Summarized: Short, fun, "quick-draw" game with music that is great and apt. Worth your money but doesn't hold up after completion due to flawed gameplay doomed by its desire to be its own entity. 3.5/5 I immediately understood the choice to have the right mouse button raise your gun. The game is all about quick reaction time and not being able to open doors or leave a vent with your gun ready to go creates the split second of frantic aiming that separates the good from the bad and the ugly. The soundtrack to this game is the best part. I foresee myself listening to it for more time than I spent on the game itself. It fits the tone of dark apartments, clubs, and docks perfectly. My thanks to Chris Christodoulou. My primary play-through lasted 6 hours for me mainly because I suck, but I'd imagine the average player that is going for all the achievements would get 14 hours maximum from the game. I mention getting all the achievements because beyond the first play-through and earning all the achievements, there isn't much fun. Similar to the raising of the gun, the bullet spray was another feature to make this game unique. It dooms the game and makes those unlucky shots simply frustrating. Without the bullet spray the game would be too easy. With it you don't feel in control. I immediately sprung for the scythe due to this mechanic. I eventually got gud, but I was very reluctant to use what the game seems to consider the most important weapons. This element also caused me to not care enough to master the game like so many other single player games I consider great. Minor problems exist beside the glaring one. Throwing weapons have arcs that I still fail to comprehend. The AI is fairly exploitable. It will come out of cover just to stroll into a room where it knows an assassin lurks, and if the AI are in a group, they will enter your domain single file. After you've seen a type of enemy twice you know exactly how to manipulate it.
Summarized: Game looks awesome. Viking theme is decent. Controls are stiff. Boss battles that unfortunately fail due to clunky controls, but are almost good. Kinda boring otherwise. 2.5/5. That's all that can be truly said about this game. It looks great visually and the trailer got my blood pumping for a fun, 3rd person, Nordic themed, aesthetic adventure with cool bosses. It only truly delivered on the visuals, and it is undeniably beautiful and has outstanding artwork. Not to mention it is all hand-drawn, which is highly commendable. The viking theme is also enjoyable and is enhanced by the artwork. There's not much good to this game beyond that. Let me start with the controls. I use a controller and it worked fine, but having no rebindable keys annoyed me slightly. It's a minor nitpick and a 3rd party program solved that problem so no big issue, but should be mentioned. This unfortunately didn't solve the other issues. The movement is a slightly awkward. The axe swings are slow and lifeless. The strong attack feels like it takes 3 second to connect, which I get since it should be a high risk, high reward, but it's too extreme to be viable. The roll is stiff and isn't optimal for using too often since it doesn't chain with movement well, which, again, I can understand, but still felt annoying. This doesn't seem like these would be a huge issues, but in a boss game like this, it is HUGE and can ruin gameplay. The boss battles feel regrettably slow. Certain games can pull off the slow boss battles as long as there is a good amount of tactical investment. I think if the controls were more fluid the boss battles would be amazing, and make the rest of the game really worth it. Especially since there are a lot of good ideas in the boss battles themselves and made it sad they couldn't be fun. They forced me to think and plan before I acted, and I would have loved it if the controls were good. The rest of the game is just, "eh." I really wanted this to be good.
