A really fun battle shooter with a unique racing concept that features a whole bunch of interesting tracks with branching paths. Pickups are fun to use and varied, you get a lot of them too so the races are never boring. HOWEVER. The 'out of bounds' hitboxes are strangely positioned, sometimes you will get automatically reset while you could still save yourself and bounce back onto the track and sometimes they let you drive on the wrong part of the track / backwards (happens a lot in a game where your vehicle is constantly tumbling) for a few seconds before kicking in. One track in particular features a FX bug where every effect like missile explosions, reset animations and pickups eat up 90% of your frames for a split second which is horribly irritating. That being said there are still a lot of good sides to this game like the splitscreen multiplayer, a long campaign with rivals, lots of customization options for your tumbler of choice and a solid tutorial and explains the mechanics step-by-step.
Can be frustrating but cmon. You shoot massive skeleton horses and demons with uranium cannonballs. Its a grand ol time.
Everything is just top-notch. The story is amazing, the soundtrack feels like this little imaginary world itself is singing it and its all coupled with the most exquisitely crafted visuals i have ever seen in a RPG. I heard this studio spent quite a few years making this game and it was all worth it because they created a work of art that stands out even to this day.
The physics are a bit floaty but thats understandable given the age of the game. Menus are quite annoying to navigate and whenever you save the "save successful" sign covers some menu options so you cant click them untill it hides. Lovers of good music rejoice! This game has one (1) track that plays both in the menus and during races and its not terribly good either! The best part about this are the powerups, there are fun weapons, fun speedups, fun troll pickups like hovercar and hot rod that mess up your steering and best of all silly NPC modifiers that can make them fat, tiny, give them weapons and so on. The racers / cars you get to choose from are also neatly designed and driving each one feels completely different. All in all it was fun for like an hour for me but a serious fan of the genre could get a lot more out of it. Also the difficulty selecting at the start of the new game is almost pointless since picking the right car has the most effect on difficulty.
...and it's got a really good soundtrack! Also all those innuendo-type gags which might or might not really fit into the whole thing but thats just my opinion. The dark magic collectibles are NOT QUITE optional if you're looking to try this one out.
...the controls are awful at times, the sound mix is inconsistent so even if you tweak the sound settings some things are gonna end up sounding way too loud or too quiet, and some sections take way too long to navigate. The story survived the ageing process, but the techical stuff sure didnt.
Things that are top-notch: - music, - sound effects, - voice acting, - art style, - most of the story, - character designs, - upgrade system, - secrets, - the interconnected map design / exploration, - the 'Keepers of the Void' DLC Things that are allright: - combat since it feels like an unholy union between dark souls and devil may cry but there are still many fun combos, the close dodge retaliation is unique for each weapon and all the specials look good and feel good to use - quick menu for the consumables since its really handy but has a hidden cooldown where you cannot swap items a few seconds after using one of them Things that are underwhelming: - even though 90% of the game runs smooth there are certain areas where performance drops massively, especially in cutscenes (PFS drops to 30-40 on an rtx 4060 ti, cheesus), - merchant menu and upgrade menu behave strangely, sometimes they ignore mouse inputs and they don't have all the navigation options mapped properly - the ending is poorly written, suffers from millennial humor especially the final boss character as a whole, - new game + only has a singular new type of enemy that drops a singular new resource, no point in going for another round trip since the story and the boss fights remain the same - 'The Crucible' DLC is the biggest letdown on this list, just like it was in the first game. The lovely facts you can buy things there if you do well and get to see new...-ish bosses is completely overshadowed by the fact you have to sit there for about two to three hours (best case scenario) to see all of them and if you truly wanna complete the DLC and get the final reward you have to do all 100 enemy waves without resuming from checkpoints a.k.a. in one go. It would be perfect if it was two difficult enemy waves per boss (and i do mean difficult not incredibly long and mostly boring as it currently is). Also ignore that one guy saying you cant guard break enemies, use the damm hammer
Has some minor hiccups regarding performance, other than that its just fun to play.
As the title says, i love the story about trans-humanism, human-robot hybrids and all that. Amazingly written, really squeezes all those touchy subjects about converting a human mind into digital data and stuffing it into random machines or not-quite-machines. I cant really give a rating about the horror elements since im not a fan of horror but as far as visuals and sound design go its 10/10. Only reason it gets a 4 and not a 5 outta me is because i got stuck in a segment where i had to do some precise work with a chip and my character kept saying i was missing something untill i realized i was interacting with a little locking mechanism for the chip and not the chip slot itself which would be fine if i didnt have a spooky scary monster shooing me away every time i got near the socket which resulted in me walking back and forth thinking i missed something for days.
