Posted on: February 26, 2022

TheHostage
Games: 212 Reviews: 61
great setting but frustrating to play
With a wonderfully bizarre and interestingly weird setting and style, the concept is a masterpiece of game design. The inclusion of live action videos within the game along with the otherworldly soundtrack, occult ideas and odd characters make an atmospheric experience which reels you in, building anticipation to see what will happen next. It’s very heavy on the lore side and there’s a fair bit of backtracking involved, although this just adds of the experience. Unfortunately, it’s more frustrating than fun to play as the combat isn’t anywhere near as good as the world building. The difficulty is very unbalanced, either being too easy or too hard, and it becomes stale after a while, even with the additional powers and number of enemy types. A few poor design choices, like putting the first shop and first defensible power after the first boss, long load times after death, amassing money with nothing meaningful to spend it on, random timed and end game missions popping up with little context or explanation and the overall higher than normal difficulty makes it annoying. It’s also a long game that drags in the middle, mainly due to the above weaknesses. Graphically the colours are a bit washed out and the characters faces don’t look quite right, but everything else looks pretty good. The menus are crisp, the characters and acting are ok and apart from too many effects obscuring the combat, the optical illusions and style of the special effects are brilliant. Foundation is more of the same but in a different setting and because you have better gear, combat becomes a lot more enjoyable. It’s still lore heavy with good amounts of exploration and combat, but some deaths still feel a bit unfair. AWE feels lazily put together with repetitive sections and nothing really new about it, but it is a good way of linking to the next game in the series. The new enemies, mods and tools add to the overall value, but it all feels a bit too little, too late.
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