WELP, here we go. I feel like this has been kind of a long time coming, considering I've been following this game since it was announced, which I guess was like a year or two ago. So, after finally playing and completing it, I'll give my thoughts an analysis on basically all aspects of the game. It won't really be like a proper review, since I'm not going to rate/score it, but I guess besides that it will be kind of like a review.
Oh, and I will try to avoid any major spoilers, especially with respect to the story, but there may be some minor spoilers, so just be warned. Anywho, let's start with the visuals.
Visuals
Overall, the graphics looked very nice! Even playing on my decent-but-still-a-laptop laptop, on about medium settings, it still looked great. I spent a lot of time gazing around the environments, and didn't spot any weird artifacting or textures that stuck out. The character models looked pretty nice too, especially the main character, Nilin. Close up, the texture of her skin looked pretty real, and even shiny as though covered with sweat. Although it is Unreal Engine, so it might have just been that. And then in areas where it was raining, Nilin's clothes got noticeably wet, and even her hair matted to her forehead. Small touches, but neat stuff.
The animations were really nice too, again, especially for Nilin. There are some areas of the game where she is kind of stumbling around in a daze, and it looks really convincing. Her normal movement animations are similarly great, and I have to give a special shoutout for the stairs animations. They were good! The combat animations were a bit harder to keep track of, since they are so quick, but they seemed smooth and felt satisfying. Of course, nothing is perfect, and I did notice some weird animation glitches in some places, but they were infrequent. The only criticism I would give is that the facial animations and lip synching were kind of meh, but it's a minor complaint.
Finally, I'll talk about the visuals of the world itself. The world just looks incredible - it might be my favourite part of the game. There are a lot of more, like, sterile environments, like when you are inside buildings, but the world really shines when you are out in the urban environments. The futuristic ads and billboards that are posted all about are really cool to look at, but my favourite part was the graffiti. There are a bunch of really awesome and beautiful designs scattered throughout the street-bound areas, and although they were repeated a few times, I didn't mind seeing them again at all. There were also some words scrawled out on the walls in the urban areas, a lot of which were in french, which was neat for me since I could understand almost all of them.
And then another neat thing in the world was how in tons of places, little labels and messages would pop up augmented-reality style. Like, for example, as you approached a storefront, a message would pop up saying the store's name, and what you could buy in there, complete with prices (even though you couldn't go inside, which was kind of disappointing). Or if there was an area where something was on fire, a message would pop up when you approached saying 'danger', and telling you the actual temperature of the area. There were tons of little cool things like that scattered all around the world.
So, overall, the visuals of the game were really great. I would love to see what they look like on maximum settings - it would probably be amazing.
Gameplay
HMM! Here's where things get...interesting. Let's start off with the platforming. It's...okay, I guess. I found that the controls were a little bit wonky, but that could have been my laptop chugging a little bit. In general they worked fine. But when we talk about using the platforming to explore the world, here's where things get a bit unfortunate. The developers seem to have, for some reason, really wanted to discourage exploring. Which is a bit ironic, for two reasons. First, because the world is so COOL! You really just want to explore it. And the other reason it's weird is that there are hidden collectables to pick up. I mean, Of course it's not supposed to be easy to collect everything, but in this game it's almost kind of punishing to try. How so?
Well, first, I should mention that when you're platforming, the game always tells you where to go next. A little orange indicator always appears on the next ledge that you can grab or jump to. That feature seems like it's probably a bit polarizing...though I haven't really played enough platformers myself to determine whether it's good or bad. I guess I was kind of indifferent towards it.
But anyway, when looking for collectibles, hidden areas aren't always indicated to you in this way. Sometimes you will see multiple orange indicators show up letting you know there are two ways to go, but sometimes they're not there. So that means that sometimes you'll have to take a leap of faith, wondering if you can get over there, or jump down onto that platform. But, most of the time you can't leading to an anticlimactic death. And dying in this game isn't terrible, since the checkpoints are very well placed (a definite positive point for the game), but it's still kind of frustrating. There are some places where you feel like you should be able to jump somewhere, but you can't. I just found it kind of deflated my desire to explore.
Another thing that ruined my exploratory fun was that along the critical path, there are tons of times when you go into a new area, and the door closes behind you. This means that if there are clearly two different paths, and you chose the 'right' one (the one that continues the story rather than leading to a collectible), you can't go back. I personally missed a few collectibles exactly this way, and it was really frustrating. This is why I actually liked features like in the BioShock games, that pointed you towards your next objective. I could use that to explore all the other areas first, making sure I didn't miss anything. Maybe that's just a personal preference, though, so your mileage may vary.
Anyway, let's talk about something a bit more positive now: the combat. Surprisingly, for the most part I enjoyed it. Admittedly, I haven't played the Arkham games yet, so I might have a bit of a different standard for this sort of combat than most, but I thought it was pretty good. When you are able to get into a groove with the timing of doing combos and dodging, it feels really nice. There were some times that I felt like I was wrestling with the game a bit, like those 'omg I totally dodged' moments, but I think for the most part those were more my fault than the game screwing me over.
Next I'll talk about the combo lab system, building your own combos. It was pretty okay, better than I thought it would be, but I still felt like it could have been a lot better. Basically, you can unlock 'pressens' of different kinds, which have different effects. These pressens can be slotted into combo strings to fill in the button presses needed to perform the combos. So, basically, you can form any combos you want mixing in damage, regeneration, or cooldown-reduction (for your super moves) pressens. The thing is, though, I found the most effective thing to do was to just make separate combos for each. Like I'd make full damage combos, full regen combos, etc. And then I would just use whichever combo I needed at the time. Like if I was low on health, I'd use my regen combo, or if I was full on everything, I'd use my damage combo.
I think there are a couple of reasons why this combo lab system kind of failed. First, there was no real benefit, at least in my eyes, to mixing up different sorts of pressens in the combos. Like, you could have a combo that did a little bit in each different category, or do a combo that was really strong in whatever you needed at that moment. I feel like they should have included some kind of bonus for mixing up pressen types. There are achievements, but there needed to be something more compelling than that, I think.
Then the other big failure of this system was that, you could unlock multiple pressens of the same type, but they were all exactly the same. Like, for damage pressens, you can unlock three X ones, and three Y ones (all the combos activate by pressing different combinations of the X and Y buttons, on the Xbox controller). But none of those actually differ from each other in terms of effect. I think it would have been much cooler if the different pressens of the same type different in effect, or at least in terms of strength. I think that would have added some more strategy in terms of forming combos.
As for the enemies, they were pretty varied, which was good. Different types of enemies often required use of different pressen types and super moves, which was definitely smart design. None of your moves ever became outdated or useless as the game went on, which was nice. I definitely have to give a special shoutout to some of the boss fights, though. Some of the boss fights were just against powered-up normal enemies, but there were a couple that were actually unique characters, and those were really fun. They required clever use of your super moves, and were almost like puzzles that you had to figure out while fighting a constant stream of adds. They were well-paced, though, and never became frustrating. The only sad part is that, in my opinion, the best fight in the game came in the middle. That was kind of sad, but the last boss was still pretty good too, so it wasn't too terrible.
So yeah, despite my problems with the combo lab, overall I thought the combat was pretty enjoyable. Would have liked to have seen more unique boss fights, since the ones that were in there were so good, but oh well.
Now, finally, I'll talk about the biggest feature of the game, the memory remixes. This was probably the most-touted feature of the game, and for good reason. They looked really cool. You'd be able to watch a person's memory play out in the form of a scene, then tweak different aspects of the environment to change the outcome of the memory. Sounds really neat and unique. But how did it turn out? Well...
First, I must say that the technology used to make these remixes is really impressive. You are able to rewind and fast-forward through the scenes really smoothly and easily, with the graphics and sounds cooperating perfectly. As for the actual scenes themselves, though...to be honest, I was kind of disappointed. I mean, it was pretty cool changing things and then seeing the outcome, but I found that the different endings that I got were all kind of...similar. Like, other than getting the outcome that I was supposed to, I found that changing other things didn't have much impact. That was kind of sad, since the developers had said that there would be plenty of different outcomes aside from the critical path. But in the end there was really a lack of variety in the outcomes, which made the remixes...kind of boring.
Another issue I had is that one of the remixes was shown almost in its entirety in the game's previews. Considering that there are only four remixes in the entire game, that's a pretty significant amount. And worse yet, the final remix of the game is only slightly different from one of the earlier ones. I mean, I understand that these scenes must have been difficult and expensive to make, but I feel like what they ended up putting out wasn't worth it. Truly disappointing to me, someone who was really looking forward to the narrative possibilities of what they promised.
Just before I end the gameplay section, I have to mention Chapter Five. There is a chase section in this chapter which is, in my opinion, just terribly ill-conceived. You have to run from *something* chasing you, which I think is a fairly common thing, but in this game...it just didn't work well. I don't know if it was the controls, or even if it was just me, but I got hit with a frustrating amount of insta-deaths. And it wasn't one of those 'oh, man I know what I did wrong there' things, it was more 'okay wtf just happened there' ones. That's just frustrating. MAYBE on a better rig clearing up any chugging would clear up the issues, but...I dunno. I just did not have any fun at all with that part.
So anyway, overall with the gameplay, it feels to me like they started out with the idea of building a game around the memory remixes, but then realized they'd bit off more than they could chew. Then they ended up having to fill up the game with other forms of gameplay, with mixed results. A bit sad, really.
Story
So, I'll just put a small part on the story here. Overall, it was...pretty okay. It was kind of meh, but there were a few twists and turns that I found genuinely surprising and interesting. The general topic of dealing with the concept of commercializing memories was reasonably interesting too. So, while it wasn't really anything to write home about, I was decently satisfied with it.
I do want to mention the voice acting, though. It was pretty spectacular across the board. I mean, some of the enemies and background characters' voice acting was kind of silly, but all the main characters did a great job. Nilin was especially convincing, lending her a likability that made her easy to get attached to and root for. Well...I should say, all the main characters did a great job, except one. The Atlas in your ear in this game, Edge...his performance was pretty terrible. I don't know if this guy just phoned it in, or if he's the kid of a producer or what, but it was really obvious that he was reading a script. Kind of weird and jarring considering how well the other voice actors did.
Final Thoughts
So when I think about this game and what it could have been, I am just disappointed. But, honestly, when I am actually playing the game, engrossed in the world and characters, I have a really good time with it. It's one of those games that I hate, but I love it even more. It can't take over the title for my MOST hated/loved game (that would go to P.N.03), but still. I would definitely recommend this game to fans of third person action games or those looking for a neat story and unique world, but definitely wait for bargain bin/steam sale prices.
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