Had a very fun playthrough years ago. Very fun beat em up style game

I just give up. This game is so fun for the first 6-10 hours, and then starts leaning HARD into the "overstaying its welcome" design endemic to FPS/RPGs that rely on "trap you in a location you cannot backtrack from and ambush you with enemies, because you have not seen this literally 500 times previously." And when I was trying to figure out what I was doing wrong with the boss I was currently fighting (big stone demon, supposedly has weak spots on his back; I spent about 15 literal minutes annihilating the weak spots on his back and nothing ever changed, so ultimately this is what caused me to quit the game), I accidentally spoiled myself that apparently where I was, thinking near the end game, was MAYBE halfway through, and particularly because the final level is apparently "here are 300 of those hard things you had to fight a handful of previously, because why not?" I decided I had had quite enough, particularly since, again, as far as I can tell I was fighting an invincible enemy.

But the main reason I wanted to write a review despite giving up on this game is the level design. The levels look fine, and they often flow reasonably well, once or twice at least per level, I would find myself running in circles for a few minutes, sometimes more than five minutes, just having absolutely no idea where I am supposed to go next. The answer was almost always "a door you have passed by a dozen times which was inaccessible before but now is subtly glowing yellow indicating you can use it" or "there is a button on a device that looks like part of the unimportant background scenery that you have to push." Just infuriating every time it happened, really killing some part of my otherwise significant appreciation for the game.

I would have said I am looking forward to the sequels as I often do with games that do overall great work, especially for a reboot like this, but the two sequels do not have manual saves, and considering how infuriating I found this game WITH manual saves, I shudder to think what would happen since they probably duplicate the DOOM 2016 special: "run around a level for 20 minutes unsure where to go, finding a half-dozen secrets and killing another 50 enemies in the process, accidentally fall in lava, find the last checkpoint was before my 20 minutes of exploration, rage uninstall"

Along those lines, though as much just comical as egregiously infuriating, is the fact that the level designers often made no effort indicating which way you are supposed to be going. Could be argued that this was intentional, but considering how many times I discovered secrets by walking the path that I thought was the actual path through the level, clearly it was not.

So why am I recommending the game overall? I honestly am not sure. Probably because UNTIL the game got so awful and possibly bugged-out that I had to quit, I was having a great time. The mechanics are solidly fun, the light RPG elements keep things engaging and make it feel like you are actually growing your character's strength--at least when you can actually hurt the enemies--and the game is quite pretty for a title as old as it is. Lo Wang was still a kind of painfully stereotypical character, but like, compared to the 1990s version that I remember all too well, he was a winking-at-you stereotype now as opposed to an "ugh what the hell is this" stereotype previously.

i prefer the older version