I think it's generally a competently made game, maybe a little rough around the edges. It feels a bit clunky, but I liked the overall aesthetics and sound design. However, the gameplay fell short for me. It's sold as a sniper game and the sniper rifles are meant to be your main weapon. But the actual sniping isn't much deeper than in many other shooter games. The general gunplay is fine, but I did expect more than an arcadey shooter. It doesn't even matter much if you miss, since the enemy AI is as dumb as a bucket of sand. I could still enjoy a game like that, but there's also the checkpoint system. I generally don't like checkpoints in shooters, but this one is especially bad. While it's an open world game, there seems to be a fixed respawn point for every mission, outpost or village. It doesn't matter from where you originally came. At frist I tried to plan my approach according to the terrain, but as soon as you die once, this is completely in vain. Often the game will respawn you next to the ideal sniping position anway. In the missions I played there were also no checkpoints during missions. You always have to succeed in one go. I managed to put up with this for some time, but finally gave up. There are simply better games that require less time.
I really put some hours into this game but overall I can't really say that I like it. I like the overall style, atmosphere and even the gameplay. I like how much weight there is behind the shots hitting, I like the analytic, tactical style of the fights. But there are many small problems. I don't want to describe them all and just mention my biggest issue: The reverse difficulty curve. It's present all along the game and - in my opinion - ruins it completely. The first mission of each chapter is always the hardest, because you lack decent weapons and usually have the fewest characters. Even the first mission in the game can be quite challenging. It requires careful planning and progressing slowly. After that, you level up your characters, buy better weapons, get additional men - and suddenly you're shooting fish in a barrel. Suddenly it's not that much of a problem anymore if you are ambushed, suddenly you can manage open shootouts with several enemies. Suddenly you are just combing through the maps to find all the bad guys you have to shoot. And this repeats every time: Challenging first mission and declining difficulty after that.
As point and click games go, this is probably going to be one of the easiest ones you have ever played. Really, I had more difficulties with games aimed at kids than with this one. The game is very linear and you only have the things in your inventory that you need right now, so there's not much trial an error involved - which is a good thing, I hate inventory puzzles, but the environmental puzzles aren't anything to write home about either. Ironically, the toughest part might be the first area in your apartment, from there on everything gets smaller and simpler. I think the devs realized that they weren't able to finish in time if they kept this up. Then there's also the problem with the story. I had no idea what was going on. I have seen the movie based on the comic some years back, but couldn't remember much of it. This game tells you little and you seem to play a pretty minor role in the plot, so I felt pretty lost. And then it's suddenly over. I think you can finish this game on your first playthrough in about two hours. I needed five, but I left the game running while doing other things I assume. From a technical standpoint the game still holds up. It looks nice and plays very smoothly. All in all, it was definitely worth the 1,07 Euro, but I wouldn't advise people to pay more.
This is a decent throwback shooter, especially since it manages not to go down the route of "boomer shooters" which only consist of arenas chained together - or rather, it doesn't do this too often. However, at some point in time the devs decided to add a save token system, to "increase the challenge". When people complained, they basicly said "get gud". The problem is, this is not the right game for save tokens. It's supposed to be a classic quake-style shooter and it does this part very well. Games like this didn't have save tokens for good reasons. If you cranck the difficulty up to the point where it's really fun, you can die around every corner. You may be forced to run around with 2 health points for some minutes. In the end I modded the game to allow quicksaves and it's much mor fun that way. Still, it feels a bit monotonous after a while.
This game really creates an atmosphere. The character design is great and really makes you wonder how this world with their partly undead partly cybernetic creatures came to be. It takes the nostalgic weirdness of a Sanitarium and adds more full-motion cutscenes, more individuals and more scenery. The sound design is also top notch and even the menus are memorable But... somewhere along the line they forgot to insert a decent game. I would even say the gamplay is so inept that it makes me wonder why anyone in development was ok with it. It would be better if there was no gameplay at all and all you did was walk around and talk to people. I would have preferred that, really. But instead you have kind of a hidden object game. There are no true puzzles, you just have to walk around every piece of every map to find every item you need. If you're stuck, you're probably missing an item you didn't find. Good luck on walking over every single piece of land all over again. This is by no means fun. There's also my pet peeve of the useless morale system. It's determined by how you talk to people - either you ask them about the plot, or you spew insults in their faces. Great. All in all, it's a good game to try on sale - or even better, watch a let's play. If you don't have to play it yourself, you get to enjoy the really superb parts without having to suffer through the horrible slog of the gameplay.
I really like this game - in theory. But as it is at the moment, I can hardly bring myself to play it, due to the lack of a save feature. You have to play an entire run of the story in one sitting or just give up. By the time I'm in the latter parts of a storieline, I usually lose interest and just click through it or just end it right there. Both leaves a bad taste in my mouth The decision of not allowing saving the game was not made due to artistic reasons, but just done because of technical issues. The original save function was buggy, so they just scrapped it and called it a day. The developers had plenty of time to fix this, but they don't. So I wouldn't recommend the game for the asking price. Get it on sale, because you'll probably only play it a few times.
This really is a game for die-hard fans, not much more. There are many positive things about it, like great tactical depth and great dialogues that really carry the atmosphere of the Adeptus Mechanicus. If you are a fan of the matter, you might enjoy it for the story alone. But otherwise... it feels like a chash grab, especially by the price they were originally asking. The graphics aren't good by any means. The battlefields are bland and boring, character animations are sluggish and stiff, the artstyle of the digital paintings looks borderline amateurish. The character portraits are ugly and not even animated. There are hardly any visual effects in the battles, corpses immediately disappear and characters crawl across the field as if they do not have a worry in the world. It feels like there was a lot of thought put into progress and upgrading characters, as well as making tactical decisions. However, progress is so slow that you hardly feel it at all. The tactical decisions end up being a random gamble since ther's no way to determine the outcome. All in all, I really liked the basic gameplay and banter between the characters, but the game felt like the skeleton of something better. Futhermore, the German translation is so bad that mission briefings outright tell you the wrong things to do. I think it might have been quite a rushed release.
I'm a long time Silent Hill fan and bought this full price when it came out on the PS2. It wasn't good back then and it's not good now. The story is lacking any of the depth of the other games and suffers from a disjointed, episodic nature. The main character's lack of emotional reaction could be seen as a nod to the first game, but that just doesn't work with the better character design and voice acting. Even the different endings are just an empty shell: They seem like an afterthought, being all based on what you do directly before or during the last bossfight. With just a savefile, you can get them all in one playthrough. Instead of a somewhat consistent world, there are distinct levels, all trying to convey a different feeling. However, they lack the level of detail of even the first game. They are also almost all rather straight lines instead of the looping, shortcut-based design of the other games. Because of this, the constant backtracking feels extremely tedious. This is paired with unkillable enemies that hurt you by their sheer presence and limited inventory space. This was surely done to add challenge to a otherwise not very difficult game and to create some kind of threat. That did not work out in my opinion. It makes you just unable to take in the atmospehere, rushing through linear levels back and forth because you forgot to bring a important item. It was an experiment and surely a brave game to make, but it did not go well.
