rare items sexily worth it."

hahaha

Other things of amusing note:

Blizzard didn't even bother to make a complete game, setting wise.  Sure, Act 1 and 4 are unique, but Act 2 is literally the same progression of settings as it was in Diablo 2.  Hey here's a desert city, here's some deserts, here's some mysterious tombs, here's a hub area to mysterious arcane ruins that run in entirely right angles.  They even added a killer bug tunnel, though to be fair, it is not nearly as obnoxious as the Maggot Lair was (did you feel a chill down your back as I typed that out, I did, let's bundle up closer).  The only real difference is that they removed the palace in place of (get ready) MORE SEWER LEVELS *confetti*.

remember me moohahaha

Act III is thankfully not cribbing from swampworld 64, but is instead just shamelessly rips from Act IV and V of Diablo 2.  They only new environment there were square tower floors which were fun until the dozenth iteration of it and you're just like "okay great I get it blizzard you made a new map idea here's a milkbone."

I'd also like to talk about the story.  Diablo 2's was not good literature, but at least there was a theme: failure and weakness.  You are basically always one step behind from stopping the destruction of mankind, Marius basically is a giant weakling unable to do anything despite having the chance to do so.  It's a downcast, simple story helped by the bleak, ugly visuals.

Compare this to Diablo 3, which has no real theme aside from "you are a giant retard badass."  The reason bad stuff happens in Diablo 3 is not because the Prime Evils are just a little faster than you, it's because they left a plate of cookies outside of town and you decided to eat them while all your friends are killed.  There is a  really important distinction between your character failing because of external factors rather than because he or she is incapable of making good decisions while constantly walking into stupidly obvious traps, and Chris Metzen has a six-figure salary because he cannot understand that.  Meanwhile, Marius has been replaced by a young girl with really weird breast physics, and in the classic new Blizzard style, everything is super pretty and ultimately meaningless during cutscenes.

If there's anything I genuinely like in Diablo 3, it's boss monster modifiers.  Baddy packs suddenly have alot of scary ways to kill you, as opposed to the Diablo 2 model of "nothing matters except lightning enchanted."  On the other hand, monsters themselves feel far less creative in their base abilities, especially by the end.  Sneaky coordination like Oblivion Knights casting Iron Maiden on you while you're busy killing their melee buddies is gone, as are the OH FUCK baddies such as Gloams which made Baal running terrifying for summonmancers.  Speaking of Baal running, there's zero areas of the game where enemies lineup changes for each game.  There was a certain anticipation during a run if you were going to get the configuration that favored your class, or if you were going to have to chug pots like a giant baby while running from those exploding skeleton dolls.  Now every area has the same monsters every single time, and while boss modifiers kind of alleviate this, it's not a complete equivalent exchange.

I'm still on the fence about character abilities.  I've been mostly playing the Witch Doctor despite my realization early on that there is no straight up viable summoner class, and while there's lots of neat abilities, even in pre-Inferno it's becoming obvious that some abilities are just incontrovertibly awful compared to others.  With the Witch Doctor, you are literally shooting yourself in the dick if you don't take the escape skill and the damage leech skill, and since you have those, you may as well take two other cooldown abilities so you can have the massive mana regen skill and then oh boy thousands of combinations!!!  This hopefully won't be such an issue with balance patches and, more importantly, the slow influx of godlike items allowing for more experimental builds, but I think if this review represents anything, it's the guarded hope of things being better no thanks to the actual developers.

So ultimately I have this game, and I will probably spend hundreds of hours on it and the expansions.  I'm not proud of this.  Actually, I'm really not proud of this.  But really, the first step of living a true life is accepting our bullshit tendencies towards self-destruction, so who cares?  I've got a boring 1000 DPS dagger to find before my journey will complete, and I can shoot myself in the head without any regrets.

Shoot Many Robots

First of all.

I think I've made the same observation before, but I'd really like to find the patient zero reviewer of this game that came up with the idea that Shoot Many Robots is like Metal Slug with multiplayer.  It's really an amazing hallmark of the game journalism landscape that literally every goddamned review I've read of this game is that same stupid idea, which just makes one wonder if any game reviewers actually played Metal Slug beyond just credit feeding past the first three stages of any of the games, or maybe just played the GBA version.  Or maybe it's something else that I can't think of because my brain pretty much froze at the concept that a game like this is JUST LIKE METAL SLUG.

Look, I understand you're lazy, and it might be hard to explain run and gun shooters to an audience of mongs that depend on arbitrary numbers to determine their cud-chewing opinions.  But saying Shoot Many Robots is like Metal Slug is like saying Castlevania is just like Mega Man.  Like, you're in stages, the A button makes you jump, and B button is what you use to kill your enemies.  Sometimes those enemies have different attack patterns, and there's platforms that might confuse you!

But here's the big thing:  there is already a sub-category of games that are about a million times closer to Shoot Many Robots than the Metal Slug series, and are probably played more anyway!  What I refer to are the literal fuckton of dumb shooter flash games.  You've probably played one, either on Kongregate or Armorgames or (if you're a 12-year-old babby) Newgrounds.  It's always the same shit, where you control your cool gun guy via WASD, and your mouse controls aiming, a little crosshairs roaming around while your cool gun guy's torso twists around in various disability check inducing manners in order to follow that gunsight.

Shoot Many Robots is basically that game, except ten dollars, a grinding mechanic, and marginal multiplayer.  But since I'm a complete idiot for the aforementioned dumb flash games, I sort of like it!

--

The thing that gets me the most about Shoot Many Robots's gameplay is the way turning works.  Basically, where your crosshair/cursor is determines where your guy is actually facing.  If you move in the opposite direction, your dude does a weird little backwards shuffle that will quickly result in you getting overrun.  I realize that the alternative would probably remove whatever challenge the game has, but I still find myself getting swarmed every so often because I tend to follow the path of the bullets than some teeny tiny red crosshair, especially because the game loves randomly zooming and panning, hurting my old man eyes and making me realize I will never be an MLG Pro Diablo 3 player.  Even worse is that the aiming, apparently due to it being originally for console, is imperfect at following the mouse.  Instead there's about 12 pre-defined directions the gun will fire in, being determined by where the cursor is closest.  This isn't a big deal most of the time since you're facing an endless stream of horizontal terror, but when the game throws out floating turrets and shit your only hope at a quick and non-embarrassing victory is jumping into the air and...shooting at them horizontally.

The core gameplay is thus:  two types of stages, one sort of side-scrolling with killer robots, one arena style overwhelm battels with waves of enemies.  There's a combo meter that reminds me of the shitty fucking combo meter from Metal Slug 4 which determine the amount of game money you make.  Game money is what allows you to buy equipment, which is the game's big selling point.  To be fair, there is a ton of pretty clothes and guns in the game with a ton of varied effects, but it falls into the same pits that pretty much any game with adjustable, level-restricted equipment* falls into:

1) You outlevel 95% of the equipment, and thus have no reason to ever get it or play with it to any meaningful degree, and
2) Of the 5% of that equipment remaining for the max level, 4% is completely useless compared to the remaining 1%.  The game doesn't even try to hide which are the best pieces, since they're the ones that are a million times more expensive than everything else.  Good thing there's a cash shop (unggggh)!

Maps are either recycled about a million times or they're so goddamned similar that I got confused.  There's about 4 types of enemies which are reskinned occasionally to hurt you a little more and take a few more gunshots.  You will never ever really need the secondary weapons that require ammo (I still use the ice beam I got near the start of the game, and have no regrets).  There are EXACTLY two bosses, which is really stupid in a genre that arguably depends more on quality boss fights than any other genre.

And yet, I still sort of like it.

A large part of this is because, while the game is mindless mush, it's still vaguely fun in a world where you can't even really find competent run and gun games anymore, and sometimes you don't want to 1cc Metal Slug X for the three dozeneth time or try to find the hidden meaning of Rush N' Attack.  Stuff blows up good, the idea of being able to punch back bullets is fun, and my brain is dumb enough to get a release of endorphin whenever a cool new gun drops for me.  There's so much wrong with this game, but for the most part I worry about breaking the fragile egg because look do you see any other eggs you dumb cock?  I'm aware of my being an indie apologist, but whatever, consistency is for dumb teenagers.

--

There's one thing I cannot logically argue myself around, though:  the fucking online multiplayer functionality.  It is 2012, how in the fuck does this game not have a lobby system of any sort?  If you want to play online with people, you are limited to playing with Steam Budz, or Quick Match.  What is Quick Match?  Most of the time, something you click that after five minutes of waiting, shunts you back to the menu screen.  If you're lucky enough to get in a game, you have an equal chance of the following:

1) Having everyone leave the game immediately
2) Going to a stage that you are way way too strong for while your teammates are severely underequipped, forcing you to hang back like a protective baby bear because the Shoot Many Robots community is fucking shit at these sorts of games
3) The opposite experience, where you end up hanging out with max level super equipped death dealers in an endgame level where it would take five minutes for you to kill anything, resulting in you getting tons of XP and superior equipment that you won't be able to equip until you reach max level.

I reached the level cap of 50 without playing a single game where I didn't feel I was either completely wasting my time or being a complete waste for my team.  Of course, this could have been solved by creating an open lobby system where you could start games on the stage you were designed to be on and other people could join up too, but I guess that would have required effort.  So now we have a game where you are either the powerleveller or the powerlevelled.