While there is a certain mystery to be solved, the lack of NPC interaction and unrequited relationship with Delilah leaves one unfulfiled on completing this game. Depth of Field and motion blur caused queasiness, and I'm not entirely certain what parameters the game uses for completion if I can finish the game at 60%. Barely worth the $3 price tag. Ultimately I am unlikely to seek out additional titles by this developer.
Pros: 1. Graphics are great for a ten year old game. 2. Good dialog. (Especially between Hoji and Wang.) 3. Surprisingly good story. 4. Lots of secrets and hidden areas. 5. The writing really shines. This isn't just a 'shoot and loot'. It's a heartbreaking tragedy. 6. Realism. Lo Wang actually belts out "Ow! F**k!" when he's hit, just like you would when you stub your toe. 7. Save at any point, including partway through some cutscenes. This is GREAT when you are in a gigantic, 45 minute mob battle and don't want to start the whole thing over. Cons: 1. Cutscene stupid. One character gets away because Wang is celebrating. This happens TWICE. 2. Repetitive battles. They throw one enemy type at you. Then you see two of them in the next battle. Then three. Then swarms. Not a big deal when it's mobs, but when it's friggin' BERSERKERS it's hair raising. 3. The controls are a mess. For example, "Lstick> Lstick> Ltrigger" activates healing. Try doing that while dodging incoming enemies-- you know, the reason you're healing in the first place? 4. No explanation of how to get higher scores after battles. They say "Use different powers and weapons in combination." Okay. I used ALL of them during one battle. Every single power and every single weapon. I got 2/5 stars. WTF? 5. Some of the bosses are terribly easy. One boss vanishes when you pull out a gun because he wants to fight blade to blade. So, need a break to heal? Just swap to a pistol. There are mob battles that are harder than any of the bosses. 6. Sudden level ends mean you can't go back to search for secrets you missed. Go through the wrong door and "Boop!" Score page. "You got 2/11 secrets." 7. I hate to say this, but the GOG version causes serious overheating on my laptop. Like "Hot enough to burn your fingers WHILE it's sitting on a cooling deck. I had to buy and play it on the Xbox to write this review. This and SW2 are the only GOG games that do this. 3.5/5 Stars.
NOTE: I did not purchase this from GOG, but on XBox One. After seeing the woke nonsense infesting Arkane thanks to Anita Sarkeesian that destroyed Dishonored, the spiritual successor to the greatest game series I've ever played, it does not surprise me that this game has finally hit the flush lever on the Looking Glass Software legacy. Pros: It's beautiful. The voice acting is well done. It says "BioShock" in the title. Cons: Literally everything else. Racist strawman storyline against anyone with light colored skin. Distorted presentation of American History. Mary Sue character who can magically find ammo, health, and "salts" as needed. Irritating writing: One moment she's upset that you're killing people and taking their stuff, and the next she's literally pointing them out for you to kill. Further, I am sick of being preached to by hypocrites. Arkane makes a huge deal out of the simpleminded "Racism iz bad!" theme without giving any kind of amplification or depth to characters, while at the SAME TIME showing their own racism. For example, their staff makes a big deal out of one point where you can choose to throw a baseball at a mixed race couple and start a stoning or you can throw it at the announcer. They were so smugly proud that "Not one playtester threw it at the couple!" Great. Good for you. Now can you explain the racism behind NOT EVEN BOTHERING TO NAME THE COUPLE?! Seriously, they are "Bride" and "Groom" even when you meet them later. They were so insignificant (beyond their skin color) that the production staff couldn't even be arsed to give them names. THAT is blatant racism: the focus entirely on a character's race above all other features. This is a child's primer to why "Racism iz bad!" with nothing else behind it. The second most obnoxious part of this crap game is that it isn't a BioShock game at all. They literally bolted less than two minutes of a recycled BS2 level into this JUST to be able to get name recognition for sales.
Please note that I did not purchase this from GOG, but the XBOX One console. PREY looks like it will be a decent FPS/Mystery/Puzzle game. LOOKS, I said. Once you start playing you find that the developers had no idea how to structure level design, challenge ratings, or even simple puzzles. You can't sneak around because there is no stealth mechanic. You can't shoot the enemy because there is absolutely NEVER enough ammunition for any of the weapons. The fourth time you get swamped by mimics and you can't even beat the little shits to death because of an obnoxious stamina meter that prevents you from spamming melee you'll want to throw your controller at the wall. (Seriously, how fat and out of shape is Morgan Wu that swinging a wrench four times in a row leaves him gasping for breath?) This will be the final Arkane title I purchase. Anita Sarkeesian's stink is all over this game as much as the Dishonored series. There isn't a single white, heteronormal male in a positive role anywhere in this game (or any Arkane titles post 2012). I'm sick and tired of woke BS infesting the media I purchase and I'm no longer interested in paying for it. This game is no exception. You play as "Morgan Wu." Note that you're not Caucasian, and the naming is specifically androgynous. After suffering through Dishonored 2 and Bioshock Infinite (Which is NOT a BioShock game, and only has limited BioShock elements bolted on to gain name recognition for sales.), I literally groaned during the intro when the helo pilot recommended I look out the window and saw Arkane's logo defacing the Golden Gate Bridge. This is not a spiritual successor to System Shock. This is flat out a garbage game with poor playability. I don't care about the story because playing the damn thing is a chore. You might love it, but I found it infuriating almost to the level of Disney Star Wars and for the same reason: It killed my desire to ever buy anything else from this development staff just like LucasArts did.
Most of us know how Arkane was infested by Anita Sarkeesian and her patsies and decided to change the direction of their gaming. Dishonored was a decent spiritual successor to the Thief series, as should be expected from the minds that created the stealth genre. It only really lacked the amazing vocal talents of Stephen Russell to be complete. D2 at least has that. Unfortunately, things went rapidly downhill from there. With Sarkeesian's influence, a secondary character was promoted to PC: poor Emily Kaldwin... and there things fell apart completely. Because politics insisted that they insert this character for whom no one asked, Arkane had to include all new mechanics to give her similar-- but not exactly the same-- powers to Corvo. This is where the mechanics of the game were irrevocably damaged. The new game engine simply doesn't work for her "Far Reach", a distorted attempt to give her a similar power to Corvo and Daud's "Blink" that doesn't operate in nearly the same manner. It clips to anything and everything randomly, usually EXCEPT the item targeted by the cross hairs. This causes the player to fly bizarrely, or (because it can be used to pull items and enemies towards you) can make noise, alert enemies, and cause all kinds of issues for a stealth player. Since this is the power many players will use the most, it generally causes the most problems for players. Emily is also part of the irritating woke trend in media of making characters gay or lesbian. Personally, I get enough of that hamfisted into EVERY SINGLE Netflx show. I neither want nor need it in my gaming. Most people I know who are LGBTQ are irritated with the attempts by media sources to pander-- they know full well that producers don't CARE about them and are only trying to manipulate them to score points. There are other issues, but this review is running out of space. YouTube has dozens of reviews of this game's flaws in writing and play. Suffice to say that it's a $5 game at best.
Impossible to decipher controls. I can't see any reason to bother trying to play this when learning how to work the damn thing is a time consuming mess. I tried playing this with a controller, and somehow it was WORSE than trying to learn how to play with keyboard and mouse. I legit HATE this game after trying to play it in three thirty minute installs. I'd rather go get a second master's degree than endure this "game".
This isn't a game. It's a slideshow telling a story with a few minutes of action here, an unskippable cutscene there, then a lengthy click-to-converse conversation, then some exploration. It took me five minutes just to get to a point where I could quit to the main menu: the ESC key doesn't work when you are in a conversation, apparently. I don't even know what the conversation was about, as I clicked through it as fast as I could to get someplace where I could exit the game. Beautifully drawn. Limited UI. Unintuitive gameplay. I'll give it one more chance and then chalk it up to a $2.99 evaluation.
I have 26 hours into Everspace without attaining more than the most basic level of understanding in the story. The game is a confusing mishmash of exploration with little reward (I flew for four game minutes to find an out-of-the-way wrecked freighter that gave me... 2 scrap?), combat with little success (In the third parsec of sector two I got jumped by TEN Okkar and Outlaw fighters with accompanying drones?), and crafting with little result (I upgraded all my weapons only to be blown apart when the warning not to fly into a black hole came AFTER I had already crossed the event horizon, due to not having a clue what it was?) I'm fine with dying while playing a game, and I like the persistent perks, but the way this game works is annoying for the sake of being annoying. You develop a loadout that you like, which allows you to make it a little bit further into the game-- then you die and start with basic junk and your body (if you even have the perk to recover anything) is FOUR SECTORS OR MORE AWAY FROM YOU! That is about 45 minutes to an hour of gameplay just to get MAYBE one or two of the weapons you had upgraded-- which you will have replaced long before you get that far. The repair and fuel systems are a disaster. Hull repairs are done with nanobots, and you will NEVER find enough of these to be meaningful to your "run". (A run is one iteration through the game.) Sometimes enemies will damage components of your ship, When that happens, you will limp on, hating the game and yourself for playing it, until you're finally shot down. You'll never have the specific resources to actually repair something when that happens, so the best thing you can do is to auger into an asteroid immediately. Fuel is scarce for no reason, leaving you stuck in parsecs until capital ships arrive-- and you will NEVER defeat one of those. There's a story, but it only advances when you make it deeper, which means you forget previous installments by the time you get to a new one.
