Status: Beaten
Currently: Just finished on the 'normal' difficulty, which leaves hardest for completion.
This game definitely does not hold up to the test of time. I really hate to say that, because this was always a game I wanted to play since I could only rent it on the SNES (which was buggy and censored). The PSN collection came with all 6 episodes, but its rather clear that the first 3 have the best design out of all of them, and the other three, which seem to have been sold together, were of far lower quality. Its not like the graphics or anything were of lesser quality, but the first three episodes kind of had a nice flow to them, a new enemy in each one that you had to get used to (albeit any differences are minor other than how fast they kill you), and a steady progression in difficulty. Once you hit episode 4 though, the little things you hadn't really noticed before start to kick in.
The damage as I noted in a previous post, is all kinds of out of proportion, especially when you're right next to an enemy, and they can nearly take your head off with two shots (even the grunts). The enemies probably just deal more damage the closer they get to you, which means being able to see them first and not let them get close is very important. Once you get to the additional three missions, the designers seemed to realize the only way to up the difficulty was to make it much harder to see the enemies first...and thus follows about 27 solid stages of tight corridors with alcoves that you have to check every step, and even when you do, sometimes they'll pop out and blast you before you can reasonably react. This isn't challenge, its fake difficulty, and often I was blasted down to near dead and had to backtrack because of an enemy you couldn't possibly see unless you knew he was there beforehand. This is made even worse by the fact that one bad turn of luck kicks you back to the start of the stage with a pistol and hardly any ammo, which means you might have to reload or get really lucky depending on the stage. This design also means a lot of the stages are a lot of walking down very tiny corridors, looking for a key, and getting lost, hoping to not run into an enemy at the wrong time and get blasted. The rewards for finding secrets and exploring are not worth the hassle, since you can only find more health, ammo (with a max of 99), or points which give you extra lives. At no point did I ever feel necessary to go exploring for secrets.
Overall, it is a classic and its worth a play, but I would almost just recommend playing the first three episodes, they're a more solid game.
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