I've been enjoying this so far - the hacking part is neat and I like being able to take over cameras and follow "links" of things to open doors and whatnot.
This game REALLY feels like it's trying to be GTA, with the driving and all the rest which I've found quite surprising. There's a whole system for getting new cars, upgrading driving-related skills/perks, and everytime you steal a car it gets added to the ones you can "rent" (if you hadn't found that model before).
So far, the only REALLY jarring part of the experience for me is the disconnect between the idea that you can do good deeds for a positive reputation BUT that those deeds are often shown on-screen as really brutal physical takedowns. So, a dude robs a person, I chase them down and then I literally slam them against the pavement (passersby even freak out), but I'm good? I guess it's like I'm Batman. Ha!
I started playing this and I got really nauseous. I took a break, and it was still pretty bad. I'm not sure how far I got along but it was definitely the walking that got me - I want to say that the movement/navigation controls are awful mostly because I had a hard time being able to point in the direction I wanted to go.
Ugh.
I kind of want to say that the game has tank controls, but in VR...and it made me feel really sick.
It's short, it's fun enough. But it's also REALLY crass! (in ways I found slightly embarrassing).
I think what I appreciated the most about it was:
a. It really encourages exploring/messing around in the same way that Job Simulator does, but since there (usually) are no explicitly stated goals, you really are just messing around rather than trying to solve a problem.
b. It really rewards just listening. So, that's not really interactive, and on successive playthroughs it did get a bit tiring, but there's SO MUCH DIALOGUE that I was quite surprised.
c. There are LOTS and LOTS of secret areas/endings you can explore. I don't know if I found/got to them all, but it was neat to see some clues and then pull threads on them and being rewarded with secret levels that aren't in the critical path to get to the game's ending. They also start to get increasingly wacky/crazy and meta too, which was fun.
On the downside, the controls are really quite wonky which is fine for MOST things except there's some stuff that requires a certain amount of precision (throwing, it's throwing) and I just found these parts annoying - mostly the trophy chasing associated with it, but still.
Still, it's so crass!
(I'll admit I thought the scene with the gang was pretty funny though...especially when you pick up the brick)
Weirdly, I ended up playing the entire campaign/story. This most mostly thanks to the sunk-cost fallacy, I was sure there were only X levels remaining, and I was wrong, but I had already played Z many levels, so why not keep on going because, surely, there are only X levels left. And so, 4-5 hours later, it was done.
I was playing on the lower difficulty level, which is clearly not the level you're supposed to play at because, although I did get better at using different moves, the game wasn't that difficult for me to clear (one of the boss fights being the salient exception). That being said, the more I played the more depth I realized the game had (even if I didn't need to take advantage of that depth in order to succeed).
Here's a few things I thought were really neat about the game:
a. Although you only control 1 character, there are always 3 available and swapping between them at the right moment is really neat/fun - you get aextra buffs, damage etc.
b. There's a meter that fills up and you then activate it for ALL of the characters to tap in and start attacking. You still control your main, and I think the others mostly target whatever you're going up against. It's a neat way to deal with really large mobs OR to efficiently bring down a boss. I couldn't think of another game that had something like this.
Things I was confused by:
a. I was about 2/3 through before I realized there were items you could use for stuff. Other than healing, it didn't seem like these were very important?
b. You can also buy rings and equipment for buffs and such. However, I was not able to buy any! I'd select them in the menu and press "X" but nothing would happen. It wasn't until after I had finished that I realized that you had to select an item and then press "right" - the item was actually a bar you had to fill up! Sigh. I'm not sure what difference that would have made for me, but all the equipment slots now made sense. Sigh.
My final thoughts are more genre-related. It's definitely a "B" game - production values and more (similar to the Earth Defence Force games). But the barely clothed protagonists and certain camera angles strongly indicate an interest in titillating the player. Would it be fair to think of this game as an exploitation game the same way there are exploitation films? Well, a quick trip to wikipedia reveals that there is a subgenre of exploitation called "Chanbara" films - which are loosely samurai movies but with added nudity etc. So, with this game called "Onechanbara ZII: Chaos" - it's clearly a "chanbara" game? So yes? It's an exploitation game? Hmm... this seems interesting!
