After stopping my car at the 15th big door I need to go find a button to open and then oh no it's unpowered we gotta do a light electricity puzzle to get that working and drive onto the next big industrial door I realized this is actually one of the games most directly pulling from HL2-era Valve level design. I live for that shit. Between that and all the things I recognized and desperately wanted to know more about having played Control first, I spent the whole game Leo pointing at the screen.
Really great and bold especially for its time, but really should've been much more of an adventure game with a bit of puzzling and combat sprinkled in than the full-on third person shooter it often feels the need to be. Whether you see that as console action games reaching higher in terms of storytelling than was typically done or as a 3D adventure with combat stapled on to appeal to a mass market is on you, I suppose. That focus also lead to de-emphasizing their beautiful yet mundane rural setting that draws me to this the most. My favorite moments were those spent looking around in the kid's section of a library or national park vistor's center, not popping a thousand not-zombies.
Really great and bold especially for its time, but really should've been much more of an adventure game with a bit of puzzling and combat sprinkled in than the full-on third person shooter it often feels the need to be. Whether you see that as console action games reaching higher in terms of storytelling than was typically done or as a 3D adventure with combat stapled on to appeal to a mass market is on you, I suppose. That focus also lead to de-emphasizing their beautiful yet mundane rural setting that draws me to this the most. My favorite moments were those spent looking around in the kid's section of a library or national park vistor's center, not popping a thousand not-zombies.