So Zig Forums told me God Hand is a masterpiece from 2 gens ago. So I finally played it. The combat system is okay (at best), but player control, the camera, level design, enemy design and basically everything else flat out sucks. Character models and animations are reasonably nice but the environments are extremely bland, both in geometrical and texture detail. The intentionally poor story and dialog is so bad it sort of works. Sort of. Terrible voice acting but the music is pretty great, making it one of the only redeeming things about the game. The game is surprising lengthy for such a basic game, though it gets increbily boring and frustrating so you likely won't play for too long. The bottom line is that God Hand quickly becomes a boring, annoying and frustrating game. Why should you be forced to try and complete a level with no starting health when you have no hope of survival and will just need to reload a minute later? What's fun in fighting the same annoying demon creatures over and over again when the fight was old the second time you tried it? Why, oh why, did Clover Studio put so much money into such a risky joke, and why did no one see that the joke didn't have a real punch line at any point in the development?
Here's a better joke for free: What's green and has wheels?
You can tell when someone is bad a criticism when, instead of giving examples for the things they like / dislike, they just say "X has bad combat, controls, level design, etc."
I'll give you an example of how to explain yourself better, so you can more effectively communicate with people, OP:
"God Hand has really really good combat, actually. It's the primary appeal of the game. The combo customization system and large variety of moves give you a huge amount of ways you can build your character. The way the game handles its very finite resource management and its difficulty both reward careful play. Every hit you take over the course of a level is extremely dangerous because you rarely get more than a small handful of health pickups, and with the ever present threat of demons you generally want to save your roulette spins and meter. The game gives you a great variety of tools to deal with problems and also rewards their careful considerate use. Managing these resources is a compelling and necessary skill to learn as the game throws extremely difficult encounters at you."
See? Someone reading that will actually understand why I liked the combat in God Hand after explaining that. I could even go into more detail and give examples of specific encounters that I thought offered unique gameplay scenarios, like the Crane, the midget Kamen Rider guys, the gay guys or the Devil Hand. But Who has time for me to explain the game's many unique encounters, that goes more into level design.
