Having just finished the game I really enjoyed it. I'll be starting my secoond playthrough on hard to wrap up the trophies later today but the following are my takeaways from my roughly 11 hour playthrough one
Positives
- Stunning art direction especially given the setting.
- Voice acting is great. Incredibly well done across the board. Right up there with the best I've heard in a game.
- Really enjoyed the story and it has me excited at the prospect of followup game
- Sound direction (OST, ambient noise, weapon feedback etc) are all incredibly well done. Hands down among the best I've heard in a game.
- Lighting and shading is way beyond anything I've ever seen in any other game. When inspecting flyers the ink and contours of said material reflect 100% realistically in realtime when manipulated by the player. The lighting is so good that I found myself gawking and screen caping even the most mundane of things (lantern on a barrel etc) because it blew my mind every single time. I have som 40 odd screenshots from my first playthrough uploaded t my twitter acct (@rexnovis for anyone who wants to look)
- Gunplay is excellent. The shotgun and the thermite rifle are both an absolute blast to use. Also the secondary fire on the falchion that stuns enemies with a blast of air was quit fun to use on advancing enemies.
- I really enjoyed the werewolf encounters. It managed to avoid the tendency in these games to make boss fights into bullet sponges and make them feel unique from all other encounters in the game. The half breed fights managed to capitalize on the speed and ferocity of the enemy instead of just being a big bad thing that you shoot until you die. The sort of guerrilla attack from all sides and angles aspect had me panicking to fire back. The Elder lycan fights were absolutely brutal. I do however think that they could relinquished a bit more control of the situation to the player, They still get a positive from me for not being a bullet sponge fight though.
Negatives
- Depth of Field sometimes causes sighted enemies to appear out of focus causing them to look blurry.
- Disorienting and seemingly unnecessary loss of camera/character control (descending/climbing ladders, intermittent short scenes that could have easily played out while maintaining control)
- Immersion breaking button prompts. Some of them really aren't necessary. After you establish the proper button or control element to use in a situation you really dont need to constantly remind the player. Why does it need to display a symbol over ever inspect-able item instead of just a slight glow or something? It immediately reminds you "oh yeah I'm playing a game"
- Some chapter breaks that make the story feel unnecessarily disjointed. These were especially puzzling because it just felt like the transitions were very sudden or jarring when providing just a smidge more context or a bit more content prior to the transition wouldve eliminated the problem.
- No gun draw control. Gun may only be drawn when combat scenario starts. This is more of a pet peeve of mine. I'm the sort that likes to shoot the environment to see how it reacts so anytime I couldnt draw my gun to shoot a vase or a painting the arbitrary limitation reminded me that I was playing a game and immediately removed me from whatever immersion I had at that point.
- Oddly reflective white areas on the eyes and lack of shaders on and around them in some heavily lighted scenes make them stick out like a sore thumb when everything else looks damn near real.
All that said I dig the game a lot. Gunplay is fun albeit hard as I tend to suck at TPSs in general but it's really the atmosphere and the story that steal the show for me. While the story is a bit predictable at parts there are some unexpected twists and the characters themselves make it for me. The use of discover-able items and sound logs to provide insight into certain characters is really well done. I specially liked the flyer where Tesla drew demon horns on Edison.
Overall the game is very indicative of inexperience thanks to some odd design decisions. But given that this is RADs first AAA title it's nothing that really surprised me. It's not likely to be anyone's Game of the Year but at the same time it's not by any means a bad game. I certainly don't think it's deserving of the reaming it's received in reviews especially since it's released with a rock solid Framerate and no glitches that I've seen or heard of outside of a friend reporting a solitary crash to system menu but that was while using the share function.
It's a shame when games that release stuffed to the gills with DLC and plans for countless more or patently broken games that don't work as advertised or intended receive stellar scores (9s and higher) while a solid contained game like this one is rated so dismally by so many. I guess maybe I just don't see eye to eye with most reviewers any more. We clearly have different priorities/desires when it comes to games. I really enjoyed the game. I'm looking forward to my second playthrough and am excited and hopeful whatever follow up RAD might have planned.
