I’m going to try this in a different format. However, since I didn’t think about it until after I finished playing last night, the first day or two will be summarized. Spoiler alert for this article.

Day 1: This is an XBLA game? It doesn’t look like it. Very visually appealing. Feels more Metroid than Castlevania, but the play style is familiar territory. Oh how I missed thee.

Perhaps this is due to moving from digital to analog, but the controls feel looser than I’d expect with a side scroller. I hate how the camera zooms in sometimes and makes it impossible see ahead.

I love the flashlight. I love how the lighting effect looks; I love how it’s used. It’s a terrific feature. I can’t tell if enemies are more likely to see me if I have it on. I’m playing like that’s the case. I like feeling sneaky. I wish there was a way to put it below my face and make scary faces at enemies to freak them out just before shooting them.

Giving the player infinite ammo is great. Breaking it up by forcing reload is smart—it removes the Metroid/Megaman “run forward shooting at all times” play style.

The voice acting is terrible. I can’t tell if they’re from daytime soaps or late night Cinemax. Every time my character talks I wish he was hit by a bus. I started ending his lines with “brah.”

The only thing missing from the prelude is for the music to go “dun dun duunnnn” before the fade to black. The prelude made me think I bought Contra for a second.

I just crawled through a vent, then dropped down and snapped a guy’s neck from behind, shot a robot off the ceiling from across the room, which fell and exploded on another guy. I approve of this. Eat that Steven Seagal. Speaking of gratuitous violence, it’s funny how quickly this guy went from pacifist to Enemy Antichrist. He has this emo flashback about telling his father he’s nothing like him, which is hilarious since the actor couldn’t have delivered it any more half-hearted yet filled with melodrama (“I’m not like you! I don’t want to kill people! I just want to… sing!”). But then, in the same scene, he watches his girlfriend get beaten like a piñata filled with travel bottles of tequila at an AA meeting, and suddenly all his pacifism goes out the window. He picks up a gun lying on the desk, because nothing mitigates an escalating crisis like introducing firearms into the equation, and proceeds to go on a rampage. The guy’s personality went from The Dude to Walter in like five seconds (“I myself once dabbled in pacifism. Not in ‘Nam, of course.”).

Steven Seagal should’ve voiced this guy. It would’ve been great if he voiced the main guy, and all the lines from the lackeys contained movie titles that he starred in, like:

“Man, this guy is hard to kill.”

“This guy is dead! You hear me? Dead! He’s on deadly ground now!”

The girl has marbles for eyes. To look into her eyes is to see my own death.

Day 2: His girlfriend is NSA, right? Can I toss that out there now as a possibility? When she tells the lead that “they” need to “do all they can” to stop this Evil Corporation/Military/Taco Stand™ I don’t get how he acquiesces. She isn’t bugging him to go shopping or take out the garbage—she’s demanding he alone kill an entire army. Normal, well-adjusted people who aren’t in government agencies don’t suggest this. Where’s the reasonable person who knows doing “all you can” might, maybe, be escaping and telling, I don’t know, perhaps the actual U.S. military? Just a thought. Amy is also placing her bets now—his dad is the main bad guy.

Double jump is a go. Maybe I’m too twitchy, but this also highlights my earlier complaint about the controls feeling soft at times. I can run up a wall, fall down, and try to do the exact thing again but the next time my character refuses to grab the wall. I don’t know why. This is exacerbated when you have to navigate up tall shafts; missing a jump because your guy decided to be a priss and not touch an icky spot he saw on the wall is just frustrating.

Yay for assault rifle! The sub machinegun’s small clip was starting to get annoying. Chair is pacing this well. As soon as I start to get annoyed with the confines of my current ability set they’re there providing a new addition. That’s quality.

Being able to snap necks from behind is nice—it adds variety to the play. I know I already mentioned it, it doesn’t make me a psycho. There’s also this point where you shoot a grenade into a tube, and somehow that turns into this hellfire on the other end that kills all the enemies. It might be Nintendo logic, but that’s awesome. They’re playing with variation in a side scroller and winning the Internet.

Scuba Steve time. This reminded me of Undertow, so I looked up Chair. Same studio. They do this well. I can’t get over how good this game looks for an XBLA game.

I’m divided on the placement of the question mark on the minimap that indicates a particular room has a hidden item. It might be Easy Mode, but I have to admit that it helps prevent tunnel vision sometimes.