So I finally got around to playing this around the weekend and so far, it has been a mixed bag of mixed feelings.
By the time I am writing this, my character is just above level 22 and I just finished the Ice Forest level.
I started out by creating a Defender class character named Defender (duh) because his real name is Baldur anyhow. Does the co-op mode display the name of your gamertag or your customized character name? Either way, it makes no sense. I like the Defender class because he does not get knocked over by the shockwaves, which apparently enough cause damage to Baldur whether he avoids them or not. I also went Cybernetic with this guy, though I honestly see no difference. Most everything in the skill tree beside the passive buffs and spider turret seems useless crap.
Running through the first level, I quickly collected the first Defender 6-part armor set, something named the Dragon or such. This stuff was level 8, but I found myself using it up to as high level 15. Since that, I have not seen any armor sets, just separate pieces of equipment strewn about. The Dragon armor was cool, but it almost broke the game in cutscenes: since the chest plate made Baldur look like a freaking walking sarcophagus, he was covering over 1/2 of the screen. The game tries to fight this with generous "face-to-camera-time," but frankly, not that good. So far I enjoy the narrative, even though there is some atrocious animation involved in the overall process that simply breaks whatever tension there is. The worst bits are the seemingly random character exchanges in the hub world. I managed to talk to Freya after the Ice Forest level, Baldur was saying serious stuff about how he killed somebody while freaking
stretching himself vigorously. Those two kind of did not mix, so I walked away from the lady. Instead of cutting out the dialogue immediately, the voices became muffled, as if Baldur had forgotten his vocal cords behind. The other weird stuff happened as I skipped a cut scene with the cyberspace witches and when returning to the campaign level, Baldur's face continued talking for about 10 seconds. I mean, come on: how does that kind of stuff get past QA these days?
The tension is built and maintained with the troops (who seem to have some kind of an advanced teleportation technology available to them - reappearing at special locations, which has taken Baldur just half an hour to reach, out of thin air) having short dialogue bits that play in the background, but these are at times mixed with each others. There are some, which play automatically at certain set pieces, and then there are some, which are random. Some are epic, father and son type punch lines, but some are humorous and when those two are combined, hilarity ensues (an example: Don't you die on me now; You cannot take him to Valhalla yet; I would like to be home with your wife as well). Also, the troopers cause zero damage on the enemies, even when they do keep firing at them for an hour or so.
The game play is moderately easy, but every now and then I run into those big spiders or multiple trolls who simply kill me. There is a real need for some kind of recovery medicine, because the health orbs are dropped quite rarely. And when I die, the Valkyrie drops down, melts with the floor and I reappear at some random check point just to continue where I left off killing the giant enemies. The ranged weapons targeting is balls, most of the time I manage to empty my clip at something completely irrelevant - something that made the boss battle at the end of the second level a real pain in the ass.
There doesn't seem to be a single good camera angle. I tried playing with the isometric and standard views, and even then, the camera acted like a caffeine addict baby, jumping around and at times focusing on stuff that made no sense. If they are going to patch something, start with the camera. The worst thing about the camera is that they haven't even gotten the art of maintaining the character direction during camera angle changes. This is something that was akin to old games like Ecstatica and was in my view perfected in Devil May Cry. The idea is simple: when the camera changes, the player's control scheme layout is kept until he chooses to let go of the sticks. However, here the character direction is tied to the camera, but the connection points, at which the direction changes, are all broken. I run in one direction, the camera swaps, and suddenly I am hugging the walls. The same applies for the targeting systems.
The list of technical mistakes for this game is too long, even for my taste. I really want to keep playing it, I want to see where the story ends up, but there are many deterrents to achieving that.
Some questions, if people are willing to answer:
- Why do the Valkyries have to wear lipstick?
- When will I start seeing new armor sets? After level 30?
- Can color scheme runes only be attached to socketed items?
- What the hell is going on with the equipment color schemes? Is this something like gray-blue-violet-orange-red?
- Will I get to fight the giant dog/wolf that is in one of the intro videos?
