Ended up finishing up
UnMetal. I played the second half at my desktop with a guide open to be able to alt+tab for the random troll stupid stuff.
In the end I'll
hesitatingly say it's a good indie game and that any MGS-head should give it a playthrough, especially if you happened to pick up the humble choice bundle and got it free anyhow this month. But it's frustrating because there is a great indie game in there that's just bogged down by design stuff. Design stuff that could be patchable. Design stuff that like every review I saw mentions. And the game did receive patches and balance adjustments. But whatever they did just didn't go far enough to fix some of the core stuff.
My recommendation would honestly be to play through it skipping every cutscene. You're not missing much and the game between cutscene, cutscene, cutscene dialogues is pretty good outside the troll bullshit (which isn't too frequent, but is annoying when it happens) and random difficulty spikes. Also skipping cutscenes would probably drop the game from like 9-10 hours to like 6 hours.
Also the game having only 1 save slot that continually overwrites really seems like you can get so fucked you are stuck by the end. I missed an item and when back to get it and going in reverse through the screens was basically impossible without taking hits, but by the end at that point I had no health items left and it was pretty much impossible and it had saved over. Thankfully you get a couple of invincibility items in the run and I never used them so I used it to get through that bit but it was close.
There's some good boss fights in there, some good levels and some fun easter eggs and secrets. But then there's stuff like an optional event with a huge dialogue tree and every branch ends with a game over except one and it's just pure trial & error (the guide I used thought it was 100% fail states since it was optional and there was no achievement tied to it, but afterwards I read there is one branch that actually survives the event. With trial & error it would take like 10+ tries of 3 mins of dialogue to find it).
I think yeah, it's something like a 7-8/10 game. It was good enough that I kept playing it because the core gameplay was good, and there aren't a lot of good MGS clones out there. But I did start reading thebore on my phone during cutscenes after a while because yawwwwn. If the game had at least let you manually advance the conversations it would've been better since you could skim them quickly, but it doesn't.
Also for an MGS homage/clone/parody I think it's missing a couple of MGS features like you have a codec and it's used frequently throughout the story, but I'm pretty sure there are zero optional conversations where you just randomly call someone during something, which seems like a big omission. Also...I don't think there was a cardboard box? Also for the final boss I thought there would be a giant ass Metal Gear, but instead there's
spoiler (click to show/hide)
The mech from Robocop 2
Oh and I agree with that review I posted earlier in the thread that the game's story would've been better if it didn't take itself so seriously. It should've been more of a silly parody.
Though I disagree with that review that the ending joke didn't land, the execution of it was great and I laughed
ENDING SPOILER
spoiler (click to show/hide)
the post-credit scene reveal that the main character made up the entire game story to impress his girl & get laid. On paper that's dumb, but it's actually executed really well with the ending and the post-credit scene.
