Seriously, not EVERY mechanic in a game need be activated by key-mashing. The quality of life in a first-person game is in direct INVERSE proportion to the number of nonsensical key-mash sequences where a tenth of a second timing error five or six keys in means instant death. The pervasive stupid key-mashing is the ABSOLUTE WORST thing about this game. (You'll notice they turned it down a lot in the later Tomb Raider games.) I'm only up to retrieving the pack from the wolf den in the cave, and I'm already heartily sick of key-mashing and on the edge of abandoning the game because of it. By contrast, one of the BEST things about Elder Scrolls games is that THEY DON'T HAVE ANY.
Don't even try to think about whether the story for this game makes sense, because it's utterly obvious it is just whatever nonsense they could wrap around the puzzles. It would actually be a better game if it didn't HAVE a story and was just a collection of puzzles you could approach in any order. I know if I were an auditor checking into this place, I'd be strongly tempted to fire every single researcher and shut the place down as a waste of budget, because you were supposed to be studying these effects and instead you've wasted your time building puzzles?!? I got about five hours in before I ran into a puzzle so obscure and convoluted that I couldn't even figure out what on earth I was supposed to achieve in order to get past it. Sorry, that's it, fun killed, done here. 'bye.
The game concept could be very satisfying, but the gameplay experience is ruined by bad interface issues. My experience with this game has been mingled immersion and frustration, because there are MANY possible actions bound onto very few keys, and the game does a terrible job of deciding which action or which enemy you meant. This leads to MANY experiences of accidentally killing the worm you meant to interrogate, because the game selected the wrong target, or repeatedly vaulting a vault-resisting foe whom you're trying to JUST HIT for crissakes. Many enemies have the Death Defying ability, which you CAN counter IF you can hit the correct key at the correct instant, but the indicator flashes up so briefly you don't get time to see what key/button it is, and even if you guess right, by the time you see the momentary flash it's already too late. So you have to fight them again and again and again, until you manage to deliver the deathstroke in a way that Death Defying doesn't apply to. But the real joy-killer here is that the drakes are UTTERLY BROKEN. They are almost impossible to fly with PC controls, and if they get too close to almost anything the drake gets stuck in it and all you can do is abandon the mission and start over. The final straw was being on a drake stuck between the balrog Tar-Goroth's legs, unable to move, unable to break free, unable to dismount, unable to attack or be attacked, and still with no idea how to perform the optional-extra goal of hitting the balrog 3 times with ice bolts because the game never sees fit to tell you how to fire one (even if you could steer the drake well enough to ain one). The entire drake control system is broken beyond usability -- and if you can't complete drake missions, you cannot complete the main storyline. I don't know what playing Shadow of Waris like on a console. But on the PC it is an exercise in misery and frustration, and that is ENTIRELY, 100% because of control and interface issues.
Truth? This may be a good game... IF what you want out of a game is a frenzied-ferret-on-speed nonstop-sprint fandango-on-keyboard that doesn't give you time to think or plan, just twitch-react or die. Possibly it's a better game if you're playing it on console and have used a console controller for so long that you run on pure muscle-memory. But if you're playing on PC and like to, you know, have at least just a few seconds to think tactically and consider your options ... Well, let's just say I lasted about ten minutes before I quit and uninstalled it. In that ten minutes I was up to seven keys that my left hand needed to be covering ALL THE TIME. And I only HAVE five fingers on that hand. I don't do NEARLY enough crystal meth for this game to be remotely enjoyable.
Did I mention linear? This game looks open-world but is as linear as anything you will ever find. Go there, do this. In this order. No, you can't explore over there. No, you can't climb that. Oh, find these mushrooms while you're at it. Never mind why. You don't need to know why. But there's a lot of them, and you should find them, because we said so. Oh, look, there's one up there! You can't get to it, because you're a duck right now, and ducks can only fly down, never up. Well, you should have seen it while you were up over there in that place you can't see it from. Too late now. My tolerance for being led around like a bull with a ring through its nose ran out after about half an hour. Yes, sure, the game is pretty and has some imaginative mechanics, but the player is just along for the ride. You're there to rigidly follow the script. If rigidly following a script is your cup of tea, well, hey, there you go, give it a try, this ... interactive experience, I won't call it a game ... is probably perfect for you. If you like having free will and exploring freely? You might want to look elsewhere. Also, just as an aside, Lost Ember features the WORST "wolf howl" sound effect I have ever heard. It sounds oddly like one of the developers trying to howl like a wolf. Possibly in a bathroom.
This feels like an quick release that was thrown together from SGW3 assets to bring in some quick money, possibly for a larger project like maybe an in-development GW4. The story is a bit thin; the "seeker" stuff gets old quickly, as does the fact that your employer shouts all the mission intros completely ignoring volume settings (and while we're at it, there is no master volume setting). The weapon selection is mostly straight out of GW3, though sharp eyes may note the appearance of the Kel-Tec RFB, AKA'd of course and fitted with an almost ludicrously huge suppressor. If there were a simple script to undo all the weapon AKA'ing, I'd install it in a second. The pervasive mouse pointer bug gets irritating fast: Either it's there when it's not supposed to be, or it's not there when it should be. Contracts also inherits movement bugs from SGW3: You can't move past that brick, you're crouching. You can't move off that kerb, you're crouching. You know, you could just STAND UP and walk over it ... but then of course, everybody will see you. Life is hard for videogame avatars. At least I have yet to find a map trap in Contracts that you can walk into unsuspecting but can't get out of at all. Unlike, um, some other games I've recently played. I too have experienced the bug in which a main target is just suddenly dead for no apparent reason. Olga Kurchatova, in my case. One minute she was standing there talking to guards and NOT hustling her booty to her helicopter. The next, suddenly just dead for no reason. And nobody even alerted. There's ... not a lot of content for the money, and not much of a storyline to speak of. This, the extensively re-used content, the disconnection between the various map areas, and the many bugs are what give Contracts the feel of a "Raise some money fast" release knocked out over a few weeks. This probably bodes ill for the bug-fix release that it badly needs, but probably won't get if this theory is correct.
I somehow managed to buy this game on the strength of its marketing without realizing that it was a side-scrolling platformer that doesn't tell you how to play it. It showed me three keys that did things. I'd figured out two others within about five minutes that the game couldn't be bothered to tell me about, but why did the mailbox fall down? And why does the game want me to pick it up? And what am I supposed to do with it? And does the portrait next to the windmill do anything? And how about the windmill? And is that a lunchbox? And how do I get back past this wardrobe or whatever it is? And... ...And right about there was where I hit NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, I don't have to play this and you can't make me.
I never got as far as actually playing this game. I didn't realize how OLD it was until after I'd installed it. There is one important thing you need to know if you are considering this game, before anything else: THIS GAME DOES NOT SUPPORT ANY WIDESCREEN RESOLUTIONS. AT ALL. ZIP. ZILCH. NADA. NONE. ZERO. It's 4x3 or GTFO. If you expect to be able to play immersed in a full-screen display with no black bars, this game is not for you. Go buy the latest Ghost Recon spinoff instead. That's where I'm going.
The setting and fundamental concept of Elex is good, and the overall structure of the game is not revolutionary. The graphics are good, the scenery is great, and the provision of a jet-pack to allow you to get almost anywhere is a nice touch. Unfortunately, the quest leveling is awful, the combat engine atrocious, the weapon scaling sparse (one weapon in a tier requires DEX 11, the next 33, the next 60), and you will spend 90% of your gameplay time searching for trash mobs you can actually kill to gain experience to level up far enough to have a hope of surviving your current quests, only to be given a new set of quests you are again too low-level to survive with the atrociously clunky and non-cooperative combat system. And that's on "Easy". Having a companion is little help UNLESS you can somehow maneuver your companion into engaging first, otherwise you'll likely be already dead by the time your companion gets around to noticing that you're in a fight. To make matters worse, far too many of the quests either double-cross you or force you to choose between double-crossing someone else, wrecking your faction reputation, or forcing you into courses that will seriously hurt you later in the game. ELEX needs at the very least better-leveled quest difficulty, a better scaling of weapons so that you don't have somehow gain five levels to be able to wield a better weapon, and a combat system that doesn't leave you flailing at air because your target moved while the game was thinking about getting around to starting your swing, or doesn't leave you locked onto a target on the other side of a rock or a wall and unable to switch targets while another casually kills you from behind. Did they play-test this AT ALL before releasing it...? I really tried to give ELEX a fair chance to win me over, but in the end it just wasted my time and pissed me off.
I like the look and the visual design of the game, and the teaser story is intriguing. Beyond that? ... This is one of those games where the most dangerous and deadly threat you have to face is the awful mechanics of the game itself. Lord of the Fallen plays like a game that was ported - BADLY - from some console or another. The energy mechanic is infuriating, because you can use up your energy in one or two moves and can then do nothing until it recharges, while the enemy never runs out of energy and will kill you while you're still in cooldown. Stability is a problem too. I've made it as far as the second boss, the Commander, and so far the game has crashed on me four times in that fight alone. This most recent time I had him down to just below 50% health before it crashed on me again. I'm glad I only spent $5 on this. I didn't get my money's worth. I'd be really pissed if I'd spent $30 on it. I think I spent about a quarter of my total play time throwing the game the finger because it jumped me off into an abyss again, or killed me while spinning helplessly around trying to end up facing my target, or... Well, you get the idea. Sorry Little Giant, but this game is pure misery to try to play.
