The "Last Game You Beat" Thread

Combat was fun, but other than special attacks from blades everything you can do combat moveset wise is open throughout game. Blades are locked off by bosses, which is a "point A to B" drive through random encounters -no story between-, and with minor enemies and location barely varying, there is no motivation for exploration outside of completing minor side objectives to earn more-or-less insignificant accessories.

Lackluster, forced, and incredibly inorganic... All I could do was equate the story to a bleak look into "Stockholm syndrome" that skips over the most significant parts.

The art is very nice, as to be expected by Vanillaware, but that was the only thing I was consistently content with.

I don't mind "health only recovered through health items", I don't mind "low numbers of predetermine health item locations" (actually I do sorta mind this one), I don't mind "stretched out check points between 2-3 different large scale battle locations", I don't mind "unskipable in-game cutscene", I don't mind those cutscenes "leading into the middle of a fire fight". But all of them jammed into one is just... beyond frustrating...

They try so hard to play the game off as a movie, I can't help but feel like they're trying to shape it off like Uncharted but wanting to go in a direction in which they can't be compared too, which was beyond ridiculous for me. A lot of things Naughty Dog does would have greatly helped them in Max Payne 3. But Rock Star seems to never be one to look to others for advice or tips (game controls of "Bully" are loads of fun~ trying to play it atm moment.). They make good games, but there is always a huge learning experience expressed through there games up to those points. The health system of Resistence would have better suited Max Payne 3, would have allowed them to do what they wanted and allowed the player to survive longer and not watch the same 5-10 sec introduction 15 times to a fight already completed 15 times.

As gloomy and depressing as Max was, he was actually rather interesting, up till the end, I did enjoy it quite a bit more than Drake in Uncharted 3. I also, very much, enjoyed walking around Brazil. The place was colorful and vibrant, full of it's own story and life. Through subtle background event's, it tells a lot of the place you are in. (All of which is a huge contrast to most of the rest of the game.) It is the part of the game I was able to immerse myself in the most, and will be the part I remember from the game most.

It's nowhere near a bad game, I simply had much higher expectations from it considering what 1 and 2 were like. Due to the preview, I expected huge amounts of action rivaling the cargo plane event, but took more than half the game to get to that level of excitement. And afterwards fell down to a lower level. I enjoyed the cruise ship, I loved the chasing bits, and the horse riding ambush. But everything else feels so bleak.

They made such a huge build up with the story, and with the expectations of the first 2 games, the "kinds" of enemies you encounter, I was expecting so much more. The ending was so... anticlimactic. Drake only comes off as "an excited kid for a toy from the store" and company as "well it's drake, so we follow". The "bad guys" true motivation is so inconsequential, that you don't find out in the end, they feel more-or-less like interchangeable placeholders (though that might have been the same for 1 and 2, can't remember).