Recent reviews by Shio

Bad localisation with internet meme text that gets irritating eXCEEDingly (get it?) fast. XSEED once again proves they're pure garbage. (Quick update: there's a reference to Hatred in game (just as bad as Sei Madou Monogatari having DSP referenced) and the Steam community items are pure cringe. Gee thanks.)

That aside something worse is probably the state of the game.

Videos might not play on Windows or Linux without enabling an old codec from Intel from Windows 95 with security issues on Windows and on Linux finding and installing said Codec into the Prefix. Why XSEED didn't update at least this is beyond me as it makes me feel like they just took the original 2001 release and just dumped it without much care.

Screen options are only available as command line options rather than just being in game (why is pixel perfect only available through this???).

The Japanese voices aren't included in the game so you're given the joy of only having English dub (vomit) (a mod fixes this).

And to be expected the game is locked to 30FPS because of the game speed, although I expected this compared to the other glaring issues.

The only positive I can say is that they added tutorials in game for controls and some game mechanics. I'd be fairly lost without knowing some of the stuff mentioned in them. (I didn't even know how to save, maybe I missed it but I'm not sure and I'm doubting myself.)

Combine all this and you get a really lackluster and poor re-release that feels incredibly scrapped together just to push out ASAP for something on the release calendar.


Aside from XSEED being XSEED, the game is charming but flawed so far.

I feel this has a similar issue to Gurumin where you aren't fully instructed easily where to go but at least it was more obvious in Gurumin as here I've felt overwhelmed and confused in scenarios.

You can only level up by eating food which might become an issue later on opposed to being able to get EXP from enemies as well like Nayuta no Kiseki.

But all the art looks absolutely beautiful, this game really is gorgeous and looks full of life, especially the music from jdk.

It's nice to hear some more music from Wataru Ishibashi as his music was some of the stuff that defined Sora no Kiseki FC to me.

It's also nice to be playing another Falcom game that isn't in 3D as their games in this style really scratch an itch for something I'm looking for (As long as they aren't going through PH3's terrible AI Upscaler).

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023), not to be confused with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, is a rough game made from the scraps of what was supposed to be a DLC for the previous entry rushed by an awful publisher to meet a yearly deadline. And oh gosh it really shows and pretty badly...

Mostly. But before I talk positively about this game I must complain.



CoD HQ Review

CoD HQ is a joke. It sucks. Feel free to read my full thoughts on CoD HQ in the review above but it just makes launching this game a massive pain. It's not nearly as bad as launching MW2022 as that had its modes split into 4 different options, instead you have 2 here thankfully but that doesn't suddenly make this not a pain to use. You still need to fully close the game just to launch the other mode and by closing the game you load Black Ops 6 (which I don't have). Amazing. What a pile of trash. Much like the



HAHA WOW, bootleg Captain Price from Liverpool returns once again with his jokers from discount Task Force 141 and this just sucks. It's easily the worst Campaign in the series beating out Vanguard by far. The story and writing? Trash, like the other games in the reboot series. Stuff just happens and the stuff that happens is so comically bad I was laughing so hard it hurt at moments that are supposed to be these shocking gasp moments like how can anyone take these seriously???

As for the levels you have a strikingly great first impression with a level that's honestly really fun and engaging, it's your typical enemy infiltration into a prison mission but it's well done and executed. I'd say better than anything in the reboot series but everything instantly falls apart right after this when you get given the "Open Combat Missions".

Pffffffft haahhahaha okay yeah they just slapped the Warzone maps into the campaign and called it a day. You're given this huge open area from a Warzone level (couldn't tell you which one, never played Warzone and never will.) and you're meant to play it very sneaky and stuff. No thanks I just ran through it easily without a care and died like once. After that I for the first time ever playing CoD stopped playing the campaign on Hard and set it to Recruit. Not because it's hard but because I just did not care at all, I was so bored after that and there were so many more "Open Combat Missions" I struggled to actually care. I just wanted to be done with this as soon as possible and not waste my time with it. Pure trash.

If there was any CoD that shouldn't have had a campaign it should've been this rather than Black Ops 4 which could've been the game to actually tie the mess that is Black Ops 3 into the story properly.

Don't buy this game for the campaign, don't even think about it even on sale. If someone gives you a copy of this for free do not install the campaign, do not think about it pretend it doesn't exist. Just like



Hate. That is the only word I can use to describe how I feel about this. Hate. They took a Warzone map, shoved Zombies onto it. Added some objectives made very clearly intended for a squad making them a pain for solo and made it also an extraction shooter.

I think I would genuinely prefer this wasn't included within the game at all. This modes existence actively brings down the package of the game. Especially since I don't have much else to say about this. This is such a nothing mode.

Also it runs exceedingly poorly on my PC, whilst barely using the hardware.



...

oh...

ohhhhh...

IT'S AMAZING!

I stopped playing new CoD releases after Black Ops 4 for 5 years due to just general burnout from the series and feeling nothing but pure disappointment returning to my comfy land of Black Ops 3 until the security issues started appearing for the game. Coming back and playing the backlog of releases since then has been fairly miserable with the 4 games since then having genuinely awful map designs that are counter intuitive and only make sense if you play an objective based mode such as Domination or Hardpoint. Coming into this game I was expecting another mess of huge maps and an effectively unplayable TDM.

I was... so wrong and I couldn't be happier to be wrong.

There are so much content here the price of the game on sale feels completely justified. You have all the MW2 maps plus a bunch of new ones and the newer ones aren't horrible... THEY'RE FUN?! I have mostly played on the newer maps so far and honestly I have been so surprised at just how good they actually are. They're the closest they've been to pre Warzone CoD and that's a massive positive. Nothing has felt overly huge and convoluted and I have been able to actually enjoy TDM and KC again since you can actually find players!

There are so many weapons it's actually insane 125 Guns and 12 Melees. And there are so many attachments for literally everything I don't think I'll get bored of this game for a very long time as I can always come back to it and I feel there will always be something new to explore, do and learn.

All of the weapons I've used so far have also been enjoyable to use as well and they've all felt fairly competitive and that I'm not at a disadvantage for using something else. The gun names suck though, silly goofy fake names like we don't know what they actually are. What is this stupid stuff that's continued since MW2022?

Perks have changed as well so now they're sort of combined together with other perks and it's alright. I prefer the other systems but that's only because I could make myself overpowered with 0 trade offs, so in a sense it's more balanced here as you have to think more carefully about what buffs you wish for.

Sledgehammer absolutely won with this MP. Absolutely amazing.




I feel broke looking at the store. Why is this here in a paid game and why is there so much what actually happened here? Activision your greed is way too much calm down. And on that like continuing from Vanguard there's tons of art style ruining cosmetics and brands.

I still hate them but I think at this point I've become numb to it or at least it doesn't surprise me anymore. Garbage.



Game runs well, very nice. In MP it never really goes below 300FPS at max settings on an RX 7900XTX.

The light flickering bug at FPS above 90FPS has finally been fixed so no more potential seizures.

The options menu is as full of stuff that makes me extremely excited as usual with CoD.



Buy the game for Multiplayer, I would say at 50% off it's 100% worth it for the amount of content you'll be getting. The value honestly feels insane especially comparing it to something like Black Ops 3 which costs about the same amount but only has a fraction of the amount of maps and weapons.

Campaign and Zombies are a joke, forget about them. They bring down the entire experience and are the reason I don't recommend the game for a review because unfortunately 1/3 of a game being good isn't a thing you should recommend.

To set the mood for this game, the moment you boot the game up you see Raul Menendez from Black Ops II, set in 2025... This is a game set in WWII... Oh and also "Ricochet" just to let you know that you're a complete fool and installed effectively a rootkit on your PC. Anyways,

I have effectively nothing positive to say about Call of Duty: Vanguard. It's literally terrible in every way so let's get into it.



Pure trash. Go play CoD 1/UO/2/WaW/WWII if you want your WW2 CoD Campaign fix.

You have 4 really forced epic main characters that say quippy lines that completely snap me out of the experience and feel like a complete joke. I played the campaign at the end of last year and remember not a single thing about them apart from how they irritated me for being such try hard "cool" people.

The levels themselves are also just straight up boring, I had to pause myself so often and take a break so I could mentally catch up and be able to proceed with actually playing it.

I really wish the campaign took notes or tried to be similar to CoD's previous campaigns like the ones mentioned before, CoD 1 - 2 (haven't played 3 or other console exclusive titles) have you go through mission to mission throughout various stages and locations of the war completing missions. I wish the campaign was a more updated version of this as it would be nice for a refined version of this style of campaign.

Or be like WWII where the campaign feels like a band of brothers fighting for a future, especially with how great that games set scenes are that completely immerse you.

This just felt like a C tier Hollywood cashgrab. Like literally any Video Game Movie.



Ahahaha. Oh wow this is awful, unexpectedly so.

I'm not against another studio trying to do their own Zombies because Infinite Warfare's was amazing (I would also love for each studio to have their own specific thing like extinction from Ghosts), but this is awful.

You have to do these silly quests for 2 maps and one is fully based on locations from the Campaign and Shi No Numa (oh it's back again) while the other 2 are back to round based zombies and are literally Shi No Numa and the other quest style map reused. What actually happened here??? The only enjoyable map is Shi No Numa which has now been used 4 times.

This is unoriginal and sucks, it feels so unbelievably forced



Tragedy.

While the gunplay in Vanguard is still great that's only because it's copied directly from MW19.

There's a new option called "Blitz" pacing which just increases the player count, it's ground war. But it can be toggled for individual modes which is nice to see. Use this. I'll mention why in a second.

However everything else sucks.

The maps are the worst maps I have ever played in CoD, they're confusing and huge. They are horrible to play on for TDM and KC and to offset how huge the maps are you move extremely fast. Like way too fast. It feels unnatural and like someone's modded the lobby so everyone has 2x speed. This doesn't fix your maps being terrible, it just shows how terrible they are that this was a thing that needed to be done. With these maps being so huge I would say Blitz pacing is necessary as more players = actually finding someone on a huge map.

But the pacing selection choice isn't definite. It's a preference and the matchmaking will still shove you into traditional 6v6 lobbies anyway. So what's the point of giving me a choice in the first place??? If I wanted both modes I'd choose "Both".

Factions are gone again but now are replaced with exceedingly annoying quippy epic characters who can't shut up, one of the first things I did was mute character voices. I hate them.

Multiplayer is also fairly dead, if it wasn't for crossplay it would literally be unplayable. You will struggle to find lobbies for some gamemodes.

The EM1 from Advanced Warfare is in the game. This actually stunlocked me when I originally saw this. Look, I love Advanced Warfare. AW, BO3 and IW are probably the best and most fun this franchise has been but... This is a WW2 game, why does this belong he-



...

This is the death of CoD's identity. Snoop Dog is in this game... Al-Asad from CoD4... Terminator... Attack on Titan... Menendez from BO2, Seraph from BO3 and there's probably more I am missing. This is where the Fortniteification of CoD really began and the death of its identity. MW19 had Saw and Cold War had stupid stuff but this is where the snowball really rolled and it feels like a shock to the brain seeing any of this. I feel like I'm playing a joke, a gag. If it is, it's a very unfunny one.

Even ignoring all this the MTX Shop is as usual full of garbage enough to probably make you waste 3 grand for everything. Yikes and disgusting.



As usual with CoD the Windows versions since MW19 have been really quality aside from some glaring issues.

The Options Menu is literally a dream come true for me, effectively everything is tweak-able in some way and it is completely glorious. The Graphics menu also has a plethora of options to choose from which should be standard for every other studio to follow,

There's Steamworks implementations too so you can invite your friends from Steam overlay or view Steam profiles as well. Neat stuff.

It isn't perfect though, the light flickering issue when your FPS is over 90 and gets worse the higher your framerate is still exists from MW19. In some scenarios this gets REALLY bad and could cover your screen with flashing. Yikes!

And the game on Steam doesn't include high quality assets. Admittedly I don't completely hate this since it makes the game 56GB instead of 150GB but even then it should be an optional download.



Don't.

Get Black Ops - Cold War instead.

I love Towa so much

This review is in progress and will focus exclusively on the Campaign for the time being due to low hour count in Multiplayer.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022), not to be confused with a good game called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered is a step down from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) in almost every single possible way, despite that game also being fairly mediocre, and is completely embarrassing with how much it even costs.


CoD HQ Review

Before I begin talking about the game itself I need to talk about its own launcher, CoD HQ. This sucks. It makes launching the game increasingly tedious and when you want to switch gamemodes you need to close the whole game, reload the launcher and then you can load another mode. Activision, fix this now. Even if the game was good I wouldn't recommend it simply because of this and Ricochet. But without of the way.



Bootleg Captain Price from Liverpool is back this time with bootleg Task Force 141. I dislike effectively everyone here, they were "tolerable" in MW2019 but the writing here just makes me eye roll at points or just do not care about anyone at all. None of the characters felt remarkably likeable which is a great shame especially since while the original trilogy was fairly simple the characters were likeable. Especially Price.

And the writing itself in general is effectively made for people who love epic references!!11!! And while with MW2019 I praised how the loading was covered up and everything had a seamless transition to each scene making it feel cinematic in a good way they take making things cinematic too far and everything is made to feel like some super military movie that would get a 5/10 score. There wasn't a single scene in the game that was thought provoking or engaging as traditionally the MW games have handled controversial moments really well to provide scenes with some impact and cause you to really think about a scenario. There is none of that here.

The levels themselves are also poorly designed and completely void of being engaging. They all feel relatively cobbled together to just have something to put on the box.

Worst of all is how- *crash* worst of al- *crash* wo- *crash* ... worst of all is how utterly broken the Steam version is. Enemies shooting through walls randomly, enemies walking through walls, crashes and a lot of them, broken lighting and tons of other stuff.

Was there any sort of testing done for this and even then I bought this 3 years after launch THIS SHOULD BE FIXED but it's been an issue since the launch of the game. Amazing.

The worst of it all has to be the broken lighting. Unfixed since MW2019 is light sources in the game being tied to the frame rate somehow, the higher your FPS the more broken lights will be in the game. At 240FPS lights in this game flicker and really badly, I wouldn't be surprised if this could cause issues for people that are sensitive to flashing images because at points lights cover your entire screen and will be flashing rapidly. It's really bad.

But that issue gets worse because when you start the mission "Alone" you start seeing every single light source through walls, all of them. It's stupid and ridiculous and the issue doesn't go away until you reset your shader cache and completely restart a mission and you will need to at some point because the mission Ghost Team is unplayable without doing this because the sun and sun flare are constantly in your face otherwise.

Campaign sucks but something worse than being bad is being bad and broken. I love playing CoD campaigns so playing this was greatly disappointing. What a massive shame and missed opportunity.

This is a review on the Call of Duty HQ application. Not a game, take note literally everyone reviewing this.

Specific game reviews for games included in CoD HQ

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023)



CoD HQ is an absolute atrocity and should've been blocked by Valve, forcing them to release future CoD titles as they had been doing so for the last... 18 years!


So with that out of the way, what exactly is CoD HQ? It's a mistake. Anyways, CoDHQ is a launcher for Call of Duty games (yes another 3rd party launcher for Steam). Yay another one but I think I actually prefer Origin and Uplay over this as at least with those the games actually automatically launch after actually clicking "Play" in Steam.

When you launch CoDHQ you have to go through 2 opening movies (skippable) and then it loads the menu, once the menu is loaded you get greeted to giant ads for a battle pass (no thanks), cosmetics (no thanks), a game you might not have (great thanks just what I wanted to play). Awesome. And this takes up your entire screen.

So you need to click "All Games" to see the actual game you want to play, can't have this as the default. Great. And no you can't quick launch a game either.

There's also a whole Battle Pass tab in a launcher. Great.

Once you find the game you bought you then get the joyful choice of choosing which mode you'd like to play and make sure you choose carefully because otherwise HQ will close forcing you to load the game, close the game, reload HQ and then choose the actual mode you want. Fantastic, well done you over-complicated launching a game.

We've progressed so far back from Black Ops III unifying all the different modes under one exe and I'd say it's even worse than the separate exe titles too as at least when you want to switch with them you can easily do so from Steam without the launcher itself reloading.

Everything here feels so awfully cobbled together and the end result is a complete disaster and UX nightmare.


My huge gripe and grievance with CoDHQ is that now there's only one app which results in

• Forums are a mess for currently 4 games as of writing, ATVI clearly don't care to try and split them up properly.
  
• One Steam Input config active at a time
  
• Community hub shares the same fate as forums
  
• Achievements are now cobbled together
  
• Only one install location allowed, so you have to have multiple 100+GB on one storage device
  
• Game size is a complete mess with the full size total being 986.60GB for literally everything (as of writing. Edit: Updated size)
  
• Only have access to a combined hour count now

So nobody was actually thinking when this was decided to be a thing and now everyone gets to suffer for it. Thanks.

Did I mention that you have to install everyone's favourite rootkit Ricochet? No not that amazing genre defining game from Valve, the "Anti-Cheat" which does nothing, 3rd game playing and someone was obviously walling. Awesome that's great, why did I pay money for a game that uses Ricochet?

Oh and each game needs an internet connection to play. SteamStub, Arxan and an Activision account wasn't good enough. Oooh great.


CoDHQ is so awful it made me praise Origin and Uplay to some degree. Outstanding. Anyways this sucks.

Playtime is incorrect. Played via Plutonium Client.

Call of Duty: World at War is a game touted as one of the games from the "Golden Era" of Call of Duty by the majority of fans (especially Reddit lol) and for good reason. This is a very solid game, at least from what I've played but it isn't without its flaws.



Is very solid. It takes you through the events of WW2 through 2 soldiers. Miller who's an American soldier and Dimitri Petrenko who's a Soviet and later appears in the timeline sequel, Black Ops 1.

The Campaigns feel similar to the Call of Duty Warchest games where you go on missions throughout WW2 but it feels a lot more connected and fluent opposed to those games whereas they felt like individual missions rather than a connected story following soldiers and their divisions.

As for the levels themselves they feel a lot more closer to CoD4 where you go for set piece after set piece down corridors and corridors and while this makes the gameplay flow a lot better it's undeniable how some of the charm from the previous WW2 CoD titles is lost because of this where in those games the levels felt a lot more open despite also being something where you go from Point A to Point B.

The Campaign also features Co-Op play! This is an awesome addition to the game as I love Co-Op Campaigns and wish more games had the option of doing this.

also Grenades. They get spammed a lot.



What an absolute homerun, from something hidden and unapproved to become a franchise staple. Zombies is a winning formula where you're tasked to stay alive as long as possible with each round getting more and more intense fighting against waves of zombies. It started out brilliant here and is easily where I've spent most of my time on PS3.

Compared to future entries Zombies here is pretty basic but I find that to be a positive as it's nice to have a clean and fairly vanilla experience where you just have the Mystery Box for Nacht der Untoten with later maps adding Perks and Pack-a-Punch.



Unfortunately I haven't played much of WaW's MP but I eventually plan on doing so. From what I have played on PS3 however it's fairly similar to CoD4 which isn't necessarily a negative but it does make it feel fairly samey except if it wasn't for the environments looking extremely distinct compared to CoD4. The maps I had played on also felt good enough but I really do need to play more before I feel satisfied saying anything more.



So like with other Call of Duty titles I have made reviews for (which are fortunately a lot more in depth than this), I praise the game as very much usually Call of Duty titles are extremely well done and polished titles with great gameplay and an unbeatable formula. But there are issues that prevent me from recommending the game, especially at the price Activison / Microsoft are selling it at.

Pros

• DLC for Steam is free unlike consoles
  
• Community dedicated server support

Cons

• Known Security Vulnerabilities*
  
• PunkBuster*
  
• No Controller support* **
  
• Co-Op is completely broken
  
• Poor options menu, need console commands for FoV*
  
• Frame Rate issues over 90FPS
  
• Price
  
• Game reads Windows Mouse settings rather than Raw Input

Yeah, no. With known RCEs in the game that are actively exploited in other CoD titles it's impossible to give this a recommendation, even if nobody is actively exploiting the issues like in BO2, MW2 and MW3. Valve update all their titles when exploits are found so why can't one of the biggest companies in the world. No instead they port it to their own platform with the known issues still unpatched.

Co-Op doesn't work at all.

FPS over 90 causes issues related to physics (which is still an issue with the IW engine, even in Vanguard)


However that leads me to Plutonium.

* Plutonium is a fan created client for a selection of Call of Duty titles that allows for Community Dedicated Servers on the P2P matchmaking CoD titles, adds Controller Support with Aim Assist (use Gyro controller bros), replaces PunkBuster with their own User Space Anti Cheat (which works on Linux but not Steam Deck, more on that in a second.) and fixes up the options menu and adding in some nice QoL like Borderless Fullscreen.

But most importantly has the games numerous security issues patched making the games safe to play again.

This shouldn't be necessary, unfortunately it is.

Co-Op Campaign in Plutonium is also broken with events not triggering properly causing softlocks.

Unfortunately, Steam Deck is not supported due to issues with how Wine handles stuff related to their AC. Hopefully one day SD gets supported.

Please use this when playing any supported game.


** You can use Steam Input to map controller inputs to Keyboard.




Great game, abysmal support from Activision/Microsoft. Fix the game.

Added Epic Games installation 7 years after launch.

❗️Contant Internet Connection required, including for Single-player.❗️

Following the masterpiece from Infinity Ward, Infinite Warfare (that doesn't get annoying when abbreviating), comes Modern Warfare (2019) (not CoD4) (and not the original version of Modern Warfare Remastered) a reboot of what Modern Warfare is and modernising it. Off to a great start already with the absolutely awful naming of this game. Aside from the terrible naming the game is resoundingly okay.



Exists and features knock off Captain Price from Liverpool. It's a resounding meh. I don't care about the story or the characters here, they all feel pretty standard while attempting to be unique. It's nothing like Infinite Warfare with a character like Ethan.

The actual levels however are quite nicely done but for only one go, there's a nice variety of stuff and things going on but there's essentially no replayability as there's not much else to do other than the objective.

The transitions for the game however are really nice, there's basically no blatant loading screens and it's one scene to another. Compared to previous games where loading screens were fairly obvious this honestly makes the game feel more cinematic but in a good way.

There's no Steam Cloud for the Campaign (MP Save data is hosted by Activision) so make sure to back up your saves when changing installs or PC. Fix please.



This is what I bought the game for, this is okay and is the largest change in CoD from game to game.

Usually with CoD you could tell the new game was built on the previous games with the subtle similarities, especially with BO3 -> BO4 -> CW. But here it feels very much distinctively different from Infinite Warfare with you feeling fairly grounded and heavy, especially compared to previous IW titles like Ghosts and the MW games where you feel speedy and lightweight.

New with MW2019 in movement is Tactical Sprint and it's faster sprinting which you get by pressing Sprint twice for a short period of time. This shouldn't be needed but I would say it is due to the Maps size so for this game it's nice to have.

Weapons feel radically different from previous IW games but they feel really great, the only ones I have a complaint with are the Pistols so far as I can't land a shot at all. Oops. Aside from that it all feels and works as expected with nothing at least right now feeling like it needs balancing.

The Maps... are really bad, with few being new classics. A lot of them are stinkers and every CoD can't be like BO3 where every stock map was awesome but jeez are these bad. They feel way too huge and convoluted resulting in being unfun to navigate in TDM. The Classic maps also aren't spared with some having modifications which make them tedious to play on. Especially Crash which has increased sight-lines in places it shouldn't need them making going trough the middle miserable.

Because of the maps I suggest you avoid TDM (and KC) as each match ends up feeling fairly pointless due to their sheer size, having a set objective at least provides you with engagement. On the topic of gamemodes.

There's quite a variety of gamemodes and playlists here with your usual variety of TDM, Domination, Kill Confirmed, Hardpoint etc but there's some new additions like Cyber Attack. However tons of modes and playlist are vaulted out of the MP, only allowing you to play them in Custom Games... Why?

Ground War, not Ground War from every other CoD (oh look more bad naming), is Battlefield's conquest mode but smaller and more fast paced and it's extremely fun. I wish more CoDs brought in new modes like WW2's War mode as they're usually the best parts of those games and this is no exception. This is extremely fun and I would honestly love to see more of this with even more players and slightly bigger maps.


Pick 10 from IW has been replaced with a system close to CoD4 where you pick only a certain amount of attachments, choose a lethal and tactical and perks with the addition of more attachments and the special equipment you can choose.

Levels in this are shared between Cold War and Vanguard, since I was level 1024 in Cold War I'm also level 1001 in MW2019 with a massive amount of extra XP as the level cap is 1001. This is a bit odd and kills some of the progression you get and also makes me look like I've played this game for years despite only having 17 hours when originally writing this.



Is almost unplayable and also bad. The main mode NEEDS 4 players and only in public matchmaking for some reason. The map seems to be recycled from Warzone or vice versa but the missions are boring and feel like nothing. I tried playing the other missions but they're clearly intended for 4 players only as well but at least you can try them out alone or have private matches and they reuse campaign maps.

And as for being unplayable, nobody plays it. It's nearly impossible to get a match and the one time I do manage to get one I played with an Activision employee.



Disgusting.

The item shop is filled to the brim with items completely unobtainable through actual gameplay, the loot boxes sucked because of gambling but at LEAST you could get the stuff from them. Instead here you have tons of items and they can cost up to £35...

THAT COSTS MORE THAN THE ENTIRE GAME WHICH IS £16.49!

The items almost all look bad anyway and are made to appeal to people who can't concentrate on one thing at once without a podcast in the background or people scared of their social status because they don't have generic "anime girl" on their gun.

Bleh.



The Steam Port here came 3 and a half years after release and it's fairly okay, you can invite and join people through Steam but the game reads inputs through Steam Overlay so you have random inputs going through into the game which caused me to accidentally invite someone.

An issue with the game in general is an FPS bug, above 120FPS you'll start to encounter issues with light sources causing them to flicker. The more FPS you have the faster the flicker to the point it could be unsafe in some scenarios such as the sun covering your whole screen and rapidly flashing.

On Steam the game requires a constant Internet connect, most likely a remnant from BNets awful DRM.

The game requires you to install a Windows Kernel Anti Cheat called Ricochet. The Anti Cheat hasn't been updated since March 2023 and is effectively useless with cheaters running rampant and to a bad degree. You will encounter a cheater in more matches then matches there aren't any and when you make one angry they just crash the entire lobby. The Anti Cheat has not enabled Proton compatibility so there's no support for the game on Steam Deck and Linux.

The game has crashed once and crashed my PC twice in the 17 hours I've played it. I've only ever had 2 crashes playing Cold War with 422 hours. Yikes. (as of editing it's crashed 3 times on MW2019 now)

There's a bug in the game that will disconnect you from the party after every game despite this bug existing since launch and remaining unfixed.

The game is Crossplay so you can pretty much get into a lobby for every MP playlist without any trouble.

A positive though is that it's well optimised and there's a mountain of options.



The Multiplayer I wish I could recommend and do, but for a review I can't.

The monetization is a complete joke, Kernel Anti Cheat and Always Online DRM leave a bad taste in my mouth. Not to mention my PC crashing issue.

The Campaign is okay and Spec-Ops is essentially unplayable despite being advertised as the third main mode.

And for value, Black Ops Cold War also exists and its the same price value on Steam despite offering significantly more content variety.

So Shadow Generations: Tokyo Mission (yes I'm gonna call it that, Japanese title works way better than calling the DLC Sonic Movie 3 DLC).

SEGA have finally dropped the final piece of content for Shadow Generations and we're finally getting additional levels for Sonic games.

That is pretty cool. I've always thought having proper additional content for Sonic games after release is a nice idea and they did do it for Sonic World Adventure somewhat but only just new levels for the existing continents.


What's included with this DLC is

• 1 Act based on Tokyo
  
• 2 Challange Acts

We're missing an Act 2 here making this feel incomplete and still not worth the £55 you pay for the game.

The level itself feels like a downgrade to every level present in the base game and more akin to the level design of Colours and Forces. It really is just constant straight lines with cubes.

Each time you play the level you're shown the Intro and Outro cutscenes, you can skip them but it's unnecessary for them to be here each time.

Tokyo uses a Westopolis remix and it starts off okay but eventually devolves into awful noises that hurt my ears, thankfully you can just select the original Westopolis from the music menu so do that. Your ears will thank you.

And on Westopolis, I honestly would've preferred that to be the level chosen rather than a Movie based level. The Movie based level wasn't even adapted to look Sonic-like with what Sonic World Adventure did it's just Tokyo.

The 2 Challenge Acts are here and they're the usual meh, wow challenges.


There's no Kōji Yusa or even Toshiyuki Morikawa, I'm forced to listen to Keanu Reeves awful Shadow impression despite the fact my options have the voice over selected as Japanese.

There's also no option to not use the awful Movie model. You're forced to use it instead of just having the option to switch to the normal Shadow model.

You managed to have model swapping with Terios but not this? Really?


So in the end, it's below what I wanted and expected.

It adds value to the £55 I paid for the game but it feels lackluster and insubstantial, it thankfully doesn't have Radical Highway transitions but they could've offered something so much better.

If you bought the Physical version or the incomplete Digital version the DLC costs £5. The World Adventure DLCs cost £1.59 and some add 9 levels to the game. It's not worth it.

Also I'm a sucker who bought the LRG Collector's and now I'm getting an incomplete disc laugh at me.