I really want to like the game, since I played all the old titles. However, this installment looks promising but unfortunately this is a basically movie with QTEs and a lot of screen shaking... and I mean a lot. The controls (mouse+keyboard) are clunky at best. The content may be good, the execution unfortunately not.
I really like the atmosphere, it's dark, it's tense. The story, as far as I have played, seems to unfold a bit slow, but still promising. The graphics are great. The concept of having two worlds simultaniously is new to me and plays a role in certain puzzles. Good idea, nice gamplay. The sound is great and helps to build the amazing atmosphere. The controls however, are atrocious. On a keyboard it's WASD, but relative to the scene and camera. This makes it sometimes really hard to control the character sensibly. The camera sometimes confusing. On occasion it jumps perspectives, which also causes change of controls. Irritating. Strange controls and camera would not make it a huge problem, but in certain circumstances it decides whether the protagonist lives or dies... in my case a lot in one particular scene (no disclose of details to avoid spoilers). For me, this breaks the immersion completely. This is just not fun or interesting, it get's tedious and frustrating very fast. For atmosphere I would give this game a 5. Unfortunately I need to downgrade it to a 2 for overall execution.
I have fond memories of the original R-Type on the C64. This new incarnation reflects all the things that are wrong in the gaming industry. - Non-skippable cutscene at the beginning. This is and was a bad design choice. - Releasing this on the PC platform without a single grain of keyboard/mouse control is ridiculous. - The menu is probably one of the worst I've come across. Again, no mouse, way to may confirmation dialogs. - Politically correct handholding is not my thing. If I want to name my character "unskippable crap" and the second word gets CENSORED, the game and the devs clearly overstep their boundaries. I'd understand if the game was a hobby project in an alpha state, but certainly not for >30 EUR. I don't even want to imagine paying >60EUR for the "deluxe edition". Uninstalled immediately.
Overall a great game, great atmosphere. The negative point is the abysmal load times, this sometimes really breaks the flow. A minor nitpick are the stiff and somewhat choppy dialogs.
Hyped in the beginning, I even broke my "no preorders" rule. Besides the technical problems, from not starting at all to very poor FPS, this game get's boring pretty fast. Controls are tedious. Ok I get it, it a very bad console port, not suited for PC gaming. Console gamers may be used to this, but no, not for me, thank you very much. Menus are bad. No oversight, the inventory is annoying. Music is not good, it is boring, sound effects are annoying, the combination is awful. The planets have little diversity, the crafting system is a disaster. You are basically doing the same thing over and over again, at the almost same locations. After 8 hours of playtime, it is just boring. Conclusion: no not buy this game, not for this price tag. 10 Euros would be more reasonable for this tech demo.
For f**** sake, this is 2016, add 64bit Linux support already. I am *very* disappointed to find out, that Win and OSX has 64bit support, but on Linux I have to install a f***ton of i386 libraries. NO MORE!!
