I loved, loved, LOVED the second game. I played that game up until the third came out. It was absolutely perfect. It was what Grand Theft Auto IV should have been. It had just the amount of seriousness without going into absurdity.
Then the third came out. The third, while entertaining enough, stepped over the line of absurdity and gave up on any seriousness. I mean, c’mon, Mayor Burt Reynolds? Zombies?
And now the fourth looks even worse. Aliens? Superpowers? It looks way too frantic without keeping anything that made the second game so great.
Remember when everyone bought Crackdown for the Halo 2 beta code and were then pleasantly surprised to find out the Crackdown was good game? Worked here. It’ll work here too, probably.
I liked SR3 well enough for the money I paid, $5 or so. It tries too hard but there is plenty of fun to be had. The co-op mode is fun, but it’s sort of confusing as far as which character and savegame relates to your co-op play.
And it really needs more multiplayer variety, at least as much as GTA IV. A lot of the fun stuff is hidden, like the player-versus-player match you can get into after being killed by a co-op player. One person pilots a flying vehicle, and the other person is in a road vehicle, trying to drive through random checkpoints. The person in the flying vehicle tries to kill the person in the road vehicle.
Burt Reynolds didn’t bother me. Zombies didn’t bother me much except that I’m sick of games shoehorning zombies into them 'cause, you know, hey zombies.
However, I stayed away from most of the sillier stuff like the shark gun or Genki cartoon cars, etc. I agree that SR4 (SRTF?) looks as though it’s going a bit too far in absurdity for my tastes but I guess I’ll reserve final judgement for when there’s an actual game. Could be that they’re just packing all the zaniness into the introductory promo materials.
I agree. SR2 was an absolute gem. Perfect mix of humour/wackiness in a fairly serious story. “Larger than life” without being so absurd it disturbs gameplay.
SRTT took the silliness too far in my opinion, but was still solid entertainment. The biggest sin was not having great, fleshed-out characters like SR2. And killing off Gat :mad: There was also the balance problem - normal fights are way too easy, so they bring in brutes. Still worth the sale price I paid.
What I’ve heard about SR4 seems to be getting to the point where the silliness will be distracting, and it almost appears to be a Prototype parody. I still have hope that it could be entertaining, at least.
I hope that somehow - SR5? - they’ll eventually go back to their roots of awesome characters in a silly-but-not-ridiculous environment.