Recent reviews by Acquire

Enhanced? Still looks and plays like a PS3 game.

They reach the end and nothing happens. A waste of time.

The Karen story here is just cringe.

The side characters start as interesting, the best so far, but quickly unravel. It's like they're trying to compete with Daniel for making absurdly bad decisions.

The side characters here are so boring. Nothing really happens to progress the story.

TXR is back and is giving me Dreamcast vibes in all the right ways. Needs more cars though.

Resident Evil and Onimusha remasters are examples of how to introduce modern controls into tank control games. This ain't it. This feels like a disaster to play.

Rebirth addressed key problems from the previous game. It’s no longer an entirely linear experience. It’s an open world. The open world can be fun to explore. The story feels like it's going somewhere instead of feeling like an introduction that's too long. The story has good moments. Some side quests are more interesting. There’s a pretty good card game to take part in. The music is great. The rest is a mixed bag.

The visuals are ugly. Bad texture work, pop in, stuttering, and broken lighting plague the game. There's no ultrawide support. Traversing the open world is obnoxious. Your chocobo is awkward to control. Clumsy and slow platforming is required in too many areas. The amount of atrocious mini games is ridiculous. Multiple chapters are made up entirely of mini games. The best gear in the game is locked behind mini games. Most of the sidequests are still remarkably dull. Most of the story content is padding or just Cloud having the same vision over and over again. Square is still obsessed with forced slow walking. Cutscenes are almost entirely made of banal action and dialogue. Story missions always arbitrarily break up your party. Then there’s the combat.

The combat is terrible. It now has synergy attacks with party members, which are just extra abilities. All the problems from the first game return. It's a hybrid system of action and turn based abilities. The action combat is not good. It’s shallow, imprecise, and the camera is terrible. The turn based side is great. ATB bars fill up and you use them to execute abilities. Tactical mode is great as it slows down time to allow for some tactics in ATB usage. The problem is getting those ATB bars to fill up. Party AI is non-existent. They do nothing on their own (they don’t even move out of the way from AoE attacks) and do not build ATB on their own. The combat requires constantly switching characters to spam their basic attack (even if it won't do any damage) to build ATB. Whichever character is currently active immediately gets full aggro. Almost any enemy attack will interrupt your attacks wasting that precious ATB. It feels terrible to play.

The open world does breathe some life into this badly thought out remake series, but this game otherwise amplifies most of the problems of the previous game. The only way to get through this is with mods, which do make it enjoyable. Mods that effectively get rid of the action combat, mods that remove the annoyance of the mini games, mods that add ultrawide, etc.

Serving gumbo is as exciting as this game gets.

The visuals are great, but the action is so underwhelming. I’m playing as a juggernaut yet feel so weak. Gunplay feels like an afterthought. There’s no cover system for some reason. The melee is a focus, except it’s clunky with parrying and dodging feeling so unreliable. Everything from level, enemy, to weapon designs is dull. All I’m doing is going from area to area fighting the same swarm of enemies over and over again. There are barely any mechanics and none of them work very well. It feels like a bad Gears of War knock off from yesteryear.