izigame.me

Love:
- Sound design, physics and visuals are very good and will likely age well over the next 5-8 years.
- The combat is a blast. All of the weapons are useful and feel impactful. Gun models and animations are detailed, it's obvious the animators and designers for the assets worked really hard on this aspect of the game. Your shots hit hard and send bodies flying, headshots on human type enemies give a satisfying cloud of blood and big monsters recoil in pain when you hit them with a well placed shot or burst of strong ammunition. The best part of the combat system are the fully modular weapons which you have to scrounge for parts to improve. It leads to many viable playstyles that allows you to mix-n-match on the go without the need for overly complex RPG style "perks" or "skills" system which I'm glad they didn't try to cram into this game. All of the gun designs are phenomenal and have their own identity and lend themselves to a variety of playstyles the player can utilize. One of my favorite aspects of the weapon system is the Tikhar. Not only is the concept around it a unique idea it serves as an economical, low damage "side arm" type weapon that would normally fill the role of a small pistol in other FPS titles. My only issue is that the movement is a bit too "floaty" which makes gameplay pretty fast-paced and "arcadey", a strange contrast to the atmosphere of the game.
- Difficulty is not based on flooding every level with enemies and making them become more of a bullet sponge. Instead, they become slightly more aware and deal more damage. when you die, you don't feel cheated. your deaths make sense, you were caught off guard or bursted by an enemy you didn't spot or flanked by an enemy that snuck up on you while you were engaging his buddies or ambushed by a swarm of monsters you didn't notice as you sprinted carelessly into a new area, things like that. Nearly every time I die I realize immediately what mistake I made and what to do next time.
- Resources are not bountiful, you feel a sense of scarcity that guides your gameplay. you feel persuaded to use weapons based on ammo available to you and you have to carefully manage your resources and adapt to your surroundings to survive. You have to make tough decisions to use your last bit of resources to craft meds, or to make a few more bullets because you're running low, but you never really feel like you're starved, you always seem to barely have enough to get by. Through this system the game silently urges you to explore as much as possible in order to stock up on loot, though you never become so overloaded on resources that you feel invincible, especially on harder difficulties. The game seems like it was throughly tested and went through a lot of balance passes and it shows.
- The game strikes a perfect balance between your typical curated "on-rails" single player experience where the story and progression of the game is entirely linear (a la Resident Evil) where you might feel too constrained and a vast "open world" experience (a la Grand Theft Auto or Skyrim) where the player is given far too much agency to do as they please which leaves the world feeling mostly empty. Each "level" is a very large area to explore, each with its own flavor. You don't feel boxed in but at the same time there isn't so much empty space that exploration is rewarding and immersive.
Hate:
- I never read the actual book but I really hope it's a lot more interesting than the story in this game. As a concept, the story should be quite interesting. Sadly, the delivery of said story falls flat in almost every way. The main character doesn't talk at all but makes really strange primal guttural grunts when you run around and get wounded. The only insight you get into the main character's personality are the voiceovers in the loading screen that simply gives you factual context as to what's going on in the game up to that point. The voice acting for every character in the game is atrocious, especially the main character's wife. She is ostensibly your loving partner in a cold dead world ravaged by nuclear warfare yet she treats you as little more than what you'd expect from a friendly work associate at a corporate office job. The characters are expressionless and dull. Every single "good guy" character has this weirdly optimistic bittersweet deadness in their voice that makes them all nearly indistinguishable, and all the "bad guy" characters have no depth or complexity to them at all, they're just crazy psychopaths hellbent on murdering and/or eating everyone. The cinematic character animations which serve as a pause between action to give the player a breather and to soak up some of the story are slow and stiff and lack any kind of human likeness, all of the characters are like weird robots.
- When you walk up to an NPC every single one of them talks on and on about nothing important and continues to talk even as you walk away from them, they just talk to themselves endlessly even if they directly address your character and are trying to talk to you, they don't react in any realistic way and none of the conversations in the game feel realistic because your character doesn't say ANYTHING back. Every bit of dialogue is just a one-sided conversation that goes on for ages and means hardly anything. I find it hard to care about literally anyone in the game, especially the main character. Since I hardly care about anything that I'm actually doing I will just generally kill anything that moves, so it's the gameplay that really carries this title and there's no shame in that. None of the side-story stuff is really that interesting, and it's almost always some scrap of paper you find sitting on a desk while you're in combat that gives little depth to what's going on around you up to that point. Besides, I'm not interested in stopping to read some piece of paper while I'm getting shot at. Sometimes there are audio tapes recorded by the same dead pan lifeless voices all the other characters have that are lying about in safe houses. You can turn them on and listen to it while you're at the workbench cleaning up your guns and making some modifications and crafting some ammo but I never stick around to listen to what they're saying so long as they aren't telling me where there's hidden loot or giving me ideas on what to do next. I just run away from them just like my "friend" on the Aurora telling me his life story again.
- I don't understand why they felt a need to put a stealth system into the game. Intuitively none of it makes sense with the relationship between relative light levels or sounds and the visual/line of sight aspect to detection. Clearly it was half baked in development and never got polished on release. I'm often in the open in a well lit area and my enemies are completely clueless and the indicator light on my watch is off. I feel like this system should be ONLY effective at night time in order to force the player to make more use of suppressed weapons and night vision/IR lasers and award the player with more resources for pulling it off. In order to be stealthy it's less about feeling like your character is moving in the shadows and assassinating people and more about learning how to cheese the clueless AI in to a state where you can quickly murder most of their buddies without them noticing and making them surrender their weapons (which is a cool idea by itself actually, I'll give them that). Often times I find myself doing some sneaking around because it seems like it would be fun and I find myself in a situation where it seems it would be advantageous - only for my immersion to inevitably be broken by bad AI and I give up and just go guns blazing, which is WAY more fun than trying to actually be sneaky.
In summary, overall game design is great, it's beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, gameplay is fantastic, story and immersion is average to downright poor.