BC: Rearmed 2 this week!

[megatronbison]

Hm, by the sounds of things I'll be waiting til they have the sense to patch this so it can be played offline with 'classic' controls.

[munchy]

Ironic that I made the thread and am also one of the last people here to buy it.

Anyway! I like it. The new swinging takes a bit to get used to, but I'd say it's no worse than the first game's swinging. The enemies and bosses are pretty dumb, but the stages are pretty huge and varied compared to the first game. And as expected, Simon Viklund once again delivers an awesome soundtrack.

[Feynman]

The more I play the game, the more it grows on me. I have all the doodads collected, did a "prestige" run, got my "no jump" trophy, and after running through the stages a couple times without having to worry about collectibles and whatnot, it's a lot more fun. The levels flow pretty well and have plenty of shortcuts and branching paths, making them a joy to swing through. Once you start playing the game like an arcade game, blazing your way to the end without having to think about where to go to find the next powerup, the game really starts to come into it's own.

The jump is still pretty lame (made even more depressing because they use it in a couple fun ways in the challenge rooms), functioning mostly as a way to shave a second or two off your time here and there, but eh, whatever. Fully upgraded, the shotgun has become my default weapon, as it murders just about anything before it can even blink. This handily removes my aggravation at the enemies absorbing every bullet ever when I first started the game.

The other weapons are basically still crap aside from their utility functions though, and most of the passive and active abilities suck, serving only as a way to break the flow of the game by forcing you to open the menu, select the passive/active upgrade you want, use it, then open the menu again to switch back to your preferred default passive/active setup. It's annoying as hell, but fortunately it more or less ceases to be an issue once you no longer need to use those superflous weapons and upgrades in order to access other superfluous weapons and upgrades.

The stage selection screen still provides a minor annoyance, though. Having to spend ten seconds scrolling to the stage I want is annoying, especially if I want to play stages in sequence, since the stage selection cursor resets back to the final stage every bloody time.

I find that I'm really starting to like the game overall though. It just required me to cut through all the nonsense they covered the game with in order to get at the core game lurking within. I'd like to see the series continue, but with more focus on the core gameplay and less extension of the game through useless collectible bullshit.