Huge decline in overall quality. Completely lacking in what makes the main game good. It's much more boring aesthetically, the only new gameplay feature doesn't feel like a real new power that could be useful everywhere and is only used in the one new area, and even the story is boring. The idea of Jesse growing a bit of an ego after taking control of the bureau and trying to do everything herself and that backfiring is perfectly fine but it's executed so sloppily. Jesse feels like a bumbling idiot in this. Jesse really be like "hmmmmst who do I trust, this weird entity that has been helping me the entire time or this other weird entity who has literally tried to kill me in the past, I just cannot decide". Not that there actually is a real decision to be made since the game ends with both sides still being in tact regardless. Even the Board becomes massively less interesting once Jesse starts directly talking to it and being like all cocky to it, just let it be a cool cosmic space entity I really hate that they felt they had to give it more character or something, you don't even learn anything interesting about it so I really don't get it. I would've given it an even lower score but it still plays like Control which is good and it has a good boss fight at the end.

I would've really liked it if it wasn't for some huge issues. Let's go over them.

1. The game's checkpoints are not great. I had to refight the Ornstein and Smogh ripoff boss fight three times since I died almost insantly after defeating them because at that point any water will drain your health at a ridiculous rate and you die within seconds. The devs could have made the game autosave after beating a boss or even do a Dark Souls 3 and put a checkpoint in the boss arena but nope. The checkpoint system itself is kinda stupid too: so like in Dark Souls, checkpoints fully heal you and restore all your healing items but unlike Dark Souls using checkpoints comes at no cost which is to say enemies don't get revived. That means there's no reason not to walk back to the last checkpoint after every encounter which robs the game of a lof of challenge which it could've used.

2. The bosses kinda suck. The previously mentioned Ornstein and Smough boss is the best one in the game as its structure makes it so you can't just circle strafe around them like for most other bosses. The other exception to this rule is the final boss which is by far the worst one in the game. He has this really fun machine gun move where for like legit 30 seconds he'll non stop fire homing projectiles. The only strat to avoid damage here is to hide behind one of the pillars in the boss arena. All his other moves are super unnoteworthy except for one move where he'll suddenly throw a barage of fire balls at you. This move has next to no wind-up and can deal ridiculous damage, I remember dying to it with more than four full health bars. The other bosses are fine overall and some are even good but yeah for pretty much all of them if you just keep strafing around them they can't do shit.

3. The metro area. This one fucking area made me dislike the entire game so much more. And it was so close to being good too - the atmosphere is amazing. It's the darkest area in the game and the only one where the map doesn't show you anything. Combine that with some real spooky enemy designs and you got some real strong vibes, ruined by the game's lighting. So like some other games like Hollow Knight at one point you can get a little lantern as a light source. The problem is that lantern doesn't at all follow the player - it is its own entity that tries to follow the player but it really struggles doing so. Its path finding is really not great so it'll constantly get stuck around corners and stuff leaving you in complete darkness. The light it casts is also just not very strong which defo enhances said atmosphere but my god does it make traversing this area tedious. You can take like five steps before you gotta wait for your little light source buddy to catch up which a lot of the time it fails to do, I really don't get how they tested this shit out and didn't think to change it for the final game. Oh yeah and about the strong atmosphere? Ruined by meme drawings on the wall. The dev let people on Twitter submit random artwork to plaster on the walls of this area, the idea being it's supposed to be like grafitti. It is kinda cool just for the novelty of it but also because it like tells you something about the world, like that there used to be people in the past who drew random shit on the walls and that's cool but like, being in this spooky ass area and suddenly seeing popular yugioh meme Ojama Lime on the wall instantly broke any sense of tension. I really would've preferred these grafitti things to be included in any other area instead.

I really wish I could've enjoyed this thing more and at times I really got into it, like it's made in the Doom engine so already it's a lot of fun play and the level design can be really strong and it has a good sense of exploration as you'd hope for a game like this to have but yeah, it sadly has too many issues for me to really be able to recommend it.