Pfffft, it ain’t my first rodeo.
Turns out, again, it was a rather strange spike in difficulty and imagination on the part of the devs. After that, it’s easy street to the end.
So yeah, I finished it and suffice to say the ending kinda made me think more of the game than I would have done had it not been so interesting. Particularly the post-credits scene which I enjoyed but, thinking about it afterwards, could have gone horribly wrong...
ZOMG Spoiler! Click here to view!
It verges on the “it was all a dream” making the entire story pointless and presumably one angry player who has just wasted 27 hours of his life but it somehow manages to pull it off.
Actually the structure of the game is really well done. It starts off linear for about 10 hours and then balloons outward for about 10 hours as interesting side quests are dished out liberally as the world gets bigger before funnelling you back in towards an end game with multiple forks. I’m impressed with how this turned out.
And the world is well made and set out. I particularly liked the structure of the space ship and the dense rooms and corridors. I liked how you could open up an airlock and use the exterior as a form of fast travel as you zip up and down the length of this massive behemoth, albeit one with its own little nooks to explore.
And the voice actors need some credit too. Particular your brother whose in-game likeness and voice go together like tea and milk. His voice is absolutely spot on and it made certain choices in the game much more difficult because of the particular nuances of his smooth bassy voice. Love that guy.
It’s such a shame that the game has technical problems. The loading times are outrageous in 2018. They make you not want to explore, and they make the end-game quests a massive chore. As you go hurtling towards a conclusion the game routinely pause for minutes on end to take a breather. It should be running at 60FPS too.
And finally the moment to moment gameplay is, dare I say it, boring. The best thing I can say about the combat, stealth and the like is that it’s just about adequate. The monsters are visually boring, they act in a way which makes combat boring, and have no interesting varieties. In a game which clearly has a lot of imagination and creativity poured into every aspect of it - I can’t understand why the one thing you do the most is the least interesting.
I’d give it a solid 7/10.