As a huge Robocop fan, I was really hoping to like this game and I think it does succeed on several levels as a "AA" title. But the whole package feels pretty undercooked. A lot of this came down to the story and characters. The part where the game needed to succeed the most - Robocop - it succeeds with, which is great. They got Peter Weller back, they were true to the character, he has a lot of good lines.

It's in literally every other character in the game where it falls short. No offense to the devs, but they needed someone better to either write or translate this game, or both. It's clear from playing this for five minutes that this was not written natively in English, but even if it was, a lot of the dialogue and situations would still be dumb, and not in a funny way. The story of this game is aggressively simple and has interesting elements but doesn't bring anything together in a satisfying way. It does nothing that the original movie didn't already do. Maybe they wanted to play it safe, which I can respect, especially working with Peter Weller who seems very protective of the character, aside from apparently just being sort of a jerk. He contributed lines and ideas to the script of the movie, and I'm sure he did to this game as well and that might be why Robocop as a character is still so good in this. But playing it safe makes the game very unmemorable. All the new characters are one-note and lame. The most interesting one, Bob Morton's replacement whose attempt to kill Robocop with an army of crappy drones later in the game is treated as just a corporate move that didn't work out, and nobody gives him any grief for it (very fitting for this franchise), dies.

Ulysses sucks, Pickles sucks (at least we get to hear Weller say his name), the journalist sucks, Dr. Blanche doesn't totally suck but should have had way more focus, and the game does you the disservice of making you feel like you have some real impact on these characters' stories through your dialogue choices. What you have impact on - surprise surprise - is a series of jpegs with voiceover that play over the game's ending. Just don't put the dumb dialogue choices and "Dr. Blanche appreciated that" popups in the game at all. People laud this game for not playing at being something bigger than it is when it has a huge example of doing exactly that.

It feels like there were about 5 voice actors in this game. They got a good impersonator for Lewis (Nancy Allen still sounds exactly like that so I dunno if they weren't willing to pay her or something), but most of the other characters sound awful, especially the ones from the movies - Robert DoQui's police chief, and Dan O'Herlihy's "Old Man". Dan had a unique voice, and his character is pretty important to the plot of this game, which, quite admirably, attempts to bridge Robocop 2 and 3, so one of the key things it needs to explain is why the Old Man isn't in 3. Yet they totally flubbed it, he sounds awful. There are multiple NPCs whose voices don't match their faces at all. The line delivery is wooden which doesn't help when the lines weren't written by a native English speaker. It's not the fault of the writers and I'm sure they tried their best, but it doesn't make a great product.

The game does have a few funny moments - notably, when you get a triumphant "Mission Complete" popup after informing a woman her son has died - but it also has a lot of jokes that fall flat.

Story isn't the only thing in a game though, despite what those who hate the later Metal Gear Solid games would imply. But the gameplay in this game also isn't too special. Yes, you feel a bit like Robocop. You walk slowly, can take a lot of hits, and can easily target enemies. There's a fairly nice sense of progression as you use skill points. And of course it's fun to shoot the scum of Old Detroit. But that's it. You don't get any cool alternate weapons until the end of the game, there's no sections that change the gameplay in unique ways, no little on-rails driving sections despite a car chase shootout being the first action scene in the original movie. Another obvious thing from the movie that should have been integrated was Robocop's thermal vision that can even see through walls. The scene where he grabs a guy through a wall is an iconic scene that I would have loved to emulate. They don't even have you use Robocop's night vision more than once or twice. I will say though, it was cool to unlock the ricochet ability to shoot people behind cover, and the upgrade system that keeps the main gun your best weapon is maybe the game's smartest feature - they should have done more with it, like maybe have random modifiers like putting a filter on the visuals if you take a 5% damage decrease.

Aside from the faces of most NPCs (which...I guess is kind of a big thing), the graphics in the game are awesome. UE5 is crazy. But there's not much I can say about that.

So you can see what I mean when I say the package feels undercooked. I've just described every ingredient here. I don't know how this all comes together to make the 8/10 game others seems to think this is. I love Robocop, and I think there's some great potential here. If the devs make a sequel, or maybe a similar game with a different character (perhaps another police-type who isn't quite as forgiving as Robo), if they get different writers, different voice-actors, have slightly more varied combat, go even further with the gun upgrade system, and turn the open downtown Detroit area in this game into a small but dense open world you can drive around in, they really could have a great game.

This game reminds me in many ways of The Last Guardian. It took a very long time to make, from announcement to release. The common opinion of the game is "good but flawed, and beautiful visuals". The games are very light on dialogue; Scorn has none at all. And let's not even mention the strange creature that accompanies the player character through much of the journey. The one in Scorn is...not quite as cute as Trico, though they do both try to kill you sometimes...

The most interesting comparison between the two games are their approach to mystery, and it's in this area where Scorn, by most people's metric, actually beats Fumito Ueda at what, throughout his career, he has shown to be his game.

See, many Ueda fans like myself have been somewhat disappointed to hear that the ancient, mysterious, abandoned places in his games like Shadow of the Colossus are put in with, if we believe the man's own words, not much care for what they may actually have been used for in the game's world, and only for how they work as game levels, and facilitate the platforming and puzzle-solving. Ueda has said that so much of his games take place in ruined areas not because there is a deep history to them, but because designing levels around random outcroppings of broken stone is easier than designing them around complete objects, like stairs, pillars and arches. A pillar is too high to climb, but a broken pillar that has fallen against another one is a ramp to walk up.

Comparatively, Scorn's levels have more thought put into them, not much of which is revealed in the game itself, but a fair amount of it is expanded on in its artbook. The opening area is a factory with an assembly line for a very disturbing product. The final area is a both a place of worship and a sort of laboratory. Of course, these areas have gameplay in them, the game isn't simply a walking simulator, but they're also not similar at all to human designs, they're completely alien and almost fully biological in some way. The game sparks your imagination in a huge huge way, for the flaws it does have it's absolutely successful in that. There is mystery while still having rhyme and reason to it. That's Scorn's best feature. The setting has been so painstakingly designed, literally every inch looked at, that it's easy to imagine most of its long development time was just spent on that.

As a die-hard Ueda fan I need to say, his intention is one thing and what the games actually make you feel is another thing. If the settings are beautiful, if they are mysterious, if they seem like they must have been used for SOMETHING, even if you don't know what, it doesn't really matter if the devs were more gameplay-minded than story-minded. If you have to HEAR that they designed it that way in order to be disappointed, then the game did its job. But I know that there are people who do take stock in that intention, and that difference between Ueda and the Scorn devs; I can't deny caring a little about it.

But also...which game would I say is more engaging to play? Which would I say has better level design? Ueda's. So....there you go.

So because of that dogged focus on Scorn's setting, yes, it falls off in other areas. It feels sort of unfinished, and leaves you wanting more, especially with how it ends. It was ballsy to go for that ending, that's for sure. But part of the reason it leaves you wanting more is because there are so many good ideas and fascinating creatures & devices (sometimes - okay, OFTEN both in one) that you feel like the devs must have had more ideas there. They did, according to the artbook. The combat is...interesting, I get why they wanted to include flesh weapons, but it's not exactly fun, especially when my PS5 version spammed me with errors on death, then corrupted and deleted my save and made me start over. That was the most horrific part of my Scorn experience.

But, like with Ueda's games, I'm very willing to forgive a flawed game if it excels in some areas. So willing to forgive that I'd much rather talk about where it excels than where it's flawed.
Scorn, like The Last Guardian, was victim of the hype cycle, and it doesn't help that the game is fairly short - people are NOT kind to short games. But don't let those bad vibes keep you from playing it, if you're someone who likes HR Giger's art, or the films of David Cronenberg and Clive Barker. Scorn has such sights to show you.

An interesting concept with, unfortunately, a largely fumbled execution. Games made previously to this one, such as Her Story, understood that you do not want to ask players to type in full sentences to view clips in this style of game, and even though this game has some measures in place to make it so you don't need to do that as much (single words often do work, and the game provides many of the questions for you to pick from), the amount you DO still need to type full questions, especially if you want to hear everything possible, still makes the game quite tedious.

Even if the devs were thinking "Her Story can do its thing, WE actually DO want players to type in full questions"...Well, I have some bad news for you, it's just not very fun, especially with a controller.

The actors are good and the story actually comes off as very interesting for much of the game's fairly long runtime, but it seems to lead to no real resolution. So many things seem like they kind of get to a boiling point and then...almost nothing. Someone kills you too, at least in the ending I got. But who and why? I tried to help all of them. What about Dekker? Everyone seemed to think he was still alive and feeding some creature. Then you find the murderer (I guessed correctly the first time, yay!), and all that just goes away. Alderby and Jaya are the real culprits, or something, but what are they trying to do?

I wonder how the game changes depending on who the murderer is. In my game, the murderer was unwilling, was hypnotized to do it. Is the only thing that changes who was hypnotized, or does the method change too? I certainly hope so.

It's an interesting concept but I came away from it thinking that these characters' stories might be better presented as a movie or some other type of content, and I'm sorry to the devs for saying that because I'm sure that'd be just about the last thing they'd want to hear.