This game offers a fairly good story-based open-world experience. It's truly a sum of its parts. Positives: Story-wise, it pretty much satisfies everything sterotypically Mafia/Italian. There's a love scene that'll make you laugh. How these are positives, I'm not sure. There's something enjoyable about it maybe. The gunplay and controls are generally solid. The vehicle controls are still pretty good. Don't go in expect to play with a controller, nor would I recommend trying since this game can be quite unforgiving. Negatives: I say unforgiving because with playing it, I recall why I only played through the story once. The gameplay is pretty solid, but there are issues with the checkpont system, the artifical intelligence, and the health system. For the checkpoint system, there can be times where it's extremely hostile. When you load back into the game from a cutscene, you may be thrown into a firefight and you will already be hit once or twice, immediately losing much-needed health. This game often relies on luck when it comes to artificial intelligence. The AI can range from being extremely dumb to Terminator 2. This leads to issues with the health system: whether there be a cutscene or a loading screen, Tommy's health is consistent throughout the chapter of the game. Did you just survive by a hair that last firefight? Well, you'll have to live with that hair unless you're lucky to have health box placed into the next fire fight. Otherwise, you may be required to go back two check points to try and do better. This is the thing that I remember hating, as the health boxes are placed almost nonsensically. Overall, it's an enjoyable experience. If you can get a trainer for this game, I recommend it for those rare times where you may find yourself restarting the last checkpoint a dozen times.
This game has a good atmosphere and that's about where the compliments end. The movement is sloppy, the screen resolution is fixed to 4:3, control input is questionable at times, collision detection is extremely unreliable, weapon control is particularly unreliable (click to fire, but nothing shoots the first time), and fixed save points so you better be prepared to repeat some bothersome stuff a number of times. You frequently injure yourself from falls of about 6 feet and the sanity meter system is visually bothersome. I can't recommend this game, even though this is probably the best the port ever thanks to the fantastic GOG team. They turned a broken flawed thing into a working flawed thing. I can only imagine the stress that went it to getting this thing to work on not only modern system, but any system at all. It crashed on me once, maybe? I'd avoid this game unless you really need to itch a cosmic horror scratch. Kudos to the GOG team, wag of the finger to Headfirst.
A year on and the Atlas Rising update now installed into my game, it still runs as poorly as it did then. The gameplay has gotten a lot better, as I do feel like I have something to work toward when it comes to upgrading from my first ship. There's some easy ways to make money, but it will only get you by for a little while. I'm running AMD graphics (R9 280X) and the game's textures are consistently foiled. I went into a settings file and adjusted the size of the texture file (set it 2GB) and the textures came back (for the most part). Looked nice. But soon after, the controls fell apart. My controller stopped working properly (right-trigger is acceleration, but also the firing button). An improvement, but this game still needs a lot of fixing.
Campo Santo did a mostly great job putting this together. The entire approach to its visuals is fantastic and presents the prettiest "walking sim" I've ever seen. Voice acting and overall sound design is great. The writing is where it falls short, which is why I give it such a low rating. It was a great experience for the first two hours, where a meaningful narrative that developed a hook may just have the entirety of your attention. It's at a key moment where this starts to go awry and you see puzzle pieces falling into place far faster than they did prior. Before you know it, the puzzle is complete and you might be left there like a stick in the mud. Some might find the "human" direction the game takes as something endearing, but I found it to be void of value in both entertainment and meaning. That's not to say the writing is the only flaw. Gameplay-wise, it doesn't offer a whole lot in ways of interesting things to do. You'll be walking over your previously set footprints several times during your four-to-five hours of playing this game. It's a lot of going from point A to point B. This wouldn't be all bad if the story built up to something more interesting. This game was not the game I remember seeing in the previews they had put out. I only recommend this game for when it's available at a lower price. It's very short, there's a greater chance you'll walk away disappointed then with most games you are interested in. Gorgeous looking game, though. Be sure to take some pretty pictures. Cheers to Campo for giving it a shot. I hope they invest more time into a conclusion next time around, which I very much look forward to.
