got a p rank on every level on the current highest difficulty (update: not anymore)
- fun. really fun. i've been playing the cybergrind mode for no real reason but to enjoy myself and it's good
- some of the secrets are bull but oh well it's an "old-school first person shooter-based first person shooter" so that's par for the course
- this really does feel like a character action game in some ways, especially the bosses (the ranking system as well but as it's not nearly as combo-based it's an iffier point of comparison imo)
- can't wait for updates! could easily become one of my all time faves though i hope they don't add voice acting to more bosses, that shit is cringe, son

BLOOD IS FUEL

HELL IS FULL

And then you blow up everything - ULTRAKILL.

when i was a kid, one of the first games i ever played on my nintendo gamecube was sonic adventure 2: battle. i was enraptured by the opening city escape sequence, an opening showcase that ranks among the most iconic first levels of all time, and a song that still gets stuck in my head incessantly. i would talk with my friends at recess about the secrets of the chao garden, gather together to play the battle mode, and even though i was never one of the more rabid fans of the series i found the atmosphere and vibe of the game to be so strikingly compelling that even though i never beat it, the game has always stuck with me. after playing through shenmue and collecting all of the little sonic capsule toys, i found myself drawn back to this game. i wanted to somewhat reflect on my own experience with it, but i also wanted to finally see how the game ends after getting stuck on the space station so much as a child.

sonic is a really fascinating franchise, a relic of the 1990s in a way that someone like mario isn't the brash attitude and almost surfer-like persona gives the character a dated charm. after the string of well regarded 2d games, sega has been constantly trying to experiment with the character and gameplay style to find something that works in a 3d style. here we see them trying to blend three mechanically different experiences together by having each character have a different playstyle as you move through the light and dark stories.

sonic/shadow have the speed driven action stages one might come to expect from a sonic game, knuckles/rouge are floaty treasure hunters in expansive exploratory stages, and tails/eggman use large mechs to run and gun through usually cramped hallways. from a design perspective the sonic/shadow stages stand up the most, both "city escape" and "radical highway" (the opening levels for each character) are probably the top two sections of the entire game, with their designs complementing the character movesets well and allowing for the kind of fast paced and acrobatic action flowstates you might be looking for as a player. when the game was working properly (i'll get into this later), i had a ton of fun with the sonic and shadow levels and they kind of provide the blueprint for what a good sonic game can really be. the knuckles/rouge sections of the game have more of a laid back feel to them, the treasure hunting gets a lot of hate for how long it can take but especially in the knuckles stages the vibes are just immaculate. it can be hard at times to get a handle on these movesets, especially with the speed ramped running physics carrying over from the hedgehog stages being a lot more clumsy in the wider spaces here, and the hints can at times be obtuse until you understand the level geography more, but i only really outright hated one of these levels (rouge's final level "mad space", which is large, obtuse, and has a ton of frustrating gravity effects which kept making me motion sick). the worst stages are the mech stages, which slow the pace of the game to a crawl. i don't really have much to say about them other than that they are tedious and plodding, unwieldy to try to control, and i just found myself rolling my eyes every single time i saw i had to do one. i understand trying to break up the gameplay, and i respect how experimental it feels to just throw in giant robots, but they're a totally monotonous pace killer and i don't think i had fun with a single level.

the real nail in the coffin for this game though is the fact that it is just broken. the camera is horrible, i found myself constantly fighting with it to try to get a handle on anything i was doing and even at the best of times i found enemies and environmental hazards obfuscated from me until it was too late. half of the environments just don't work, with you speeding through walls or getting shunted off platforms for what feels like no reason at all, or getting trapped inside a boss and being destroyed immediately. and the game tries to streamline everything by only having two button controls but it leads to almost none of the moveset actually working. the amount of times i would try to get a homing attack on an enemy or a rail only to fly off in a completely different direction had me tearing my hair out. it's a game to expects some precision in it's gameplay but gives the player no tools to be precise, and as such just felt to me like one of those games where i felt that every death was the result of the game rather than my own decisions and by the end i was just more frustrated than engaged with it.

that's not to say it's all bad, i do like some of the stages here, and more than anything i was impressed by the game's presentation. the soundtrack is, with no hyperbole, one of the best ever, and fits so perfectly with the early aughts vibe of the whole endeavor. the character designs are silly but charming, and the dreamcast era visuals mixed with the strong art direction serve as a beautiful time capsule, and are a treat even when (or especially when) their age begins to show. the story is utterly stupid and pretty poorly conveyed, but it's still pretty fun nonetheless and actually gets kind of compelling as it cruises towards the finish line (i'd be remiss if i didn't mention the hideaki anno-esque teaser cutscene that plays before the last story which is probably the best thing in the entire game). i really liked shadow, i though his arc was the most properly conveyed and interesting of any of the principle cast's stories so was always a treat when he was on screen.

in the end, i respect a lot of the risk that was taken with this game with just how utterly strange it all is (not even to mention the chao minigames and battle modes which i didn't dig into much on this playthrough), i like a lot about the general vibe of the game and some of the stages here are really fun when everything is working. it's just a shame that the game feels like it's barely hanging together, even with some of the bizarre design decisions and some bad level design, it's the moment to moment gameplay where i feel it really fails and the game is just never really able to recover from it.

 Since Critter Cove has just entered early access, I don't want to be too harsh. There's potential here—just not yet fully realized. It's a life sim where you can play as either a human, an anthropomorphic animal, or a robot. Or, really, anything you can manage to come up with within its decently robust character creator. Frankly, it cops a lot from Animal Crossing—the main goal is to, at the behest of the greedy capitalist rat Renard, attract castaways and tourists to an island that you will help build into a bustling and successful resort.

 Firstly, it has a great character creator that I hope will continue to receive parts and patterns. You almost never see developers tackle anthropomorphic character creators with this level of depth. If there's one singular thing that sets Critter Cove apart from its peers, it's this—it lives and sells itself on the character creator, so continuing to go above and beyond here would do the game well. Stompy dragons, funny ferrets, humans with vitiligo, a badass wolf with robot arms, non-binary hyenas—all of this and more is possible in Critter Cove.

 The open world aspect, with both on-land and undersea exploration, suits the game very well. The home island feels like the perfect size, and the world outside of it feels appropriately big but not daunting. In this regard, it reminds me a bit of Garden of the Sea, which feels freer than, say, Animal Crossing.

 The visual style is a somewhat mixed bag. Characters have a sort-of "Saturday morning cartoon" vibe that I don't always go in for, while the robots, shipwrecks, and run-down town impose a kind of "junker" vibe to the whole game. It's a preference thing, really, but seems a bit less customizable. Water looks less toony than the rest of the graphics—like it should be in a different game entirely—but water is historically difficult to nail in games, and has to also be see-through in this one.

 Unfortunately, we now have to get to the rough stuff. I thought at first that castaways had unique personalities, and maybe even backstories, but realized upon getting my third castaway on the island that the game is using the "Animal Crossing method" for characters rather than the "Stardew Valley" one. There is a set of personalities that castaways have been "assigned," so they will share limited dialog trees, allowing for a much greater number of characters. Aside from gift preferences, though, this makes entire sets of castaways only cosmetically different. This works if you don't mind sacrificing character narrative entirely, but needs a bit of an upgrade—for example, assigning the castaways traits on top of their already-assigned personalities might liven them up a bit (maybe Sammi likes rain but Rusty doesn't, despite them sharing personality types... but their personality type would impact the way they express those things). Getting a much bigger set of "talk to me" dialog would also really help.

 Speaking of personalities—whatever the "mean" archetype is? Kinda sucks, and characters that have it aren't fun to interact with. I don't feel compelled to do their tasks or become their friend when their entire personality boils down to being an ass. Even if they get friendlier with increased gift-giving later, it's not really a fun or interesting personality type to engage with. People often yearn for when Animal Crossing characters still had a bit of an edge to them, but Animal Crossing made it work by ensuring that no one personality type was loaded with all of the mean dialogue. Any villager could potentially be a little bit of a jerk from time to time, but they would eventually cool off. Cranky villagers exist in the AC series, sure, but Cranky villagers were, deep down, still pretty friendly and likeable.

 The biggest drawback, however, is the one I most fear won't get much attention or change: the gameplay loop. Fetch quest to get items so you can craft something that will let you craft something that will allow you to complete a fetch quest so you can craft something that will allow you complete this building so that you can get a fetch quest that will let you craft something so you can craft something else so you can craft something else so... you get the picture, but this is the main thrust of the game. Get items to make items to get items. I don't actually know if there are activities or anything else in the game to do outside of going to a location, holding the click with one of the three or four tools you craft early on (they are not meaningfully different and do not need manually selected), and then returning to complete the quest. If you're able to engage in fishing or really anything other than crafting, talking to castaways, or cooking, then it needs to be introduced much earlier than it is. I know from item descriptions that there will eventually be a museum, but what is that if not just another, bigger, fetch quest? The first ten hours of proper gameplay have been mostly chores and tedium. It would be nice to see anything else, really.

 Also, the time it takes to actually craft items and ingredients with things like the loom is high, which seems out-of-place for a single-player non-mobile game. To what end is the player made to wait for cloth to craft? What benefit does this bring to the gameplay?

 However, one element I really like about the gameplay so far is the "bring in tourists" element. Adding the tourists and shops as a management mechanic is a nice spin in a desktop life sim like this. Sure, all of the tourists at the beginning complain since they show up before you can even get your cafe running, but I can see those complaints giving players something to work towards. And you get to see a bunch of new designs all at once, which is fun—one of my first tourists was "Evil Wolf," which was great to see.

 It'll be interesting to see if these issues get worked out with further development. Some seem like they could be easily expected, while others seem like fundamental game design issues. I'll be sure to keep my eyes open for updates to Critter Cove.