I'm having a hard time beating even the second boss. I'm forced to grind and retry. Maybe on the controller the experience is a bit better, buyt so far my main complaint would be that there is not enough space to roll and dodge effeciently and I always get stuck and get anihiliated as a result. Then if you want to grind the basic enemies don't give exp enough to level up quickly, so it turns into a bit of a slog. Cool art and sound design though.
A combo of point and click puzzle-adventure and "tactical espionage action". Be warned the humour in this game is VERY early 00s Euro. It's decent fun if you are not against point & click adventure / hiding / evasion type of experience. Reminded me of Space Quest IV where you also have to run and hide a lot.
It's a very repetitive game, but it's solid fun if you are not opposed to a few hours of frenetic arcade shooting in a space/cyberpunk setting.
This game reminded me of Portal Prelude (the brutal fan project), Superhot (an indie first person puzzler), Magrunner (another indie first person puzzler), and Tower of Guns (indie first person roguelike). The art, the sound, the world are pretty awesome. Some designs are kind of in the vein of Metal Gear Rising. The gameplay is also pretty fun overall. The puzzle sections in the VR world are okay, but I thought they break the pacing of the game at least to me. You spend 80% of the time in heart pumping action, but then you need to go and do some jump puzzles and solve a spinning wheel on the wall which are slow and tedious. What ruins it for me is some completely unnecessary challenge spikes and seemingly random hit detection. I played for > 5 hours but hit detection is still a mystery to me. I can't pinpoint whether a bullet, or a laser will hit me at all. I figured out some moves/timing combos that may increase my chances of passing a section, but it's never close to percentages high enough for it to be satisfying. These difficulty spike sections are sprinkled here and there and really are a detractor for me. Some acrobatics sections are also unfairly difficult. The main problem is that you need to treat these very difficult sections like frenetic action puzzles. Just die a lot until you figure it out completely or just get lucky, but at the end of the level the results screen will chastize you by displaying your embarrasing death conut. So the game insists on ranking "the most able ones". At least that's the feeling it conveys on the first playthrough. Obviously death counts on consecutive playthroughs are different when you know the rules and know the answers to the action puzzles already.
The game is good, but it could be so much better. The story is pretty interesting, actors are great, designs and visuals are fun, and the shooting is adequate in the confines of the genre. Looting, customising, and crafting are all there if that's your thing. I only played an early version of the game and completed all sidequests so I became pretty overpowered fast with most weapons, as well as hacking. I heard balancing and leveling were improved in patches, but I can't attest to that. Things that would make this game infinitelly better: branching paths, dialogue choices, perks influencing story and dialogue, better stealth, and cyberspace navigation/hacking/puzzle solving/battle mechanic. I thought that degrading cyberspace to a walking sim in a bunch of cutscenes was a disservice to the game and to the entire cyberpunk genre. I always thought that engaging and addicting cyberspace is like a holy tenet of the cyberpunk genre. It is totally underrepresented in this game in my opinion. I also thought that it's fairly hard to switch between assault, hacking, and stealth in the game and it's not immediatey obvious if you can chose any of these styles on a whim or you need to build towards a certain play style. Stealth is very wonky, because you always engage with fairly large groups of enemies and you can be spotted easily by some random wandering character. The encounters also can happen anywhere, so unless you are playing a mission that is specifically set up as stealth and the map for the mission was made for stealth you won't be able to pick enemies one by one r sneak past them like in other popular stealth games. Battle hacking is acceptable, but solving hex number puzzles gets old really really fast. I'd rather have some kind of tactical mini game for hacking. You know - passing through firewalls, neutralising daemons, injecting viruses, infecting nodes, masking your activity. That kind of thing. Something that ties into the tactical situation. 3/5
Visually this is a great looking game. The game features great music and has great world building. There are no other redeeming qualities. Story is nonsensical and forced. Chapter five was infuriating and a complete waste of time. Most characters, the way they speak and their motivations and reasoning are simply infuriating. They can speak for 15 minutes and say absolutely nothing. Here is what it sounds like: “It is a thing of all things, and when the darkness pass the light when contemplating on a starry night do we even fathom the consequences of ones actions? But what are we or were we there? And all has faded. Of cause this all was written and what is written you cannot change. Not telling you why though!” Early chapters have a lot of swearing and characters which look like caricatures from Saturday morning cartoons. This clashes a lot with the tone of the story and especially sound design. A lot of the time the game can’t decide it wants to be whimsical fairytale or an edgy young adult novel ending up being neither. Gameplay is almost non-existent. Nothing to talk about here at all. You have rudimentary choice system which in the grand scheme of things doesn’t amount to anything.
The game itself is alright if stylish retroish 3D platforming and crusades setting is your type of thing, production quality is high, design, sound and music are great, so I'm mostly concerned with technical issues. I'll list the ones which I believe are really bad ones in order of appearance. - I randomly get garbled screen and blank white image instead of the intro video, it happened in maybe around 80% of cases I started the game. Looks like there are no other videos in game, so this is only mildly annoying and but still an ever-present reminder that the port is mediocre, because you see intro every time you launch the game. - Was very hard to configure my controller. The options menus have very dumb names like "gaming hat" for d-pad or something along those lines and the actual direction is not spelled out, all 4 directions are just "hat". Trigger buttons don't work. Unfixable without extra third-party downloads. Default settings are completely wrong so had to I spend a ton of time addressing these issues before I could even start playing. - It's impossible to play with gamepad only, you have to use your keyboard to get in-game and only then gamepad kicks in - annoying. - The game is unplayable with v-sync off, you simple won't be able to progress past certain point in the first 30 minutes of the game and even in the first 30 mins you'll encounter very glitchy physics. Why have this option at all is beyond me (broken by default by the way) - Gamepad randomly locks and becomes unresponsive. Very annoying during intense fights
