... the worst game I have ever played. Yes, even worse than Alone in the Dark currently is.
It's not so much that the game is a bad concept or anything, it's just so horribly designed and flawed that it makes the game frustrating to the point of rage quitting.
The lack of a persistent mini-map is highly annoying. The slow "run" speed of your main character is especially annoying when you're left to cover large areas of land with no action. For some unknown reason, the developers wanted to toss multiple enemies on screen that shoot or lob unavoidable projectiles at you while you're trying to fight off another group of enemies. So you're either constantly knocked down and taking damage or you're slogging your way through, dieing, and taking out as many enemies as you can in a life before you respawn.
That's another thing, the respawn system in the game. You're never really in any risk of having to start a section over again. When you die, you have to sit through a sequence of a being coming down from the heavens to lift your body up and take it away. Afterwards, you respawn with full health a short distance back from where you had died. So if you get into a multiple death area (and already I'm in one of those), you have to sit through the same annoying, unskippable animation time and time again. Run back to where you died, and attempt to kill the rest of the creatures there. The only penalty there is, is the fact that your weapons and armor lose some durability and will need repaired later.
I've run into bugs (or really asinine game design) where my guns, any of them, refused to inflict any damage on enemies. And yes, those same enemies were dying quite rapidly to the same guns before. My character will randomly start to explode every second or two, taking damage. I see absolutely NO way to stop that from happening, so I just run around killing things until I die.
For some reason, the damage radius of one of the large mechanical, hammer wielding enemies extends BEYOND the graphical representation. It took me a while to figure out how I was getting damaged when I wasn't even at the outter rim of that visual radius. Oh, and it doesn't matter if you're jumping in the air when that hammer hits the ground, you'll still get hurt. Why, when in every other game previous to TH, does your character take damage from a ground attack while you are jumping in the air.
There's no visual indicator to show that there's some sort of spherical blast radius, just a 2D radius showing up on the ground. IE: Ground strike == GROUND STRIKE, not "strike everywhere when it's clearly showing to only inflict damage if you're on the ground."
The camera won't even be discussed much as there isn't much to discuss. There are no camera controls. The most you can possibly do with the camera is either hit LB to center the camera behind you (and this doesn't even work in every location), clicking in one of the sticks inexplicably sends the camera zooming in on your head and orbiting around it so long as you don't touch anything else, and there are times you can stand still and hold down a button in order to slightly move the camera around as if your character were looking. You can't move and do this. And for some reason, in the middle of the battle the camera (which again, you can't control) decided to shoot upwards and stare at the ceiling. This lasted for a few seconds while I was blindly trying to fend off enemies who were still attacking me.
On the plus side, the armor/weapon inventory system is very RPG/Mass Effect like, which I love. The graphics are often stunning (even if the collision detection is absolute CRAP. It seems as though the collision boxes for objects and people extend outwards from the in-game models by a good couple of feet at times. Running into invisible barriers just to run around a tree or a guard is seriously annoying.).
It's not so much that the game is a bad concept or anything, it's just so horribly designed and flawed that it makes the game frustrating to the point of rage quitting.
The lack of a persistent mini-map is highly annoying. The slow "run" speed of your main character is especially annoying when you're left to cover large areas of land with no action. For some unknown reason, the developers wanted to toss multiple enemies on screen that shoot or lob unavoidable projectiles at you while you're trying to fight off another group of enemies. So you're either constantly knocked down and taking damage or you're slogging your way through, dieing, and taking out as many enemies as you can in a life before you respawn.
That's another thing, the respawn system in the game. You're never really in any risk of having to start a section over again. When you die, you have to sit through a sequence of a being coming down from the heavens to lift your body up and take it away. Afterwards, you respawn with full health a short distance back from where you had died. So if you get into a multiple death area (and already I'm in one of those), you have to sit through the same annoying, unskippable animation time and time again. Run back to where you died, and attempt to kill the rest of the creatures there. The only penalty there is, is the fact that your weapons and armor lose some durability and will need repaired later.
I've run into bugs (or really asinine game design) where my guns, any of them, refused to inflict any damage on enemies. And yes, those same enemies were dying quite rapidly to the same guns before. My character will randomly start to explode every second or two, taking damage. I see absolutely NO way to stop that from happening, so I just run around killing things until I die.
For some reason, the damage radius of one of the large mechanical, hammer wielding enemies extends BEYOND the graphical representation. It took me a while to figure out how I was getting damaged when I wasn't even at the outter rim of that visual radius. Oh, and it doesn't matter if you're jumping in the air when that hammer hits the ground, you'll still get hurt. Why, when in every other game previous to TH, does your character take damage from a ground attack while you are jumping in the air.
There's no visual indicator to show that there's some sort of spherical blast radius, just a 2D radius showing up on the ground. IE: Ground strike == GROUND STRIKE, not "strike everywhere when it's clearly showing to only inflict damage if you're on the ground."
The camera won't even be discussed much as there isn't much to discuss. There are no camera controls. The most you can possibly do with the camera is either hit LB to center the camera behind you (and this doesn't even work in every location), clicking in one of the sticks inexplicably sends the camera zooming in on your head and orbiting around it so long as you don't touch anything else, and there are times you can stand still and hold down a button in order to slightly move the camera around as if your character were looking. You can't move and do this. And for some reason, in the middle of the battle the camera (which again, you can't control) decided to shoot upwards and stare at the ceiling. This lasted for a few seconds while I was blindly trying to fend off enemies who were still attacking me.
On the plus side, the armor/weapon inventory system is very RPG/Mass Effect like, which I love. The graphics are often stunning (even if the collision detection is absolute CRAP. It seems as though the collision boxes for objects and people extend outwards from the in-game models by a good couple of feet at times. Running into invisible barriers just to run around a tree or a guard is seriously annoying.).
Comment