When you finish the hardest game of your life and you basically gave yourself carpal tunnel and you mos def would have cried if you hadn't beaten the final boss on that last attempt AND THE GAME SLAPS YOU WITH A FINAL SCORE OF 'D'. **** you MGR: Revengeance.
MGR is a bit DMC but without the Zelda-like puzzles, with stealth elements, pacing is at a shameless 250km/h & it concentrates on fewer but much harder individual enemies. Actually it's nothing like DMC except that it's a Nipponese hack & slash. It's also absolutely fucking unrelenting and doesn't tell you shit. It doesn't tell you RB is lock on target, it doesn't tell you you have health packs, never really goes into too much depth about its basic mechanics or combos. And you can get past the first half basically button mashing and not knowing any of that and it seems like a mediocre game - especially when paired with some A grade cringey dialogue and incredibly poor attempts to ground the game world in any kind of comprehensible reality.
But then shit gets real and you're forced to really learn all aspects of the combat system and experiment, adapt and REK. The fight which really helped me understand the fighting system was towards the end against Samuel. Starting with 1 of 5 health packs I really wasn't give much allowance to die.I wish it had come earlier because the in game levels would have been a fucking breeze after that.
I'm not overly familiar with the MGS series but I gather thematically MGR borrows from it heavily. Despite the generic angry power fantasy protagonist and mostly mediocre voice talent, the story was surprisingly sophisticated, aware and well told. Its themes are pertinent and intelligent and its presentation and scale is so loud, obnoxious and absurd that it could pass as satire. Whether that's actually the intention it doesn't matter, because I'm a really generous reviewer. The premise is basically an alt-timeline/near future in which security is deferred to corporate monoliths with cyborg tech, AI and monstrous war machines. Think Robocop on an global scale. Just as security is deferred to these Private Military Firms (PMCs), so is the greed and tension that creates insecurity.
The game has that Japanese lots of attention paid to the characters and level design, so little to environmental detail which results in these other worldly, sparse, purpose built environments. You can tell me it's Denver but is it? It's definitely not a beautiful looking game, but it looks good where it has to and does what it tries to do well.
I had heard good things about PlatinumGames and despite a shaky first act, I now concur with these good things. This is definitely a good action game.