Forgive Me Father Review (TxCForever)
If I was to review Forgive Me Father after the first three to four hours, it would've been a 10/10, an all time classic, a reference point to the boomer shooter sub-genre of games. The pace is great, the atmosphere is spot on, level design is top notch, shooting guns is extremely fun and satisfying, heck even using your knife feels great. Add to that the great looking visuals, straight out of a graphic novel, the amazing music (a bit intrusive at times, but still great), the leveling system that actively changes how your weapons work and look, and you have what seems to be a great package.
Unfortunately after the mid point, things start to kind of fall apart. First that starts faltering is the level design. I know it's part of the course in a Lovecraftian kind of story for things to slowly warp into something that barely resembles reality but still, the level design suffers because of that and moving around exploring looking for secrets stop being as rewarding or fun anymore. The floaty but still pretty accurate controls aren't as good when you fight tanky enemies (more on them next) on cliff edges or floating platforms in the sky and just a small tap of a direction key can throw you off to your death. In some instances you pull levers that you don't know what they are opening and you are left looking around for the exit, heck even worse in one occasion the exit opens up without seemingly doing anything to trigger it.
Also, and probably the worst thing that happens is that the game introduces enemies that not only are extremely annoying in both movement and attacking patterns, they are also extremely bullet spongy making a lot of the battles a chore. Unless we are talking about a mini-boss or a a major threat, no enemy should be able to take half the ammo of my super shotgun or four to five shots from my RPG and survive, especially on the normal difficulty level. Yet, as you get near the end, more and more enemies are like that and it really affects the fun you get from shooting stuff.
Don't get me wrong, Forgive Me Father is still for the most part a good game, great even. But it could've been an amazing one, a reference point for all boomer shooters in the future. With a few tweaks it could still be one of the best, maybe make the enemies less of bullet sponges and increase their numbers to keep the challenge high. That won't fix the mediocre level design of the later stages but it will still improve the flow by a lot. If it was annoying on the normal difficulty level, I don't even want to imagine how it will be on the highest one.
I still highly recommend it though.