I jump up on its hand to avoid an attack, then drop down onto its arm to avoid another, where I fall directly through the sprite and die. The player starts the fight standing on its head and its very obvious you are safe to climb on the boss. Kind of similar to the mission 3 boss in the third game or the desert submarine boss from whichever game that shows up in. The mech is interesting to look at, and well drawn and animated, and the idea of riding the boss for the entire fight is a good one. My best example of poor readability is the Fall Mecha boss fight from mission 3. I'm sure this can be learned and I know a deathless run of XX is possible, but man did some parts of this game feel unfair. But in XX I felt constantly surprised by bullshit jumping out of nowhere and instantly killing me. Enemies typically appear from parts of the screen where the player is unlikely to be, and will never start firing until they've given the player a moment to realize that they exist. Enemy projectiles flash and are very obvious with colors that make them distinct from the player's projectiles, and are layered over the explosions so that they are less easily lost in all the chaos. The previous games are very good about making fights understandable. The game's biggest problem is readability. In addition to the placement of enemies, no branching paths was a bit of a disappointment, but I won't harp on that point too much because this definitely hasn't been a priority after 3. That would make this fight way easier." A death felt like it was teaching me something about the game and the fault of the death always felt like it was with me. When I die in those games I typically am left thinking, "If I had only jumped a second later" or, "Man, I really need to take care of that tank first. I don't expect to beat the game without dying without a lot of practice, but in 1-3 every death felt somehow avoidable. There were multiple times I was getting killed by enemies that were off screen, or which appeared so quickly as to give me no time to react. The level design also felt pretty poor in my opinion. Also, why the fuck did they change the weapon sounds? The old ones sounded awesome and gave off great gamefeel, while the new ones are hollow and flat. Their designs are nice and well animated - don't get me wrong - they just have a very different design philosophy than that of previous Rebel Army equipment and it felt weird the whole game. I'm fine with the idea that Morden's army is getting more technologically advanced and I'm sure it is explained in the lore, but the new bosses and some of the new vehicles and robots felt extremely out of place. And I think this lack of cohesion carries through in some of the enemy designs too. There are a few areas that feel more visually interesting, such as the arena where the final boss is fought, but it is largely an unpleasing mess in my opinion. Every level is brown aside from the last one, where we get our token snow level. This isn't helped by the art direction, which seems to take most of its inspiration from Gears of War, which is to say overlapping shades of brown. They clash horribly with the cartoony designs of all the classic sprites and just feel muddy and awful to me. They feel like 3D renders that have a pixel filter put over them. The sprites are mostly what we've come to expect from previous games, but the backgrounds feel super out of place. The first thing I noticed is the graphics. I bought this a little while ago and finally got around to playing it, and man, it was hugely disappointing for me.
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