Don't be fooled by this game being made by ex-Team Ninja staff. Lower you expectations if you're going in expecting anything remotely as good as Ninja Gaiden Black when it comes to the combat. It's a janky, clunky game with only 3 different combos you can do. On top of that, you have some basic 3rd person shooter mechanics that are just like... alright? The weakest enemies take like 5 shots to the head to put down, so it feels like your guns are a damn joke. Enemies being tanky as shit isn't limited to your guns, either, they take a lot of hits from your katana to put down too.
On top of that, the bosses pretty much suck. The first boss is lame and the second boss is kinda bullshit. The rest of the bosses after that I can only describe as "we have Sekiro at home" as you're forced to use your parry, gun counter and shitty combos to chip away at their health. The thing is, the bosses do nothing interesting and you have have a limited set of tools so they're just easy and boring as shit.
Despite all that, when the combat does work it can be pretty fun. But it just isn't good enough. Besides the combat, you have basic straight-line level design. It's just combat arenas but it works for what it is.
The first few levels break up the pace by letting you explore the Police Station, where you can find documents that are more important to the story than 90% of the cutscenes are. You can also partake in some minigames! Such as a shitty crane machine (which barely fucking works but you suffer through to see Stefanie Joosten cooking), a shitty rhythm game with a few songs, a Yakuza karaoke rip-off that's funny but only has one song and a garbage SHMUP. Yeah, not much to see there.
Now, what had me hooked from the get go was the story and characters. I instantly liked Hannah Stone and her bizarre voice acting and I wanted to see what the deal was with her Zombie Unit pals. I was like "okay, the gameplay is mid but everything else is interesting!". I expected a Deadly Premonition for character action games!
Light spoilers in this paragraph, however, so skip if you want to see for yourself but... the story doesn't know what the fuck it wants to do. The shit with the synthetics seems to just be thrown in there but it amounts to nothing. Hannah has an interesting backstory which the game does jack fucking shit with. In fact, there's not even ANY story in the last third of the game until you reach the ending, where the game just kinda ends and the credits roll while I ask myself "that it?????". So yeah, the game completely lost all its charm at one point and then it just was going through long ass stages fighting the same 5 fucking enemy types and a couple shit bosses until the game just rolled credits. In the end, it does NOTHING with ANY of its plot beats or characters other than scratching the surface on Hannah's past. In fact, this review is 10 times longer than a summary of the game's story would be!
Visually, the game can't decide on what it really wants to look like. Sometimes it looks genuinely amazing, other times it looks straight out of the PS3/360 era. However, it WILL give your PC trouble no matter what, because it's optimized like shit and also fairly buggy. I saw AI spaz out and break more than once, one time with an enemy that was out of bounds... but I needed to kill to progress. Thankfully I had like 3 clips of my rifle to empty into his head from far away so he went down.
Also the game's short and takes 5-8 hours?? Playtime on my save glitched out, talk about a masterpiece, plus it deleted my save after the credits anyway. So I can't say how long it really is. It's short as shit tho, that's for sure, despite the last third feeling padded.
In short, a janky character action game that can be fun when it does work (which is rare) but amounts to nothing in the end despite starting out very charming. I didn't even spend any money on this game and I feel ripped off, do not buy this for full price. Or even half price. It's worth like 15 bucks maybe.
On top of that, the bosses pretty much suck. The first boss is lame and the second boss is kinda bullshit. The rest of the bosses after that I can only describe as "we have Sekiro at home" as you're forced to use your parry, gun counter and shitty combos to chip away at their health. The thing is, the bosses do nothing interesting and you have have a limited set of tools so they're just easy and boring as shit.
Despite all that, when the combat does work it can be pretty fun. But it just isn't good enough. Besides the combat, you have basic straight-line level design. It's just combat arenas but it works for what it is.
The first few levels break up the pace by letting you explore the Police Station, where you can find documents that are more important to the story than 90% of the cutscenes are. You can also partake in some minigames! Such as a shitty crane machine (which barely fucking works but you suffer through to see Stefanie Joosten cooking), a shitty rhythm game with a few songs, a Yakuza karaoke rip-off that's funny but only has one song and a garbage SHMUP. Yeah, not much to see there.
Now, what had me hooked from the get go was the story and characters. I instantly liked Hannah Stone and her bizarre voice acting and I wanted to see what the deal was with her Zombie Unit pals. I was like "okay, the gameplay is mid but everything else is interesting!". I expected a Deadly Premonition for character action games!
Light spoilers in this paragraph, however, so skip if you want to see for yourself but... the story doesn't know what the fuck it wants to do. The shit with the synthetics seems to just be thrown in there but it amounts to nothing. Hannah has an interesting backstory which the game does jack fucking shit with. In fact, there's not even ANY story in the last third of the game until you reach the ending, where the game just kinda ends and the credits roll while I ask myself "that it?????". So yeah, the game completely lost all its charm at one point and then it just was going through long ass stages fighting the same 5 fucking enemy types and a couple shit bosses until the game just rolled credits. In the end, it does NOTHING with ANY of its plot beats or characters other than scratching the surface on Hannah's past. In fact, this review is 10 times longer than a summary of the game's story would be!
Visually, the game can't decide on what it really wants to look like. Sometimes it looks genuinely amazing, other times it looks straight out of the PS3/360 era. However, it WILL give your PC trouble no matter what, because it's optimized like shit and also fairly buggy. I saw AI spaz out and break more than once, one time with an enemy that was out of bounds... but I needed to kill to progress. Thankfully I had like 3 clips of my rifle to empty into his head from far away so he went down.
Also the game's short and takes 5-8 hours?? Playtime on my save glitched out, talk about a masterpiece, plus it deleted my save after the credits anyway. So I can't say how long it really is. It's short as shit tho, that's for sure, despite the last third feeling padded.
In short, a janky character action game that can be fun when it does work (which is rare) but amounts to nothing in the end despite starting out very charming. I didn't even spend any money on this game and I feel ripped off, do not buy this for full price. Or even half price. It's worth like 15 bucks maybe.