Recent reviews by C9PLMS

It pains me to write this, believe me. I really want to like Samson. In fact, for all intents and purposes, I do like it. I like the setting, plot, map, atmosphere, essentially everything about how the game is designed. What I don't like is that the the game is nowhere near ready for a public release. Listen to me closely: it is truly nowhere near ready for your money.

Mind you, I not only toughed my way through the initial releases of Cyberpunk and Starfield, but actually enjoyed them in their unpatched day 1 states. Indeed, I am willing to stupe that low for a game I'm excited about - but Samson makes those look like paradise. We're talking No Man's Sky levels of incomplete.

In my <2hrs of play, I already have a massive laundry list of issues that I am astonished survived any amount of QA. Even while trying to stick as to-the-script as possible, I keep running into problem after problem after problem. So many systems and mechanics are at such odds with one another, and so many moments and possibilities are so unaccounted for in how those systems and mechanics operate, that it plays like a mid/late alpha build, or like a free standalone mod for an old Bethesda game. This doesn't come down to a few broken lines of code, there is an overall fundamental lack of any interaction between things like camera behavior, combat animations, NPC behavior, object placement, you name it, it probably clashes with something.

This is quite surprising coming from a team spearheaded by the co-founders of Avalanche, who have quite a strong track record of mechanically fluent large-scale games. This is a very small game that's also utterly mechanically dysfunctional.

Just to list a few things I've run into:

• Various gaps in the terrain geometry, revealing the out-of-boundaries void.
  
• All cars drive exactly the same. Same accel, top speed, redline, handling, braking, sound effects, all the same. It's quite weird having an E36 knockoff sound and drive exactly like the Chevelle knockoff you spend most of your time driving around in.
  
• The (too zoomed in) camera doesn't zoom out for group fights, so you constantly get blindsided by enemies completely invisible to you. Increasing FOV does not fix this. Why this game didn't take QOL notes from other brawlers like God Hand or Sleeping Dogs is beyond me.
  
• There is no manual lock on, nor any indication to who you're locked onto. You are force-focused onto whoever is in the direction of your last attack, and Samson orbits/faces them until you get far enough away. Once again, this is a NIGHTMARE of a polish/refinement issue for group fights, of which there are many.
  
• Escaping a helicopter is as enjoyable as being gaslit. Drive under 60mph, and it stays locked onto you. Go over 60mph, and by the time you've escaped its reach, you've driven far enough to run into the next batch of cruisers.
  
• The map is so zoomed in, and can't be zoomed out, that cops will re-detect you before you're aware AT ALL of their location unless you want to constantly look behind you while driving at highway speeds in an inner-city environment.
  
• During "cooldown", cops follow you to the literal ends of the Earth, have perfect awareness of your exact location no matter how much distance you have on them, respawn and populate the streets like ants, and have x-ray vision.
  
• Sliding your car AT ALL at high speed is game over. You can't regain control, you must come to a dead stop. It's almost like the code establishes a flat rule that higher speed = harder to straighten out. It's awful, and for a game so centered around driving cars, you'd think they'd have slightly more robust physics.
  
• Your attack animations CONSTANTLY cancel themselves out for no reason. It is infuriating.
  
• Some enemies will parry and dodge your attacks with 100% consistency while outright refusing to initiate one of their own. Seriously, if you stop attacking them, they'll just stare at you while dancing around you with their hands up, it's insane.
  
• Parrying is borderline useless in group fights, because the animation is slow enough that you'll get clobbered by the next guy before you land a counter hit.
  
• Dodging is also useless since enemies magnetize to you.
  
• While freeroaming, I stumbled into a group fight with 5 or 6 enemies and decided to run away. About 10 minutes later, on the other side of the map, the whole group caught up to me, still in the same fight stance/formation as before (as in they literally boxer-skipped their way to me, hands up the whole time). I ran away again and then eventually ran back into them, except then, I was able to KO all of them, one by one, without any opposition.
  
• I took down a "notorious street racer" by hitting his car once, evaporating it into thin air, leaving him (a generic copy-pasted NPC otherwise seen roaming the streets) standing completely unbothered and unscathed in the street. I punched him, and he didn't fight back. I honestly thought I had a stroke.
  
• The animations are so unbelievably goofy, low quality, and uncanny, that they seem AI-generated. Hold sprint while moving forward and then wiggle your character left and right rapidly with hair and cloth physics enabled - it looks absolutely ridiculous.

No, this list is nowhere near comprehensive. Considering the amount of talent that Liquid Swords contains, I can only chalk this up to sheer laziness. I have an incredibly hard time believing they're incapable of releasing a game that doesn't have these issues (and more), so I'm left resenting the fact they paid so little attention to a host of issues they probably knew were present.

Also, I'm sorry, but UE5 sucks, and everyone needs to stop using it. It's piss ugly, runs like crap, and exaggerates shading and lighting effects to absurdly overwhelming degrees. This game has the stylistic intrigue of a low budget solo-dev Unity asset flip, but with the aforementioned UE5 slop-FX smeared across it, and all of the performance issues that come with them. I hate looking at it, and it will take a LOT more than some performance patches to make it tolerable on a technical level. To that end, Samson needs fundamentally different DNA, because these UE5 issues seem to persist in every single game that runs on it. Hell, even the Oblivion remaster still runs like crap despite being a year old and being backed by a far larger studio and budget than Samson, and that was with all development efforts focused on visuals, performance, and refinement, since its core logic was carried over from the original. Samson has to worry about all of these ON TOP of the rest of the broken code with a tiny fraction of the manpower, budget, or customer base.

Seriously, go drive around during the day and tell me you aren't partially blind afterwards. The game tries to make your eyes bleed. Puddles are as bright as mirrors, the exposure is maddeningly high, road textures are so over-defined that they look like burlap from shallow angles, and occlusion shadows are so overly noticeable that they made their surroundings look nearly cel shaded. All of this occurs while dipping well below 60fps at 1080p on a 3080/5700X3D on medium settings with DLSS set to "Performance." Fixing these issues probably requires uprooting so many fundamental aspects of the game's code that I just don't foresee it being feasible, but I hope I'm wrong.

I will say, though, that the map is genuinely well laid out. It's fun to walk around, explore, and interact with. The combat is great as long as you don't have more than 3 opponents. The driving is fine, even enjoyable, at low speeds. I can see some of that Avalanche open-world magic on occasion, but otherwise, it's severely unfinished.

Anyways, under absolutely no circumstances can I recommend Samson. In its current state, it should be getting playtested in-house. I worry its issues are too deep and aplenty to fully amend, so godspeed to the developers.

This is legitimately one of the best games I have ever played. Full stop, it is just that fun.

I think everyone has a short list of "games that ruined other games," as in games that were so well done, and so ahead of their time, they made it difficult to enjoy similar titles. For me, those were Skate 1 and Dark Souls 1. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but I might have to add this to that list.

I'm sorry for the glaze, but this ♥♥♥♥ just rocks. I am no longer willing to settle for any combat, movement, exploration, or balancing shortcomings in a first person action game when this one, made by 1 person, for the price of a casual lunch, simply has none.

The combat is unbelievable. Think Shadow Warrior 2 speed but with the impact and weight of Dark Souls 1. Lighter/faster attacks are punchy, and heavy attacks and crits are absolutely bone crunching, nearly to the point of absurdity. Boss duels and group fights are both highly engaging and always plain dumb fun. The game hands you a ton of firepower and build variety off the rip, so you're encouraged to push deep as soon as you get comfy. And to that end, every mechanic just naturally synergizes and plays off each other so beautifully, allowing you to go nuts and always have a way to out-play the enemies, no matter how many.

In fact, the mechanics are so naturally skill-rewarding that I have no issue surviving against top level enemies, at top difficulties, with base weapons. There are absolutely 0 baked-in stat or equipment checks that hard-lock you, as the player, from surviving even the most ridiculous mismatches. That is, of course, entirely reliant on your skill as the player, but if you've got a strong grip on the mechanics and have your enemy's moveset memorized, you can beat anything with anything. THAT is the mark of good gameplay design.

And since your only healing source comes from connecting attacks, this game especially rewards aggressive, proactive playstyles. Shielding up and kiting around is a surefire way to get dogpiled, so you get the best feedback from playing intensely, which, again, just makes the game an absolute joy.

The movement is BUTTERY. B-U-T-T-E-R-Y. I cannot express, in words, how much I love just moving and darting around in this game. Everything is tight, smooth, fluent, and natural. No fall damage, stamina recharges fast, no annoying level geometry, just an absolute joy to dance around in fights and zoom around during exploration.

The stance system is a simple yet fantastic design choice. In combat, you switch to combat stance, which grounds you but gives you your weapon and offensive abilities. Outside of combat, switch to movement stance, which makes you faster and able to both jump higher and dash further, but without your weapon or offensives. This allows fights to be slightly more contained and impactful, while still allowing quick real-time traversal of the game's expansive areas.

Hell, or even switch to movement stance mid-fight to add an entire new layer of verticality and spacing to your battles. GO NUTS.

Each area I've come across thus far has been absolutely immaculate. Structures are well designed and thoughtfully placed, paths interconnect and continue off of each other, secrets are tucked away EVERYWHERE, enemies are well placed, open areas are delicately balanced against narrower corridors, and overall, the maps are just plain gorgeous. They look like a mish mash of Dark Souls and Skyrim, which would normally be a red flag for me (I love both games, just sick of all the low-effort knockoffs), but not here. Not by a long shot. These are done very, very nicely. And despite how many individual main- and sub-areas that exist already, they're all surprisingly large.

You, as the player, are given true freedom to explore these levels how you see fit, as well. I've invested so many points into this one gear piece that I can basically fly around any level, which has allowed me to approach significant locations and landmarks from some truly obtuse and interesting angles, as well as scale buildings and mountains that 99% of other games would have just blocked off with invisible barriers. But this game encourages you to Bethesda jump like a crackhead, so you can go quite literally wherever you want (within the bounds of the level, of course).

The "sky node" system is also a simple, yet thoughtful and clever implementation of fast travel. It's just a slightly more engaging and rewarding way of handling fast travel than the industry standard. Nothing groundbreaking, but just another smart way of slightly playing-up a feature you take for granted in most games.

And also, there are just, so many things to upgrade, so many ways to upgrade them, so many builds to make, so many weapons to use, so many stats to combine, and so many ways to use these combinations... this is just a really, really well designed game. Although its gameplay loop is quite simple, everything is so naturally congruent that it's just a joy to unlock and try new stuff.

So far, I have 2 primary critiques.

• Giants shouldn't launch the player into the air on successful parries
  
• The current "endgame" area (The Grimmir Expanse) is too large for the content it contains (needs more structures and side-quests)

All of that being said, as I continue to play this game, I keep asking myself "what the ♥♥♥♥?" for 2 reasons.

1. There are no glaring downsides or sacrifices to be found. Usually, there's a catch. I'd need more fingers and toes to be able to count the number of $100+ AAA releases with MAJOR catches and downsides.
   
2. This is being developed by ONE PERSON. ONE.

It truly shocks me that one person can make a game look and feel so good, while offering some legitimately clever genre progressions. What the hell are AAA publishers even doing anymore? There are studios with tens of thousands of employees, with budgets in the hundreds of millions, that churn out pure dogwater incapable of holding a candle to this, and that legitimately infuriates me. On one hand, this is just a great, fun game. On the other, it's quite a crude reminder of how absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the AAA market has become. If $14 gets me something this fun, then $70+ games from studios as resourceful as EA and Ubisoft should be life-altering experiences, not mediocre slop.

Anyways, this is fantastic. Please buy it.

I need you to believe me when I say this: I want to like this game. I really do.

But it sucks. Like... "where do I even begin" levels of suck.


Edited to add this to the original review (which begins with the next header).

It has been over 3 months since this game's full release, and the developers have improved nothing, and have even worsened parts of it. I've been watching from afar with no interest in reinstalling it, but it's on its way out and it isn't even half a year old.

It is so close to being an outright scam (seeing as multiple missing in-game features are still mentioned on its website) that I think exceptions need to be made to Steam's refund policy for it. Unbelievable.


The AI is dumb as doorknobs and will frequently brake check you on straightaways and slam into you with the weight of an aircraft carrier. But worse yet, their cars are 2-3x faster than you no matter your or their car's performance rating. Make no mistake, upgrades mean nothing. You can literally be a 550PR in a max-550PR race with all of your upgrades geared towards accel/speed, be going 150mph, and an Abarth 500 and/or Alfa Mito will blow by you like you're standing still. Hell, my 680hp 700PR SLS AMG gets gapped by A110's... from 1973. No, that is not an exaggeration.

And even worse, the AI takes corners like F1 cars on steroids. Adverse camber, over a crest, high speed, low speed, doesn't matter, they're on rails. In fact they quite literally have access to more steering angle than you, since this game insists on speed-limiting yours, so have fun trying to take a turn without ripping the E-brake. No, this is not a skill issue. That is to say the controls suck. You're going to understeer a lot - have fun!


After your 4th or 5th time repeating a race, the rewards are reduced by half and then reset every 24hrs. And worse yet, nothing in the game tells you any of this - you are only shown the full payout for each event, meaning you need to remember every single event you've repeated to this extent every single day. This also means you need to remember to login and play EVERY SINGLE DAY to have any chance of keeping up with the meta.

This comes off as a publisher or shareholder engagement farming design choice - make it harder to make money so people have to play for longer. Congratulations, you've now made the game unenjoyable. Is this really what 13-18 years of industry development has gotten us? Games that are less fun and more work? Really, guys? You had both previous entries as cheat sheets... why didn't you use them at all?

The other frustrating part about these race reward reductions/cooldowns is that because the AI is so dodgy, if you do find a race you enjoy and can reliably win, you only get to do so a handful of times before getting shafted. Maybe some people like this, but I think it's stupid. I like working for rewards in games but I don't like being punished for doing so. Games don't have to be like this. Grinding can be fun. Do I need to repeat myself?

Limited (10) FRIM cash-ins per car, per day. Who decided this was worth adding? I don't think anyone ever thought "man, TDU would be so much better if it was harder for me to make money while freeroaming." If anything it comes off as engagement farming by the heavy hands of shareholders and/or publishers. The irony of this is that by making the game less rewarding and less fun, they're accelerating the attrition of the game. Crazy concept, I know. Why do I need to point that out?


I'm sorry, but nearly 20 years ago, in 2006, TDU1 gave me a full scale, 1000 sq mi Hawaiian island that ran buttery smooth on everything from an Xbox 360 to a PS2 and PSP, that is STILL a ton of fun to drive and race around to this day. In 2011 we got TWO full scale islands, totaling somewhere around 1500 sq mi.

So why is the 2024 entry only 48 (yes, 48) sq mi large?

The difference is so hilariously absurd that I wouldn't blame you for thinking I'm joking or lying, but I am not. That is how much smaller this map is compared to what we had 1.5 decades ago. Exploration was one of the main pillars of TDU, so this is beyond disappointing. I don't know what can be done about this. The map is already made, and it's just not good enough.

And no, I'm not hearing the "this map is more meticulously crafted" BS. It is not. It's serviceable at best. It's no industry shattering piece of work, and inch per inch, it's hardly any better than TDU2 or TDU1. I mean seriously, the cities in this are barely any more detailed than the PS2 TDU1's Honolulu. And no, I don't consider alleyways full of fruit/vegetable stands to be "detail." And no, I don't care about the global illumination and rain reflections. I just want lots of fun roads to drive on, and 13-18 years ago I had, literally, 20-30x more of that than I do, today, in 2024. My god.


These are what made TDU relevant and they don't exist in TDUSC. You have a soulless apartment/hotel room thing, and that's it. We had houses 18 years ago and customizable ones 13 years ago. Why are these gone?

The lowest effort "car dealerships" I've ever seen. They look like AI-generated Warframe levels.


Pick which HQ you wish to visit every 10 levels. That's it. That's the club system.


Make no mistake, this is not an online game. This is a single player game that sometimes puts you in laggy lobbies with other players who will probably rage quit or disconnect halfway in. You might see some other players cruising or walking around...? Cool, I guess? I don't think that's worth the inconveniences.

Speaking of inconveniences, there have already been 2-3 waves of server related issues and the game isn't even out yet. The last round of server maintenance has left many of us unable to discover new locations with saving - yes, saving - becoming a hit or miss endeavor. Needless to mention the ongoing threat of being disconnected from a seemingly offline race - meaning one with no other connected players, AI only. Yes, you read that right.

So please remind me, why am I forced to play online? Why am I forced to deal with all of these inconveniences?


Oh yeah, if a race you need to complete is the currently selected "ranked" race, you have to wait to be matchmade with other players... or just sit and wait until it rotates to another race.

Also, a little nitpick... even on imperial units, torque is expressed in N/m and weight in KG. Not a huge deal, I know the conversions, but like... how was something that simple glossed over?

...and why are we constantly racing in the wrong direction? Seriously, it's like they forgot the game was set in Hong Kong when building the race routes.

Also, the game runs like crap. It looks bad, but I'd be okay with that if it ran well, but it doesn't. RTX 3080, 3900x, game loaded on a game-only SSD, on 1080p medium settings with DLSS set to "balance," and I'm usually looking at 45fps while racing in the city. I get higher framerate on Cyberpunk 2077 and RDR2 set to high. This is pitiful.


I'm exhausted. I cannot believe how poorly this turned out. Every bit of effort was put into the exact wrong aspects of this game. As a result, we have an unbalanced, unfun, punishing, lackluster racing game that fails to pay homage to the games it desperately clings to the identity of. This is not TDU, it's just called TDU.

A good chunk of this stuff can be fixed through some updates if the developers are willing to swallow their pride about making this into an engagement farming gacha game, and turn it back into an actual TDU game where we can just bang out races and buy cool cars. If everything I mentioned here that can be resolved, gets resolved, I might recommend the game.

But until then, absolutely not.

Perhaps this is my fault, but I went into this expecting more emphasis on the "interstellar" aspect of the game, expecting gameplay mechanics tied to the traversal between star systems. Unfortunately that is not the case. Instead, systems are just small 6DOF hub worlds that you teleport between, each time putting you into a loading screen masked as a cutscene, with your controls locked.

This is disappointing because the flight controls are great. I just wish there were some sort of mechanics involved with the teleport jumps - like getting up to speed, slowing down in time, changing approach angle - rather than just lining up with the gates, so I could spend more time enjoying those controls. The teleportation cutscenes interrupt the flow... constantly.

In order for a trucking/delivery/navigation game like this to work, the act of traveling long distances needs to be satisfying and engaging. This is why ATS and E:D are so fun - very different games, but they're obviously the 2 biggest inspirations of this one - because every inch that you travel is under your control and subject to your neglect. Keeping control of a 150,000lb payload on ATS is engaging because losing your focus for a couple seconds can turn into an absolute disaster. FSD'ing on E:D is engaging because being slightly off on your throttle can overshoot your destination by hundreds of thousands of miles. That stuff is FUN to learn, it keeps you engaged for hours on end, and it feels like a legitimate accomplishment when you tighten your skills up with them. Needless to mention the oddly cathartic and meditative feeling of just traveling a long distance.

And this game simply doesn't have any of that. At most you're in control for a handful of miles at a time.

This is less of a trucking game and more of an upkeep/repair sim. If that's your thing, go for it. But I think you'll be disappointed if you're looking for a zen experience similar to the games I just mentioned.

This one hurts. The races are fun, the physics are absolutely sublime, the tracks are pretty accurately replicated, the graphics are beautiful, and the sound effects are great. But this game has some really strange design decisions and some problems that ultimately ruin it for me.

Before I go on, let me qualify: I have lots of experience in the MotoGP games, particularly MotoGP '07, '08, and '13. I also have, in general, a ton of experience in various simcade/semi-sim games, as they're the only game genre(s) I've consistently enjoyed throughout my life. Now, onto my critique.

Firstly, and most importantly, this game severely lacks content. For instance, there are only 8 bikes to pick from. Yes, 8. Sure, there are TONS of parts to swap and mount for each bike, but you have to understand, none of these add any actual variety to the game. They, as they should, make small performance/cosmetic differences, and don't offer any actual separation bikes from one another (which is to be expected because this game is about racing within a regulated class). Also, there are only 15 tracks. Yet, there's 70 career events (see Merriam Webster's definition of "repetition"). I know this game is about precision accuracy and simulation, but this is laughably too little content for $45. That price tag necessitates more content than this. If this game were $25, I'd reverse my opinion on this part of my critique.

Secondly, the game VERY FRUSTRATINGLY only allows you to restart races if you're on the easiest AI difficulty... yet, regardless of difficulty, you can always quit a race (taking you back to the main menu) and start it over again with no penalty. And let's face it, no matter how good you are at a racing game, you're going to get impatient against the AI, you'll get bored of a repetitive event, or you'll look at your phone at the worst time, and end up making stupid mistakes. Resultantly, you're going to restart races, period. I'm glad this game doesn't have a rewind feature (I disable that in all games that have it), but forcing players to go back to the main menu to restart a single race is silly. Or, if you're going to make players do that, penalize them for it, otherwise everyone is going to get caught in a frustrating loop. And the career races, at least as far as I've made it, simply are not long enough for there to be any chance at recovering from these mistakes on the hardest difficulty. And believe me, it gets REALLY annoying having to constantly go back to the main menu every time you make a mistake. Absolutely ridiculous.

Thirdly, although I appreciate the game's attempt at making you sense as though you're managing an entire race team with things like R&D, management, and so forth, these features are nothing more than shoehorned XP trees to get the player past feature walls. To name a few, you don't get to know the weather/road conditions of an upcoming event until you hire a research team, you don't get to check certain telemetry until you advance your engineering tree, and you get store/part discounts from advancing that part of your management tree.

Lastly and least importantly, although I know this is just a bug, the game doesn't save your control configurations. Have fun with that until it gets fixed.

Now, to give the game some due credit, the engineering aspects of the game are sweet. Because the game has extremely authentic physics, you will absolutely notice differences in things like drag coefficient, brake pressure, weight distribution, and so forth. Tires have a great feeling of gradual wear and tear as you slowly lose grip and have to make fine adjustments to your brake points, racing line and throttle input. And if you aren't silky smooth with your inputs, you will crash, a lot, as you should. In fact, this game is extremely punishing, and I like that a lot. Also, rainy tracks in this game are a JOY. So much fun to slide around and have to constantly toe the line of braking just in time to not get pulled into the grass.

So yeah, those parts, the game absolutely nails, which is why it hurts to give this game a thumbs down.

At its core, from a pure gameplay perspective, RiMS Racing is a great (if not the best) motorcycle simulator. But the game has NOWHERE near enough content for this price tag, and a lot of its attempts at gameplay features ultimately fall flat in my opinion.

Movement-wise, this game is awesome. You'll have no issues with trying to fight your character into doing what you tell him to do. He moves like greased lightning and responds to input very, very well.

Environmentally and aesthetically, this game is gorgeous. From the textures, to the lighting, geometry, finer details, and so forth, this game is a slam dunk in the visual department.

Oh and the audio is just... pristine. The voice acting and sound effects are great, but that soundtrack is just... incredible. Fans of cyberpunk/retrowave music NEED to at least check out this game's soundtrack.

However, mechanically, the game has some issues. Some really, really annoying issues that need to be fixed, that I can't reconcile until they are indeed fixed. Let me preface my annoyance with the fact that this game is AWESOME. But what I'm about to mention are issues that severely disrupt the game's flow. Ghostrunner is clearly supposed to be a skill-based game that the player is expected to want keep coming back to in order to optimize his or her runs through each level. In order for it to succeed at that, the following must be addressed:

The timing and hit registration for your attacks against the melee enemy type (which is the latest enemy I've reached so far) is all over the place. And that's really, really annoying, because you NEED good timing to reliably and consistently kill that enemy type. But as it stands, sometimes you'll swing WAY too early and magically kill one while he's still over 20ft away from you, and other times that won't work at all. Sometimes you can kill one by swinging when he gets real close, but other times you'll somehow miss and die, even with the same frame timing. Considering you will very quickly be facing rooms containing 3 or more of these guys, in addition to multiple armed enemies, with shield buffs, you will very quickly get extremely frustrated as you keep getting killed by these enemies that you see coming at you, but you just have no means of judging and reliably landing attacks on.

Beyond that, one of the game's biggest strengths - its tight movement and instant/buttonless/seamless wall snapping/running - ironically becomes a weakness in very specific areas. Namely, the ones where you're in or at the end of a tight corridor, or sandwiched between 2+ walls, well above an enemy or group of enemies. In these scenarios, you have to plummet down onto said enemies, while dodging their projectiles, and kill them. Inherently, that sounds like a great combat layout. But with so many walls so closeby, and such quick/seamless wall snapping baked into the controls, requiring no button input to do so, what happens is that you keep accidentally snapping to and running along walls as a result of you trying to dodge incoming projectiles. You can't just plummet straight down, because you'll fall right into their bullets. You have to shift and shimmy around mid-air, which inevitably just sends you into other walls. There aren't THAT many spots where this is an issue, but where it is an issue, it's really annoying.

I guess my complaints just stem from the fact that I want to get really into this game and master it, but I'm never going want to do that if the game has inconsistencies within some of its core mechanics, like hit registration. Anything that disrupts the player's ability to reliably blast through a level on skill alone is bad, and that's what the 2 aforementioned problems are. There is a TON of potential replay value here, much like how Portal has replay value. Ghostrunner just needs to clean up these couple problems and it will be a thumbs up from me.

I really don't know what they were thinking with the MyCareer in this game. It starts off really strong, with the training camps, combine, draft prep, summer league, etc. Those are all absolutely fantastic, and it really does feel like you're involved in the sport when you're playing them, to a level of immersion that no other game has ever achieved for me, regardless of genre. I really cannot speak too highly about how well the whole intro section to the game is.

Then when you get into the season... it just all falls apart.

First off, your teammates absolutely suck, no matter what. My created player is on the Rockets with Harden and Westbrook, and when I say these men miss layups, I mean they miss LAYUPS. Wide open elbow shots, top of the key, in the paint, doesn't matter, they'll miss almost every time. These are a couple of some of the most phenomenal guards in the game right now, but in MyCareer, they play like they barely made the cut for JV. I haven't even seen Westbrook go for a single dunk. WESTBROOK. The man that flies over people on the regular and absolutely tears through interior defenders. He plays like he has a 20" vertical in MyCareer.

Secondly, if you ever try to act on your court awareness, like playing effective off-ball interior defense, you will get blamed every single time something bad happens. Someone else's man scores? That's your defensive breakdown. Throw the ball to your teammate off a pick and roll and he butterfingers it, or reaches the wrong direction? That's your turnover. Miss a wide open elbow shot (which will happen a LOT)? Bad shot selection. Oh look, now you're benched again, because somehow every bad thing that happens is your fault.

And good luck ever sinking a layup as a rookie. If an opponent is within 5 feet of you, you'll throw up a brick, regardless of the shot or timing, no questions asked. And if you're driving, the moment a defender comes within that same distance, your player will start riding up against him instead of just keeping his line, as if he wants to be stopped.

Also, your player is barely capable of executing a crossover, and he is as slow as a slug. You literally cannot dribble under pressure for more than 2 seconds without either turning over or having to pick up the ball.

The free throws are totally rigged too as a rookie. I've missed PERFECT RELEASE free throws and my guy has a 70 free throw rating as a rookie.

And then, even as a point guard, with plenty of assists and some good baskets, your team will still frequently ignore your pass calls even at your most opportune moments, which drops your team chemistry, causing your team to play even worse. This means that it's just better for you to ball hog and keep setting screens until something happens, because without your heroism, your team won't score.

MyCareer mode just boils down to you having to play really selfishly. On offense, ball hog and just call for constant screens. On defense, stay right up against your man and never trying to play the support role. And the best part is, you'll be having to one-man-army your way to victory with your starting ~60-65 rating. And leveling up your character takes forever.

It's just really clear that you're supposed to purchase in-game currency and use that currency to blast your player level up as soon as possible. The game is entirely focused on you being the star of the show, and you simply can't do that unless you have high stats.

Terrible. Just terrible.

Just go get THUG Pro. It's every great Tony Hawk game in one convenient (and free) package/executable on the THUG engine. Want to skate Hangar with reverts? You can do that. Want to backflip down the School II steps with no drop warning? You can do that. Want to airshuffle into the Moscow skybox with moon gravity enabled, while wearing a moose head, in 4k? You can do that. The community is still alive and online functionality is flawless, both for hosting and connecting, so bring your friends too.

But this? This is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Don't buy this.

THIS is the king of all first person shooters. No reloading, no 2-weapon limit, no objective markers, no perks, no stats, no story, no dialogue, no cutscenes, no cinematics, no quests, no side missions, no character stats, no weapon wheel, no always-online DRM, no snapmap, no DLC, no season pass, no wubwub metal, no scripted executions (*cough* glory kills *cough*), and no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. This is the purest FPS on the market. Go blast your way into the bowels of hell just because you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ can.

Dear Bethesda and nu-id Software:
Take some notes, gentlemen.

Worst game I've ever played. Complete garbage

- No replay value
- Easy as ♥♥♥♥
- Crappy mechanics
- Small, short, one dimensional levels
- No character progression
- No level progression
- Horrible soundtrack
- No weapon variety
- No armor variety
- No stat variety
- No intriguing NPCs