izigame.me

Like other negative reviews stated, this is half a good game. First half is great, the environment design is spot on, the castle is a joy to explore for example, you have a choice of which playstyle you like more, the stealth elements I enjoyed very much, being able to silently take down enemies as an occasional alternative to a full head on assault sure is nice. The perk system with unlocking bonuses by completing challenges deserved some more love though, it's a good idea that keeps you engaged and invested in how you choose to approach disposing off enemies, but it begs a few redesigns, especially which challenges unlock which bonuses, and would benefit from better buffs for mid game+.
The second half however is terrible, it went bad so fast I just dropped it. I played on one difficulty below hardest, and the first half felt challenging at times, sometimes hard, but doable. The second half ramps up the difficulty, but in all the wrong ways. First signs of trouble begin with the mission where you're supposed to break out the resistance guys. First half of the mission feel like a half-assed attempt at a mandatory stealth mission, except not really, if you're spotted nothing really happens, but you only have ONE knife, and 0 throwing knives, and having almost maxxed out the stealth/knife perk tree at this point it was disappointing. The prison levels felt very lame, like for example there was this courtyard with passages and chainlinked fence which you can cut through, but a few meters further you can just walk through. There are turrets but they are randomly placed and easily avoided. But if the game was just slowly started circling the drain, the second half of this mission pushes the flush button all the way down. The moment you get a gun, you now have to go down a spiral stairway while constantly being shot at from lower levels. It is difficult to spot and aim in there, and the cover is slim to none, so you constantly lose health, and your only strategy is just camp shoot the creeps one by one, ducking prone between shots. This is also the point where the game starts throwing tankier enemies at you that ignore headshots and eat a shotgun clip point blank before going down, which is lame. Oh you don't like that? Tough luck, because there are only going to be more of them down the line. After that, every level is a boring but tedious arena shootout, where enemies just spawn around you, there is no good cover, and they spam you with grenades if you don't move constantly. Either that or a spiral/snake stairs, where you get shot from below/above, and feels like a chore. The sound design is also half-done, as it's impossible to use sound cues to tell the enemies location even if they're shooting at you! Also remember how I said that in the prison level it was difficult to aim? That was peanuts, the moon level colors and lighting make it impossible to parse the silhouettes, it all blends into a muddy darkish brown vomit.
One last thing, there are a few interactive cutscenes or level sections which I believe shouldn't be interactive at all. One crappy example is the evil frau Whats-her-name on the train. The fake choice is what pisses me off. It's essentially a "guess what the dev wants you to do" game. Every other choice is irrelevant or wrong, you die, and start again. What's the point? Why do I have to repeat the whole thing again? And this isn't the Skyrim cheap fake choice either, where the illusion of choice only costs the developer one extra voiceless text dialog choice, and one extra voiced npc reaction, this is an interactive cutscene, with custom scripting, voice lines and animations, why waste all this effort and budget for a non-choice that feels lame? And why instakill the player for that matter if you decide to grab the gun? Sure there's a huge robot in there, but couldn't you at least give the player the satisfaction of killing the bastards in front of view and go down fighting, instead of meekly slumping down like a sad sack of fertilizer?
So anyway, enjoy the first half, but you can drop it at or after the prison level, as it's only downhill from there.
Forgot to mention, this game is a huge pain in the ass to set up for comfortable PC gaming on a modern system. You only need to take one look at the length of its pcgamingwiki entry to see that you're in for a fun hour of tweaking and fixing stupid issues. Consolified up to its neck, bugged af, fps locked, all logic tied to fps so unlocking above 90 introduces more bugs, unskippable lengthy logos, its a technical disaster. And even after all the tweaking, it still somehow manages to bring fps down to single digits in certain firefights for a couple of seconds, which often end up with you dead.