I know that 3 stars might seem a bit low, because I did enjoy this game. I played the demo but waited for the 1.0 version to jump in. The good It's a very nice nostalgia trip for long time FPS players or anybody who can get into the most classic of shooters from the early years. The shooting is solid and you get to pick from two classes at the time of this review. Some of the levels are really creative with the formula, especially in Episode 3. You can really tell the team got better during the development at making cool levels. There are also user levels available. Graphics are nice and colorful and you do get a lot of different environments throughout the lengthy campaign (took me around 20h to complete with all secrets). The bad I thought the weapons, while staying useful throughout the campaign, just didn't have the visceral impact you would expect of a good shooter nowadays. The enemies are a bit too curtesy and don't offer that much variety too keep you interested till the end. The make or break for me was the completionist aspect of this game. For one thing, after release the devs quickly added lore items to each level, so my completion was annihilated half way through the game :/ But the part I liked the least was secret hunting and collecting all the treasures. I now it's emulating the classics like Wolfenstein 3D with the wall humping for secrets, but combing the levels often trippled my playtime while I just could not find the last secret or treasure. You can get items to mitigate this, but in the case of secrets you still have to find the map in each level and for the treasure it only triggers once you found basically all of it, forcing you to again backtrack the whole level to find one stack of coins you missed. Enemies can also drop bags of coins in awkard or impossible to reach areas, screwing you out of your 100%. I hope you still give this one a chance. It was worth it for me, just don't bother with collecting every single thing.
I did not play the original version. From what Nightdive created from it, I can see a half baked game that is now much more fun to play. Neither the story nor the gameplay reach any of the heights that horror shooters or squad based games could achieve. It is a fun romp though, if you like the movie. Don't expect to be wowed though. One playthrough took me 5 1/2h.
Played this with my partner. I personally played all the previous Brotherhood games and liked them too. If you like very dark Sci-Fi, this is for you. If you are sensitive about... basically anything, you should stay away :D Lot's of gore and body horror in this one. I would say this is their best effort yet. Very intriguing story/plot. Very nice pacing for the most part. There is always a clear goal and a sense of urgency. We both liked the characters, especially Moses. He is the smartest bear. Puzzles, for the most part, where quite enjoyable with hints on how to solve them available when inspecting the levels closely. Sometimes the game is a little too talky with repeating points in the dialogue that really slow down the pace. The cut scenes have very strange framing. You are always very close to the characters or at an odd angle to the action. Quite hard to see and follow what is going on in them. The whole game is also a bit too dark on an OLED monitor. I personally also really disliked some of the character's faces. They just had an amateur 3D modeling look to them. A few puzzle solutions and item combinations we could only figure out by guessing. Overall, very enjoyable point & click with some meat on it's bones. Would definitely recommend this.
After one playthrough I'm not gonna spend any more time with this ever. The graphics are moody but overall bland, the soundtrack is barely there, combat is super unsatisfying. It just feels more like a demo or a project in development for the original Xbox or something. After 30 minutes you get what happened but the game just goes on and on. Even the 4+ hours I spent with the game felt stretched as I walked through empty streets while my 3080Ti was at 85% usage at 4K for this level of fidelity. I would have accepted this as part of a game jam like collection, but not at over 15€ standalone.
