a fun premise all round but it is short, and a couple more 'magic' production scenes would have been nice. there are 2 good, and one bad ending, and it's best to just get the choices to make from a walkthrough so you can unlock all the scenes. there is fast forward functionality to help with further playthroughs. the game is all stills with a touch of animation during talking, but to be honest the artwork is absolutely beautiful. the voice acting is excellent as well, though only in Japanese of the love interest (with subtitle of your chosing), it still really enhances the whole experience.
played on Xbox GP. it's a stealth horror game that took me around 14 hours to finish with finding about half of the collectables. heard so many good things but still surprised me. looking at the credits i couldn't beleive this was made by only a medium sized studio, it is so polished. this studio is some seriously talented people both artistically and technically. i finished it realising this game must have had a tonne of love and passion poured into it by everyone involved. each environment is meticulously crafted (leaves far bigger studio games to shame), realising this world slowly falling to ruin beneath the inquisition and a terrible disease. the voice actors are perfect, but the stand out is the music. i can't remember the last time i played a game where the scoring and pace is so perfect. and i play a lot of big name rpgs, japanese and western alike. i keep wondering if it is the best i've heard. it's terrifying, sombre, tense, painful and hopeful, yet always strikingly beautiful, and makes each moment hit so much harder. there are also well thought out audio and visual cues to help you while traversing the levels and avoiding detection. combat is tactical as your weapon is slow and is designed to build tension. there is more emphasis to do things by stealth. combat opens even more late game but...spoilers. there is a crafting system as well, and while i'm not a fan of crafting in a game like this, it's organic enough considering the storyline, and the requirement for using different ammo types. the ammo types is fun and i enjoyed figuring out how to use them to get though each encounter. what i found good is that there was not quite enough supplies to build all the upgrades to equipment, so you have to be mindful of how you want to play. that said i had to drop a star as there are a few moments in the game where the pacing outstrips the combat flow and things get grindy, but thankfully they are brief. best storied game i have played in ages
graphically pleasing and simple, light puzzling consisting of placing square map pieces wherever edges match. i didn't find, trying to push the map away from the storyline, would bear anything unexpected. story so far was your basic coming of age scenario. would have liked the demo to show the next part of the game a little to see how it expands, because if this demo is an indication of the game as a whole, it would get boring pretty quickly.
the games mechanics are solid, but it would be nice to see them more planted in the gameplay. as your creature eats it grows in size, making it slower (just) and its inertia increases. it flows quite well but i couldn't find any real advantage as being slower and harder to control made it more vulnerable to attacks. i really enjoyed the balance of the creature itself though, it feels powerful as it slithers at great speed across a room with table, chairs, tv's popping and bodies flying aside in your path. yet its physical weakness limits wild abandon. other nice touches like ripping lights of chains is great but again that was something just there without any advantage to it. i also found the throwing of objects somewhat awkward. as others have mentioned the remapping of the attack button from MMB needs to happen. the secondary attacks are great, and i felt an indecent amount of glee smashing through a bunch of armed people at the right moment, then lying amongst the bodies, feasting on the bits left over. the demo is considerable fun at i'm looking forward to seeing this game expand on what it has.
like the first 2 Metros, this is heavy on atmosphere, but just in a far more open world, with the usual travelling location to location on missions, interspersed with small skirmishes with the mutated wildlife, and managing limited ammo at times. on hard difficulties it's more like sneaking than walking, as the enemies will be tough, and ammo even more limited. i played this game on Xbox console, and even on the console, this game is utterly gorgeous. it must look wonderful on a PC. on the console i never had a single bug or crash, but it sounds like the PC version is different. movement through the world felt good, and the story is mostly the typical apocalyptic cliches. what makes this game one of my favourites in years is the attention to detail the devs have obviously lovingly crafted into the game. NPC AI is top notch, but more surprisingly, the work put into the wildlife is just as good. on a couple of occasions, running from overwhelming numbers, i would hide and a group of animals would get distracted from their pursuit of me by a different pack. what ensued each time would be a stand off the likes you would see on a wildlife channel, with the dynamic constantly shifting. these would last a good 5 minutes at a time. this kind of effort in a game is incredibly rare. what results is very believable adventure that i personally felt completely engrossed in.
...but not for the right reasons for everyone. i tend more toward the more positive reviews here. i have this game on Steam and found it enjoyable, but i have little interest in the Warhammer world. the flaky AI and RNG does make things a bit tougher than the usual, but i really like the freedom of movement in the maps, and the detailed mechanics of the game. it's amongst the deepest mechanics i've played in this kind of game, and found myself getting sucked into it's world thanks to it's morbid beauty. if the AI had been fixed this would be up there with the best of them for me.
says it all. excellent dungeon crawler in every aspect. i played it on Xbox so not a verified user here.
i play this on xbone and i like it...when i'm liking a change in my usual pace in my gaming. it all feels like a chilled rogue-like, fps, base building (clunky but useable), gene-splicing, resource collecting, and technology researching kind of game. it can get a bit frantic at times with infestations, but settles once you get the hang of the ropes. graphically standard but pleasing and eerie in a sci-fi horror fashion (like Albedo Eyes from Out of Space), and the controls feel tight. if this genre is your type of thing i really think you will get a shit-ton of hours out of this game and enjoy the whole ride.
i originally got this free on Xbox Live, but didn't expect much due to the review scores the game had garnered. it turned out to be one of those occasions when games reviewers completely fail me, as i have enjoyed this one a lot, as much the The Surge in fact. i'll point out that i didn't like Mars Logs at all, and yet this one got me. a beat'em up with RPG elements, not too heavy on either, but just right for a change. had to buy it here on GOG out of respect for the developers and the desire to play it again.
