It's insane how similar this is to God of War. The combat, the upgrades, the bosses with QTEs at the end... Being able to fly around freely whenever is pretty unique, I'll give it that. It doesn't even break the levels in half like you'd expect it to. The final boss is fucking terrible though – the amount of blinding effects on the screen is comical. Half the time you genuinely can't see shit. Even some of the QTE prompts get covered by purple lightning vomit somehow??

The story is some melodramatic garbage but honestly, would you really even expect it to be good? No idea how fun this is in single player but co-op is a decent enough time.

An insane amount of insane new mechanics thrown at you constantly for how unengaging all of them are – the first half an hour must average somewhere around one tutorial screen per minute. It's like the someone wanted to make a game based on rescuing people from disasters, had lots of ideas about little mechanics based on disaster rescues but no idea how to make any of it fun. Most perilous situations you get into have one (1) correct response on the player's end, so you press the correct button and you move on. Every time.

Your lungs meter fills up with smoke when you go through it, unless you sprint, in which case it will basically never fill up. If it does fill up, you have to press the "take deep breath of fresh air" button and if you time the Gears of War perfect reload meter perfectly, you get a Perfect Breath that empties your whole lung meter in one go and the character does a little celebratory animation. This also gives you Survival Points (SP). You can use these to level up one of your five Survival Skills. One of these is Metabolism. There is an entire separate gameplay mode that kicks in during combat sections, which plays like a terrible rail shooter and we turned the game off about 10 minutes into it.

Interesting for an hour or two as a novelty, I suppose? The story seems like it'll get fucking bizarre later on based on the opening cutscene that spoils what seems like half of it. I really don't want to risk suffering through the dull shooting bits just to see it, though.