Look, I know I nitpick a lot but I see the positive reviews for this game and I think to myself, have these people actually played this thing? I put a few hours into this but it got too unbearably frustrating to the point I just gave up on it, and that's saying something because I've powered through some hot garbage in my time on this site.
So my review of the mechanics and story will obviously be limited, but a few hours of this is enough to warrant dunking on this game to this degree.
The story had promise, and as I'm reading the cliffnotes it's pretty good. You have to read a lot of journal entries to get the real gist of it, but this is an extremely ambitious story for a shooter, even by today's standards. You wouldn't think they'd put a high drama about family strife and generational curses into a frenetic early 2000s horror themed first person shooter, but they did, and that's pretty cool.
The atmosphere is decent enough, but the entire game feels like traversing through hallway after hallway. It's very boring.
The shooting mechanics would be fine if they didn't feel so floaty and awful. The entire thing just reeks of "it's a horror game so let's make the shooting and combat feel like hot garbage". There are no health packs but enemies can and will instantly hit you and you can do very little to avoid damage because leapers move at the speed of light and other enemies practically have hitscan weapons, so you're in a constant state of save scumming. The enemies in general have this Dark Souls 2 level of hit tracking, where they can change direction mid-throw to hit you.
The guns do very little damage and something more substantial like the shotgun takes like fifteen minutes to reload. The only real viable gun that outclasses the rest is the Himalayan cannon, but even that gets annoying to use after a while.
You can't hit quickload once you're dead, you have to reload and then hit quickload after you've loaded back in. This wouldn't be an issue if the game weren't so unplayable.
The ectoplasm spell is really your only viable damage dealing spell in the beginning, yet still is inaccurate when it comes to the enemies that zip around and deals about as much damage as lightly farting on enemies. I'm sure there are more substantial weapons and spells later on in the game, and I'm sure the game gets more playable later on as Patrick gets more powerful, but overall I absolutely hated this.
So my review of the mechanics and story will obviously be limited, but a few hours of this is enough to warrant dunking on this game to this degree.
The story had promise, and as I'm reading the cliffnotes it's pretty good. You have to read a lot of journal entries to get the real gist of it, but this is an extremely ambitious story for a shooter, even by today's standards. You wouldn't think they'd put a high drama about family strife and generational curses into a frenetic early 2000s horror themed first person shooter, but they did, and that's pretty cool.
The atmosphere is decent enough, but the entire game feels like traversing through hallway after hallway. It's very boring.
The shooting mechanics would be fine if they didn't feel so floaty and awful. The entire thing just reeks of "it's a horror game so let's make the shooting and combat feel like hot garbage". There are no health packs but enemies can and will instantly hit you and you can do very little to avoid damage because leapers move at the speed of light and other enemies practically have hitscan weapons, so you're in a constant state of save scumming. The enemies in general have this Dark Souls 2 level of hit tracking, where they can change direction mid-throw to hit you.
The guns do very little damage and something more substantial like the shotgun takes like fifteen minutes to reload. The only real viable gun that outclasses the rest is the Himalayan cannon, but even that gets annoying to use after a while.
You can't hit quickload once you're dead, you have to reload and then hit quickload after you've loaded back in. This wouldn't be an issue if the game weren't so unplayable.
The ectoplasm spell is really your only viable damage dealing spell in the beginning, yet still is inaccurate when it comes to the enemies that zip around and deals about as much damage as lightly farting on enemies. I'm sure there are more substantial weapons and spells later on in the game, and I'm sure the game gets more playable later on as Patrick gets more powerful, but overall I absolutely hated this.