If you watched the trailers for this game, you might be deterred from trying it out like I did. The idea of a traditional third person shooter gameplay-wise is appealing to me, as a fan of those kind of games that was so prevalent back in the PS3/360 era. As luck would have it, it's available on PS Plus Extra, and after finishing the game, I'm glad to say that there's a worthwhile albeit flawed game here.
The main star of the game for me is the presentation. The cell-shaded graphics looks appealing enough, and the comic book panel framings that the game does occasionally is quite well done, with smooth transitions and eye-pleasing camera angles. The voice acting and writing are also pretty decent, which is not what I expected. It goes to show that indie developers can achieve a lot with relatively little these days.
The story is about a man with noir-esque hard boiled qualities, mostly shown through his entertaining VO and dialogues, fighting for his life as insidious third parties take a shot at him for unknown reasons. It's engaging enough to pay attention to, especially with the stylish presentation, although it's nothing special.
The game plays mostly as a third person shooter. You mostly use your one and only technologically advanced pistol that you can upgrade as you earn XP by killing enemies and finding hidden XP cache. You also have abilities such as slamming an enemy down and a temporary shield, all of it needs to be unlocked by either XPs or getting to specific parts of the story. The upgrades for the gun include automatic high fire rate and armor piercing bullets. While they are certainly useful, the progression feels quite linear because there are not many upgrades, and in the later parts of the game it will feel like you have to install certain gun upgrades all the time in order to avoid having too much trouble. The abilites does provide more room for self-expression as you unlock more of them. They can provide the same effects to enemies as some of the gun upgrades, and thus freeing some room for other gun upgrades to be installed. There's also a overheat system where you can be temporarily stunned if you use too many abilities in a short time period, and this applies to your gun upgrades as well. This forces a bit more thought to the gameplay because you can't just pick and use the most useful upgrades/abilites all the time.
The gunplay encounters are okay, it's mostly just waves of enemies coming at you. The level design awkwardly supports cover-based gameplay (although the game doesn't have a cover system), with sparsely placed cover here and there. The enemy AI will be aggressive if you stay in one place, but the level design makes their path of approach very predictable since the levels are quite small in size. The enemy types is not too varied too. In a bigger game, these are potentially fatal problems, but since the game is so short (3 hours) and it doesn't only rely on combat, they never really snowballed to become an annoyance.
The stealth sections are mostly very loose. It reminds me of the stealth in Naughty Dog's first three Uncharted games, where it feels like stealth is not what the game is designed for, and yet you can still do them in certain situations. It does have a few dedicated sections where if you're seen even once you'll fail the game, and these sections are actually pretty fun.
The puzzles mostly involve you roaming around the map looking for specific objects to interact with using sonar radar-esque tool. It's nothing to write home about, it does its job to vary up the gameplay and nothing more.
Overall, Foreclosed is a enjoyable attempt at a story driven third person action adventure game. While there's nothing too special here, the short-and-sweet nature of the game makes for a decent one-sitting experience. It scratches a very specific itch as I describe at the very beginning, and if you care for that at all then it's worth a shot.
The main star of the game for me is the presentation. The cell-shaded graphics looks appealing enough, and the comic book panel framings that the game does occasionally is quite well done, with smooth transitions and eye-pleasing camera angles. The voice acting and writing are also pretty decent, which is not what I expected. It goes to show that indie developers can achieve a lot with relatively little these days.
The story is about a man with noir-esque hard boiled qualities, mostly shown through his entertaining VO and dialogues, fighting for his life as insidious third parties take a shot at him for unknown reasons. It's engaging enough to pay attention to, especially with the stylish presentation, although it's nothing special.
The game plays mostly as a third person shooter. You mostly use your one and only technologically advanced pistol that you can upgrade as you earn XP by killing enemies and finding hidden XP cache. You also have abilities such as slamming an enemy down and a temporary shield, all of it needs to be unlocked by either XPs or getting to specific parts of the story. The upgrades for the gun include automatic high fire rate and armor piercing bullets. While they are certainly useful, the progression feels quite linear because there are not many upgrades, and in the later parts of the game it will feel like you have to install certain gun upgrades all the time in order to avoid having too much trouble. The abilites does provide more room for self-expression as you unlock more of them. They can provide the same effects to enemies as some of the gun upgrades, and thus freeing some room for other gun upgrades to be installed. There's also a overheat system where you can be temporarily stunned if you use too many abilities in a short time period, and this applies to your gun upgrades as well. This forces a bit more thought to the gameplay because you can't just pick and use the most useful upgrades/abilites all the time.
The gunplay encounters are okay, it's mostly just waves of enemies coming at you. The level design awkwardly supports cover-based gameplay (although the game doesn't have a cover system), with sparsely placed cover here and there. The enemy AI will be aggressive if you stay in one place, but the level design makes their path of approach very predictable since the levels are quite small in size. The enemy types is not too varied too. In a bigger game, these are potentially fatal problems, but since the game is so short (3 hours) and it doesn't only rely on combat, they never really snowballed to become an annoyance.
The stealth sections are mostly very loose. It reminds me of the stealth in Naughty Dog's first three Uncharted games, where it feels like stealth is not what the game is designed for, and yet you can still do them in certain situations. It does have a few dedicated sections where if you're seen even once you'll fail the game, and these sections are actually pretty fun.
The puzzles mostly involve you roaming around the map looking for specific objects to interact with using sonar radar-esque tool. It's nothing to write home about, it does its job to vary up the gameplay and nothing more.
Overall, Foreclosed is a enjoyable attempt at a story driven third person action adventure game. While there's nothing too special here, the short-and-sweet nature of the game makes for a decent one-sitting experience. It scratches a very specific itch as I describe at the very beginning, and if you care for that at all then it's worth a shot.