izigame.me

I have been more than patient with this game. Truly I have, and I've given it every benefit of the doubt I had since day 1. I bought this game when it released, pre-ordered it even. To say I was looking forward to this is truly an understatement. A game made by the guys who made dead space? My personal favorite horror game series so far? Sign me up. Well here we are 2 months later, and I've finally stepped back into this game only to be let down, again. Where do I start?
The Good: I truly believe this is one of the most gorgeous looking games to date, and I genuinely enjoyed most of my first time walking through Black Iron Prison. The acting was also impressive! I liked Jacob a lot (even though he's always sweaty. Why is he so sweaty? Eh, still the best looking sweat I've seen on a character in a game so I'll let it slide.) and most of the side cast too even if the actual story set pieces became very cliche and obvious. I won't post spoilers, but nothing amazed me too much story wise. And the weapons, even though the combat itself was different, to say the least, were mostly very solid. MVP goes out to the Stun Baton, wouldn't think it looking at it, but it put in the work from start to finish. Also the GRP (the Grip, haha, so clever.) was fantastic, even though it was basically Dead Space's kinesis on a cooldown/battery operated device which left me more vulnerable than when I watched The Mist (you know exactly which part too, the last few minutes of that movie, ugh. That was hard on us.) I also thought the premise of the game was very cool, and the first few hours were actually incredibly intriguing and left me wanting for more. Wanting for something I'd never get.
The Bad: I hate plagiarizing others. I don't wanna be that guy. But I have read and heard from many sources how the combat is just... well it's basically Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. And I can't un-hear that because it is incredibly like Punch-Out. The only difference is the setting, obviously. But dare I say it... I'd be more scary to fight Mike Tyson than anything in this game. I'm sorry. Maybe I'm just desensitized? From years and years of scary games and movies? Or maybe my expectations were just too dang high. But this game didn't scare me. I had one jump. One actual jump this entire game, (spoiler?) I was walking down an hallway, near the final few chapters, stopped to get a drink, and a hologram popped out to talk and startled me. That's it. Everything else, I knew what to expect. My girlfriend was honestly getting mad at me because I kept calling things that were about to happen. I just knew. I've been through this experience before, but I've experienced it better. And I hate to keep bringing Dead Space up in this, a game which "isn't," but it wears it inspiration on it's sleeves. Hell, it wears it on it's back, on it's hat, it's walking around with a sign practically screaming "HEY CHECK IT, WE'RE LIKE DEAD SPACE BUT WE'RE NOT SO COME ON OVER!" I realize this was the first game from this new company working with a new publisher which has veteran developers from their magnum opus coming over, but this was just so copy and paste. (And before you ask, we did play the DS remake, and it was an absolute blast, I highly recommend you buy that game over this one for this price.) I wanted to see something else, what we could do with today's technology. Instead I got a watered down version of a game from 2008 that attacked my computer more than running too many Skyrim mods. Also, the gun gameplay just plain sucked. I don't know how else to describe it but it just wasn't satisfying. You could ADS, but you were far more rewarded for beating the absolute shit out of monsters with your stun bat to unlock a 'target' to which Jacob will just all of a sudden go full Sam Fisher, snap his gun to the monster, and shoot said target, dealing what? 3 times the damage in stead of just aiming and shooting? Ridiculous. Funny, surprisingly effective, but would I expect that from this guy in this game's context and narrative? Hell no. Also, 2 of the guns you could unlock were just not worth it, at all. You'd be better off skipping them. Why? Because you don't get ammo for guns you don't have. And the inventory management of this game is one of the dumbest ones yet. And you can't just unlock more, which is obvious that you'll do, until the halfway point when you armor up, but you can't even improve your armor or inventory spaces at all after this point. I hate that!
The Ugly: This game is very unkind to any hardware that isn't "new" or up to the crazy standards that are starting to go into effect. Don't have an Nvidia 4090? Or that Ryzen Threadripper? Oh that sucks. Oh what's that? You do? Eh. Still sucks because this game operates willy nilly. Sometimes it ran fine. Other times it was just a fight to keep it from crashing. This is a standard experience I've come to accept with over half of today's games, but I hate it nonetheless. And from a complete opinion, one that is homely mine that I've developed over many many years, this game was just a disappointment. And I've had some bad disappointments in the past few years. Borderlands 3 (before DLC and updates), Cyberpunk 2077 (day one guy again) Hell I played Anthem. Remember that? And this game sit right up there with these guys and more.
The reason I'm writing this review so late, is because after everything that's come out that we wanted to play, Dead Space remake, Hogwarts Legacy, Modern Warfare 2, I put this game on the back-burner waiting for New Game+ to drop. We planned to make a fun time out of this, just for me to boot up and find out I lost my save points. And I never uninstalled this game. But it deleted my original run and every autosave I ever had. The only save I had available was a manual save from the beginning of my second playthrough. Not even an option to start New Game+, and no way to recover what's missing. And that was the final burn I needed to light the fire in me and write this review.
To summarize, the game is quite fantastic to look at. And though it's combat is questionable, it's weapons and environment were enough to keep me lurking through it's corridors until the very end. But a predictable story, bizarre gameplay choices, difficult accessibility options for hardware, and a never ending comparison to the dead space franchise from days long ago, have led me to be genuinely upset with this game and pragmatic about the future games I can expect from these developers. If I had to give this game a rating I'd say it's a very solid 6/10, but for the same price, you can buy the new dead space remake, which is a far better experience, OR all 3 of the original games (I liked dead space 3 waaaay more than this game and that's easily my least favorite out of all 3, which are games I've played on 360 and ps3 at least 20 times through on each game.) I have no idea what dlc is in store for this game, if it's even still in development but at this point I want nothing to do with it.