Lee Roberts

Hugely disappointed. I finished R-Type Final: unlocked all 101 ships, completed every challenge. It's one of my favourite games ever, so you can imagine my joy when a favourite series that I thought was gone for good was coming back for one last hurrah. Final 2 is disappointing for a bunch of reasons. For one, it's essentially just R-Type Final re-skinned: but with less ships currently, which is completely baffling considering we're 18 years on from Final. The ship unlock system is now some weird material system, which you collect by destroying enemies, and is extremely underwhelming. In Final, the system was logical and very grindable: play a certain amount of game time with the previous ship, reach a certain level (which would unlock a new arc to the story, where the next unlockable ship is introduced), etc. The new system makes it feel like grinding for the sake of grinding, and places no investment in the fantastic lore and story of R-Type: one of the all-time great series from that perspective. Final 2 plays well, just like how you'd expect an R-Type to play. The problem is the graphics: there's a lot of bloom, and very little contrast between background and enemies. They've tried to make Final 2 brighter than Final, but that just means that you'll frequently be caught by a stray beam or enemy that you don't see coming. Hitboxes also seem weird, although I'm sure if I played more I'd get used to them - people are finishing this without being hit on the hardest difficulty, so that's likely a "me" problem. The single biggest problem with Final 2 is the awful, awful checkpoints. There's a tricky part on Stage 4, where if you don't kill something quickly enough, it's very difficult to figure out the path even on easier difficulties. When you inevitably die, you're brought back to a checkpoint with multiple enemies around you: you do not spawn with your Force on any difficulty, so you're totally defenceless and your firepower is minimal. You cannot kill the enemies quickly enough, and requires Bydo-level movement even on the easier difficulties. The difficulty spike caused by this is so unnecessary, frustrating, artificial and pointless that I've not brought myself to even finish the main stages fully: it destroys any motivation to replay stages from checkpoints. I found myself just quitting the game and restarting from Stage 1, rather than dying constantly at the same point: inevitably, it resulted in me just putting the game down for good. As a huge fan of the series, and someone who was waiting since the announcement, I'm hugely disappointed, and sad that such a fundamental problem exists in a game like this.