REVIVE!
I finally got around to renting this game, and I'm having a blast with it. Besides the couple of side-missions which might as well be impossible (Some Mayhem and septic avenger stuff), I'm playing with a guy that looks like Dog the bounty hunter:
and I'm enjoying myself.... Kinda sorta.... Not really.
I only wish more of the game's humor were more tasteful, because it's really grating to the senses to hear all this unfunny, unwitty garbage that's thrown at you constantly. There's a few chuckles here and there, but it's not nearly enough to make up for forcing me to turn down my tv's volume to near-silence just so I can tolerate the endless stream of drivel the game slathers over every area of the game.
Also, one thing that's bothersome is how watered down the difficulty is. I don't know, perhaps I just play too much Nethack, but there seems to be something terribly wrong with how lenient the game is to the player. I mean, it's nice, it really is. I enjoy the fact that all my weapons aren't taken from me every time I die. I like the fact that I can easily save my favorite vehicles, and then summon them, presumeably from the bowels of hell, at any of my land-based "cribs". I also enjoy the fact that I can "warp" out of most bodies of water (although this is mostly because there would be no way of getting out of the water otherwise), but I still find myself irritated, abysmally bothered by the game. The game developers took into consideration everything that could make the game genuinely difficult, and then thoroughly steamrolled it into a much less difficult, flattened version of it's former self. They wanted the main character to appeal to everyone, and thus made them fully customizable, and the character himself is so flat and bland that it is provbly impossible to be able to see the world from his perspective, because he's bonkers, of course, and so his persona doesn't encroach on the attention span of any player. What I'm trying to get at here, is that the dev team thought to make the game appealing to everyone, but only succeeded in making the game feel homogenized and, get this, trite. The game that supposedly prides itself in it's 'uniqueness" turns out ot be so poorly lacking in originality that it inspires in me painful headaches.
If they were gonna make the game so lenient, they miight as well have added in a teleporter, because I'm NOT NOT NOT NOT
NOT interested in driving around the FUCKING HUGE city they've prepared for me, which is both giant and labyrinthine, if I only want to get back to my safehouse or get to the next goddamn mission or if the retarded side-mission places me on the wrong side of the map and then tasks me with driving all the way over before I can start doing what it is I WANT TO DO! I'm trying to say, is that they made the game lenient to avoid some headaches, but they ran face first into some collossal migraines because they took an idea, and then only half-assed it.
The mayhem missions, which, as I said might as well be impossible, are the victims of poor foresight on the part of the development staff. The missions themselves are randomly generated, and the game tasks you to do ABSOLUTELY LUDICROUS amounts of property damage within a set amount of time at a certain location. The PROBLEM with this is that I sincerely believe no one bothered to sanity check these mission generators, or the missions themselves actually. I say this because doing the ABSOLUTELY LUDICROUS amounts of damage requires you to use your (conveniently provided for you) infinite rocket launcher to blow stuff up. The problem with this is that you live in a world made of diamonds, where most things cannot be scratch, let alone blown up. So, with your infinite rocket launcher, you might think that blowing up high value objects like vehicles might bring you victory, but if you think this, then you're wrong. The key to victory is using the rocket launcher to blow up fences, piles of garbage bags, dumpsters, and TABLES! The reason behind this is that the game has an arbitrary "combo" system tied to these missions, and these objects are usually put into large groups, and so destroying many garbage bags in fast succession will net you more points than destroying 100 swat vans, helicopters, and tanks. The main problem with this is that these small objects are preposterously rare and hard to find, depending on which zone the game tasks you with your mission. SO whether or not a mission is possible is determined entirely by chance. That is thoroughly aggravating, nad someone deserves to be punched in the face for that one.
Also, there are a set of missions called "hitman" missions, which task you with killing generic characters that live all over the game world. To coax these characters into spawning, you have to do certain things, fulfill certain criteria before that character will spawn and you can kill them. One character, Roje, has given me endless grief. His description says that he likes to hang out at a very particular store. I go to this store. His description says that to lure him out, I need to buy some Music from said store. I buy some music. The description of this person says nothing else, so now I'm sitting inside a crappy music store, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for Mr. retarded NPC to spawn BECAUSE HE NEVER SPAWNS, NO MATTER WHAT! The game does this as a way to torment me. That has to be the case.
Also, I scored an achievement (a system I absolutely abhor as is) called "soprano", and, wondering what this was, I looked into the achievements sections to see. The game said that I had earned the achievement by "singing along with the music"... I have no idea what this means, but I was NOT singing along, and how the game even deduces this in the first place is beyond me.
TL;DR? I hate all console games today, for we live in a dark age where nothing good ever gets made. I make one exception, to see if my feelings still hold true, and I'm only completely right.