User Rating: 6.7 | Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds PS2
(Minor spoilers ahead) I was a huge fan of the original Buffy game (with the caveat the last three levels were a huge, unfortunate departure from the rest of the game). My wife happily got me Chaos Bleeds the day it came out. I really liked playing all the different characters---Xander in particular had really funny writing and I never tired of his one-liners. I also liked the convenient one-button staking, although this meant I wasn't encouraged to try tossing vampires into the sunlight or onto local scenery, and it was clear that wasn't a priority in the level design. The story was fun and the cutscenes were built well---I really loved the level where Buffy finds Giles in his ba****t. What really didn't work was the frustrating puzzle-solving. The artists drew detailed, interesting environments, but they are almost entirely uninteractive. However, to solve the puzzles, you have to wander around trying to figure out, say, which of the 8 to 10 identical doors you need to open (the original Buffy clearly hilighted which doors you could open), or which of the several hundred immobile props you can actually push. This was particularly frustrating when you could tell where you were supposed to go, but you couldn't get there because of a flimsy chain-linked fence or a ledge that looks grabbable but isn't. It feels as if they just didn't test the later levels very well. The combat is pretty robust, but the puzzles are arbitrarily hard and amount to LucasArts-style pixel-hunts. After the first four levels or so, the characters stop giving hints to speed things along and the prop-finding becomes totally obscure; I have no idea how they expected anyone to figure out that Faith was supposed to push the bookcase, for example. The levels don't get much more interesting past Sid the Dummy, although the very last level definitely felt like they had worked a little longer on it, and the big shiny sword with the bright lighting effect was very fun---a prop they could have introduced earlier. A fair number of the boss battles were really ridiculous. I hated fighting Tara and Kristos (sp?), both of whom you had to defeat by treating them like idiots. See, the best way to survive was to hide behind the scenery and let them cast spells directly at you. One would imagine that if Evil Tara were as smart as Good Tara, she'd figure out that casting fireballs at the wall you're hiding behind is a waste of time. Likewise, Kristos would happily torch his sidekicks for a shot at shooting at his own spell globes (and that level, in particular, was insane. I'm an experienced gamer and so was my friend who was watching, and we were baffled by how you'd know to hit the globes when they were randomly slightly fainter---after the 16th retry, you'd imagine a hint would be in order). Fighting Adam was equally stupid, and surviveable only after lots of trial and error dying, which isn't really how I want to be my heroes from the TV show. So, although I appreciate removing most of the sucky jumping puzzles from the first Buffy, I didn't think the adventure-game aspects of it worked, the boss battles felt hurried, and without a hint guide I would have given up a long time before the end. I'd like to see an Angel game that combines the great technology they've built up, but with a longer testing and refining cycle to make something nicely polished. 
