Played AW1 & 2 back to back.. am I crazy for thinking the combat is better in the original?
As a childhood Max Payne era Remedy fan, I eagerly followed AW1's development and played it day 1 back in 2010, and while I loved it, I never revisited it. For some reason the AW2 hype and launch completely passed me by in '23 so I never played the sequel either until now - I guess life got in the way.
AW1 was on Steam sale for £2 recently so I decided to dive in for a replay, and wow, I loved revisiting this game so much. I have read opinions recently citing the gameplay as very dated and clunky, but my experience was very positive: the animations hold up well, the world remains equally intriguing and terrifying, and while the gameplay loop is arguably excessively repetitive, it holds up fundamentally as a solid action adventure game. The combat, exploration and the occasional environmental puzzle kept me engaged all the way through. The flashlight mechanic holds up incredibly well as a unique and solid twist on the genre that never feels gimmicky. (unrelated disappointment, but one of my core memories of the game was Bowie's Space Oddity playing in the credits, so I was gutted to see it has been removed on the OG PC version of the game).
Upon finishing AW1 last week, I immediately purchased AW2 on the strength of my enjoyment of the original and went in totally blind having never even watched a trailer. It absolutely blew me away start to finish and I can't wait to go back for NG+ in a couple of months when I'm ready to delve back into the nightmare.
However, the one thing holding AW2 back from being a top 5 GOAT title for me is the combat compared to the original and it's contemporaries. I enjoyed the weapon selection, the upgrade paths, and the details like the reload animations. But I really didn't gel with the flashlight boost in this game, it felt like a chore to use compared to the original, which felt much more intuitive, strategic and satisfying. In the original, you are burning away the darkness by just aiming the torch at the enemy, while focusing the beam burns the darkness faster, at the cost of battery juice. This introduced a battery management element that is lacking from the sequel. Even the visual representation of the circle shrinking as the shield depletes was a satisfying combat loop that I missed when playing AW2.
Additionally, dealing with enemy movement and deploying the dodge mechanic felt better to me in the original. Granted, dodging the throwing axes felt very satisfying in AW2, but otherwise I found the enemy movesets and patterns more frustrating than fun in AW2: serviceable but notably unimpressive compared to other elements of the game. My overwhelming feeling when dealing with groups of enemies was frustration. I wasn't even dying, it just felt like I was wrestling with annoying encounters that weren't fun.
I even turned the controller aim assist back on after a few hours, which is unheard of for me, because I wasn't getting a good feeling from the shooting. Later in the game, I found some enjoyment popping headshots with an upgraded hunting rifle, and the crossbow felt quite fun at times too, but I couldn't help but think that AW2 would be elevated to 10/10 status if it had a combat system more akin to TLOU2: very tight and responsive, but also grimy, grounded, desperate, and visceral.
For the studio that pioneered some of the tightest TPS action in the Max Payne series, I would expect Remedy to be more focused on cutting edge combat innovation, so it really stood out to me as a weak point of the game. Did anyone else feel like the original had a notably better feeling combat system?