first impressions were great and the atmosphere really grips you at first, but soon, the horrible design ruins everything. the game employs multiple mechanics it does not really need in such a way that they combine to make the experience as painful as possible. There is no saving system, only checkpoints, so if you run into a tough fight, better hope your last checkpoint is not too far. And better not turn off the game at all, because on restarting the game, you are going to respawn at the starting village, literal miles away from where you quit. So you better remember the way to where you quit. Because there is no map. Oh, and all the monsters along the way respawned. So you might be running out af ammo and health by the time you return to where you quit. The barrels which sometimes drop ammo respawned too, but they mostly give you just mana for your spells. It's tpp bad your spells have only environmental effect which you get to use like two pr three times. Well, at least armors work to ease off the backtracking pain, if you can find them. You always get this glorious info screen about how cool your new armor is. Too bad it eases of your pain fpr about two or three enemy hits. Well, at least you buy some upgrades for your weapons in the village, right? Wrong! You need money, the money you drop to the ground and lose most of every time you die backtracking. Most of locations are full of mysterious fog, which you cannot turn off anywhere and which makes your crosshairs invisible. One exceptions is underwater though. Underwarter, the visibility is so exceptionally bad, you are gonna miss the fog. That about sums the gameplay loop. Do this hundreds of time over, dying to the same 4 types of enemies and backtracking, and that is Graven for you. Minus points for ripping off the Heretic logo design. I want my money back. Do not buy.
One of many examples of how the publisher can ruin a great game with a potential. It's only Activision's fault that this game was initially insanely buggy (the first patch had like 100MB - imagine downloading it at about 5kbps at that time). If released properly, maybe it would overshadow Half-Life... However, once patched, the game is perfectly fine and runs smoothly, so buy it without hesitation - it's fun, fast-paced and will surely take you few evenings to finish.
