Maybe I’ve become desensitized to horror, but Silent Hill 4 wasn’t scary to me at all, just annoying. My irritation was caused by the ghost enemies in particular, who keep moaning all the time. They can’t be easily killed and they keep stalking you which makes traversing levels a pain in the ass. Technically, the game is a disaster. The gameplay is unenjoyable and unrewarding. You’re either bashing the enemies over their heads with melee weapons or shooting them with a gun. While it’s classic survival horror design that sounds good on paper, the execution makes it terrible. The protagonist’s movement is janky and the camera is all over the place. Managing the limited inventory and saving progress is way too cumbersome, as there’s just one item box and one savepoint. Acting is poor. The main character seems either oblivious or indifferent to what’s happening around him. Maybe it’s coincidental, but the plot rehashes ideas from the films “Seven” and “1408” which is uninspired and disappointing for someone who is already familiar with them. Also, there’s too much reading involved in the gameplay.
Playing Mafia boils down to driving, shooting and occasional stealth. None of these elements were done right in my opinion. Driving is sluggish; cars are unresponsive, they handle like tanks. Shooting is unimpactful, guns lack power, enemies are bullet-sponges. Stealth is barebones: there are no on-screen indicators informing you about visibility or noise. AI can be extremely dumb, especially pedestrians who seem to purposefully run into your car whenever you drive nearby them. The entire game design feels outdated. The open-world makes little sense in this game, since it only serves as background—you can’t interact with it beyond missions. The plot is structured in such a way, that a cutscene is played immediately after you finish a mission. Then, a time shift occurs, and you’re in a different place, at a different time. For me, these transitions felt too abrupt, and made the plot harder to follow. The plot itself is ridiculous. Main characters regularly engage in full blown street wars, robbery, assassination plots, mow down entire squads of policemen, yet they never get apprehended. The dialogues are poorly written—they sound like fan fiction. The protagonist is one-dimensional and flat. The authors attempted to give him some moral depth, but it’s unbelievable because of the ludonarrative dissonance, e.g. he hesitates to shoot a gangster, even though he killed many others moments ago. Voice actors put on a fake mobster accent which is annoying. Music is mostly limited to instrumental tracks. If you expect something the likes of GTA series’ radio, you’ll be disappointed. Last but not least, performance is poor, with constant frame hiccups regardless of graphics settings. The only redeeming quality are the visuals, but they alone cannot change the fact that the game is bad overall.
At first glance Prey looks like a competently made game. It’s strongest features are environmental design, setting, soundtrack and atmosphere. The problem is that at the same time it’s rather formulaic and hardly innovative, so for anybody who already played games like BioShock, PREY may be all too similar. Narration is largely handled through text and audio logs / calls. Interactions with characters and cutscenes are only occasional. I’m not a fan of such an approach, since games are a visual medium. These disjointed notes and conversations are hard to digest, especially when you’re distracted by combat. Their abundance and the fact that they often concern trivial matters, further discourages from reading / listening to them. There are moral choices in the game; however, for the most part they’re black and white and it’s rather obvious what you should be doing to achieve a “good” ending. Ultimately though, your decisions change little in the big picture, they just affect the fate of the main character. The gameplay is disappointing: PREY features just two unique guns. Shooting is unenjoyable for the most part. Special abilities are rather generic and bland. There are no bossfights, just a recurring enemy that can be avoided, which the game even recommends you to do. You can play stealthily though in my opinion it doesn’t fit a game like this at all. Hacking is very simplistic and unsatisfying. The game artificially inflates playtime by including a tedious crafting mechanic, which requires the player to collect scrap around the station and break it down into materials. Backtracking is also a prominent issue. All in all, PREY falls into the “not great, but not terrible” category for me. It’s pretty average, so I’d recommend to avoid it unless you cannot find a better game to play.
This game absolutely does not respect the player’s time. You’re only able to save if you drink a special potion (which you have to brew or buy), sleep (only in select locations), or make progress in a quest. Every option is either tedious or situational. The day is very short compared to real time. NPCs become available only at 9 am and you can’t interact with them at night. Quest markers are often placed far away from each other, and traveling can take a lot of time. Because of that, you’ll often have to wait / sleep, which is very slow and boring. A rotating dial appears indicating time passed. Near the end it moves at a snail’s pace. Even the so called “fast travel” is slow, as you have to watch the map showing the player character’s journey. It can be interrupted by an attack at any moment, forcing you to stop and defend. Pathfinding seems to be broken, as the game often chooses a longer route than necessary. Also, there are too few fast travel spots, and you’re not allowed to stop midway on your own. Gameplay-wise it’s a mixed bag. Duels are enjoyable, but as soon as more opponents appear, you have to resort to other tactics like mounted archery, since you’re at a big disadvantage otherwise. During larger battles, on the other hand, when you’re fighting alongside allies, it just becomes a button masher and is hardly challenging. Stealth is downright terrible and bugged, as there are no dynamic on-screen indicators informing you about your visibility and noise you make. The rule “show, don’t tell” is violated regularly. NPCs talk very long, often about background characters that are not even featured in the game. It’s easy to lose track of their explanations. The ending doesn’t bring a resolution to the story. After finishing the main questline it feels like the plot was just a setup for the sequel. Last but not least, the game is rather poorly optimized, particularly in cities, where frames can drop significantly.
It’s a generic open world game with a barebones plot that’s just unenjoyable to play. On first glance the combat resembles the Batman Arkham series, but the feeling is entirely different: simply put, it’s bad. The camera wobbles on every sword thrust and it’s located too close to the player character so not all enemies are visible, which is annoying. The map is littered with side quest markers, where you fight against hordes of orcs but this gets old very fast. Story missions seem to be located map width apart from each other, and you can only traverse on the ground, which is incredibly slow and tries your patience. The player character has a ridiculous running animation which is just painful to watch and experience. This tedium, along with the ugly environments simply discouraged me from playing any further.
My main complaint is the RPG attribute system which completely ruins combat in this game. Each combat segment features a significant number of enemies. The only viable strategy is to dispose of them as quickly as possible. To achieve that, it’s absolutely obligatory to collect various stuff around the world, do side-quests and create upgrades to “outstat” the enemies, or you won’t be able to defeat them. At first you’re restricted to the axe. It’s a terrible weapon, because you can hardly engage more than one opponent at the same time. Given how many of them appear, and how spammy some of their attacks can be, you’re forced to constantly dodge and evade until you acquire useful abilities, which is frustrating. Skill progression is slow in the first half of the game which just exacerbates this issue. Enemy variety is poor, as most of them are humanoids with different textures. A few bosses are repeated several times throughout the game. The game is littered with chests. You need to use them to upgrade your health and rage meters. Some can only be opened by solving a puzzle, which are largely trivial and only become a nuisance the further into the game. Lots of people praise the game for lack of loading screens, but that came at a cost. You’ll often have to use elevators, climb obstacles or walk through gaps to give the engine breathing room to load assets. This means that you’ll be waiting anyway so I don’t see any breakthrough here. Moreover, in the open world section, the CPU seems to be constantly busy which in my case resulted in poor performance. The interface is ugly. The map looks fancy, but you can hardly retrieve any meaningful information from it. E.g. the layout of the interior location you’re in is not show at all, just the general area which is useless. The story is clichéd. Any time you are about to reach your goal, some obstacle appears and you need to overcome it, having to run to and fro.
Cuphead is extremely difficult. Unlike any other game I played, the player character cannot heal at all. Completing levels requires hundreds of attempts; you need to learn enemy attack patterns and avoid them almost perfectly. I completed about half of the game until I realized, that the excessive grind required to beat it is anything but enjoyable. The visuals alone aren’t enough to motivate me to finish it.
The gameplay isn’t enjoyable. It’s built around the “bullet time” mechanic. Even though it seems cool at first glance, after a while it turns out that it makes you practically invincible, even on the hardest difficulty. As such, the game offers no challenge at all. There’s hardly any enemy variety; besides standard clones you only get a ninja or a mech warrior to fight against here and there. There are no bosses. The plot is bare-bones. None of the characters has any personality and the player character is a silent protagonist. All locations look the same, there’s little to no environmental story-telling. Horror boils down to jumpscares. It really pales in comparison to its contemporaries like Half Life 2 or Doom 3.
Acting, sound design and atmosphere are good but that’s where my praise ends. Half of the game is spent on retrospections which have no connection to the events at hand. They do not lead anywhere and are a chore to play through. It seems like the developers run out of ideas and added them as a filler. Because of the above, the actual plot is underdevloped. While the notes and the protagonist’s ruminations do shed some light, they’re entirely optional elements. Moreover, obtaining them is not always possible because of enemies. Lastly, they violate the “show, don’t tell” rule. The game limits your escape options significantly. Oftentimes, you’re not allowed deviate from the predetermined path which results in a frustrating experience, dying over and over again to learn what the game wants you to do. The gameplay has hardly been expanded on since the previous installment. The environment isn’t interactive enough—you should be able to use it to your advantage to escape from your pursuers. As far as the “horror” aspect goes—the game relies too heavily on gore and jumpscares.
PROS: • Good graphics. • Detailed environments. • Interesting premise. CONS: • The plot is vague and hard to comprehend. It’s pretentious and unengaging. • A lot of narration is text-based. Imagine a film where every 5 minutes you’re shown a still frame displaying a letter. Is that interesting storytelling? • Bland, boring characters. Unlikable protagonist. • Abilities are nothing special, shooting isn’t fun. • Sluggish animations. • Lack of cover system. • Uninspired enemy designs—you fight with humanoids most of the time. • Forgettable soundtrack. • Generic perks. They’re just percentual upgrades. • The game loads extremely slow even on an SSD.
