This game is fine, mechanically more refined than Human Revolution, but it just feels kind of soulless. The iconic golden color scheme of HR is gone, replaced with unappealing white interaction overlays and a dull, grey city you spend the whole game backtracking through in place of traveling around the world. The story felt less focused, and the end just kind of came out of nowhere, as if they only finished a third of the game and just padded it out to make it full length. And this is on top of it being really poorly optimized. All in all, I'm glad I played it, and am doubly glad it's on GOG already, but I have a hard time recommending it. If you played Human Revolution, a game I wholeheartedly recommend, I'd say this is competent enough of a sequel to warrant playing, just don't do much side content otherwise the game will drag on way longer than it already does.
I can totally understand why people don't like this. The writing is mediocre at best, few of the voiced characters sound like they were voiced by actual voice actors (which wouldn't be so bad if some of the bad ones didn't give you side quests), the game is insanely glitchy (some secondary missions seem glitched out to the point they can't be completed), and the game isn't very well balanced (though, thankfully, it errs on making you too powerful rather than the other way around). Still, if you can look past that there are some great visuals, and the action I found to have enough of a kick to it to make it worth completing. If I were to make a suggestion to someone playing this new, it would be to not bother with secondary objectives unless they are on your way, as you can waste a lot of time trying to do something you can't even be sure is possible. My biggest disappointment would be that none of the bosses talk during the fight, not even in mid-fight cutscenes. This was especially weird with the final boss (who, BTW, I LOVE the visual design of), but I suppose given the quality of the writing it might have been for the best.
This is a great game just because of the incredible cham of everything, but do yourself a favor and follow a walkthrough, because the puzzle design is really bad.
Personally, I felt this wasn't quite as good as Season 1, but better than Season 2. If you've never played a Telltale game before, what you should know is that it plays more like an interactive movie than a game, so if you are ok with a game that is 90% cut-scenes but has a good story and just enough gameplay to make it still kinda feel like you're playing a game, this might be a good game for you. However, unlike the first two seasons this one has a TON of graphical glitches that I found to be really distracting and really harmed the immersion. Here is a list of the ones I remember: The lines around the characters tend to pop in and out a lot Often I would see random lines spanning across the scene The aliasing is really terrible (even with AA on), especially with the Depth of Field The Depth of Field is really distracting and often doesn't seem to quite focus correctly a lot of the time A lot of objects (especially the zombies) stutter a lot while moving Shadows cast on the characters tend to flicker in and out of existence Sometimes facial animations will also stutter This, combined with it nagging you to get a Telltale account every other time you load the game and its shameless self-advertising of other Telltale games at the end of every episode did color my impression of this game, but once you get down to the actual content, which is the story, I feel they did a really good job. I liked the characters, the drama was well done like in S1, and really my only gripe is their over-use of flashbacks, which not only do I find kinda annoying from a storytelling standpoint, but it also makes the decisions you make kinda weird, as some decisions you make in the flashbacks you would think would have effected things differently before the flashback in the "present day" story. However, I feel overall the flashbacks were done tastefully enough that they didn't come close to ruining the overall experience.
This game has several issues, most of which are graphical (the aliasing is terrible, I recommend using ReShade/sweetfx to force SMAA), but the biggest problem this has is that there are way too many puzzles, which is too bad because most of them are actually really well made, it's just that you're put through so many of them that it gets grinding and really takes away from the really well made world they made. All in all, if you enjoy Myst-style games, you'll likely enjoy this, though don't feel bad about looking for a walkthrough if you're stuck on a puzzle for too long because otherwise you'll be playing this for an obscene amount of time.
This game has a serious identity crisis. Can't ever decide whether it wants to be a horror or a fast-paced arcade shooter like the originals. What this ends up with is a game full of enemies while you have a very slow walk speed and slightly underpowered weapons. Also, the entire game is entirely too dark. The BFG edition helps significantly, however, but not enough to make me call this game "good" by any means. It allows you to use the flashlight regardless of what weapon you're holding (though this does break the experience in one of the few cool levels which was designed around the original mechanic), ammo seems to be a little more plentiful, and The Lost Mission has the best level design out of the entire game, since they actually designed the levels for an action shooter, though the slow walk speed and everything still get in the way of that. All in all, I do recommend picking this game up just for its historical significance, but I can't really recommend playing it all the way through, even if some of the later levels are legitimately really cool.
