Guess who beat the Resident Evil 3 remake for PS5 on Standard?
Onward to the RE4 remake.
I hope the 2-4 REmakes will get Switch 2 ports after the 7-9 ports. Also, remakes of 0, 1, Code Veronica and 5 & 6.
Games Beaten 2025
-
PartridgeSenpai
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 3187
- Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2015 9:27 am
- Location: Northern Japan
Re: Games Beaten 2025
Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1~50
51~100
101. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (N64)
102. Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa (Famicom)
103. Panic Restaurant (NES)
104. Mr. Gimmick (NES)
105. Bucky O'Hare (NES)
106. Wheel of Fortune (N64)
107. Resident Evil 2 (PS1)
108. Dragon Quest VI (SFC)
109. Ninja Gaiden (NES)
110. StarTropics (NES)
111. Parody World: Monster Party (Famicom)
112. Super Mario Bros 2 (NES)
113. Kamen No Ninja Hanamaru (Famicom)
114. Power Blade (NES)
115. Power Blazer (Famicom)
116. Metroid (NES)
117. Kid Icarus (NES)
118. New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U) *
119. Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Juurokubee no Karakuri Manjigatame (SFC)
120. Hitman: Blood Money (Xbox 360)
121. Super Bonk (SNES)
122. Plok (SNES)
123. Batman: The Video Game (NES)
124. Power Blade 2 (NES)
125. Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (NES)
126. Phantasy Star (SMS)
127. Solomon's Key (Famicom)
128. Solomon's Key 2 (Famicom)
129. Panel De Pon (SFC)
130. Ice Climber (Famicom)
131. True Crime: Streets of LA (PS2)
132. True Crime: New York City (PS2)
133. Mafia III (PS4)
134. F.E.A.R. 3 (Steam)
This is a game I watched a Let’s Play of well over a decade ago (just as I did with the other Fear games), and I’ve also owned it for quite a while on Steam, but as is so often the case with such things, it went unplayed forever <w>. Forever, that is, until my friend asked me if I’d like to stream it with her! We streamed Kane & Lynch 2 (another infamous co-op game) a couple years ago and had a great time, so of course I leapt at the chance to stream with her again. Unlike with K&L2, though, I was actually familiar enough with this game to think it’d be nowhere near as rotten and jank a time as that’d been. She accidentally knocked it down to easy mode after the first mission and we couldn’t change it back, and it took us around 4.5 hours to finish the English version of the game on easy mode (with her as Point Man and myself as Fettel) getting the Fettel ending.
Fear 3 is the bizarre conclusion (because they never made any more <w> ) to the F.E.A.R. trilogy. After Alma (scary psychic ghost girl/lady) got pregnant at the end of Fear 2, that pregnancy now threatens to rip apart the very fabric of reality. The Armacham Technology Corporation’s military goons are working frantically to find her and put a stop to this (and perhaps salvage something of their company out of this rapidly spiraling mess), and one part of that has been kidnapping Point Man to interrogate him on Alma’s whereabouts in some prison compound in Brazil (for some reason). Fettel, however, still very much not at rest despite being dead is clearly no fan of this. His ghostly self breaks Point Man out of prison and the two of them begin their journey to find Alma and put a stop to all of this.
I’m sure that sounds like a lot to take in at face value, and that’s because it is XD. Fear 3 attempts to “make a trilogy” (to use the words of one of its writers) of the Fear series, and to that effort it makes a lot of really weird decisions. In total fairness to the team who made it (who had a hell of an awful time making it thanks to WB’s awful management), they were between a real rock and a hard place with just how messed up an ending Monolith gave to Fear 2. There are a lot of things done for very unclear reasons, and the ending of the game in particular has a real “scene missing” vibe to it with just how murky the reasons for the conclusion actually happening are. I personally had a lot of fun with just how absurdly over the top the story is, but it’s impossible to describe it any way other than messy.
And there’s a lot of fun to be had with it, honestly! I’m not sure the developers necessarily intended the ways in which this game’s narrative is such silly fun, but I enjoyed it for those reasons nonetheless XD. A key point about Point Man (other than how absurd it is that they just kept that filler occupation-based name from the first Fear) is that he never speaks. It’s pretty reasonable for the game Fear 1 is to just have a silent protagonist, but that Point Man also never has a face either. This Point Man has a face and a proper character model so he can appear in cutscenes, and a firm scowl is basically all you’ll ever see from him XD. His dead brother and partner in crime, Fettel, on the other hand, is such a loud personality that they make a hilarious combo. Fettel is both so maniacal and petty in how he both mocks people for being inferior to him and also complains about his brother killing him (something he almost explicitly asked for in the first game!) that, especially in co-op, we just could not stop laughing at how gloriously silly this whole weirdo adventure ends up being.
That said, I do think there actually IS something more to Fear 3’s narrative than just “scene missing”-tinged weirdo comedy. I think there’s actually quite a decent story about breaking cycles of abuse in Fear 3’s story, even if it’s hardly at the forefront of the narrative. It involves looking fairly deep into Point Man’s character (so much as he has one) to get an idea of the person he is via the person he’s not: Fettel. Fettel is continuing the violent, selfish actions of his parents, Alma and Harland Wade. Alma was also a terribly abused and traumatized child, and with a jerk like Harland Wade as her caretaker/father figure, it’s no surprise that she ended up becoming such a violent monster in her afterlife: She never knew any other way to be. Point Man deciding to put both his brother and mother to rest rather than chase the godhood his brother craves demonstrates a desire to end that cycle of abuse even if Point Man himself is hardly a saint. Again, this is hardly the main selling point of the narrative, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a completely unintended reading by the authors in the first place, but it was nonetheless a very interesting thought experiment to try and suss out a main theme from this game’s bonkers story.
The story is decently well known for being bonkers, but I’d say the most infamous part of Fear 3 is probably it’s supposedly lackluster gameplay compared to its predecessors. Fear 1 was very well known for creating a good balance of John Woo-inspired slow-mo action nonsense alongside tense, quite horror sections. Whether you agree with that assessment of Fear 1 or not (and I’m more so in the camp of the latter myself), Fear 3 got a lot of hate at release and since for being decidedly very much not that. The guys at Day 1 Studios wanted to make a survival horror-y game much more like the first game, but WB’s executive was determined to let them make nothing less than a Call of Duty-inspired co-op shooter, and that’s what we got instead. However, as much as Fear 3 may not live up to being some grand, terrifying successor to Fear 1, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Appreciating what it is rather than preemptively hating it for what it isn’t, I found Fear 3 to be a really fun co-op shooter!
Fear 3 leans into the shooting and action aspects far more than the horror. The co-op aspect makes it pretty impossible for much horror in the first place, but Day 1 Studios seem to have taken that to heart and made a more horror-themed shooter rather than trying to make a particularly scary game (making lemonade from lemons, one could say). The default play experience for Fear 3 is just playing as Point Man if you’re playing single-player. If you’re playing it co-op with someone else, though, you sadly don’t get a choice of playable character. The person hosting the game (player 1) is always Point Man, and the person joining the game (player 2) is always Fettel. That kinda sucks, but at least you unlock the ability to play as Fettel if you complete a level as Point Man in the single-player mode.
Point Man more or less plays as he usually does. He’s got guns, melee stuff, grenades, and the usual pile of shooty bang weapons that he can carry two of at a time. Naturally, in the tradition of Fear games, he also has his slow-mo powers as well, and he can slow down time for his “super quick reflexes” to do some blasting around in bullet time as well. That’s all well and good, and it’ll likely feel at least generally familiar to anyone who’s played a Fear game before. Fettel, however, is a very different story, and the ability to play as him was the main reason I was so excited to play this in co-op with my friend. Fear 3 isn’t just a co-op shooter but a co-op shooter built around asymmetric multiplayer design.
Fettel is very unlike Point Man in personality, but the same goes for mechanics as well. For starters, Fettel is a ghost, and therefore can’t really interact with things outside of pulling switches or pushing buttons to navigate the environment. He can’t even pick up guns, and while he can certainly be shot at and killed by the Armacham mercenaries out to kill you (who can see him for whatever reason), all he can normally do to defend himself is shoot back pitifully weak ghost blasts from his hands. He can levitate enemy soldiers to immobilize them for Point Man to shoot at, and he can also give Point Man a remarkably powerful shield if he chooses (almost like a TF2 medic), but he doesn’t even have Point Man’s slow-mo powers to defend him. This would give the impression that Fettel is obviously the far weaker of the two brothers, but that’s absolutely not the case because of the power he DOES have: body snatching.
While it’s fatal for the possessed person, Fettel’s special ability is to steal the body of an enemy he’s levitated off the ground. Once in a body, Fettel has all their weapons and abilities, and he can pick up guns and grenades to play more or less like Point Man can. This may not sound like much, but the ability to hop WAY behind enemy lines and start flanking them from the back while Point Man assaults them from the front is a truly terrifyingly powerful ability to have at your disposal, especially since Fettel can take advantage of Point Man’s slow-mo too (he just can’t activate it himself). The only danger is that Fettel can only stay in a body as long as his possession bar stays not empty for, so taking power pickups from downed enemies is a must if you wanna keep your body. You can’t possess again until that power bar is full either, so being careful to not lose your new body and be reduced to weak little normal Fettel is an essential part of strategizing as the little brother of the two. Sure, the campaign is fairly short and the guns can feel a bit wimpy in places (especially just how pitiful the shotgun is compared to how legendarily busted the Fear 1 shotgun was), but just how strong the multiplayer experience is makes up for that SO much that Fear 3 is a super easy recommendation if you’ve got a buddy to laugh along and heck stuff up with.
The last meaningful note about the multiplayer are the challenges and point system. There are challenges for each player in each level that they can fulfill to get points. There are several kinds of them, but it’s mostly just down to how well you’re playing and how many kills you’re getting. Whichever brother gets the most points determines which ending you’ll get, but more importantly, more points also levels you up to new ranks. More ranks can unlock new passives as well as expand your respective brother’s special power bar, so more points is always more fun. This lends the game a kind of co-optional hostility to playing together. Do you go for more kills to make yourself more powerful and lean things towards your ending, or do you share the points to give you both a better chance at victory? There are even special hidden bodies you can interact with in each level (that actually don’t always appear in the same place, interestingly enough) that you can use for more points as well. Do you share the points between the two of you, or do you steal them for only yourself? I honestly wish there were more interactions between the brothers’ powers other than just the levitating enemies and shielding Point Man, because the strength of the multiplayer mode is the main selling point of this game, as far as I’m concerned. While it’s certainly good enough to make a fun romp with a buddy, I think a more modern and dedicated take on this kind of asymmetric multiplayer could really have something brilliant in the right team’s hands.
The aesthetics of the game are stuff I’m kinda mixed on but still generally positive. On one hand, this game is made by a different team and came out like 6 years later, but it’s always been jarring for me JUST how different this looks from the original Fear. I think this is largely a good thing (like Jin looking much more Korean rather than a more generic Hot Girl™ like she does in the original Fear), but it still takes some getting used to the new art style for how a returning character like Fettel looks. The game’s art style is a bit comic book-y in its stylization, and even if it can make people like the cultist enemies look a bit funky at times, I still quite like it. It means the game has aged a lot better visually than a lot of other PS3-era games that aimed harder for realism, and the really heavy use of color in the environments (compared to a lot of other shooters) helps things have some personality despite the greys and browns still in relatively heavy use at this point in FPS design.
The music is nothing to write home about, but the voice performances are really good! Fettel is really the main voice you’re hearing, but even when this was just a game I was casually watching a Let’s Play of, I’ve always loved how much creepy arrogance his VA brings to the role. He manages to make Point Man and Fettel a much more engaging duo despite the inability of one of them to speak, and his over-the-top performance also brings SO much of that fun, ridiculous aspects to how silly and funny this game gets X3
The game’s performance is overall pretty good too. Granted I’m playing this on a mid-range PC from like 5 years ago, so it’s hardly a beast compared to modern machines, but it’s also pretty top of the line compared to the hardware that would’ve been new at the time this was released. The frame rate and such largely behaved quite well, and the only real issues came from internet connectivity issues. I’m basically on the other side of the world from my co-op buddy, so we had some instances where it was pretty clear that some weird math was happening between us (like enemies dying or spawning in ways that were too instant to keep animations), but it remained remarkably playable despite the less than ideal distance between us! We only ever had one crash too, and it was because the connection to the host was lost. That was a bummer, sure, but Fear 3 actually is remarkably well tooled to handle these sorts of errors. Not only could we hop back in right from our last checkpoint, but the game also remembered how many points and challenges we’d respectively done up to that point! I’ve had some really awful headaches trying to get older PC games to play nice over the years, and it was really nice to have the only pain with Fear 3 being that the tool tips for controls on PC always give the keyboard key bindings rather than controller buttons even if you’re using a controller (like I was).
Verdict: Recommended. I honestly never expected to have a great time with this game, but I was very pleasantly surprised! It’s not the best game ever, but I think this game is WILDLY over hated online for no good reason other than it’s not the imagined Fear sequel that people think it should be. If you approach Fear 3 from the perspective of appreciating it for what it is rather than what it isn’t, then it’s a remarkably fun and competently put together shooter. Especially if you’ve got a buddy to play through the co-op mode with, then this is a great, silly choice to spend a weekend with~ ^w^
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1~50
102. Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa (Famicom)
103. Panic Restaurant (NES)
104. Mr. Gimmick (NES)
105. Bucky O'Hare (NES)
106. Wheel of Fortune (N64)
107. Resident Evil 2 (PS1)
108. Dragon Quest VI (SFC)
109. Ninja Gaiden (NES)
110. StarTropics (NES)
111. Parody World: Monster Party (Famicom)
112. Super Mario Bros 2 (NES)
113. Kamen No Ninja Hanamaru (Famicom)
114. Power Blade (NES)
115. Power Blazer (Famicom)
116. Metroid (NES)
117. Kid Icarus (NES)
118. New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U) *
119. Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Juurokubee no Karakuri Manjigatame (SFC)
120. Hitman: Blood Money (Xbox 360)
121. Super Bonk (SNES)
122. Plok (SNES)
123. Batman: The Video Game (NES)
124. Power Blade 2 (NES)
125. Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (NES)
126. Phantasy Star (SMS)
127. Solomon's Key (Famicom)
128. Solomon's Key 2 (Famicom)
129. Panel De Pon (SFC)
130. Ice Climber (Famicom)
131. True Crime: Streets of LA (PS2)
132. True Crime: New York City (PS2)
133. Mafia III (PS4)
134. F.E.A.R. 3 (Steam)
This is a game I watched a Let’s Play of well over a decade ago (just as I did with the other Fear games), and I’ve also owned it for quite a while on Steam, but as is so often the case with such things, it went unplayed forever <w>. Forever, that is, until my friend asked me if I’d like to stream it with her! We streamed Kane & Lynch 2 (another infamous co-op game) a couple years ago and had a great time, so of course I leapt at the chance to stream with her again. Unlike with K&L2, though, I was actually familiar enough with this game to think it’d be nowhere near as rotten and jank a time as that’d been. She accidentally knocked it down to easy mode after the first mission and we couldn’t change it back, and it took us around 4.5 hours to finish the English version of the game on easy mode (with her as Point Man and myself as Fettel) getting the Fettel ending.
Fear 3 is the bizarre conclusion (because they never made any more <w> ) to the F.E.A.R. trilogy. After Alma (scary psychic ghost girl/lady) got pregnant at the end of Fear 2, that pregnancy now threatens to rip apart the very fabric of reality. The Armacham Technology Corporation’s military goons are working frantically to find her and put a stop to this (and perhaps salvage something of their company out of this rapidly spiraling mess), and one part of that has been kidnapping Point Man to interrogate him on Alma’s whereabouts in some prison compound in Brazil (for some reason). Fettel, however, still very much not at rest despite being dead is clearly no fan of this. His ghostly self breaks Point Man out of prison and the two of them begin their journey to find Alma and put a stop to all of this.
I’m sure that sounds like a lot to take in at face value, and that’s because it is XD. Fear 3 attempts to “make a trilogy” (to use the words of one of its writers) of the Fear series, and to that effort it makes a lot of really weird decisions. In total fairness to the team who made it (who had a hell of an awful time making it thanks to WB’s awful management), they were between a real rock and a hard place with just how messed up an ending Monolith gave to Fear 2. There are a lot of things done for very unclear reasons, and the ending of the game in particular has a real “scene missing” vibe to it with just how murky the reasons for the conclusion actually happening are. I personally had a lot of fun with just how absurdly over the top the story is, but it’s impossible to describe it any way other than messy.
And there’s a lot of fun to be had with it, honestly! I’m not sure the developers necessarily intended the ways in which this game’s narrative is such silly fun, but I enjoyed it for those reasons nonetheless XD. A key point about Point Man (other than how absurd it is that they just kept that filler occupation-based name from the first Fear) is that he never speaks. It’s pretty reasonable for the game Fear 1 is to just have a silent protagonist, but that Point Man also never has a face either. This Point Man has a face and a proper character model so he can appear in cutscenes, and a firm scowl is basically all you’ll ever see from him XD. His dead brother and partner in crime, Fettel, on the other hand, is such a loud personality that they make a hilarious combo. Fettel is both so maniacal and petty in how he both mocks people for being inferior to him and also complains about his brother killing him (something he almost explicitly asked for in the first game!) that, especially in co-op, we just could not stop laughing at how gloriously silly this whole weirdo adventure ends up being.
That said, I do think there actually IS something more to Fear 3’s narrative than just “scene missing”-tinged weirdo comedy. I think there’s actually quite a decent story about breaking cycles of abuse in Fear 3’s story, even if it’s hardly at the forefront of the narrative. It involves looking fairly deep into Point Man’s character (so much as he has one) to get an idea of the person he is via the person he’s not: Fettel. Fettel is continuing the violent, selfish actions of his parents, Alma and Harland Wade. Alma was also a terribly abused and traumatized child, and with a jerk like Harland Wade as her caretaker/father figure, it’s no surprise that she ended up becoming such a violent monster in her afterlife: She never knew any other way to be. Point Man deciding to put both his brother and mother to rest rather than chase the godhood his brother craves demonstrates a desire to end that cycle of abuse even if Point Man himself is hardly a saint. Again, this is hardly the main selling point of the narrative, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a completely unintended reading by the authors in the first place, but it was nonetheless a very interesting thought experiment to try and suss out a main theme from this game’s bonkers story.
The story is decently well known for being bonkers, but I’d say the most infamous part of Fear 3 is probably it’s supposedly lackluster gameplay compared to its predecessors. Fear 1 was very well known for creating a good balance of John Woo-inspired slow-mo action nonsense alongside tense, quite horror sections. Whether you agree with that assessment of Fear 1 or not (and I’m more so in the camp of the latter myself), Fear 3 got a lot of hate at release and since for being decidedly very much not that. The guys at Day 1 Studios wanted to make a survival horror-y game much more like the first game, but WB’s executive was determined to let them make nothing less than a Call of Duty-inspired co-op shooter, and that’s what we got instead. However, as much as Fear 3 may not live up to being some grand, terrifying successor to Fear 1, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Appreciating what it is rather than preemptively hating it for what it isn’t, I found Fear 3 to be a really fun co-op shooter!
Fear 3 leans into the shooting and action aspects far more than the horror. The co-op aspect makes it pretty impossible for much horror in the first place, but Day 1 Studios seem to have taken that to heart and made a more horror-themed shooter rather than trying to make a particularly scary game (making lemonade from lemons, one could say). The default play experience for Fear 3 is just playing as Point Man if you’re playing single-player. If you’re playing it co-op with someone else, though, you sadly don’t get a choice of playable character. The person hosting the game (player 1) is always Point Man, and the person joining the game (player 2) is always Fettel. That kinda sucks, but at least you unlock the ability to play as Fettel if you complete a level as Point Man in the single-player mode.
Point Man more or less plays as he usually does. He’s got guns, melee stuff, grenades, and the usual pile of shooty bang weapons that he can carry two of at a time. Naturally, in the tradition of Fear games, he also has his slow-mo powers as well, and he can slow down time for his “super quick reflexes” to do some blasting around in bullet time as well. That’s all well and good, and it’ll likely feel at least generally familiar to anyone who’s played a Fear game before. Fettel, however, is a very different story, and the ability to play as him was the main reason I was so excited to play this in co-op with my friend. Fear 3 isn’t just a co-op shooter but a co-op shooter built around asymmetric multiplayer design.
Fettel is very unlike Point Man in personality, but the same goes for mechanics as well. For starters, Fettel is a ghost, and therefore can’t really interact with things outside of pulling switches or pushing buttons to navigate the environment. He can’t even pick up guns, and while he can certainly be shot at and killed by the Armacham mercenaries out to kill you (who can see him for whatever reason), all he can normally do to defend himself is shoot back pitifully weak ghost blasts from his hands. He can levitate enemy soldiers to immobilize them for Point Man to shoot at, and he can also give Point Man a remarkably powerful shield if he chooses (almost like a TF2 medic), but he doesn’t even have Point Man’s slow-mo powers to defend him. This would give the impression that Fettel is obviously the far weaker of the two brothers, but that’s absolutely not the case because of the power he DOES have: body snatching.
While it’s fatal for the possessed person, Fettel’s special ability is to steal the body of an enemy he’s levitated off the ground. Once in a body, Fettel has all their weapons and abilities, and he can pick up guns and grenades to play more or less like Point Man can. This may not sound like much, but the ability to hop WAY behind enemy lines and start flanking them from the back while Point Man assaults them from the front is a truly terrifyingly powerful ability to have at your disposal, especially since Fettel can take advantage of Point Man’s slow-mo too (he just can’t activate it himself). The only danger is that Fettel can only stay in a body as long as his possession bar stays not empty for, so taking power pickups from downed enemies is a must if you wanna keep your body. You can’t possess again until that power bar is full either, so being careful to not lose your new body and be reduced to weak little normal Fettel is an essential part of strategizing as the little brother of the two. Sure, the campaign is fairly short and the guns can feel a bit wimpy in places (especially just how pitiful the shotgun is compared to how legendarily busted the Fear 1 shotgun was), but just how strong the multiplayer experience is makes up for that SO much that Fear 3 is a super easy recommendation if you’ve got a buddy to laugh along and heck stuff up with.
The last meaningful note about the multiplayer are the challenges and point system. There are challenges for each player in each level that they can fulfill to get points. There are several kinds of them, but it’s mostly just down to how well you’re playing and how many kills you’re getting. Whichever brother gets the most points determines which ending you’ll get, but more importantly, more points also levels you up to new ranks. More ranks can unlock new passives as well as expand your respective brother’s special power bar, so more points is always more fun. This lends the game a kind of co-optional hostility to playing together. Do you go for more kills to make yourself more powerful and lean things towards your ending, or do you share the points to give you both a better chance at victory? There are even special hidden bodies you can interact with in each level (that actually don’t always appear in the same place, interestingly enough) that you can use for more points as well. Do you share the points between the two of you, or do you steal them for only yourself? I honestly wish there were more interactions between the brothers’ powers other than just the levitating enemies and shielding Point Man, because the strength of the multiplayer mode is the main selling point of this game, as far as I’m concerned. While it’s certainly good enough to make a fun romp with a buddy, I think a more modern and dedicated take on this kind of asymmetric multiplayer could really have something brilliant in the right team’s hands.
The aesthetics of the game are stuff I’m kinda mixed on but still generally positive. On one hand, this game is made by a different team and came out like 6 years later, but it’s always been jarring for me JUST how different this looks from the original Fear. I think this is largely a good thing (like Jin looking much more Korean rather than a more generic Hot Girl™ like she does in the original Fear), but it still takes some getting used to the new art style for how a returning character like Fettel looks. The game’s art style is a bit comic book-y in its stylization, and even if it can make people like the cultist enemies look a bit funky at times, I still quite like it. It means the game has aged a lot better visually than a lot of other PS3-era games that aimed harder for realism, and the really heavy use of color in the environments (compared to a lot of other shooters) helps things have some personality despite the greys and browns still in relatively heavy use at this point in FPS design.
The music is nothing to write home about, but the voice performances are really good! Fettel is really the main voice you’re hearing, but even when this was just a game I was casually watching a Let’s Play of, I’ve always loved how much creepy arrogance his VA brings to the role. He manages to make Point Man and Fettel a much more engaging duo despite the inability of one of them to speak, and his over-the-top performance also brings SO much of that fun, ridiculous aspects to how silly and funny this game gets X3
The game’s performance is overall pretty good too. Granted I’m playing this on a mid-range PC from like 5 years ago, so it’s hardly a beast compared to modern machines, but it’s also pretty top of the line compared to the hardware that would’ve been new at the time this was released. The frame rate and such largely behaved quite well, and the only real issues came from internet connectivity issues. I’m basically on the other side of the world from my co-op buddy, so we had some instances where it was pretty clear that some weird math was happening between us (like enemies dying or spawning in ways that were too instant to keep animations), but it remained remarkably playable despite the less than ideal distance between us! We only ever had one crash too, and it was because the connection to the host was lost. That was a bummer, sure, but Fear 3 actually is remarkably well tooled to handle these sorts of errors. Not only could we hop back in right from our last checkpoint, but the game also remembered how many points and challenges we’d respectively done up to that point! I’ve had some really awful headaches trying to get older PC games to play nice over the years, and it was really nice to have the only pain with Fear 3 being that the tool tips for controls on PC always give the keyboard key bindings rather than controller buttons even if you’re using a controller (like I was).
Verdict: Recommended. I honestly never expected to have a great time with this game, but I was very pleasantly surprised! It’s not the best game ever, but I think this game is WILDLY over hated online for no good reason other than it’s not the imagined Fear sequel that people think it should be. If you approach Fear 3 from the perspective of appreciating it for what it is rather than what it isn’t, then it’s a remarkably fun and competently put together shooter. Especially if you’ve got a buddy to play through the co-op mode with, then this is a great, silly choice to spend a weekend with~ ^w^
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
-
PartridgeSenpai
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 3187
- Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2015 9:27 am
- Location: Northern Japan
Re: Games Beaten 2025
Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1~50
51~100
101. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (N64)
102. Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa (Famicom)
103. Panic Restaurant (NES)
104. Mr. Gimmick (NES)
105. Bucky O'Hare (NES)
106. Wheel of Fortune (N64)
107. Resident Evil 2 (PS1)
108. Dragon Quest VI (SFC)
109. Ninja Gaiden (NES)
110. StarTropics (NES)
111. Parody World: Monster Party (Famicom)
112. Super Mario Bros 2 (NES)
113. Kamen No Ninja Hanamaru (Famicom)
114. Power Blade (NES)
115. Power Blazer (Famicom)
116. Metroid (NES)
117. Kid Icarus (NES)
118. New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U) *
119. Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Juurokubee no Karakuri Manjigatame (SFC)
120. Hitman: Blood Money (Xbox 360)
121. Super Bonk (SNES)
122. Plok (SNES)
123. Batman: The Video Game (NES)
124. Power Blade 2 (NES)
125. Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (NES)
126. Phantasy Star (SMS)
127. Solomon's Key (Famicom)
128. Solomon's Key 2 (Famicom)
129. Panel De Pon (SFC)
130. Ice Climber (Famicom)
131. True Crime: Streets of LA (PS2)
132. True Crime: New York City (PS2)
133. Mafia III (PS4)
134. F.E.A.R. 3 (Steam)
135. F.E.A.R. (Steam)
----
136. F.E.A.R. Extraction Point (Steam)
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1~50
102. Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa (Famicom)
103. Panic Restaurant (NES)
104. Mr. Gimmick (NES)
105. Bucky O'Hare (NES)
106. Wheel of Fortune (N64)
107. Resident Evil 2 (PS1)
108. Dragon Quest VI (SFC)
109. Ninja Gaiden (NES)
110. StarTropics (NES)
111. Parody World: Monster Party (Famicom)
112. Super Mario Bros 2 (NES)
113. Kamen No Ninja Hanamaru (Famicom)
114. Power Blade (NES)
115. Power Blazer (Famicom)
116. Metroid (NES)
117. Kid Icarus (NES)
118. New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U) *
119. Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Juurokubee no Karakuri Manjigatame (SFC)
120. Hitman: Blood Money (Xbox 360)
121. Super Bonk (SNES)
122. Plok (SNES)
123. Batman: The Video Game (NES)
124. Power Blade 2 (NES)
125. Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (NES)
126. Phantasy Star (SMS)
127. Solomon's Key (Famicom)
128. Solomon's Key 2 (Famicom)
129. Panel De Pon (SFC)
130. Ice Climber (Famicom)
131. True Crime: Streets of LA (PS2)
132. True Crime: New York City (PS2)
133. Mafia III (PS4)
134. F.E.A.R. 3 (Steam)
135. F.E.A.R. (Steam)
136. F.E.A.R. Extraction Point (Steam)
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
Re: Games Beaten 2025
Beat The Birdcage for Android, a puzzle game where each level has you trying to unlock a birdcage by completing a series of puzzles.
Might also tackle the next game in the series.
Might also tackle the next game in the series.
Re: Games Beaten 2025
Ugh, calling it slo-mo nonsense hurts my soul.If the whole slow-mo nonsense fighting
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
Re: Games Beaten 2025
First 50:
51. Brazilian Drug Dealer 3 (FPS)(PC)
52. Toilet Chronicles (Adventure)(PC)
53. Chorus of Carcosa (Horror Adventure)(PC)
54. Soul Calibur VI (Fighting)(PC)
55. Squirrel Stapler (FPS)(PC)
56. Warhammer: Vermintide 2 (Action)(PC)
57. Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr (Action RPG)(PC)
58. Warhammer 40,000: Shootas, Blood & Teef (Action)(PC)
59. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (FPS)(PC)
60. Sisyphus Reborn (Adventure)(PC)
61. Off-Peak (Adventure)(PC)
62. The Monster Inside (Visual Novel)(PC)
63. GreedFall (RPG)(PC)
64. GreedFall: The De Vespe Conspiracy (RPG)(PC)
GreedFall is like if BioWare released an RPG about colonialism. It takes place in a world which resembles portions of the 16th-18th centuries. Three nations suffering from a terrible plague have also colonized a distant island, where they battle with the local natives and each other. And your character's cousin has just been named the local governor for one of these nations, so guess who's getting sent out to see as his right hand man? If you guessed you are, then good, you figured it out.
You're the legate for the Congregation of Merchants, a nation based on a mixture of feudalism and capitalism that feels like a stand in for English and French imperialism. Your rival nations are a Catholic-inspired religious nation reminiscent of Italy/Spain that really wants to convert the heathens and a more Turkish/Middle Eastern-inspired nation built on the principals of science, math, and 18th century cold logic...which means dehumanization of the locals to understand their animistic magics. So much so that you have a questline which involves taking down a guy who's trying to secretly go full Mengele. Never go full Mengele. And the natives? Well, they're magic-wielding nature worshippers who serve as a placeholder for every colonized people. I noticed touches that reminded me of Native Americans, sub-Saharan African tribes, but also Welsh and Celtic civilizations. Which, to be honest, is actually kind of nice because it manages to tell a story about the dangers of colonialism without seeming to condemn any one single group over any others while also not upholding any singular colonized group over any others. Well played, GreedFall.
I picked this game up thinking it would be more like the Gothic or Risen series, but instead was surprised to find the game was more like KOTOR or Mass Effect, where I recruited characters into a party that had their own personalities, back histories, and reactions to ongoing events. GreedFall presents full freedom to build your main character however you like, though it's also better to tend towards specialization for magic, melee, or the more rogue-like track with guns and traps, though skill trees are short enough you can do some branching for added versatility. Why not pick up the ability to shoot guns alongside your magic spells? Gotta do something while you wait for your mana to come back. You also have separate trees for specific stats which relate to gear and yet another for skills, so you can be a magic-wielder who blacksmiths or an extremely charistmatic talky dude with a big sword. All have strengths and weaknesses, and you also will find items throughout that will let you respec on a whim, so you can sometimes adjust accordingly. Get into the good graces of your allies, and they also provide benefits when in the party, so you can use them to bolster areas you might be weaker.
The game is also good at providing a variety of ways through. You can resolve quests through talking, intimidation, and bribery. And because skill trees are split, your character isn't gimped for combat just because you wanted to be a negotiator. I felt GreedFall handled its character growth well and offered a lot of ways to get around obstacles, though every now and again I ran into a momentary snag...that was always ultimately momentary. There are a lot of ways through the game. I applaud how well handled it is.
The other thing about the game is that it has multiple endings, but they're decided by key plot points, which in turn can be influenced by how you played the game. A couple are very specific "this is gonna change things" moments where you make a decision, but others are based on how you've been playing up to that point. All have major impacts on the story going forward though, such as a coup breaking out or who becomes high king of the natives, so you feel involved without always simply feeling like you made a specific choice. Well...not always. The game's "worst" ending is literally decided right after the final boss fight. Which I also appreciate, because I could literally see two different endings by reloading the final boss fight and doing it again. Nice.
I also played the expansion content, The De Vespe Conspiracy, which does offer a few new questlines as a terrible old world family shows up to blackmail you and try to take over the colony and eventually the island. It adds a new major area, a bunch of new weapons and armors, as well as some new ways to influence the storyline. Most importantly though, it adds a particularly nasty new villain that you have to defeat through searching, questing, and talking, as opposed to combat. And she's awful. You'll love to hate her. There is some solid writing in this game, and I was pleased with how much I ended up enjoying it in the end.
I'm still not entirely done with GreedFall. I have several other endings to see, as well as the enhanced difficulty mode to try, though I'll likely be rushing through these now that I'm through the main game and did all the quests and side quests. I started by seeing the Best and Worst endings; now to see all the ones between.
52. Toilet Chronicles (Adventure)(PC)
53. Chorus of Carcosa (Horror Adventure)(PC)
54. Soul Calibur VI (Fighting)(PC)
55. Squirrel Stapler (FPS)(PC)
56. Warhammer: Vermintide 2 (Action)(PC)
57. Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr (Action RPG)(PC)
58. Warhammer 40,000: Shootas, Blood & Teef (Action)(PC)
59. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (FPS)(PC)
60. Sisyphus Reborn (Adventure)(PC)
61. Off-Peak (Adventure)(PC)
62. The Monster Inside (Visual Novel)(PC)
63. GreedFall (RPG)(PC)
64. GreedFall: The De Vespe Conspiracy (RPG)(PC)
GreedFall is like if BioWare released an RPG about colonialism. It takes place in a world which resembles portions of the 16th-18th centuries. Three nations suffering from a terrible plague have also colonized a distant island, where they battle with the local natives and each other. And your character's cousin has just been named the local governor for one of these nations, so guess who's getting sent out to see as his right hand man? If you guessed you are, then good, you figured it out.
You're the legate for the Congregation of Merchants, a nation based on a mixture of feudalism and capitalism that feels like a stand in for English and French imperialism. Your rival nations are a Catholic-inspired religious nation reminiscent of Italy/Spain that really wants to convert the heathens and a more Turkish/Middle Eastern-inspired nation built on the principals of science, math, and 18th century cold logic...which means dehumanization of the locals to understand their animistic magics. So much so that you have a questline which involves taking down a guy who's trying to secretly go full Mengele. Never go full Mengele. And the natives? Well, they're magic-wielding nature worshippers who serve as a placeholder for every colonized people. I noticed touches that reminded me of Native Americans, sub-Saharan African tribes, but also Welsh and Celtic civilizations. Which, to be honest, is actually kind of nice because it manages to tell a story about the dangers of colonialism without seeming to condemn any one single group over any others while also not upholding any singular colonized group over any others. Well played, GreedFall.
I picked this game up thinking it would be more like the Gothic or Risen series, but instead was surprised to find the game was more like KOTOR or Mass Effect, where I recruited characters into a party that had their own personalities, back histories, and reactions to ongoing events. GreedFall presents full freedom to build your main character however you like, though it's also better to tend towards specialization for magic, melee, or the more rogue-like track with guns and traps, though skill trees are short enough you can do some branching for added versatility. Why not pick up the ability to shoot guns alongside your magic spells? Gotta do something while you wait for your mana to come back. You also have separate trees for specific stats which relate to gear and yet another for skills, so you can be a magic-wielder who blacksmiths or an extremely charistmatic talky dude with a big sword. All have strengths and weaknesses, and you also will find items throughout that will let you respec on a whim, so you can sometimes adjust accordingly. Get into the good graces of your allies, and they also provide benefits when in the party, so you can use them to bolster areas you might be weaker.
The game is also good at providing a variety of ways through. You can resolve quests through talking, intimidation, and bribery. And because skill trees are split, your character isn't gimped for combat just because you wanted to be a negotiator. I felt GreedFall handled its character growth well and offered a lot of ways to get around obstacles, though every now and again I ran into a momentary snag...that was always ultimately momentary. There are a lot of ways through the game. I applaud how well handled it is.
The other thing about the game is that it has multiple endings, but they're decided by key plot points, which in turn can be influenced by how you played the game. A couple are very specific "this is gonna change things" moments where you make a decision, but others are based on how you've been playing up to that point. All have major impacts on the story going forward though, such as a coup breaking out or who becomes high king of the natives, so you feel involved without always simply feeling like you made a specific choice. Well...not always. The game's "worst" ending is literally decided right after the final boss fight. Which I also appreciate, because I could literally see two different endings by reloading the final boss fight and doing it again. Nice.
I also played the expansion content, The De Vespe Conspiracy, which does offer a few new questlines as a terrible old world family shows up to blackmail you and try to take over the colony and eventually the island. It adds a new major area, a bunch of new weapons and armors, as well as some new ways to influence the storyline. Most importantly though, it adds a particularly nasty new villain that you have to defeat through searching, questing, and talking, as opposed to combat. And she's awful. You'll love to hate her. There is some solid writing in this game, and I was pleased with how much I ended up enjoying it in the end.
I'm still not entirely done with GreedFall. I have several other endings to see, as well as the enhanced difficulty mode to try, though I'll likely be rushing through these now that I'm through the main game and did all the quests and side quests. I started by seeing the Best and Worst endings; now to see all the ones between.
-
Markies
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 1614
- Joined: Fri Mar 27, 2015 4:29 pm
- Location: St. Louis, Missouri
- Contact:
Re: Games Beaten 2025
Markies' Games Beat List Of 2025!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***
1. Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
2. Mario Party 4 (GCN)
***3. The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (PS2)***
***4. Pokemon Snap (N64)***
***5. Dead Or Alive (PS1)***
6. Rogue Galaxy (PS2)
7. Pokemon Blue (GBC)
8. Mario Kart 8 (Wii U)
***9. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising (NSW)***
***10. Sonic The Hedgehog (GEN)***
***11. The New Tetris (N64)***
12. Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls (GBA)
13. Yoshi (NES)
***14. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES)***
15. L.A. Noire - The Complete Edition (PS3)
16. Batman: The Video Game (GBC)
17. Splatoon 2 (NSW)
18. The Punisher (GEN)
***19. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time / Master Quest (GCN)***
***20. ChuChu Rocket! (SDC)***
21. Advance Wars (GBA)
22. Shadow of the Ninja (NES)
23. Tecmo Super Bowl (SNES)
24. Child of Eden (PS3)
***25. Atelier Iris 2: The Azoth Of Destiny (PS2)***
***26. DuckTales: Remastered (WiiU)***
***27. The Bard's Tale (XBOX)***
28. Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)
29. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (GB)
***30. Threads of Fate (PS1)***
31. Metroid Fusion (GBA)
***32. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (NES)***
***33. Super Baseball Simulator 1,000 (SNES)***
34. Miitopia (NSW)
35. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (WiiU)
36. Shadow Hearts: Covenant (PS2)
I beat Shadow Hearts: Covenant on the Sony Playstation 2 this evening!
I have always been interested in the Shadow Hearts series, so I have been picking them and beating them in the order the last couple of years. In 2018, I played through Koudelka, which is the precursor to the series. Then, in 2022, I played through the original Shadow Hearts and really loved it. In 2023, my local game store had some games traded in and two of them were ones I was very interested in owning. One was Brave Fencer Musashi and the other was Shadow Hearts: Covenant. I was looking for a PS2 game to play late this year and I figured now would be the perfect time to get into it.
Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a direct sequel to the original Shadow Hearts, so it takes place just a few years after the original Shadow Hearts. In fact, the game uses Yuri as the same main character. The story takes place in the middle of World War I Europe, which is very interesting and unique for a JRPG. Besides the introduction of some new characters, the game is very much like its predecessor. It uses the same ring battle system throughout the entire game. It perfectly encapsulates this PS2 era of JRPG, which I absolutely adore. The ring system is fun and the battles are very addicting. The largest change is the tone of the game. Koudelka and Shadow Hearts had this kind of creepy, Victorian Gothic feel to the game. Shadow Hearts II throws all of that out the window and is much less serious game. There is a hint of uneasiness in the enemies and story, but there is a goofiness to the entire game. Some of your party members and dialog are quite goofy, which did get a chuckle out of me. It is just a bit shocking especially when I was considering more of the first.
I would say my major gripe of the game would be the story, specifically the main antagonist. The game takes place in World War I Europe where you have a German officer as a playable party member. You would think the story would write itself. But, you spend very little time in Europe, a good chunk of the game dealing with heirs in Russia and then to Japan to stop a laboratory. I would have preferred one central antagonist instead of several in different locations.
Overall, I loved playing Shadow Hearts: Covenant! This type of game is my bread and butter, so I will always love playing them. It's a bit sillier, but the game is still a blast to play. A fantastic PS2 JRPG game that deserved more credit.
***Denotes Replay For Completion***
1. Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
2. Mario Party 4 (GCN)
***3. The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (PS2)***
***4. Pokemon Snap (N64)***
***5. Dead Or Alive (PS1)***
6. Rogue Galaxy (PS2)
7. Pokemon Blue (GBC)
8. Mario Kart 8 (Wii U)
***9. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising (NSW)***
***10. Sonic The Hedgehog (GEN)***
***11. The New Tetris (N64)***
12. Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls (GBA)
13. Yoshi (NES)
***14. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES)***
15. L.A. Noire - The Complete Edition (PS3)
16. Batman: The Video Game (GBC)
17. Splatoon 2 (NSW)
18. The Punisher (GEN)
***19. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time / Master Quest (GCN)***
***20. ChuChu Rocket! (SDC)***
21. Advance Wars (GBA)
22. Shadow of the Ninja (NES)
23. Tecmo Super Bowl (SNES)
24. Child of Eden (PS3)
***25. Atelier Iris 2: The Azoth Of Destiny (PS2)***
***26. DuckTales: Remastered (WiiU)***
***27. The Bard's Tale (XBOX)***
28. Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)
29. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (GB)
***30. Threads of Fate (PS1)***
31. Metroid Fusion (GBA)
***32. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (NES)***
***33. Super Baseball Simulator 1,000 (SNES)***
34. Miitopia (NSW)
35. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (WiiU)
36. Shadow Hearts: Covenant (PS2)
I beat Shadow Hearts: Covenant on the Sony Playstation 2 this evening!
I have always been interested in the Shadow Hearts series, so I have been picking them and beating them in the order the last couple of years. In 2018, I played through Koudelka, which is the precursor to the series. Then, in 2022, I played through the original Shadow Hearts and really loved it. In 2023, my local game store had some games traded in and two of them were ones I was very interested in owning. One was Brave Fencer Musashi and the other was Shadow Hearts: Covenant. I was looking for a PS2 game to play late this year and I figured now would be the perfect time to get into it.
Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a direct sequel to the original Shadow Hearts, so it takes place just a few years after the original Shadow Hearts. In fact, the game uses Yuri as the same main character. The story takes place in the middle of World War I Europe, which is very interesting and unique for a JRPG. Besides the introduction of some new characters, the game is very much like its predecessor. It uses the same ring battle system throughout the entire game. It perfectly encapsulates this PS2 era of JRPG, which I absolutely adore. The ring system is fun and the battles are very addicting. The largest change is the tone of the game. Koudelka and Shadow Hearts had this kind of creepy, Victorian Gothic feel to the game. Shadow Hearts II throws all of that out the window and is much less serious game. There is a hint of uneasiness in the enemies and story, but there is a goofiness to the entire game. Some of your party members and dialog are quite goofy, which did get a chuckle out of me. It is just a bit shocking especially when I was considering more of the first.
I would say my major gripe of the game would be the story, specifically the main antagonist. The game takes place in World War I Europe where you have a German officer as a playable party member. You would think the story would write itself. But, you spend very little time in Europe, a good chunk of the game dealing with heirs in Russia and then to Japan to stop a laboratory. I would have preferred one central antagonist instead of several in different locations.
Overall, I loved playing Shadow Hearts: Covenant! This type of game is my bread and butter, so I will always love playing them. It's a bit sillier, but the game is still a blast to play. A fantastic PS2 JRPG game that deserved more credit.
Re: Games Beaten 2025
Beat The Birdcage 2, the followup to the last game I beat. More or less, it's more of the same.
-
PartridgeSenpai
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 3187
- Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2015 9:27 am
- Location: Northern Japan
Re: Games Beaten 2025
Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1~50
51~100
101. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (N64)
102. Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa (Famicom)
103. Panic Restaurant (NES)
104. Mr. Gimmick (NES)
105. Bucky O'Hare (NES)
106. Wheel of Fortune (N64)
107. Resident Evil 2 (PS1)
108. Dragon Quest VI (SFC)
109. Ninja Gaiden (NES)
110. StarTropics (NES)
111. Parody World: Monster Party (Famicom)
112. Super Mario Bros 2 (NES)
113. Kamen No Ninja Hanamaru (Famicom)
114. Power Blade (NES)
115. Power Blazer (Famicom)
116. Metroid (NES)
117. Kid Icarus (NES)
118. New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U) *
119. Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Juurokubee no Karakuri Manjigatame (SFC)
120. Hitman: Blood Money (Xbox 360)
121. Super Bonk (SNES)
122. Plok (SNES)
123. Batman: The Video Game (NES)
124. Power Blade 2 (NES)
125. Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (NES)
126. Phantasy Star (SMS)
127. Solomon's Key (Famicom)
128. Solomon's Key 2 (Famicom)
129. Panel De Pon (SFC)
130. Ice Climber (Famicom)
131. True Crime: Streets of LA (PS2)
132. True Crime: New York City (PS2)
133. Mafia III (PS4)
134. F.E.A.R. 3 (Steam)
135. F.E.A.R. (Steam)
136. F.E.A.R. Extraction Point (Steam)
137. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Steam)
In my continuing journey through all the Fear games, I decided to skip ahead a little bit and give this one a try to give myself a little break from how Fear 1 and its expansions play. Where I was already pretty familiar with the first Fear games and expansions, Fear 2 is a game I was far less familiar with. I did was a Let’s Play of it when I was much younger as I did with the other games, but only once, and basically all of this game had left my head by the time I decided to sit down and play this. All I remembered was a really mean jump scare right at the start and a particularly messed up detail about the ending, so with those memory fragments in tow, I set out to finish this game X3. It overall took me right around 9 hours to beat the English version of the game on normal mode using an Xbox One controller via Steam input.
Fear 2: Project Origin follows Sergeant Becket. A member of S-FOD rather than FEAR like Point Man was in the first game, his unit is sent out around the time the previous game was at its climax to find a loose end of Armacham Technology Corporation’s mess with Alma and the titular Project Origin (the thing that made all the replicant soldiers that you’re fighting in the first game). Genevieve Aristide is a pretty central character to why the mess in Fear 1 happened, but she disappears from the narrative before the end of that story. This is the story of what happened to her. In searching for her, you get assaulted by the same ATC soldiers after her and hurt so badly that she and her medical team have to save her. Brought back from the brink of death and gifted (against your will) with slow-mo bullet time powers like Point Man had in Fear 1, Becket begins his mission to both find out what’s happening and hopefully stop Alma Wade’s ghostly reign of terror once and for all.
Fear 2 is trying to be a lot more than its predecessors were in a lot of ways, but it succeeds in precious few of them. The story is one such location where it ends up being a lot of style but very little substance behind it. It’s certainly a neat touch that there are a lot more characters in the story than ever with just how many supporting NPCs and other members of Becket’s S-FOD team stick around throughout the story, but they don’t really have much to contribute other than occasionally funny quips here and there among all the exposition this story serves to teach you. While we have a lot more text to show it, this game’s narrative ends up being basically just as shallow as Fear 1’s story was, and frankly the narrative of Fear 2’s reason for existing seems to primarily be answering a lot of questions that Fear 1’s story brought up but left hanging. While I’d argue that they’re nearly all fairly unimportant questions in the context of Fear 1’s story, the bigger issue is that shallowness of purpose. We’ve once again got a quite un-scary and shallow story that’s meant to carry us through our 8~9 hour campaign, and it just is not up to the task at hand beyond an occasional “Damn, that’s crazy” at the lengthy plot you’re seeing play out before you.
I honestly don’t think the story is *that* bad, though, at least in comparison to the first game. Enough is happening throughout the campaign that, even though it’s pretty shallow, you feel like you’re always going somewhere. It’s still not a brilliantly paced story by any means, but it’s at least better than Fear 1’s meager narrative had. The lede I’ve buried here is that it’s the facts of this story that make it far worse than any other game in the Fear series, and it’s all about how they treat Alma. It’s impossible not to spoil the narrative at least a bit here, but Monolith have chosen to center this narrative around Alma, a character whom they spent a ton of time in the previous game (and this one) showing as a tortured and abused 8-year old forced into a coma to eventually carry children she never asked for (nor ever got to so much as hold), finding her sexual awakening as a ghost.
They REALLY go out of their way to make it seem far less creepy than that and that Alma is in fact totally an adult and not an 8-year old in an adult's body, even going as far as to make her naked ghostly form much taller than she was in the last game. However, I found it pretty hard to buy all that when you have lines from the scientists like “She’s a woman and she doesn’t even know it” in regards to how long she’s been in that coma and how they’ve clearly sexualized her creepy “adult” form along with the height increase. The graphic boost we've gotten since the last game has come along with much more defined breasts, hips, and lips, and it's hard to see that as simply an accident of advancing hardware. It’s incredibly gross and “distasteful” barely manages to cover it. Fear 2 would be a tolerably OK story if not for this wretched point around which it revolves, but sadly that is just not the case, and this is the story you’ve got hanging over you constantly as you go through the game’s set pieces.
The action of the game is alright, but I’d be hard pressed to say it’s actually better than the first game. You’ve still got your bullet time slow-mo powers as the main gimmick of gameplay, and the level design is honestly a pretty good step up from how repetitive the first game so often felt, but it’s one step forward and two steps back. I do appreciate that we’ve tried to increase enemy variety, but that doesn’t matter much with the other mechanical issues we’ve got to deal with now. The gun variety is far weaker than the first game, and with slow-mo feeling less useful (it’s less of a slowing effect than it used to be) and melee/jumping/sliding being far weaker as a result, the absurd John Woo-esque shotgun nonsense that defined so much of the first Fear is absent here. The new star of the show isn’t the absurdly powerful combat shotgun or physics absurdity penetrator rifle, but the normal assault rifle because it’s just that powerful and useful. Level design still drags too, as even with more locations, we spend SO much time going through some of them (the underground facility at the start and the school later in particular) that it feels like we’re right back in super repetition land of the first game all over again. It’s definitely improved at least a bit, but it does little to improve the pacing of an already so witless and exposition-heavy story.
The other really big stumbling block is the horror aspect of this game. Monolith are clearly trying a lot harder to actually make a horror game, but they’re just so poor at it that it only drives home how not scary it all is all that much harder. It felt like I was being treated like I’d never so much as heard of a horror game before with how much this game loves doing scare chords at you for totally mundane things. Additionally, their love of scare chords runs into their love of branching paths with optional goodies, as there were countless times that I’d be looking for goodies in a side door, hear a scare chord, and then look around with no idea what it was I was meant to have seen. Heck, there were tons of times I wasn’t looking for goodies that I somehow was nonetheless dumbfounded at what the scare chord I’d just heard was meant to highlight. You’ve got so much radio chatter with your NPC teammates that the overall level and game design does little to create a sense of tension and isolation that would benefit a horror experience anyway, and the constant failure of the scare chords to do any meaningful scares just started to feel pathetic after a while ^^;. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with just being more of a horror-themed FPS instead of an actual horror game, but the gunplay and such ends up being so mediocre that we don’t exactly meaningfully succeed at that either.
The aesthetics of the game are alright, but they’re nothing really impressive. There’s a much higher use of music in this game than the last one, but it’s nothing particularly memorable. The graphics also look far more appropriate to the 360 generation than the first game’s 2005 graphics did, but that’s honestly not a huge plus for me. It’s nice that people look more like people this time (and women look less absurdly proportioned than they did in Fear 1, thankfully), but I wouldn’t say the game’s graphics are anything particularly special or remarkable in the current day. The audio for other stuff, though, was hopelessly broken. It wasn’t so much an issue at the start of the game, but for more than half the game I could barely hear enemies making sound at all. Enemies don’t scream much when they die like in the first game and melee-ing something no longer makes sound either, so there’s some generally poorer audio design here, but enemies’ footsteps and even gunfire were almost always *silent* in the back 2/3rds of the game for me. I hope this is a relatively uncommon issue and nothing but a bug on the PC version these days, but whatever it is, it definitely made the game a lot more of a pain in the butt to play.
Even if that wasn’t a bug, a lot of the biggest issues I had with the game is just how badly it runs. I was less than happy to see that it had no native controller support, but at least that’s not super uncommon for a PC game in ’09. The framerate and such were fine, but just how much it crashes is totally unacceptable. A couple levels in particular (the school and the final area) seem particularly vulnerable to sudden crashes or having to just quit to desktop due to a totally unloaded level in front of you, but they were honestly so frequent at some point that I was worried I’d be unable to finish the game in the first place. That thankfully wasn’t the case, but 7+ crashes is definitely a lot more than I’ve come to expect when there aren’t any connection errors to blame things on. Anyone reading this who somehow still really wants to play this game is likely better off hunting down a console copy that’s hopefully more stable than the current Steam version will provide.
Verdict: Not Recommended. Compared to games I genuinely couldn’t stand like Modern Warfare 2 or Killzone 2, this is actually one of the better FPS games from ’09 that I’ve played, but that’s still damning with faint praise. Even aside from the awful writing problems and technical issues, this is just a pretty unimpressive shooter in the wide sea of FPS games released in the 360/PS3 generation. While I hardly loved my time with Fear 1, that game at least has compelling and cool gameplay to justify giving it a look. You might not have an awful time playing it if you choose to, but there are so many other far more compelling things you could be spending your free time on that I can’t really think of a single good reason to recommend you give Fear 2 a play in the modern day.
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1~50
102. Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa (Famicom)
103. Panic Restaurant (NES)
104. Mr. Gimmick (NES)
105. Bucky O'Hare (NES)
106. Wheel of Fortune (N64)
107. Resident Evil 2 (PS1)
108. Dragon Quest VI (SFC)
109. Ninja Gaiden (NES)
110. StarTropics (NES)
111. Parody World: Monster Party (Famicom)
112. Super Mario Bros 2 (NES)
113. Kamen No Ninja Hanamaru (Famicom)
114. Power Blade (NES)
115. Power Blazer (Famicom)
116. Metroid (NES)
117. Kid Icarus (NES)
118. New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U) *
119. Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Juurokubee no Karakuri Manjigatame (SFC)
120. Hitman: Blood Money (Xbox 360)
121. Super Bonk (SNES)
122. Plok (SNES)
123. Batman: The Video Game (NES)
124. Power Blade 2 (NES)
125. Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (NES)
126. Phantasy Star (SMS)
127. Solomon's Key (Famicom)
128. Solomon's Key 2 (Famicom)
129. Panel De Pon (SFC)
130. Ice Climber (Famicom)
131. True Crime: Streets of LA (PS2)
132. True Crime: New York City (PS2)
133. Mafia III (PS4)
134. F.E.A.R. 3 (Steam)
135. F.E.A.R. (Steam)
136. F.E.A.R. Extraction Point (Steam)
137. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Steam)
In my continuing journey through all the Fear games, I decided to skip ahead a little bit and give this one a try to give myself a little break from how Fear 1 and its expansions play. Where I was already pretty familiar with the first Fear games and expansions, Fear 2 is a game I was far less familiar with. I did was a Let’s Play of it when I was much younger as I did with the other games, but only once, and basically all of this game had left my head by the time I decided to sit down and play this. All I remembered was a really mean jump scare right at the start and a particularly messed up detail about the ending, so with those memory fragments in tow, I set out to finish this game X3. It overall took me right around 9 hours to beat the English version of the game on normal mode using an Xbox One controller via Steam input.
Fear 2: Project Origin follows Sergeant Becket. A member of S-FOD rather than FEAR like Point Man was in the first game, his unit is sent out around the time the previous game was at its climax to find a loose end of Armacham Technology Corporation’s mess with Alma and the titular Project Origin (the thing that made all the replicant soldiers that you’re fighting in the first game). Genevieve Aristide is a pretty central character to why the mess in Fear 1 happened, but she disappears from the narrative before the end of that story. This is the story of what happened to her. In searching for her, you get assaulted by the same ATC soldiers after her and hurt so badly that she and her medical team have to save her. Brought back from the brink of death and gifted (against your will) with slow-mo bullet time powers like Point Man had in Fear 1, Becket begins his mission to both find out what’s happening and hopefully stop Alma Wade’s ghostly reign of terror once and for all.
Fear 2 is trying to be a lot more than its predecessors were in a lot of ways, but it succeeds in precious few of them. The story is one such location where it ends up being a lot of style but very little substance behind it. It’s certainly a neat touch that there are a lot more characters in the story than ever with just how many supporting NPCs and other members of Becket’s S-FOD team stick around throughout the story, but they don’t really have much to contribute other than occasionally funny quips here and there among all the exposition this story serves to teach you. While we have a lot more text to show it, this game’s narrative ends up being basically just as shallow as Fear 1’s story was, and frankly the narrative of Fear 2’s reason for existing seems to primarily be answering a lot of questions that Fear 1’s story brought up but left hanging. While I’d argue that they’re nearly all fairly unimportant questions in the context of Fear 1’s story, the bigger issue is that shallowness of purpose. We’ve once again got a quite un-scary and shallow story that’s meant to carry us through our 8~9 hour campaign, and it just is not up to the task at hand beyond an occasional “Damn, that’s crazy” at the lengthy plot you’re seeing play out before you.
I honestly don’t think the story is *that* bad, though, at least in comparison to the first game. Enough is happening throughout the campaign that, even though it’s pretty shallow, you feel like you’re always going somewhere. It’s still not a brilliantly paced story by any means, but it’s at least better than Fear 1’s meager narrative had. The lede I’ve buried here is that it’s the facts of this story that make it far worse than any other game in the Fear series, and it’s all about how they treat Alma. It’s impossible not to spoil the narrative at least a bit here, but Monolith have chosen to center this narrative around Alma, a character whom they spent a ton of time in the previous game (and this one) showing as a tortured and abused 8-year old forced into a coma to eventually carry children she never asked for (nor ever got to so much as hold), finding her sexual awakening as a ghost.
They REALLY go out of their way to make it seem far less creepy than that and that Alma is in fact totally an adult and not an 8-year old in an adult's body, even going as far as to make her naked ghostly form much taller than she was in the last game. However, I found it pretty hard to buy all that when you have lines from the scientists like “She’s a woman and she doesn’t even know it” in regards to how long she’s been in that coma and how they’ve clearly sexualized her creepy “adult” form along with the height increase. The graphic boost we've gotten since the last game has come along with much more defined breasts, hips, and lips, and it's hard to see that as simply an accident of advancing hardware. It’s incredibly gross and “distasteful” barely manages to cover it. Fear 2 would be a tolerably OK story if not for this wretched point around which it revolves, but sadly that is just not the case, and this is the story you’ve got hanging over you constantly as you go through the game’s set pieces.
The action of the game is alright, but I’d be hard pressed to say it’s actually better than the first game. You’ve still got your bullet time slow-mo powers as the main gimmick of gameplay, and the level design is honestly a pretty good step up from how repetitive the first game so often felt, but it’s one step forward and two steps back. I do appreciate that we’ve tried to increase enemy variety, but that doesn’t matter much with the other mechanical issues we’ve got to deal with now. The gun variety is far weaker than the first game, and with slow-mo feeling less useful (it’s less of a slowing effect than it used to be) and melee/jumping/sliding being far weaker as a result, the absurd John Woo-esque shotgun nonsense that defined so much of the first Fear is absent here. The new star of the show isn’t the absurdly powerful combat shotgun or physics absurdity penetrator rifle, but the normal assault rifle because it’s just that powerful and useful. Level design still drags too, as even with more locations, we spend SO much time going through some of them (the underground facility at the start and the school later in particular) that it feels like we’re right back in super repetition land of the first game all over again. It’s definitely improved at least a bit, but it does little to improve the pacing of an already so witless and exposition-heavy story.
The other really big stumbling block is the horror aspect of this game. Monolith are clearly trying a lot harder to actually make a horror game, but they’re just so poor at it that it only drives home how not scary it all is all that much harder. It felt like I was being treated like I’d never so much as heard of a horror game before with how much this game loves doing scare chords at you for totally mundane things. Additionally, their love of scare chords runs into their love of branching paths with optional goodies, as there were countless times that I’d be looking for goodies in a side door, hear a scare chord, and then look around with no idea what it was I was meant to have seen. Heck, there were tons of times I wasn’t looking for goodies that I somehow was nonetheless dumbfounded at what the scare chord I’d just heard was meant to highlight. You’ve got so much radio chatter with your NPC teammates that the overall level and game design does little to create a sense of tension and isolation that would benefit a horror experience anyway, and the constant failure of the scare chords to do any meaningful scares just started to feel pathetic after a while ^^;. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with just being more of a horror-themed FPS instead of an actual horror game, but the gunplay and such ends up being so mediocre that we don’t exactly meaningfully succeed at that either.
The aesthetics of the game are alright, but they’re nothing really impressive. There’s a much higher use of music in this game than the last one, but it’s nothing particularly memorable. The graphics also look far more appropriate to the 360 generation than the first game’s 2005 graphics did, but that’s honestly not a huge plus for me. It’s nice that people look more like people this time (and women look less absurdly proportioned than they did in Fear 1, thankfully), but I wouldn’t say the game’s graphics are anything particularly special or remarkable in the current day. The audio for other stuff, though, was hopelessly broken. It wasn’t so much an issue at the start of the game, but for more than half the game I could barely hear enemies making sound at all. Enemies don’t scream much when they die like in the first game and melee-ing something no longer makes sound either, so there’s some generally poorer audio design here, but enemies’ footsteps and even gunfire were almost always *silent* in the back 2/3rds of the game for me. I hope this is a relatively uncommon issue and nothing but a bug on the PC version these days, but whatever it is, it definitely made the game a lot more of a pain in the butt to play.
Even if that wasn’t a bug, a lot of the biggest issues I had with the game is just how badly it runs. I was less than happy to see that it had no native controller support, but at least that’s not super uncommon for a PC game in ’09. The framerate and such were fine, but just how much it crashes is totally unacceptable. A couple levels in particular (the school and the final area) seem particularly vulnerable to sudden crashes or having to just quit to desktop due to a totally unloaded level in front of you, but they were honestly so frequent at some point that I was worried I’d be unable to finish the game in the first place. That thankfully wasn’t the case, but 7+ crashes is definitely a lot more than I’ve come to expect when there aren’t any connection errors to blame things on. Anyone reading this who somehow still really wants to play this game is likely better off hunting down a console copy that’s hopefully more stable than the current Steam version will provide.
Verdict: Not Recommended. Compared to games I genuinely couldn’t stand like Modern Warfare 2 or Killzone 2, this is actually one of the better FPS games from ’09 that I’ve played, but that’s still damning with faint praise. Even aside from the awful writing problems and technical issues, this is just a pretty unimpressive shooter in the wide sea of FPS games released in the 360/PS3 generation. While I hardly loved my time with Fear 1, that game at least has compelling and cool gameplay to justify giving it a look. You might not have an awful time playing it if you choose to, but there are so many other far more compelling things you could be spending your free time on that I can’t really think of a single good reason to recommend you give Fear 2 a play in the modern day.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
Re: Games Beaten 2025
Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
First 50:
51. Galactic Civilizations II - PC
52. Alan Wake 2: The Lake House - PC
53. Rogue Flight - Switch
54. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 - Gamecube
55. System Shock 2 Remastered - PC
56. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries: Shadow of Kerensky - PC
57. Hollow Knight: Silksong - Switch
58. Borderlands 4 - PC
59. Daemon x Machina: Titanic Scion - Switch 2
60. Cats Organized Neatly - PC
61. Cultic: Chapter Two - PC
62. Moros Protocol - PC
63. Tormented Souls 2 - PS5
64. Dragon Quest I HD-2D Remake - Switch
65. Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake - Switch
66. The Outer Worlds 2 - PC
67. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky First Chapter - PS5
68. Ico - PS3
69. Shadow of the Colossus - PS3
70. Cannon Spike - Dreamcast
71. Mortal Kombat II - SNES
72. Mechwarrior 5: Clans: Wolves of Tukayyid - PC
73. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond - Switch 2
Metroid Prime 4 was announced a long time ago, finally coming out in time for the Switch 2 launch, including having Switch 2 features like letting you use the mouse feature. Development was restarted midway through, and unfortunately, it shows.
The game begins with Samus heading to a Galactic Federation planet that is being attacked by Sylux (one of the characters from Hunters) and some space pirates. During the showdown a stray shot hits an artifact and teleports Samus and Sylux to a mysterious planet. Samus must find a way to get herself back home, and finds a little help along the way.
The game is a mixture of Metroid Prime 2 and 3. From 2, it takes the whole "Samus is the savior for a defeated race" thing, which is the prime component of the plot. After landing on the planet, Samus is given the mission of finding keys to a teleporter so she can take a relic of the dead race off planet. Also, Sylux shifts to being a Dark Samus-style antagonist who shows up a few times and is the final boss but isn't linked to the rest of what's going on. From 3, we get a series of disconnected zones.
The game is laid out similar to Ocarina of Time; there's a large desert area, and then on the edges are entrances to the five zones of the game where you do the real exploration. This is where you utilize the bike from the trailers, serving a similar purpose to Epona. If I had to choose between this and the gunship travel menu of Metroid Prime 3, I'd say this is a little better, especially since there are a few optional abilities to unlock in the desert, so it isn't just a waste of time.
The zones themselves are a mixed bag. The environmental design is amazing, just like previous games. But the actual level design is a noticeable step down. They are all very linear, to the point of you go down a path to the end, then go back along the same (or a slight side path) to get back. You don't even get a loop of "you get an ability at the end that lets you go this alternate route that will make your life better on the way back". There is a bit of revisiting for key abilities, as well as a final cleanup for items once you have all the mobility items, but it isn't as fun to go through as previous games. This is exacerbated by an overuse of active enemies, a la the space pirates. It's much harder to just blaze through when you're doing a cleanup.
When it comes to your abilities, you basically have the Metroid Prime 1 set, without anything new aside from the motorcycle. Instead of beams, you have elemental shots, which achieve the same effect but use ammo. Weirdly, they depowered missiles in this game; you'll find that you have higher DPS with rapid fire beam shots, though the elemental shots when powered up are the kings of DPS. Now that I think about it, there is one new item, which is a guided shot you can trigger from the scan visor. This is used for some puzzles and bosses, as when the shot is in midair time slows to a crawl, so it can be used for "get past a fast fan" and "you need to hit three things at once". The game is good about keeping your full arsenal relevant through the game, rather than "you used this for this one boss, now you stop caring".
Overall, there are the bones of an excellent game here, but it falls short. I think, if they started development on Metroid Prime 5 now and incorporated thoughtful feedback during the process, the result would be awesome. As it stands, we have a game that's enjoyable, but it is the weakest of the series.
First 50:
52. Alan Wake 2: The Lake House - PC
53. Rogue Flight - Switch
54. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 - Gamecube
55. System Shock 2 Remastered - PC
56. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries: Shadow of Kerensky - PC
57. Hollow Knight: Silksong - Switch
58. Borderlands 4 - PC
59. Daemon x Machina: Titanic Scion - Switch 2
60. Cats Organized Neatly - PC
61. Cultic: Chapter Two - PC
62. Moros Protocol - PC
63. Tormented Souls 2 - PS5
64. Dragon Quest I HD-2D Remake - Switch
65. Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake - Switch
66. The Outer Worlds 2 - PC
67. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky First Chapter - PS5
68. Ico - PS3
69. Shadow of the Colossus - PS3
70. Cannon Spike - Dreamcast
71. Mortal Kombat II - SNES
72. Mechwarrior 5: Clans: Wolves of Tukayyid - PC
73. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond - Switch 2
Metroid Prime 4 was announced a long time ago, finally coming out in time for the Switch 2 launch, including having Switch 2 features like letting you use the mouse feature. Development was restarted midway through, and unfortunately, it shows.
The game begins with Samus heading to a Galactic Federation planet that is being attacked by Sylux (one of the characters from Hunters) and some space pirates. During the showdown a stray shot hits an artifact and teleports Samus and Sylux to a mysterious planet. Samus must find a way to get herself back home, and finds a little help along the way.
The game is a mixture of Metroid Prime 2 and 3. From 2, it takes the whole "Samus is the savior for a defeated race" thing, which is the prime component of the plot. After landing on the planet, Samus is given the mission of finding keys to a teleporter so she can take a relic of the dead race off planet. Also, Sylux shifts to being a Dark Samus-style antagonist who shows up a few times and is the final boss but isn't linked to the rest of what's going on. From 3, we get a series of disconnected zones.
The game is laid out similar to Ocarina of Time; there's a large desert area, and then on the edges are entrances to the five zones of the game where you do the real exploration. This is where you utilize the bike from the trailers, serving a similar purpose to Epona. If I had to choose between this and the gunship travel menu of Metroid Prime 3, I'd say this is a little better, especially since there are a few optional abilities to unlock in the desert, so it isn't just a waste of time.
The zones themselves are a mixed bag. The environmental design is amazing, just like previous games. But the actual level design is a noticeable step down. They are all very linear, to the point of you go down a path to the end, then go back along the same (or a slight side path) to get back. You don't even get a loop of "you get an ability at the end that lets you go this alternate route that will make your life better on the way back". There is a bit of revisiting for key abilities, as well as a final cleanup for items once you have all the mobility items, but it isn't as fun to go through as previous games. This is exacerbated by an overuse of active enemies, a la the space pirates. It's much harder to just blaze through when you're doing a cleanup.
When it comes to your abilities, you basically have the Metroid Prime 1 set, without anything new aside from the motorcycle. Instead of beams, you have elemental shots, which achieve the same effect but use ammo. Weirdly, they depowered missiles in this game; you'll find that you have higher DPS with rapid fire beam shots, though the elemental shots when powered up are the kings of DPS. Now that I think about it, there is one new item, which is a guided shot you can trigger from the scan visor. This is used for some puzzles and bosses, as when the shot is in midair time slows to a crawl, so it can be used for "get past a fast fan" and "you need to hit three things at once". The game is good about keeping your full arsenal relevant through the game, rather than "you used this for this one boss, now you stop caring".
Overall, there are the bones of an excellent game here, but it falls short. I think, if they started development on Metroid Prime 5 now and incorporated thoughtful feedback during the process, the result would be awesome. As it stands, we have a game that's enjoyable, but it is the weakest of the series.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.