Beat. It is tough to say which part of the game was the worst because none of it was good. Most of the game (and the beginning) was Contra style on foot side scrolling shooter. The way your blue bullets hit enemies and then fell to the floor looked ridiculous; were these plastic bullets? That would explain why enemies took so many hits to kill while the protagonist died in a single hit. The weapon power ups were pretty cool; I preferred the triangle homing, but the zig zag pulse could hit all over the screen. Normal and ring shot were not as good. Weapon powerups were plentiful and it was annoying to accidentally lose homing due to a pick up. It would have been better to be able to carry them all and switch on the fly, making sure to design situations for each. Picking up CDs seemed to be like health in that once you got enough you got an armored suit that could take a single hit. Losing the suit dropped those CDs and they could potentially be picked up to restore it. I did find the UI to be very busy with information but it was difficult to tell what was actually useful vs what was just fluff. The early bosses were very simple, just cars to jump over. I thought they were getting more advanced when the helicopter arrived and I was shooting it like mad only to realize it was for me to drive. And then it was only to fly over a gap for a couple screens, then land and go back to on foot. Why even put that in the game? I mean the helicopter took up way too much of the screen but it could have transitioned into a chopper shoot em up. This game certainly liked those alternate genres.

I hated the little puzzles for hacking terminals. They had punishing time limits and I did not figure out what the question even was until the end of the game. The math problems were simple, but the colored shapes? Wtf do you expect me to do with that? It seemed to be "which one of these belongs with the above images based on shape, color and orientation?". Maybe that was in the manual, but either way I don't play video games to solve math and obscure logic problems. The shooter stages had portals to jack into cyberspace, which led to 3D flight sim sequences. No reversed flight controls. One type was 1st person avoidance of obstacles. It was like Star Fox, only no combat, no maneuvers, no control of speed and much simpler obstacles. It also only took one crash to send you back to the beginning. They later mixed it up slightly by giving you a gun and putting in shooting gallery sequences in between the flying. So if the guy can come to a complete stop to fight enemies, why can't he slow down to not crash into stuff? And why even bother making this mode without the ability to fly and fight at the same time? There were 3rd person flight sequences that had a bit of flying combat, but it was still mostly obstacle avoidance. I did not enjoy the flight sim parts and felt they went on way too long with too much repetition of the same challenges.

Completing those cyber sequences changed your location in the "real" world, which made no sense. There were plenty of other things that made me believe the main game was taking place in VR; the way enemies explode into pixels, and the enemies that were animated furniture. Hell one of the toughest enemies in the game was a vending machine shooting cans of sprite. I died many times from stuff I thought was just background scenery. And then there was the gas station boss, with snake like pumps shooting flaming gas. There was also a guy on fire flying around, but I was totally confused about what was going on and what I was supposed to do. The fight was dragging on so long that I wondered if shooting the guy was the correct action. It would help to see the boss's health bar so you could know what actually caused damage. I think the goal was to avoid shooting and hope he walked into the gas fire. There was a top down car driving sequence, with avoidance of hazards and shooting other cars. It was not bad. The mid game boss fight against Jobe was a Star Fox style Andross fight. But there was a stupid gimmick that took me many attempts to figure out; so many that I probably would have run out of lives if I was not save state scumming. The goal was not simply defeating the boss, but knocking him into the green hexagons in the background. The trick was that you had control over the boss while he was falling, but the game in no way communicated that, or what the goal even was. Failing to realize this would make the fight drag on infinitely. Terrible design. Then the final boss was something completely different; a vertical shoot em up. It was probably the best part of the game. There were a number of different weapon powerups but they did not seem very different functionally; one was a bit wider and another was a bit faster but meh. I don't understand why they made a game with so many different genres done half assed, rather than just picking 1 and doing it well. The story also made no sense. So they used VR experiments to turn the retarded lawnmower guy into.... skynet? Who then caused an apocalypse by... erasing the internet? Not launching all the nukes? No robot army? And why is the final boss the corporate executive instead of skynet? Was any of this game taking place in the real world? So stupid.

5.0/10