We Happy Few

Given the wonderful aesthetic and interesting theme, I can only imagine what a studio like Looking Glass might have done with a game like this. Alas, that's only wishful thinking. What we actually ended up getting is a painful disappointment. WHF is one of those games that you want so badly to be great that you steadfastly set your jaw and soldier on, sleeprunning far beyond the "best before" date, convinced that any minute now its inner stealthy/satirical glory is going to come gushing out. But that just never happens. The cut scenes and set pieces are passingly clever, giving a frustrating hint as to what might have been "if only," but the game itself, as a game, never quite gels. No One Lives Forever, unfortunately, this is not. And that's it. Others have described the details, so I'll just offer my overall opinion of the experience. As you may have surmised, it's somewhere between Meh and Less-Than-Meh.

While the atmosphere is great and the story is pretty good, this game is so darn repetitive it hurts. Go to pace X, fetch Y, go back, drop Y. Rinse and repeat. This game would have been much better without the open world, since traversing it is just boring, sometimes even annoying and a lot of skills are directly used to eliminate this aspect of the game. That is not a good look. To be a little more precise, it took me roughly 50 hours to complete the game, I assume that nearly 20 hours are just me walking from A to B...in a world that is just not interesting. The novelty wears off very fast. Additionally, once you get the hang of it, it becomes painfully obvious that this is a game, you have to force yourself to not "look behind the curtain" because it's so obvious that this is a facade. We Happy Few depends much on creating and maintaining atmosphere, but unfortunately the maintaining bit falls to the player. I would recommend it when it is on sale, maybe 20 bucks for the whole package. Shame, really.

Expensive game with lot of lags and bugs. This game not empress me after bioshock. Poor textures, poor locations, poor story. This is not AAA game, this game still have issue when you fall under textures and die without saving progress. Also game sometimes just crash and you lose all you progress for 1-2 hours. And developers drain money from community, why game price seems like price for AAA game without community support and without bugs?

The game looks really nice and the overall setting is very interesting, but gameplay is just broken. It's a stealth game. You're supposed to hide, sneak up on enemies and either avoid them or take them out silently. Neither works. When hiding I got constantly stuck in walls and other game world decorations, unable to move, forcing me to reload a previous save. If I didn't get stuck, getting caught seems to be completely random. Alarms seemingly get triggered at random, even when you're in hiding, on the other hand enemies can stare you right in the face and won't find you, as long as you're crouching in flowers. But good luck leaving your hiding place ever again without fighting, because enemies might stand there facing you forever and won't move or react to distractions at all. When trying to sneak up on enemies to take them out, sometimes they just either disappear right in front of you, or new ones respawn and pop up in full line of sight. Not only does this completely break immersion, it also makes the core gameplay mechanic unreliable and pointless. I really wanted to like this game, but in the end I'm just glad I'm one of "the happy few" who got it when it was on sale. Even if it looks interesting, I don't recommend buying this at full price.

Visual style is awesome. British humor everywhere - it's beautiful. But the game is undoubtedly flawed. Many quests are "meh" and, to be fair, getting to the finish line with the main game felt like I was struggling, dragging myself through it. The most frustrating thing was the AI - up to a point of unbearability. BUT after I finished the main game and got to the DLCs - I was pleasantly surprised - they were really nice, no boring side quests or main storyline that feels like forever - only nice short compact stories, one for each DLC. My favourite was "The Lightbearer" - it was really different from the others with its really distinct pretty visual style. TLDR: I'd rate the main game 3/5 but the DLCs improve the rating up to 4/5 for me