I agree entirely- it's the one big blank patch, that really rather breaks the immersion, in the whole story arc.

I definitely agree, mate. I thought that was absolutely clear.

Nah, boy is definitely Solid imho.

It's a show that only gets better the more you watch it. Like a long-running sitcom or a soap. The more you know the characters, how the world works, how they interact, the places they frequent, etc. It just gets better and better, until you can't stop smiling at it every second that you watch.

I agree for the most part. Brotherhood felt like a real improvement; but still had the same issues of basic gameplay bluntness.

#corrections

It's definitely noir, mate. Ever since the visuals appeared colourful on screenshots, people have been shouting about how the 'noir' in it is gone: noir is nothing about colour or visual style.

Yeah, the actual hardest difficulty; 'old school', doesn't let you have the second wind painkiller escapes.

Oh, oh, oh, and another thing (which the stupid comment system won't let me add):

I agree for the most part; but still fundamentally disagree that I'm mixing up tension and intensity.

You said that 98% of scariness is tension... Or 'based on' tension, but I don't see how that's any different.

Really good tragic story at the end there. Unsure about the gameworld, though. How open is it? And a lot of the mechanics/ polish look questionable.

You including Resi 4 or not? I'm replaying it now, and, especially on harder difficulty, it's just as scary and tense as the first several.

Tension is not what makes fear. Action games are tense. Racing games are tense. Puzzle games are tense. Roleplaying games are tense. None of them are scary. They all have tension/ anticipation in bundles; it's what makes compelling gameplay.

So... To avoid spoilers, I skipped randomly through the video.

He said it.

Haha, incredible. I love that age-old experience of falling through the world map and coming out of the sky. Happens in GTA so much.

Ah, no it's a bit more of a severe spoiler, the FTL-drive thing. It's in the second novel in the series I think, there's alien tech which allows FTL, and it's essentially the same as the mass effect. In description and effect (but it goes into far more intelligent and scientific detail; like how the "mass effect"…

Driver 3 man!

Great article there, Patricia. Like, some of the best writing on Kotaku for a while.