It's like a joke. Give the development of a game sequel to a studio that everyone made fun of for making a "walking simulator" with no gameplay, and they go ahead an remove all game design. There is no tension, no sense of accomplishment or exploration. You just walk forward and get assaulted by pretentious writing. The few interactive things in the environment are badly indicated, and basically you're just supposed to find the one thing in the level that you can touch.
A phenomenal pseudo-RPG with realistically merciless combat, and tense and balanced relatively complex stealth mechanics. A huge amount of content, a wide variety of quest types, well-written believable characters, a strong sense of historical authenticity, and the most beautiful medieval countryside visuals you can find. It also has decent mod support. Unfortunately the game suffers from really poor performance optimization. Unstable 40fps is what you will have to get used to. Also I'm not a fan of over-reliance on "immersive" first person animations for every interaction. Especially ones that flop the character's head around all over the place. Animators should understand what the vestibular system does. Mind you that this is coming from a fan of Oblivion and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. -so many "horrible bugs" are just endearing to me. Also, the game crashed only once during about 80 hours of playing.
▲ What at first seems like a puzzle game with only officially recognized intended solutions, is actually a game that lets you exploit the various mechanical complexities to bypass challenges in unintended ways. A lot of players probably only did the most obvious thing, thinking that there are only "the right solution" to everything. ▲ Very well optimized. Runs perfectly fine. ▲ Completely customizable UI ►►► Extremely well produced stealth tutorials. ►► Very good pacing. The game has a cycle of escalations and moments of calm. ► Good use of color shades to give the player valuable feedback. ► Many other visual and aural feedback mechanisms to give info to the player about their surroundings. ► The majority of stealth segments can be completed without engaging in any violence. Also, the game often narratively implements the possibility of non-violence and acknowledges your mercy. ► Special items that can take out enemies non-lethally or remove obstacles permanently are very expensive to produce so, you need to decide what to make and use ◄ Many instances of annoying Cutscene Incompetence where the player is not allowed to use the game's mechanics to overcome an obstacle. This often also leads into unavoidable combat scenes. ◄ Sometimes, albeit rarely, the game expects a specific outcome so you can get stuck if you don't do what the game expects. For example there can be a section where all your enemies need to be neutralized, which arbitrarily triggers a scripted event. ◄ The last few levels completely abandon the concept of stealth and just assume that you'll kill every enemy you come across. ◄ Semi-interactive ingame story sequences are unskippable unlike the cutscenes ◄◄ Impatient NPCs give you solutions to puzzles if you're too slow ▼▼ Certain graphics effects cannot be disabled in the options menu despite the fact that a boolean value for deactivating them exists in the configuration files.
This game can be very fun if it works, and most of the time it doesn't. The game has always been praised for its team combat, but that is definitely viewed through downright opaquely rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. ▲ The music is fantastic and seamlessly blends official and original songs ▲ The campaign follows the movies very well without taking many liberties ▲ Good characters. ...Well, it's just TMNT. 38 = Leo, 07 = Raph, 40 = Don, 62 = Mike ▼ Horrendous PC port. The only thing that works without third party fixes is that the game kinda runs ▼ Inexcusably atrocious friendly AI. You can stand in place for 10 seconds with your entire squad around you and an enemy next to you and they will not attack the enemy. Even a "focus fire" directly targeting the enemy has a hard time coercing your squad mates to attack the enemy. You will play a lot of the game without ammo because you will be the one killing the majority of enemies. ▼ The AI's inability to find targets to attack is exclusive to friendly AI. The enemy has no problem targeting and attacking your squad. ▼ Focus fire command has pinpoint precise input, so it's difficult to engage it accurately with fixed mouse control, and unreasonable to engage with vanilla control. Focus fire can also be cancelled with that same command so you can't even spam the button to get it to stick. ▼ Search & Destroy order does nothing of value since your squad fails to attack enemies they meet ▼ Squadmates sometimes get stuck on fortified positions and no Move On command can dislodge them. You need to run back to them and manually click the position ▼ Ludicrous bullet sponge enemies. When combined with your team's selective grasp of the chain of command, even a focused attack on one enemy, already weakened by a grenade that makes them vulnerable, can take nearly all of your ammo. ▼ Squadmates have a hard time targeting flying enemies unless placed at designated sniping spots ▼ Melee attack has buffered input
(I own this game on Steam) Last I checked, this game does not even let you save your game without being connected to IO Interactive's servers. If you're in a difficult section and you need to save, your PC will need to ask for permission from Denmark to be allowed to write data on your own hard disk. If the servers are down, you'll have to manage without saving. To be constructive, all regular singleplayer content should be accessible offline. They exist locally and are run locally. There is no technical excuse to have them tied to an online requirement. There should be a sign-in option to unlock Leaderboards, Contracts and seasonal content such as Elusives. I'm a player who have never taken a single glance at any of the three, so the online requirement has only ever caused harm to my gameplay experience, in the form of failed sign-ins, and inability to save the game. This product needs to be changed to no longer require an online connection, or it needs to be removed from the GOG catalog. It is violating the basic principles of this service.
This game tries to be S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Call of Duty at the same time, failing at both. Metro simply wasn't made for this format. The linear style of the previous two games suits it much better. And this is coming from someone who does not like linearity in games. This game executes the alternative wrong. +Good controls +Good performance +Mostly good sound design +++Absolutely stellar environmental storytelling in every tiny detail of the world +Mostly stealth and nonviolence-compatible level design --HUD graphic elements are incompatible with normal desktop Field of View (90°-100°) -Repetitive combat with weapons that become unreliable simply from walking around -Simplistic stealth -Annoying navitation in the world. The more classic style linear levels work much better. --Careful resource distribution replaced with crafting -Weapon classes mean that you need to carry something you don't want and abandon things you do want -Voice acting is horrendous across the board. There is no direction and the actors don't even seem to know the context in which the characters are supposed to be speaking ---Every piece of dialogue says one short thing in fifty long sentences and nothing can be fast-forwarded or skipped. They just drone on and on wasting everyone's time -The silent protagonist actively hinders storytelling as every other character's interaction has to be unrealistically worked around his inability to speak
I have to be honest here and give some critical feedback. The original version of Jedi Knight has been plagued by modern systems' inability to render the game's 3dFX graphics and the hassles of playing music and cutscenes from a CD in an optical drive. I bought this in the hopes that all such problems would be resolved, and they were, but new problems emerged. To make the game run at 16:9 resolutions, instead of the field of view being appropriately widened horizontally, it has been shrunk vertically. The game runs cropped, so you are actually seeing less than in the original game that runs in 4:3. Also I have not discovered a way to play the game in windowed mode to account for the FOV which is too small for a 22" display in desktop configuration, like I used to do with the original game. I had to crank down the ingame screen size to make the FOV suitable for my eyes at my viewing distance. People need to understand that FOV is not a preference, it's a geometric calculation based on the size of the screen and the screen's distance from the eyes. That's why PC games default to 90°, and console games default to 60°. The game is great and runs smoothly. But if I can't have the game in HD resolutions without cropping it, then I say the HD resolution needs to go. Seeing more is better than seeing less, even if it means playing with black bars on the sides.
