izigame.me

I got the game after playing through it on the GOG version, because frankly I don’t think this is the lazy or “bad” remake that I’ve read a lot of people saying it is, and this is coming from someone who finished the original game a couple of years ago when it came out through the ps2 emu on the ps4, I even platinumed the freaking thing back then.
Now, it is true that the developers for some absurd reason removed and took a side mission that had a man dealing with being transgender or something of sorts, apparently that’s out of the realm of satire nowadays; I say this because the game lampoons -just like the first-, a number of different crowds from the time period it takes place (the 1960’s) hippies, the military, the Russians, spy films, science fiction films, James Bond movies, everything about the counterculture, the British invasion, the Indian spiritual influence in the west during the time, etc. But for some reason, that one mission had to go away. If they were smart, they would release it as DLC, either free or paid, just get something out of the controversy.
As for the actual game? I feel as if people are more keen in mentioning what got taken out rather than what was kept in and improved, it is a remake after all, and there’s a lot here that’s as fantastic as it’s ever been if not a lot more, there are frankly a lot of side content I didn’t remember the original having, there’s also the ability to replay through the side and main mission content with different modifiers in a similar fashion to something like say a traditional NG+ mode where you get to keep all of your upgrades, whilst at the same time experimenting with the game’s mechanics and difficulty settings. That’s another addition as well, the difficulty settings in the game range from easier difficulty settings to fairly difficult ones at that, although the game for the most part is well balanced independently of whether you’re playing on easy, normal, or hard and very hard. Except for one mission near the end that serves as a escort quest through some sort of alien base which made me want to tear my hair out because of how badly it had been updated (if updated at all).
There’s also the revamped combat & movement most people seem to just gloss over for some strange reason, maybe they don’t remember how the original game played or something? The original game was really slow and clunky, it was a completely different kind of gameplay experience, more methodical in a way, lot less chaotic and fun in my opinion. In this one you’re essentially a one-man army, and there are upgrades here for both your movement as well as your arsenal, so you’re left with completely new weapons that weren’t available in the original versions of the game. There’s an upgrade to your ion detonator which pulls objects and enemies towards it making them ragdoll in the process, and on top of that, it has a strong chance to convert any objects it destroys in more ammo for your weapons; and that’s not even talking about the upgrades to something like the Anal Probe, which allow you to not only shoot multiple ones creating utter chaos as enemies and npc’s alike run around grabbing their buttocks, but also convinces some of your enemies to fight on your side, whilst in other cases the effect multiplies to others whether you fire at them or not. It’s pretty darn fun, and there’s a number of different, newer weapons on top of that, that frankly, I didn’t use because I was just so pleased with how they handled the original arsenal.
There’s the story which has remained for the most part unchanged, some of the jokes are going to land, others are not, the problem is that it relies on a lot of stereotypical humour to make fun of the decade, but in the midst of it you can actually get some pretty sensible and clever jokes here and there, overall I would say I liked the story and the character’s in it, but I completely understand why people might get put off by it, I personally really dislike how they kept the extremely cartoony aesthetic for people, some of them look great such as Natasha, but others just look too goofy for me, and they do change the overall atmosphere of the game as a result.
Having said that, I do appreciate what THQ has done with these games and I can only hope they either remaster the rest of them, or alternatively come up with newer versions of the titles. There are issues here and there that still need some sorting out, even in this title, like the fact that there are some balancing issues in that escort mission, or alternatively how some of the tutorials are mislabelled for kb & m players, plus there’s also the fact that the game got that side mission taken out and to top it off, they didn’t really build on top of the collectible locator, which if you’re like me and want to get 100% completion, it can get really, really annoying. They just kinda added a pulse indicator that gets progressively closer as you get closer to the collectibles; why not add an upgrade system for that, maybe one that lets me actually mark the collectibles in my map? That would’ve been awesome.
I’ve also heard some have had some pretty big performance problems, but I personally haven’t run into any of them, unless I’m doing something else while I’m playing or I’m absolutely destroying cities, as in running around and obviously doing stuff that the devs didn’t intended for me to do, like completely try and combine different saucer upgrades and weapon attacks to obliterate an entire town. There are five towns here and they’re all fairly detailed, a lot of the locales have their own small activities that you see people partaking in, so in America you’ll have some hippies protesting, while in Britain you have some of them meditating and there will be side content build around it a lot of the times, which is pretty cool as well. Some of the later stages are fairly detailed as well, and I didn’t run into more than a single crash at one point where I enabled a lot of game modifiers when replaying a pretty hectic mission, not trying to excuse it, but just saying, it’s not really a game you want to “stress” that much. As for my settings? I literally left everything by default, the game defaulted to borderless fullscreen with vsync on and put most settings on Ultra, and I was happy.
I didn’t even talked about the tons of costumes you can get and change as you play, this was one of the coolest additions in the first game’s remake and remains a beautiful addition here, now you can even customize your saucer with some pretty cool skins which, if you’re like me, you’ll really come to appreciate. The skins by default are fairly detailed and I’m planning to get the dlc ones because they’re frankly quite good and seem like work went into them.
So overall, I do recommend the game, although I do think that is more of cautious recommendation because even back then it was quite a “niche” game, most people probably won’t get a lot of the references, nor humour that the game is using, simply because you have to be familiarized with a lot of aspects of the decade and the historicity of it in order to get a lot of the jokes. But yeah, I think THQ does deserve a commendation for this title, despite its issues, hopefully they won’t abandon it and keep sorting out the problems people seem to have and, although I’m not holding my breath for it, they really should do something about the mission they took out and the balancing problems at later levels in the game, plus maybe… add some upgrade to the collectibles, like a toggle that lets me see all of them in the map after finishing the main story? Maybe? Maybe a way to upgrade the locator? Just a thought people, don’t take this shit too seriously.