Well after finally going back to this game and completing it, I'm not sure my above post is actually, really so much how I feel about this game. I'm actually leaning toward Tom DS' post above.
First of all, I somehow just dropped the game two collossi from the end. Just couldn't be arsed picking it up and finishing it. Now that I have, I'm wondering why I did that, and seeing the game-breaking faults.
The Collossi. I still do think they are grand and great and chill-inducing, but like almost all of the game, it's the art design more than anything else that does that. The stomp and crash and lumber, and it all looks good and weighty and mythical. The sense of scale when you clamber over them helps to sell it, but the longer you spend on one (and due to some game design misteps, that can often be quite a time) the more the illusion falls apart.
These are not things of even rudimentary intelligence. They make things hard for you, but they'll do the same things all the time, every time. They'll never learn to adapt, never learn that doing certain things help you rather than hinder you.
I don't know if it's particularly fair to use that as criticism, since that's been par for the course with boss characters since the dawn of time, but it really is pretty glaring in this game. Considering how hard it can be in some cases to hold on to them and do the stabby thing, especially the closer you get to their weak points, repetition is really wearing. When you're going through the same motions for the sixth time, coaxing and climbing in exactly the same ways, the Collossi cease to be the big, dynamic God-things they appear to be when they first rumble into view. They're just math's equations you have to do over and over again, showing your working step by step every time.
This same art-over-game design goes for the world around you too, which, for all the lush sweep and grandeur it has, is really very barren. You're a hero defined by your amazing climbing and clambering abilities. Why then are practically the only things you can climb in the whole vast landscape, the ruined save-point towers (that as far as I can tell, all use exactly the same model)?
San Andreas works because your environment is a fun obstacle course before it's a thing of beauty. Your vehicles can be coaxed over the next hill if you work it just right, those walls can be clambered and jumped. Not so with Agro and Wanda. Agro goes where he thinks he's able and nowhere else. Wanda, with all his L33T parkour skillz, can't even mount a boulder without oddly sliding down the side. The world isn't anything more than ground to be covered before you can get back to playing the game.
The look doesn't matter, because there's no reason you'd actually want to be there, never mind look at it.
It's not all bad, mind. There are lots of bits I like about it. But it's very flawed and not particularly well thought-out, it would seem. Quite a few people here bought this, yeah? Nobody else have much to say about it after they got into it a bit? |
what a trailer ...