STRIDE: Fates

Let me preface this by saying this: the original Stride is one of my favorite VR games. Period. The movement is fluid and dynamic, the visuals are charming, and it's easy to get sucked in for long periods of time between arena, endless, and trials. With that, I had fairly high expectations for the story mode, and even though it didn't take place in the same stylistic world I'd come to love through Stride, I still thought it could be a great continuation. Those expectations made the grand reveal so much more disappointing. The first level was the only one that I enjoyed visually, as everything else felt like cardboard cutouts with postcards plastered onto them. Supposedly the environments were previously AI generated, but I honestly wonder if they've even been changed, especially considering the voice acting (and most definitely the script writing) was so blatantly AI. I don't have problems with AI, I think they can be a great way for people without access to artists or writers to still let their dreams come to life, but I can't say I extend that consideration towards studios that have made successful, widely popular games before that certainly have enough money to pay people to talk into a microphone or come up with a story that doesn't make me want to bash my head against a wall. Besides, from a gameplay standpoint, when you're stuck in a tedious level for ages, the same soulless AI voices with no emotion or variety going off every five seconds to lore dump some AI generated spiel becomes one of the most obnoxious experiences imaginable. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where the gloves come off. The writing was overly predictable, the characters were unlikable, bland, and as cliche as the environments, but all of that would be fine if the gameplay was solid, right? Right? No. This was genuinely one of the least enjoyable experiences I've had in gaming, possibly ever. The only somewhat okay change they made was changing the linear wallrun into an arc, but that change went from "oh, that's interesting" to "why the hell did they do this" as soon as I hit the second level. When the game isn't hand-holding you to an extreme through story beats that make you yawn your brains out, it throws you at an objective with no hints or indicators as to where to go (in a game with holographic people and neural chips, yet somehow no gps or pathing assistance), so you're left to fend for yourself. And that resulted in me spending five minutes fighting the game's insistence that I should wall run while trying to move between buildings, getting forced into wall running straight into my death to the void below and having to get back to try and die once again. That said, the parkour wasn't entirely horrible, and moving around through the environments did actually become fun at times, but the game about parkour was only about 30% parkour. 30% was walking around and listening to the characters lore dump, 30% was solving the same five puzzles fifty times in a level to get gun upgrade parts that felt like a complete rip off of Half Life Alyx's system without any of the charm, and 10% was fighting the world's dumbest enemies in a world where gaps you can see are somehow bulletproof. And the very generous 30% estimate of the time spent doing parkour? At least a third of that was in some jank "digital world", where you had to do an entire song and dance just to open a singular door, and the little bit you got was eventually jammed between even more mind-numbing "puzzle" sections where you had to manually move drones into position so you could make a singular jump. And, without giving you secondhand trauma from a full account, the longest level in the game is a continuous streak of puzzle after puzzle, where parkour is disabled, your guns are gone, and the tiny bit of climbing you can do so the developers could say there was technically "parkour" in the level is completely dark, to the point where I had to climb something I most likely wasn't supposed to be able to climb just to progress after spending AN HOUR in the hospital from hell. There was something I came to realize though, that this game was a time waster. So many components nobody wanted or asked for to pad out the game time, so many elements introduced and either incomplete or never touched again, so many sections that would go from overwhelmingly easy to almost cruelly unfair, and so many areas where the movement that made the last game so enjoyable had to be completely halted just so you could move a drone or open a door. Stride set the bar high, and this failed to even get off the ground. My only enjoyment of this game came from laughing at how completely ridiculous the flow of the game was, how completely brain-rottingly boring the story and dialogue were (I was able to predict the ending by the second level), and just how much time I was able to waste doing absolutely nothing at all. This game could genuinely give someone the confidence to shoot their shot with someone they fancied, because no disappointment will ever come close to what I and I'd imagine so many others feel about this long awaited sequel.