There is almost a good game here. It falls short of the mark in too many places, but there might be enough here to make it worth playing if you catch it on discount. There are two things you will be doing throughout the game: sneaking and fighting. Stealth consists of avoiding enemy line of sight and either getting close enough to do a instant takedown, or just sniping them with your crossbow. You can sometimes get through areas by stealth alone. However if you are spotted, things get funny. So long as you are not hit by an enemy you are still technically in stealth and can continue to use your instant takedowns even as the guards begin swarming around. However the moment you get hit, the enemies will realize they were better off letting you be a sneaky wolf. This is the only stealth game I've ever played that punishes the bad guys for detecting you. When you get hit you will shift into your big werewolf "Crinos" form. I truly liked how it looks and think its design is the best thing about this game. For much of the experience, combat will consist of running over to groups of enemies and swiping at them once or twice, then moving on another group. Each room will have the enemies that were in it when you arrived, plus one or two additional waves that come from ever present reinforcement doors. Once you clear a room of all enemies you are free to move on to the next room which will likely be a connecting hallway leading into another room of enemies. The battles are easy with only a couple notable exceptions later in the game. The lack of a challenge makes combat less interesting but also leaves you more time to admire your wolfy self while enemies fail to be a threat to you. Sadly once you clear a room, you change back to human form. The story and characters aren't anything special. I can only recommend this if you really really like werewolves.
I had wished for a game where you could be a werewolf and the monkey's paw curled a finger. If you are not familiar with the Werewolf: The Apocalypse source material, the game will tell you enough to understand the gist of what's going on. I still had many questions, however understanding the lore of how things work in this setting is largely unnecessary. The story is an evil corporation serving an evil god-entity-thing does evil because "mwahahaha" and you must step up as a defender of nature and massacre the ever loving heck out of all of them. The Endron company (yes seriously) and its employees are all so irredeemably, cartoonishly, villainous that it is impossible to take seriously. I found the player character to also be pretty unlikable; having abandoned his family due to events at the beginning of the game. I don't understand why he did it, but maybe that's another thing that would make more sense if I knew the source material. The reasoning behind his motivations weren't important enough for the game to elaborate on so I can only assume it's because he's a lousy father. But it doesn't take long before the evil corporation kidnaps your daughter and the rest of the game becomes your princess being in another castle. The real crime is the gameplay. The loop is broken up into two modes: stealth and awoo. When you enter a room there will be guards patrolling around. You can attempt to sneak past them, but the thing you should be watching for are the reinforcement doors. Go break those to make the second phase slightly more tolerable. It's not required, and in fact will be more likely to slow you down than if you went in and immediately hit the werewolf button. Pressing that turns you into a big "crinos" werewolf/human hybrid whose design is the best thing about this game. The werewolf form looks great and is beautifully animated. You won't have much time to admire it though because it also aggros the entire room immediately and what follows is a flurry of swinging your claws at every living thing until enemies eventually stop coming through the reinforcement doors. A room can have multiple waves of enemies behind those doors which drag the combat on past the point of exhaustion and straight into the domain of tedium. Damaging those doors during stealth will weaken the enemies that come through but don't stop them entirely. Once the room has been painted in the viscera of its former occupants you return to your human form (no you can't just stay in crinos) and can move on to the next room to do it again! I hope you're ready to do that a lot more times because it sticks to that pattern for the remainder of the game. Enter room, sabotage reinforcement doors (optional), awoo and murder. It's rare for you to be able to sneak through a room undetected but the only penalty for being spotted by the guards is having to spend a few minutes tearing them apart. They aren't much of a threat to you except in a few rare occasions so the only ones punished for you failing stealth are the guards. With one all too brief exception. I liked the prison section. It felt like stealth mattered and I was encouraged to go through all sneaky like instead of wolfing out immediately. You have to sneak around, do some investigations to figure out how to get to the people you need without being seen. There are a couple of boss fights that are mechanically interesting, one of which is the final battle... oh wait no the final battle is another room with doors and waves of the same enemies you've been fighting. The _penultimate_ battle is cool boss fight. I wish more of the game had been designed like that. I wish there was more depth like what the prison chapter demonstrated they were capable of doing. I wish I could just walk around in the crinos form. Alas the monkey's paw is out of fingers. Maybe that's for the best. Editing my review to be more detailed and also bumping the score to 3 stars because I at least didn't hate my time with it.
