Very good collectathon with a decent amount of gameplay and solid mechanics. There's some kind of story there but it's ignorable if you just want to jump and zip around large levels looking for secrets. Sprite work and sound design is very nice. Giving it 5 stars as I know I've given lesser games the same rating.
I loved Mafia 1 and 2 on release, and this game looked like it had everything going for it. Great new setting (who doesn't love New Orleans?), intense story, interesting characters, and (one would assume) great modern gameplay developments in the 6 years since the release of Mafia 2. Oh boy did they get most of it wrong. The story and cinematics are pretty much the only saving grace of this game, and it feels like a great disservice to the cast and crew behind the story that the rest of the game is so bland and monotonous. New Orleans (or whatever they call it here), is flat and boring with zero interactivity. I know that's been a staple of the Mafia series that 'it's linear and not like GTA', however, even Mafia 2 which was criticised for being uninteractive is WAY more interactive than this. Here you can basically rob stores and that's about it. It's not helped that the map and mission layout feels more designed for free roam than the previous Mafia games. After a solid opening hour or so that might trick you into thinking it seems fun, the real game begins and undoes all the cinematic legwork that came before. The general mission structure and variety is the real meat of the issue as to why this game doesn't work. It's astoundingly repetitive, with mission after mission copy-pasted from each other, and usually just 'go here, destroy this, kill guys' etc. And there are so many of them. Every so often you get given a more original side-quest, but they're a small percentage of the overall grind. Also, if you want to be immersed, this game will challenge your patience with its constant bugs, ugly graphics issues and dodgy pedestrian AI. Colours are all washed out and there are graphical anomalies in the weather and light that seemingly never got fixed, and it's a blurry mess unless you run it at extra-high settings and then it becomes very performance heavy. Some solid gunplay, music and cinematics and that's it unfortunately.
Constant crashing to desktop, usually after cutscenes. Also a weird bug where every texture has gridlines on it - totally distracting. There are obscure fixes, one of which involves reducing your anistropic filtering down to zero - which looks ugly, and I still get frequent crashes to desktop no matter what.
I remember being amazed at not just the technical advances in light & shadow but how they're incorporated into the gameplay. I'd replay the same section again and again because of the various ways I could complete it. Do I lure the guy out? Do I jump above him into the darkness and wedge myself between the walls? Do i just shoot him in the face? I even remember just marvelling at how good the thermal vision graphics were. Today it's a lot easier to see the issues. There are games with way more freedom than this today. There IS freedom there, but more how you deal with moment to moment enemy encounters and so on, not really in the way missions pan out). The graphics have dated, although the importance of light & shadows on gameplay, the usage of the different vision modes and slower pace still work well. The shadows have that, now retro, early, sharp 'pitch black' look, so that they feel more like physical objects than actual shadows, but it adds to the charm. There are lots of linear and scripted sections that, while they serve the story in the sense that they make you feel that you are slipping between seismic events and getting deeper into the thick of things, they conflict with the desire for free-form stealth gameplay. There's also a limitation on that 'freedom', especially in areas that force combat upon you, or send you down a series of specific paths. The immersion breaks from time to time, however for an 18 year old (cries) game, I think you can forgive some of it's flaws. The story is well told and acted. It's a bit convoluted, but the main thing is you really feel engaged with the urgency of the missions thanks to the back and forth between the voice-in-your-ear. The series climaxed with SC3, and I'd say for story and immersion factor (as well as it being a landmark game), this is the next best one in the series.
This game is quite good, except a) it has a fairly bland and forgettable story, and b) it has the overpowered issue. It's the same problem I had with Witcher 3, in general I play these games on 'mega hard' mode because I enjoy the challenge, but ultimately it gets to a point where, unless I limit myself, I'm demolishing everything in my path to when it becomes a button pressing simulator. So that means I enjoy the first 10 or so hours of the game before the monotony sets in. But if you don't mind that sort of thing, this game (as many others have said) has a funand customiseable magic system. You should really go the mage route if you're playing this game - it's the most unique and fun system it has to offer (until it gets overpowered and you can basically instantaneously make enemies heads explode and summon a load of super-strength skeletons to do your work for you).
I liked both Metro games, they play and look solid and immerse you enough. When the gameplay opens up it can feel like a nice mashup between Halflife and Stalker, but those moments are often rarer than you'd like - it leans more towards linear sections and after a while the series feels a bit samey. Kind of like the original Bourne trilogy - the movies are fine when you watch them but after a while they kind of blend together and become a bit forgettable. However, the pacing is good and the linear sections serve to drive the player forward (hence again the feeling of Halflife). Last Light can be a bit more action-orientated than the first, and there are a few monster-hiding sections, but other than that it's very similar to the first game. The attention to detail, immersion & unique rudimentary weapons and equipment make up for it's shortcomings though and I'd recommend it.
The claustrophobic lonelines of the subterranean world. The immediately engaging and well developed storyline that made me actually care about what was happening. Great lighting and sound. Slowly building dread combined with peaks of immediate dread. But not overly cliched like most horrors. One bit got so intense my left hand wouldn't stop shaking for five minutes. No overly acted narration, cutscene after cutscene or anything cringey like that.
