I gave this shit like 8 hours of my time and I just can’t finish it, and I legitimately feel bad for saying it because I did want to like this game it sounded cool and when I saw it on PS plus I was very interested but it’s just so bad man.
The combat is fine, the enemies are really bullet spongy and don’t have the satisfying feeling that a lot of shooters, I noticed that the description mentioned that the director worked on COD and I feel like that’s a bad comparison because COD despite all its flaws feels viscerally fun in a turn your brain off way that this game really lacks. There are also a lot of little annoyances that make the combat not as fun to engage with, I think the “having three colors of magic to shoot with enemies color coded to each one as a weakness” is fine but having the switch between these be just pressing triangle leads to plenty of situations where you need to get to a certain color fast and you just have to wait the second animation between switching colors twice. I know stuff like that sounds really trivial but when 80% of the game is fighting dudes little things can become big concerns especially when playing on hard mode which I was for most of what I played. The flow of combat is really bad in this game and it makes me really appreciate how well something like the newer DOOM games managed to do the fast paced movement and shooting of which this game seems to be leaning into more rather than a shower paced cover shooter like COD.
In terms of looks it’s fine, from a technical perspective it’s great it looks like a AAA game but the actual art direction isn’t really my thing. I can imagine someone who like more futuristic fantasy liking it more than me but it felt really bland to me. The game is very visually cluttered, you always have a visa or HUD watch mostly unnecessary information, along with dipshit generic white guys arms always in view which means that maybe a good 30% of vision when in gameplay is not the actual world. In combat it can sometimes feel very cluttered and hard to tell when’s going on with constant explosions and colored orbs flying everywhere. The actual character designs were fine they all looked different and showed their personalities pretty well, however the mocap was very interesting, the look on the body was fine but I think the have a similar problem to Supermassive games in the face mocap where things don’t looked rigged right around the mouth along with the general dead fish look a lot of mocap has. Just as a last word on the visuals I do find it funny how they the supporting cast is pretty diverse which is cool but the main character: the guy on the box, is the whitest man which kind of segways into the story section.
The story and characters are fucking… flaccid I guess. They just feel very by the books, I felt like I could guess the words the characters were going to say before they said at points it was that predictable. The dialogue is very Whedoneske which feels a bit overdone as well, at times I felt like I was watching a C tier MCU movie and that just isn’t what I want in a story. For a rated M game if I’m not mistaken it really feels that the story would only really appeal to a child or someone who is fine with getting the same story in everything ever. I may be wrong because I only experienced half of it maybe it takes a crazy U turn into being good halfway through but I wouldn’t expect anything more than a crash
I think that covers about every base, or all of the ones I actually cared enough to actually engage with, I’m not someone who get really excited at RPG mechanics and the ones in this game seemed fine but I just kind of just upgraded very occasionally so I’m not an authority and apparently the levels have some Metroidvania elements with stuff to be found while coming back through old areas with new powers but to be frank levels as linear as this are not the type that I think would benefit from cool little nicknacks to find if you go through a level again. I’m usually pretty fair with scoring and a 1/10 might be a bit low for this game but I was so miserable throughout every second of this game in a way I am all to familiar with when it comes to media out of gaming but with this game even more than DMC 2 or Metroid other M both of which I rated a whopping 2/10 I feel the misery of a properly bad work but hey that might just be a me thing. I gave 8 hours of my life to this game and essentially all of it was with a frown on my face and also in my soul so I don’t like it and I don’t get why this game doesn’t have a FOV slider like come on guys-