It's unfortunate that 95% of the discourse about this game is dominated by people who either dropped the game two hours in, or are parroting the opinions of people who dropped the game two hours in, because nobody is talking about the ACTUAL worst parts of the game.
So the opening is bad and goes on for too long before you get anything more than just a melee weapon, then once I got all my gear I started to enjoy myself for a decent chunk, then the entire back half of the game is fucking dog shit.
You get five weapons in total, the first is a powerful pistol, the second is a pistol-shotgun, then a real shotgun, then a bad pistol, and then a bad burst-fire assault rifle. So of your five weapons, three of them are good, and and even then two of those three are basically the same thing. And of these weapons, only your first pistol and the real shotgun are unmissable- the other three require you to pick up a schematic that you can miss, and if you end up doing so then tough shit, you don't have that weapon. And yeah I think 2 of the 3 weapons you need a schematic for are bad, but it takes so long for you to get new shit in and there's so little you get overall that it feels like you're constantly starving for the game to give you anything new.
While on the subject of equipment, aside from the five guns, you have your melee weapon and kinesis that can also be upgraded. You cannot upgrade your health. You only get one suit in this game at around the halfway point, and this is the only time you get increased health and inventory space. Yet despite the fact that you essentially have a fixed amount of health at all points in the game, the amount of damage enemies can do feels shockingly unbalanced. So you constantly feel like you need to upgrade your health, but you never have the ability to do so, and you only get one health boost in the entire game.
Yes, the melee combat is not good. I think people are exacerbating and/or misrepresenting some of its problems (see my opening comments regarding the discourse surrounding this game) on top of just overthinking it and/or not understanding the tutorial, but it's such a bizarre system and I don't know why they didn't just make something more... normal?
There are 8 chapters in total (unless I'm dumb and miscounted), and at the end of chapter 5 the game introduces the first boss, which it then proceeds to make you fight three more times in the remaining chapters. This boss essentially only has two attacks, a left punch and a right punch, but if you get hit by either of them it's an instant kill. And you're always forced to fight this boss in very tight quarters in a game where everything from movement to swapping weapons feels comically slow. There's one point where you need to get an item in another room, and you can see this item through a window, at which point there's nothing else in the room, but as soon as you walk in the door locks behind you and this boss just pops into existence directly in front of the item, and simply picking up the item and running isn't an option- every time the game makes you fight this boss you have to kill it, despite the fact that it can be a huge ammo sink before you understand exactly how you're supposed to fight it.
It should be noted that when I say "first boss," the only other boss in the game is the final boss (which I think is slightly less frustrating but still not good), and since the game waited until over halfway through to introduce this boss it makes me confused as to why they even bothered at all.
The chapter that ends with you fighting this boss is almost entirely filled with one single enemy type. This enemy is blind and can only find you based on sound, and because you (theoretically) don't have to worry about being rushed down by a ton of enemies at once, the game just constantly puts 5 in a room with you, so even with them being blind you still have to play pretty carefully, because having to fight one while the others are still active will just attract everyone to you and at that point you don't really have a way to get back into hiding. This all ends up making this the most tedious chapter in the entire game (which is saying a lot, because many individual segments in this game feel like they're way longer than they should be), and the rest of the game isn't really much better, if at all.
There are also lots of little places here and there where taking damage is practically unavoidable? Sometimes when you open a chest or a locker a tiny enemy will jump out at you and latch onto your neck and you have to do a QTE to get rid of it. You can technically use kinesis or a gun on these before they jump on you, but to do so you pretty much HAVE to know it's coming, and if you know it's coming you don't have any reason to open that container/locker in the first place, because there's never anything else in those containers aside from the tiny enemies.
The save/checkpoint system is incredibly fucking inconsistent, to say the least. Manual saves won't always actually save the things you've done since the last autosave, sometimes when a checkpoint reloads after you die, items in the environment will still be where they should be, but then if you die again they just won't be there anymore and you can't get them at all (this happened to me multiple times). I've never seen a game where the save/checkpoint system just didn't fucking work, and it's honestly inexcusable. This is just another of many reasons (incredibly poor PC performance, subtitles that only show up half the time and don't always match up exactly with what's being said, etc) that the game needed more time in the oven before shipping.
The story sure is there. It's one of those stories where you can't even go "ha, called it," because unless this is the first piece of media you're experiencing in your entire life, every element that's introduced just makes you go "ah so this other thing is what's really happening," and you get confused when the game acts as though you aren't supposed to have figured these things out. Granted, in a game like this, the story doesn't need to do much more than act as an excuse for the game to happen and for there to be some setpieces here and there, but it feels like it doesn't even reach that level, and the gameplay being plagued with so many problems certainly doesn't help.
Overall there were just so, so many baffling design decisions made during development. There is no way testers played this game (ESPECIALLY the back half) and said anything but "what the fuck are you doing."
In the words of AVGN, "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!"
So the opening is bad and goes on for too long before you get anything more than just a melee weapon, then once I got all my gear I started to enjoy myself for a decent chunk, then the entire back half of the game is fucking dog shit.
You get five weapons in total, the first is a powerful pistol, the second is a pistol-shotgun, then a real shotgun, then a bad pistol, and then a bad burst-fire assault rifle. So of your five weapons, three of them are good, and and even then two of those three are basically the same thing. And of these weapons, only your first pistol and the real shotgun are unmissable- the other three require you to pick up a schematic that you can miss, and if you end up doing so then tough shit, you don't have that weapon. And yeah I think 2 of the 3 weapons you need a schematic for are bad, but it takes so long for you to get new shit in and there's so little you get overall that it feels like you're constantly starving for the game to give you anything new.
While on the subject of equipment, aside from the five guns, you have your melee weapon and kinesis that can also be upgraded. You cannot upgrade your health. You only get one suit in this game at around the halfway point, and this is the only time you get increased health and inventory space. Yet despite the fact that you essentially have a fixed amount of health at all points in the game, the amount of damage enemies can do feels shockingly unbalanced. So you constantly feel like you need to upgrade your health, but you never have the ability to do so, and you only get one health boost in the entire game.
Yes, the melee combat is not good. I think people are exacerbating and/or misrepresenting some of its problems (see my opening comments regarding the discourse surrounding this game) on top of just overthinking it and/or not understanding the tutorial, but it's such a bizarre system and I don't know why they didn't just make something more... normal?
There are 8 chapters in total (unless I'm dumb and miscounted), and at the end of chapter 5 the game introduces the first boss, which it then proceeds to make you fight three more times in the remaining chapters. This boss essentially only has two attacks, a left punch and a right punch, but if you get hit by either of them it's an instant kill. And you're always forced to fight this boss in very tight quarters in a game where everything from movement to swapping weapons feels comically slow. There's one point where you need to get an item in another room, and you can see this item through a window, at which point there's nothing else in the room, but as soon as you walk in the door locks behind you and this boss just pops into existence directly in front of the item, and simply picking up the item and running isn't an option- every time the game makes you fight this boss you have to kill it, despite the fact that it can be a huge ammo sink before you understand exactly how you're supposed to fight it.
It should be noted that when I say "first boss," the only other boss in the game is the final boss (which I think is slightly less frustrating but still not good), and since the game waited until over halfway through to introduce this boss it makes me confused as to why they even bothered at all.
The chapter that ends with you fighting this boss is almost entirely filled with one single enemy type. This enemy is blind and can only find you based on sound, and because you (theoretically) don't have to worry about being rushed down by a ton of enemies at once, the game just constantly puts 5 in a room with you, so even with them being blind you still have to play pretty carefully, because having to fight one while the others are still active will just attract everyone to you and at that point you don't really have a way to get back into hiding. This all ends up making this the most tedious chapter in the entire game (which is saying a lot, because many individual segments in this game feel like they're way longer than they should be), and the rest of the game isn't really much better, if at all.
There are also lots of little places here and there where taking damage is practically unavoidable? Sometimes when you open a chest or a locker a tiny enemy will jump out at you and latch onto your neck and you have to do a QTE to get rid of it. You can technically use kinesis or a gun on these before they jump on you, but to do so you pretty much HAVE to know it's coming, and if you know it's coming you don't have any reason to open that container/locker in the first place, because there's never anything else in those containers aside from the tiny enemies.
The save/checkpoint system is incredibly fucking inconsistent, to say the least. Manual saves won't always actually save the things you've done since the last autosave, sometimes when a checkpoint reloads after you die, items in the environment will still be where they should be, but then if you die again they just won't be there anymore and you can't get them at all (this happened to me multiple times). I've never seen a game where the save/checkpoint system just didn't fucking work, and it's honestly inexcusable. This is just another of many reasons (incredibly poor PC performance, subtitles that only show up half the time and don't always match up exactly with what's being said, etc) that the game needed more time in the oven before shipping.
The story sure is there. It's one of those stories where you can't even go "ha, called it," because unless this is the first piece of media you're experiencing in your entire life, every element that's introduced just makes you go "ah so this other thing is what's really happening," and you get confused when the game acts as though you aren't supposed to have figured these things out. Granted, in a game like this, the story doesn't need to do much more than act as an excuse for the game to happen and for there to be some setpieces here and there, but it feels like it doesn't even reach that level, and the gameplay being plagued with so many problems certainly doesn't help.
Overall there were just so, so many baffling design decisions made during development. There is no way testers played this game (ESPECIALLY the back half) and said anything but "what the fuck are you doing."
In the words of AVGN, "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!"