oozes style, lacks substance
first i want to say the art direction, world building, and platforming (platforming being the weaker of the 3) are great! if thats what youre mainly looking for then play this. however, other aspects of the game are pretty lacking and theres apparently a softlock in chapter 3 but i dont think ill be making it that far to experience it.
what this game gets right, it knocks out of the park. visually unique and the blend between spritework and the 3d environment is seamless, great job on that. the world is built up for you through interactables you can log in your PDA thingy (which comes with a VERY cool, stylized FPV of the screen) that come with flavor text recounting the events that lead up to the point in time that the game is set aswell as the motivations and conflicts of the people in the world. im personally of the opinion that games only need to lock you in place and force feed you exposition if the writing is so lacking that you wouldnt engage with it otherwise, so major W alert here. thats not to say that the writing in this game is all that great (its not lol) its just nice that they respect the fact that you purchased an INTERACTIVE MEDIA and not seinfeld on blu-ray. the platforming was ok from what i played but definitely not anything interesting, and the ledge detection is pretty bad for what kind of game this is trying to be, a linear narrative platformer?
so now onto why i rated 2 stars
so first, the writing is genuinely horrendous. from what i saw the lore items arent bad but the characters are genuinely so cr-inge with nearly every line they deliver. like very on the nose and lacking subtlety cr-inge. its hard to remember exact diologues because you get 5 whole seconds to read the lines sometimes and others it feels like if you dont jolt your eyes down to the bottom of the monitor when a text popup appears in 0.2 seconds youll miss it. this came to a head when i got ambushed by the 4th or so group of bad guys and one of them said "we'll tear you from limb to limb" and ngl i turned the fu-cking game off immediately lmao. like really, you couldnt even take 5 seconds google the actual expression? are we deadass?
i took it as a predictor of whats to come, along with everything else i was slogging through just to enjoy the parts i liked about the game which is why i prolly wont finish this one
the combat is genuinely braindead. its another brawler that wants to be batman arkham really bad. they kinda fail badly here. basically combat boils down to spam your 1 melee attack, if you see red spidey sense, hit A. if you see yellow spidey sense, hit Y. positioning doesnt matter because the protag wil just fly across to whatever enemy is closest to you and get a free combo starter, which just means u can spam ur 1 melee attack to stunlock enemies until they hit the ground, and unlike the arkham games theres no combo meter to incentivize it, it really is just that basic. im aware there are more enemy types and probably other weapons but please try it yourself and youll pick up on what im saying immediately if you have an eye for it, it just doesnt feel good or worth it to put up with until its actually fun or challenging to engage with.
if the game still sounds appealing then i hope you enjoy it!! more power to you for real. i just feel very let down after the pretty strong opening.
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