Seven: Enhanced Edition

I loved it. I hated it. I have no idea, how someone could finish it in 50 hours. It took me 118, and I dropped the Rune-Quest. After about 80 hours or so my only wish was to finally come to an end with it. I never played a game that made it so difficult to find your way, even if I liked the combination of isometric perspective with Jump&Run, which is in a way the mother of the orientation problem, because: you cant`t look up. You never really know, where you are, where your way could be, and the map is totally crap. There are no names and no important markings (like entrances, cities, or just differences in height), all is dull green, dull brown and dull grey. It took me literally hours in real time to find the way, always interrupted by canyons, unsurmountable industrial ruins or hordes of monsters. Never ever ago I`ve been so lost in space. Anyway, I finished the game. I loved the voice of Teriel and kind of speaking. I liked the Quests (mostly). After a while I didn`t miss a levelsystem anymore. I started my own quest for opening the complete travelling network (which, of course, took me hours, too). I wanted to see the end(s). And I saw them. The game looks and feels beautiful, for all it`s faults, and if you like RPGs and see it on sale, buy it and try it, on condition that you have a certain resistance to the frustration to never know where you are :)

I commend the game for mixing genres and trying something new. Unfortunately they haven't really finetuned the gameplay and forgot to include explanations for several mechanics. All the items you loot will weigh you down until you move as fast as a turtle, but you can't sell 90% of them, even though they looked valuable to me (elite weapons). The side quests are way too long and stretched out all over the map which feels like doing fetch-quests rather than engaging in a side story. I know it is to familiarize with the terrain and the different regions, but exploring new areas is not as fun. Since everytime I want to get to a certain place, it's often only possible through a 10min detour to another region (you'll be walking A LOT). I like the idea of activating traveling trains via sneaking into the enemy's base. But they are so heavily guarded it's going into a hornet's nest armed with a spoon. Shooting your way in is suicide, which leaves only disguising yourself as a guard. Tried it several times, the guards often spot me from far. The game never establishes guidelines what works and what doesn't. I like the isometric perspective but for parcour climbing, sneaking, breaking-in it can be a nightmare. It needed at least better color design to distinguish upper levels from lower ones. Figuring out how to enter a building can be a puzzle of the frustrating kind - everything is so small that you can miss a vent or opening. I really wished there was a better zoom function. This game would play probably gangbusters on a Nintendo 3Ds where you can take advantage of the stereoscopic depth of field. The story didn't grip me so I left the game after completing roughly 25%. The world building and the apocalyptic factions and religious groups seemed to me indistinguishable from another. I didn't know exactly who I'm doing favors for, nor did I care. It's too bad since there is a really good game here that gets bogged down by the mechanics buggy quests and an unreliable map.

IMPORTANT NOTE: There is a hidden stash. Its everywhere. Mostly. This game puts you far in the future, in which the humanity has evolved so far that mostly every war was taken by words until something fatal happened that vanquished most of humanity and set their evolutionary power over themselves as a whole far back. I highly recommend to read all the books you can get/steal. They're well written. The first loadingscreen to the main menu sometimes tells you to try different weapon types since each weapon type has a different ability. And I tell you DO IT! In the very beginning you get a mission in which the guards have "the basic" weapon types, so you just need to kill them and try them out - thats what the demo is for - later in the game you will face different enemy types and sooner or later you will realize that it might be a good idea to take more than just one weapon type with you at once, to be able to combat them all. And seriously. The Map design of this game. It. is. in. sane. The fact that you can go very deep in a mountain, in a building, or a cave, and still be able to see just everything makes the game look so ridiculously gorgeous during the play. I still cannot believe it. The map design is compact, complicated on first sight, but very well readable for spintaneously planned actions. This is one hell of a good stealth game, and although i felt like i was gathering way too much trash around early on, i got pretty much use out of it in the later game. Dont loot too much. As soon as you got the upgrades of your crafting stations you really dont need any more trash except for actual crafting of secondary tools like health and buff injections and consumable tools like grenades. This game wants you to make it your own. You dont even need stealth to beat it, but sometimes its just better to not face too many enemies at once. If youre a Warrior, no problem! This game gives you plenty of options to do just like you want - at every point of the game. Play it.

Seven has some non-trivial flaws with many of its core systems, including stealth, combat, character development and enemy AI. Fortunately, I didn't find those flaws critical enough to seriously impact my enjoyment from exploring the game's rich, detailed and somewhat original world. It is a wide open game, both in the non-linearity of mission and map design and for supporting different play styles (although the flaws make some more viable than others). For lovers of exploration, a dangerous and beautiful world awaits, with many hidden secrets and side stories that could take up to 100 hours to properly appreciate.

This game is sort of like they took the sneaking and stealing component of Divinity: Original Sin and expanded it into a whole game. And while there are a ton of flaws, I still found myself really enjoying it. The good: Great map with a lot of verticality I liked the setting and visual style. Overall the movement seemed to work pretty well, and it was easy enough to climb and jump around. Putting on disguises is fun (though, I think that the non-wreath enemies should still be a little less sensitive when you have one on). There is a good amount of stuff to do in the world. Neutral: Vendors have very little cash, so you end up doing more of a trading style where you take their best items in return for your junk. With all the verticality, the map doesn't always give you a very good idea how to get from where you are to where you want to go. So it can be easy to get lost - sometimes kinda cool to try to find your way through, sometimes annoying. Some of the flaws: Your carrying capacity is stiflingly low - and it only gets worse, since you actually start with the skill chip that increases the capacity. This does everything from limiting trying out new weapons and armors to dis-incentivizing you from diving into the crafting. You can rotate the camera 360 degrees, but the angle is fixed. It would be nice to be able to adjust the tilt at many points. Sight lines for NPCs should be easier to see - can't tell when cover actually protects you oftentimes. And enemies end up detecting you through walls a lot. Assassin playstyle is a non-option, as your backstab doesn't one-hit-kill in many situations. And the drop-kill is very hard to employ. And any fight or noise brings everyone for miles running to you. With all the verticality, walls/roofs/landscape going transparent is required. But sometimes it will show you places that you can't actually ever go. The blink ability that you start with is very hard to use. It can't change height at all and has trouble with gaps too.