JohnCoffey wrote:
I could cry.
I so badly want to like this but two hours in and I am still being controlled. Honestly two hours of training? how much time will I actually get gaming without being told what to do and punished if I don't do it exactly as I am told and then have to repeatedly do it ten more times learning where the enemies are?
Two hours on the training? What in God's name are you doing? Half an hour tops to blast through it all surely.
I played through all the actual missions it offered last night and I award it a 'meh' out of ten. On the surface of it it's the same art style as the original (which is one of the prettiest games ever made) but I agree with everyone else that something about it's just not as 'clean', though I'm struggling to put my finger on exactly what's different.
The combat sections are more fun than before and they've obviously put some work in there but they're still scrappy and a bit silly given that you sort of need to back off and take a run at an enemy to get a good hit in. The circle strafe is a nice feature though and that worked well. Any combat involving guys with guns though is instantly stupid because you don't have anything to counteract their weapons so it's just a case of taking as few hits as possible while closing the gap to slap them around.
Conceptually an open world seems to fit the idea of the game really well but in practise this just meant running back and forth over really samey sections of the city over and over again. Maybe the full game will introduce more variety but I'm not convinced, I think this is the kind of thing that really needs actual properly designed levels rather than just a sandbox to dick around in. God knows I was pretty bored of what was there by the time I was finished and the fact that the red leading line kept crapping out entirely wasn't helping. In fact, did anyone else get that? It would just say 'runner vision is offline'? Sometimes it would reconnect automatically and sometimes I would need to hold a button to reconnect it. I mean, what is that? Is it some odd gameplay conceit or does it genuinely require a connection to maintain that feature? The latter idea is ludicrous but it was never explained either way.
What else? Every single one of the characters is a massive prick in their own way and the plot is so obviously going to be the worst kind of nonsense. I was thoroughly expecting that from the original though so ended up taking some enjoyment from how bad it was, like watching a B movie on purpose.
Overall a lot of the ingredients are there, but it just never seems to gel into a massively fun experience. I'll probably play the full game at some point but on current form it's certainly not sitting at the top of my 'want' list or anything.