One of the worst games I've had the displeasure of playing through in recent memory, and that's a fact even when excluding all the bugs... it's that bad. It didn't take me many hours before I realised that this is a woefully unfinished product that might have been excusable for an indie dev studio with no experience in making games however with a seasoned veteran in the industry like AAA Arkane Austin it's utterly inexcusable.
The loot progression doesn't make any sense, with a weapon of the highest rarity and quality being awarded to the player at the very start of the game. Weapon level overrides every other factor like rarity so even if a weapon is the highest rarity / tier it's useless if its level is not on par with the player. Every enemy scales with the player level as well which only exacerbates the problem of having every weapon having its damage tied to its level. Damage numbers go up as the player progresses but the amount of shots required to kill stays static meaning it's pointless for this game to even have damage numbers in the first place. As soon as a weapon is too low of a level it gets scrapped, and there's no weapon customisation either.
There is no stealth kill animation, just a damage multiplier when you hit enemies in the back but it functions the exact same way whether you hit them in or out of stealth. The character I chose has special abilities that revolve around stealth and one of the abilities is a raven that scans enemies. Once you irreversibly upgrade it enough it starts to damage enemies in addition to scanning them. The glaring flaw here is that when the bird damages an enemy the player immediately gets taken out of stealth, thereby making the entire ability contradictory.
Enemy AI is extremely low IQ, humans miss shots constantly on midnight difficulty and they aren't able to react fast enough to anything the player does, making them laughably vulnerable to the player just running around getting behind them and hitting them with melee attacks. Vampires are only challenging to deal with in large numbers, when alone they easily get stuck on every object and their attacks are so predictable a toddler could avoid them. Every puzzle/objective is solved the same way every time: by finding a key. Kill enemies --> find the key is the gist of everything you do, no alternative methods of opening doors or approaching any given situation exist.
Both world maps are empty even though they're so small with no enemies spawning if they aren't close to a mission objective. Sometimes enemies will suddenly spawn in a cluster next to the player in an area where they were nowhere to be seen previously. In some places there are invisible walls making it impossible to climb rocks that should be climbable. The game is unplayable on controller with being forced to cycle through every weapon and there being next to no aim assist, but even when aiming with a mouse it still feels janky.
Cutscenes are cheap slideshows with nothing going on visually so all you get is the narration. Memory echoes have identical silhouettes of characters making it impossible to identify or distinguish them visually and you never get to see them anywhere else either.
They really expect you to pay $70 for this disgrace when it's clear that everything about this game is not well thought out in the slightest. This gigantic roll of used up toilet paper should never have been allowed to see the light of day.
The loot progression doesn't make any sense, with a weapon of the highest rarity and quality being awarded to the player at the very start of the game. Weapon level overrides every other factor like rarity so even if a weapon is the highest rarity / tier it's useless if its level is not on par with the player. Every enemy scales with the player level as well which only exacerbates the problem of having every weapon having its damage tied to its level. Damage numbers go up as the player progresses but the amount of shots required to kill stays static meaning it's pointless for this game to even have damage numbers in the first place. As soon as a weapon is too low of a level it gets scrapped, and there's no weapon customisation either.
There is no stealth kill animation, just a damage multiplier when you hit enemies in the back but it functions the exact same way whether you hit them in or out of stealth. The character I chose has special abilities that revolve around stealth and one of the abilities is a raven that scans enemies. Once you irreversibly upgrade it enough it starts to damage enemies in addition to scanning them. The glaring flaw here is that when the bird damages an enemy the player immediately gets taken out of stealth, thereby making the entire ability contradictory.
Enemy AI is extremely low IQ, humans miss shots constantly on midnight difficulty and they aren't able to react fast enough to anything the player does, making them laughably vulnerable to the player just running around getting behind them and hitting them with melee attacks. Vampires are only challenging to deal with in large numbers, when alone they easily get stuck on every object and their attacks are so predictable a toddler could avoid them. Every puzzle/objective is solved the same way every time: by finding a key. Kill enemies --> find the key is the gist of everything you do, no alternative methods of opening doors or approaching any given situation exist.
Both world maps are empty even though they're so small with no enemies spawning if they aren't close to a mission objective. Sometimes enemies will suddenly spawn in a cluster next to the player in an area where they were nowhere to be seen previously. In some places there are invisible walls making it impossible to climb rocks that should be climbable. The game is unplayable on controller with being forced to cycle through every weapon and there being next to no aim assist, but even when aiming with a mouse it still feels janky.
Cutscenes are cheap slideshows with nothing going on visually so all you get is the narration. Memory echoes have identical silhouettes of characters making it impossible to identify or distinguish them visually and you never get to see them anywhere else either.
They really expect you to pay $70 for this disgrace when it's clear that everything about this game is not well thought out in the slightest. This gigantic roll of used up toilet paper should never have been allowed to see the light of day.
Reviewed on Jun 01, 2023