Recent reviews by E-Commerce Meatualization Inc

poker is goty

Just started a new play through because I need to play this game again it's that good. If you ever see it on sale don't even second guess picking it up.

Mandatory Gaming.

Pretty simple and chill game. No fall damage is a huge plus. Snag it if it goes on sale.

you can pee as much as you want

some of my favorite games are loosely simulating what it's like to have a good paying job without the BS that comes with having a good paying job.

If you have no other way to play crash games, go for it. Tons of people on steam love this port.

If you can play the originals somehow they're just better games imo. More responsive, controls are tight and you don't have to cheese jumps or fight with the weird jump-box hit-boxes. They standardized the handling across all games which makes the first entry more frustrating than difficult. After several hours of trying to figure out how the obstacle hitboxes work I decided to give the original playstation copy a shot to see if I'm just getting old and bad at retro 3d platformers.

I am getting old, but theoriginal controls feel better in every way. Jump-boxes just work, and jump timing fits with the level design. Plus the original has a certain janksthetic that worked on playstation 3d platformers. Original feels arcade-y, balanced, and intentional, the remaster feels like a shovelware game you'd get for $5 at burger king if they did that again.

The art style in this game is very generic and doesn't seem like they were even trying to recapture the corny/goofy art style of the original. If I can describe the art direction it's "try and make everything look kind of realistic, but not too realistic." It's neither photorealistic or stylized. Just plain with a ton of plain details. Sometimes it looks nice, but it rarely looks cohesive at all.

Hard to recommend because outside of the art it feels super generic. Cool stuff happens... sometimes. The idea is neat, and some of the over-worlds make it worth checking out if it's on a good sale, but it's been about 2 years since I've played this and even the cool stuff doesn't have me itching to go back at all.

Maybe one day i'll replay this and might actually like it as much as I wanted to, but atmosphere alone is a hell of a crutch to prop up mediocrity with. At least I didn't run into problems like almost every single AAA game I've played in the past 5 years or so. So I do have to applaud the developers for putting out something that works as intended.

Ultimately it's a case of the trailers being more interesting than the game.

feels poorly optimized

edit: came back to this with a better pc and am in awe at the absolute trash this game is after years of updates. 1080p at maybe 80fps if I'm lucky on a 6900 xt and 5950, less than 50% gpu utilization, less than 25% cpu utilization. Enemies seem to not even be in sync with my instance. Lots of lag.

Turns out throwing way more computing power at something that's an absolute disappointment will in fact give you an extra 7 fps or so

still fun

Update. (Story mode only)

Now that I've played this for ~200 hours i'm revising my review.

Is it still fun? Yes and no.

Graphics are fine still as long as you play on Ultra. Anything below ultra knocks the 8.5/10 graphics to 4/10 (and that 4/10 is for "high" textures, yes it's that big of a downgrade). Blown away that people still think this is one of the best looking games of all time, when to me it looks like it's aging about as hard as the first RDR did (which I consider a better game overall). If you're playing past 1080p you might notice how badly the ultra-textures are aging but luckily there's an annoying vignette you can't turn off in the setting which hides a ton of this. The lighting and volumetrics do so much of the heavy lifting you'd think they'd be a bit more optimized several years after release but this isn't how modern AAA companies do business, so ymmv.

Controls are really clunky. I mean 5/10 clunky. It's easy to forgive the controls while you're playing through the story for dozens of hours and you aren't playing any other game. Some might argue Arthur being sluggish and questionably responsive to controls is by design. Well that's bad design. It's a game not a visual novel. Play BotW or TotK and you'll immediately know what I mean. Hell, play older games. I don't know what the obsession with selective realism is with game companies these days but that makes for a poor player experience imo. Solid responsive controls don't taint the experience or take you out of immersion, and to be frank, selective realism ruins immersion because you keep asking yourself "why did x happen but y works fine" which constantly reminds you you're playing a game designed to be selectively realistic. The horses follow mechanic is easily one of the worst implementations of a quality of life feature in any game I've ever played, and you'll know what i'm talking about the first time the cinematic camera inverts controls on you and suddenly you're horse stops following a guide character and you fail a mission. (basically don't use the follow feature when in cinematic mode).

You'll constantly find yourself in "puzzle" situations, i.e. not actual puzzles, just "how do I pick up one item that my character can't seem to see even though it's right there and i can't maneuver Arthur anywhere to where he notices it because there are two items next it it that I can't pick up because my inventory slots for those items are maxed out so I guess i'll use those items in my inventory to clear the slots so I can pick them up so Arthur notices the third item that I actually want to pick up." Small gripe, sure, but when you're doing this several times an hour the entirety of your play-throughs, that's a wild amount of time.

Story is great. They did retcon stuff which doesn't take away anything from the story imo. It's nice to play an open-world game with a linear fleshed out story. I'd say the story is about on par with the first game, but the newer cinematic presentation might trick you into thinking it's a much better story than the first game. The cinematic presentation of the game is an experience in and of itself for sure, but don't conflate presentation with the actual plot of the story. The story itself is on par with some of the better stories in games over the past decade or so, and it does have depth to it that'll be missed by the vast majority of players, especially those who complain about the story's linearity. Very few games with open ended/branching storylines do a good job of having anything to say beyond "yeah so this happens because that's the branch you're on." I honestly can't think of a single AAA game with an open ended story that has real depth to it. That being said, the story is pretty on par with other great stories in games. Not as deep as stuff like "Death Stranding" or really quite a few Square Enix games but for a newer game from an older studio it's about as good as you're going to get. Truth be told if you play games for the story you aren't playing AAA games, you're playing indie games.

Why did I change to thumbs down?

The biggest reason is hassle. You pay for a single player game and you are hassled to sign in to a separate launcher. I play this on story mode, single player. Which means I have to maintain a Rockstar account. For one game. How many accounts for single player games should I have to make, I'm up to three rn. NBD right? Three additional passwords and accounts I have to maintain and keep track of in addition to steam. And there have been quite a few new games i'm just not getting because of this. I'm tire of needing to log in to separate accounts or create separate accounts to play games. THPS remakes? Would love to play those but that would be a fourth account I have to create and keep track of. I'm done making accounts for every little thing, it's dumb, it's a waste of time, it's a hassle. Just not recommending games anymore based on that. I'm not buying anymore games that require this. I'm begging everyone to not buy games that require jumping through hoops to play, because the more hoops people are willing to jump through, the more hoops companies will add. It's called threshold testing and it's predatory.

The game is also finicky, super finicky. Poorly optimized imo. You'll spend an amount of time tuning the setting to reduce microstuttering if you're system will even run it. You'll even get microstuttering above 100fps which is insane to see in any game. You can minimize it and even use motion blur to hide a good bit of it, but I've never seen a game running over 100fps have microstutter like this. Ultra textures are basically mandatory as mentioned above, because high textures are a joke.

If you still want to pay rockstar for this game, I'm not going to stop you. But I strongly recommend visiting the steam discussion page before you commit so you aren't surprised if you have to spend hours troubleshooting this game to get it to run acceptably on your system.

Because steam's refund window is 2 hours iirc.