Have The Saint's Lost Their Way?
-Graphics-****. While they are not top notch, they are solid. The colors of the clothing and neon signs pop, and the frame rate is smooth. While some textures look flat, others look very realistic. It is a little more cartoony than the previous titles, which may be why, to me, it doesn't look as good as they did.
-Sound-***. Hm, the sound was something else. I didn't care for the music, and I felt the voice acting (choosing the voice of Laura Bailey- BloodRayne and Chun-Li- for my own for a black female character) left much to be desired. Black people simply didn't sound black to me. And I'm pretty sure Gat and Pierce were the only people voiced by the originals. I felt the sound got less attention in production than making the dild0 melee weapon look as good as it could. That's a shame.
-Mechanics- *. I give it one asterisk as I feel they gave one asterisk of their capabilities to some of the mechanics in-game. This is where the game really gets the hurtin' from me. In SR2, they introduced the player to activities through missions, and then let you go to them on the map to do them. This same concept is in SR:TT, yet they SERIOUSLY cram them down the players throat- via many, many tedious missions that cycle around them. I felt like 3/4 of the main missions were activities. Again, this is me, personally, but I felt like it was more of a to-do, than actually fun to do. Whoever thought putting a tiger in a passenger seat forcing you to drive it around dodging the media was a "fun" mission needs to be fired- immediately, if not sooner. Oh, wait? I'm mixing the two games activities together? Huh- they should have made it more memorable. Don't expect any kind of interesting story here. Gat is dead, and quite frankly, he's better off that way.
-Controls-*****. I will say- the controls are where this game shines. I felt that running up and hitting someone in the face was very fluid- almost intuitive. And the run animations are realistic. My only gripe (which I won't remove an asterisk for) is that the combo system had been ditched- something I felt made hand-to-hand combat a pleasure.
-Overall-**. This game is about as inspiring as the new "Call of Duty", merely upping the ridiculousness for the sake of doing so. What they had hoped might be a fun "South Park like satirical take of GTA" has ended up full of itself. You can also see a lot of models/animations from their WWE games being used (definitely in SR2), further cheapening this experience for me.
To say this was a disastrous departure from the other titles is too harsh. To say it is the most boring is brutally accurate.
I wish they had stopped at SR2, if they weren't going to make a meaningful experience. They stopped the DLC on SR:TT, and decided to have it be the full-fledged bulk of SR:4. This does not bode well for us.