[Mikey]

Sweet Jesus that sounds worse than I imagined

[Mikey]

I have to say I really like this. It's the sort of cyberpunk dystopia stuff I eat up. Playing this in French with subtitles is pretty great, too. The memory-remixing is way too paint-by-numbers, but the funky combo lab stuff is kinda fun. I don't mind the icons that show you where to climb as, honestly, it's not like most other games of this type don't make it absurdly easy to do that kind of stuff, anyway. Gonna keep playing.

[Mikey]

Gironika that was beautiful and accurate

[Mikey]

So I'm at this one encounter that is making me so salty. There are invisible guys you can only hit if you can see them. Nilin will actually not punch at all unless they're visible, so you can't just keep an eye out for their flickering Predator outlines and wail them through pure luck. The spotlight you can use to overwhelm their optical camo gets disabled after the first wave, and you have to rely one specific AoE super move to stun them and make them visible. This move has a really long cooldown time and the only way to build up the meter to use it again is to beat up the normal mooks. First you need to shoot them off the walls with your zappy gun, then you need to run them down and hit them with a cooldown-bonus pressen. At any point while doing this, you are likely to get an invisible boot in the ass which will take a decent chunk of health off.

Part of me appreciates that this is the first genuinely challenging fight thus far, and that it's largely because it's forcing me abandon my lazy tendency to lean on just these two combos, but HOLY SHIT does the contrived "Nilin won't punch what she can't see" thing super annoy me. I had to step away. When I return I guess I'll have to fiddle with my combos.

[Mikey]

Alrighty, tonight I picked the game back up and made it nearly to the end. But at a certain point I was experiencing rapidly diminishing returns and I decided to hang it up. In the end I think it was the aesthetics that kept me coming back for more, though I didn't hate the plot. I watched the ending on Youtube, and boy is the English dub lackluster compared to the French.

I think Nilin might be able to challenge Nathan Drake for Best Video Game Blue Jeans.