For starters, the entire run-up to the end game mission is lifeless. This game has three distinct mission types: fetch quests, clearout quests and climb quests. Once you've played the game long enough to make it to the second map every mission you get is just a rerun of the thirty missions you've played before it. Every now and then the game will fruitlessly try to change things up by introducing a new enemy type or (more commonly) just being as cheap and "cheat-y" as possible by placing certain enemy types in trap positions.

In the last five missions I got so sick and tired of the game constantly placing hidden exploders and suicide runners right where you could not see them coming and where they would insta-kill you the first time you encountered them, forcing you to restart the mission at least once. Then when they started introducing the screaming babies it was just icing on the cake... you knew they were there, you could see them from a mile away, but the horrible doorway clipping prevented you from killing them with a thrown weapon or rifle as your weapon would always hit the door frame. You'd have to physically enter the room to attack the baby and by the time you F hugged it to death, it would have drawn a bunch of fast movers to you and yelled you down to like 50% health.

But while immensely frustrating, those trap enemies were par for the course for the game and were just a tiny piece of my overall anger at the finale.

The first big "fuck this piece of shit game" moment for me in the finale is the sewer chase. Whoever thought of this level needs a swift kick in their balls with a steel toed wingtip. Not only does the section of the last level begin by throwing down into a sewer, the least exciting and most cliche of all game levels, it throws you down right into a trap creature screaming baby who right out of the gate saps your health and slows you down. From that point forward the entire level section is supposed to be you RUNNING away from all the volatiles that the game spawns into the sewer. Here is where the shitty controls start to fuck you hard... every time you get hit, the game drops you out of sprint mode and you have to press the run button again to start running... only to get hit again, dropping you out of run.

This entire level section is a free-running course in which you absolutely need forward momentum to clear the chasm jumps. No forward momentum means you don't have enough speed to clear the jumps, which means you will fall into insta-death pits and die and restart at the fucking screaming baby. I tried everything... camouflage, flares, UV lamp, molotovs, decoy fireworks, you name it. Nothing works for more than a second in this level and you quickly discover you are drastically outnumbered and overrun. Your only chance is what the creators force you to do, which is RUN... but because every hit you take drops you out of run you are constantly in a losing position desperately trying to maintain momentum.

And once you reach the "fuck you" spots in the level... the chasm jumps... you will most likely have five or six volatiles right on your ass taking chunks out of it, knocking you out of run. Every... fucking... time... I would attempt the chasm jumps I would have good speed then THUMP! hit just as I start to jump, knocking me out of run, stealing all my momentum, causing me to weakly bunny hop right down into the insta-death pit.

RAGE fucking QUIT.

It took me no less than a half hour and something like twenty tries, attempting various strategies and routes, before I finally... FINALLY... got through that sewer section.

And at no time did I feel like the game was "hard"... I felt like the game was cheating or broken or a combination of the two. It was not fun, it was blood boilingly frustrating... robbing the final mission of any sense of immediacy or flow.

Then after climbing up the "been there done that" cut and paste skyscraper level I was all set to have one of the game's notoriously bad "boss fights".

The two previous boss fights that this game threw at you were both the same... all your weapons and health items taken away, player given simple low power weapon with no mods and expected to fight off a larger / faster / equally capable opponent. Stages that, while cheap, felt like boss fights. FIGHTS being the applicable word here. Yes they had their clunky issues and their cheap feeling mechanics (the bulldozer zombie's ability to insta-hit you no matter how far away from him you dodged and the henchman fight's "fog" preventing you from having a good line of sight to him or the other bad guys) but they were honest to god boss fights.

At the end of the game... after all the bullshit the game puts you through... the final boss is a FUCKING SIMON SAYS QUICKTIME EVENT. A QTE that robs you of any and all desire and fun. The game robs you of your fight and closure. No skill, no gameplay, no effort... simply "press X not to die".

Bull fucking shit.

Thanks game. Thanks a lot.

Edit: And as for the story elements this game could not be more cliche if they made it out of paper mache using zombie movie scripts. The only saving grace is that the voice acting is at least tolerable when compared to Dead Island's horrific fake accents and knee-slappingly bad dialogue. However as a villain, Rias is completely ineffective. He is more or less a boogeyman with no teeth until the two or three missions where you deal with him directly. His so called "grip" on Harran is fleeting and ineffectual. The player is told he is the bad guy and every single thing he does is bad guy cliche tropes 1 through 100. He has no motivation and no plan that the player can see. Rias exists for the sole purpose of being a foil to the player, which is the biggest, cheapest hallmark of poor writing. And any backstory that we are presented dealing with anyone is quickly glossed over and brushed under the rug.

Honestly this game desperately needed a Far Cry style "your princess is in another castle" situation with Rias. Rias is basically Vaas... except there is no greater power behind him, it's just him. I was expecting to kill Rias and then square off against the GRE... nope. Just one handed captain quicktime. Roll credits.

Weak.