izigame.me

Nope, a swing and a miss again. I was actually thinking about maybe, just maybe, giving this an ever so slightly positive review but a crucial bug was the final nail in the coffin, more about that later. Anyways let me get into the nitty gritty of it all.
It actually starts nice enough, the concept of how the zombies come to be in this one is slightly unique compared to other games but they couldn't even implement that very basic setup unfortunately. In summary the cause of the "outbreak" this time isn't actually a virus but rather these electrical anomalies (orbs) caused by this ancient and otherwordly source, that supposedly bring corpses to life in a zombified state and even if you kill one zombie, an orb can come out and go "infect" other corpses, so you have to -in a way- double kill every enemy you face. With levels filled with corpses at every turn, I thought this mechanic would make every room or corridor I enter a death trap if I wasn't careful enough or couldn't deal with an orb in time. However, that only happens a handful of times and usually zombies just spawn in when there is a scripted event so that entire gameplay concept goes out of the window very quickly. In short, they couldn't even deliver the basic premise they themselves had set up...
There is another fresh addition to the combat however, and that's the ability to freeze your enemies. I guess one of the dev team members played Dead Space, maybe even the entire series and thought it would be cool to add some sort of a Stasis mechanic into their game as well. The weapon (which is a backpack) looks fine enough visually albeit a bit too run-of-the-mill sci-fi but that's where the positives end because when it comes to its gameplay capabilities it's like everything else in the game: clunky and a pain to use. On the off chance you get to completely freeze enemies and either exploding them with a one punch finisher or using a weapon instead to quickly rid them of their head is nice but that's about it. Since enemies are so unbalanced, you barely get to use it effectively. How can you use it against enemies that teleport around however is a mystery to me, different firing methods you unlock barely make a difference too. I can only guess the dev member/members must love Dead Space 3 because getting swarmed by unfathomably fast enemies despite being able to slow them down, very much reminded me of my time with that game, the bad seed of that franchise.
Talking about the overall gameplay and enemies remind me how they learned basically a metric ton of nothing from the first game in terms of designing bosses and basic zombies by the way. All every single enemy but one does is to run at you with reckless abandon, doesn't even matter if they've seen you beforhand or not and the one enemy that doesn't do that can teleport around at will... How fun. Gotta give 'em this though; there is some kind of enemy variety here. If all they did wasn't simply charging at you or annoyingly teleport around, with very wooden animations that make you miss your shots that is, overall combat might've felt somehow bearable but alas. Oh and the main character definitely doesn't help this situation in the slightest; every single thing you do from firing your shotgun to simply switching weapons take almost an entire year and considering how an enemy can run and grab you, locking you in a QTE in a matter of seconds, makes it all the more apparent how unbalanced and poorly designed the combat is. But I guess everything has to be unresponsive and clunky because of le oldschool aesthetics.
Actually, that's the only time I can use that word to describe anything about this game, since the environments look dull and devoid of character or detail, zombies scream "asset store" and lack visual variety, weapons are boring apart from the freezing backpack and characters are not memorable at all. At least in the first game they did their best to copy I mean replicate Resident Evil's 90s metropolis style, adding ample details to achieve that and zombies, although having no other gameplay characteristics to their name, at the very least had different clothing so there is no excuse for the lack of details in this one, hell-- It even baffles me how they took a step back from that.
Visuals aren't the only thing that's dull about the game either as level design doesn't stray too far from that as well. It's either corridors or big rooms when you need to find a handful of enemies. Having replayed Resident Evil 2 remake only a couple weeks ago, it was all the more apparent. Compared to the first one I can hardly call this a survival-horror anyways but it wouldn't have hurt to have memorable or well designed levels regardless. I can hardly forget the RPD or the NEST in RE2 remake but can't remember a single level in detail from this one even if you put a gun to my head.
I can actually talk more and more about tiny little details that bug me; from the weird running animation the main character has which makes her look like Marge krumping (her upper body moves way too much), perhaps the uneven voice acting with poorly stitched together lines that sometimes hardly match what's happening on the screen or maybe even the needlessly convoluted story which barely makes sense but I'm going to end my gripes on the one bug that sealed the deal on my opinion about the game, the very same one that made me talk less about the positive things the game has for its name.
Well, I wanted to 100% the game. Learned that I could unlock bonus infinite ammo variant of the wepons by getting an A rank, so quickly played through the game on Story difficulty and actually got one of the achievements I was going for but not the one I was actually going for. I thought I might've have messed up my saves but was fine since even with one of the infinite ammo weapons I though I'd be fine on Hardcore difficulty. Despite getting the actual achievement though, the Bonus section under Extras was completely missing for me. Which meant that I couldn't even get other Bonus stuff like the auto-hacking tool. The moment I realized that something iffy was going on, that I wasted around 3-4 hours of my time for absolutely nothing, was the moment I decided to vent through this review. So yeah, here we are.
That leaves me with only so much space (as I suspect I must be cutting it pretty close with the max character limit here) to praise the puzzles (they finally improved upon something after all!) and the soundtrack, although cranking up the music in that one cutscene to oblivion so I could barely hear the dialgoue wasn't all that great. Nevertheless, If you've somehow made it this far I assure you beating this game was a greater chore but thanks for reading. Get it for pennies or don't get it at all. I'll be sure to do the same for Invader Studios' next game just out of morbid curiosity.