METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE

Amazingly fun. Camera's a little janky but you mostly get used to it. Love it

Incredibly difficult to get into due to the practically non-existent tutorial for key gameplay mechanics like parrying and lock-on, but once you get over the infuriating learning curve the game is pretty fun. The world of MGR:R has a lot of charm with all its characters (even the edge lord protagonist), the slicing mechanic and subsequently the healing mechanic are very fun once you get the hang of them, bosses are challenging but fair, lots of creative usage of the slicing mechanic within said bosses, destructible environment is sick, etc etc. The game's praise is warranted. But with that said, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the annoying things that come up in this game are everywhere. Like I said, tutorial is non-existent. There's a tutorial for basic controls, but key mechanics are not properly explained, leaving you dumbfounded on THE SECOND BOSS. I ended up looking up how to play for the entirety of the second level simply because of how little was explained. For anyone who happens to stumble upon this before playing the game, YOU TAP FORWARD ONCE AND TAP ATTACK ONCE TO PARRY; DO NOT HOLD FORWARD, THE JAPANESE SYMBOLS IN SLOW MOTION MEAN YOU NEED TO SLICE THE ENEMY, THE DWARF GEKKO IS THE HAND DRONE THING IN THE GLASS TESTING TUBE. The parry mechanic is so annoying at times because there's a very fine line between moving/attacking and parrying, leading to constantly screwing up parries, especially in some of the more intense bosses like Sam and Armstrong. The lock-on mechanic is [i]fine[/i], but often leaves you blind during fights and can be incredibly disorienting to use. The plot is utterly incoherent and asinine. The bosses are all super unique, but are introduced so randomly with zero build up (other than Sam) that they don't feel very meaningful to fight other than simply being a boss. Lots of the characters are just [i]there[/i] with zero build up either, making their relationship with Raiden meaningless (Courtney's sole purpose is goon bait, she and Kevin have zero importance to the story and nobody can tell me otherwise). And I feel like the slice mechanic is underutilized. I don't know how it could've been used better, but it feels lackluster, serving only three purposes (weakpoints, healing, and qte).