Let's start with the positives: - it's very pretty - music is nice And the not so good: - combat is of the "hitting a big sponge with a wet noodle" variety - unresponsive controls with broken hit detection - strorytelling gives me Fallout 4 flashbacks (the world doesn't really work and dialog choices are not great) - plenty of glitches, luckily nothing gamebreaking Overall I give it "finished once and will never touch again" out of five.
The concept seems interesting. I'm not a fan of the execution. If you don't "git gud" quickly, you'll be stuck repeating the same red level with the same music track playing a character that either has very low damage or almost no way to recover health. Whether you get overpowered items or something that's completely useless to you is up to RNG. The game has more ways to punish you than to reward you. Even the rhythm mechanic basically punishes you for making actions outside the beat. A single mistake can end your run. It has been interesting for a few hours, but I think I'll move on.
It's an action RPG. The story isn't much, but then I didn't expect it to be. Disappointing loot, sluggish controls, environments that outstay their welcome and gradually increasing hordes of monsters that become tedious to slog through towards the end. The final boss sponge was more tiring than difficult. The graphics aren't bad, I like the cartoony style. The game is rather easy, penalties for dying are mild. I loved Torchlight II, it has improved quality of life in many respects, plenty of content, excellent mods. There's almost no reason to play Torchlight over Torchlight II.
What breaks this for me is a combination of floaty driving and twitchy unhelpful camera. I don't feel in control of the car at all. This was not an issue for me in any of the previous Carmageddon games. There is a game here, but I'm not really enjoying it. I won't bother completing it.
Note: ignore the remaster, play the Classic version; the remaster crashes often (as others have noted) and it even looks worse to my eyes. The Classic version is perfectly fine and playable. Although it does have some annoying mouse sensitivity issues. I feel like Bioshock 2 was made by the B-team that received a booklet with the Bioshock formula and a bunch of assets and was told to make a game around it, possibly without playing through the first one for themselves. It has lots of details in it, but not a lot of attention to detail. Good: the environments are atmospheric and look good some decent story moments quality-of-life improvements (you can now wield a plasmid and a gun at the same time) the hacking minigame is quicker and less annoying than in Bioshock 1 it's fairly short Bad: level design - little was memorable, most looks like thrown-together corridors and random areas with staircases with not much logic to them controls - each gun has several types of ammo and there are a few non-guns added into the mix, so in the heat of battle you will probably do some really stupid things while looking for a gun that still has ammo, preferably of the right type and the game reshuffles the order of your plasmids every so often so you won't know which key has which one some of the battles just throw waves of enemies at you in a confined area without bothering to explain how or why Overall: meh, in the series I would rank this a distant third after Bioshock 1 and Infinite
