MadWorld. Everything about the game is ridiculous in its excess, except for the actual game part. Once you finish the first zone, you've literally seen everything the game has to offer. The game looks really cool and all, and it stays inventive with the different hazards to kill guys with, but the game still feels really light on things for the player to do. You never get new abilities, so the gameplay gets stale incredibly fast, and it's not very complex to begin with. The enemies have the same attacks in every level, they just get reskinned, so that becomes boring immediately. And there's only like 3 improvised weapons that are just reskinned over and over but have the same function. The minibosses and bosses were cool, I guess. The game had kinda jarring shifts in tone, since the gameplay is absurd, with juvenile commentary at all times, and then the story cutscenes between zones are suddenly an incredibly serious The Running Man rip-off.
Puzzle Quest 2. You have no idea how much I love Puzzle Quest 1. It's where I got all my mad Bejeweled skillz, since I've barely played any actual Bejeweled. But I think every game that Infinite Interactive made between Puzzle Quest 1 and 2 must have been a significant monetary loss or something, because everything in Puzzle Quest 2 felt like it was cutting corners. I've been told the multiplayer is less completely broken than in the first game, but everything else about the sequel is just poor. The art style looks really generic and lame. The battles are barely more visually impressive: they still don't animate, but sometime still images of your weapon or character class will appear on-screen, which is unfortunate because the character art is ugly as sin. Baffling, when the art in PQ1 was totally fucking rad. The game has like 10% as much writing as PQ1, and it's incredibly generic Diablo 1 bullshit instead of the reasonably original setting in PQ1. In PQ1, the quests were varied and you'd fight at most 2-3 battles before finishing a quest. In PQ2, there are way less quests, and they drag on forever, requiring you to clear out the same like 2 fucking enemy types over and over on each floor of the dungeon. The game has like 4 or 5 companions that join you, but only 2 of them ever say a goddamn word once they join you, and neither one is as interesting as any of the companions in PQ1. And PQ2 managed to remove all of the equipment/spell customization, and the interesting monster-capturing mechanic. Just terrible.
Trials 2. Thank god this only cost me $2 on Steam. I wasn't looking forward to it, just got it with a random bundle, but figured now is as good a time as any to mention it. I don't know what people see in this series. I don't find it fun or interesting to make a guy dry hump a dirt bike until he can physics his way over bullshit obstacle courses. Sorry, guys. The 2D dirt bike platformer genre is dead to me.
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