This game is such an easy knock out of the park idea, and has an incredibly gorgeous style especially for when it came out, but oh my LORD everything about the actual gameplay of this game reeks of mediocrity.
The story is incredibly forgettable in the game so I'm not going to mention it much mostly because I've forgotten any context for the scenes in the game.
The gameplay is just, bad. This is exactly how you DON'T make movement in a first person game, everything is so SLOW, building up speed is weird and clunky, every action is style-less climbing that takes WAY TOO LONG, when you think of movement in a first person game you think of something like source Bhopping, Titanfall 2 wall-riding etc. etc. but this game just wants you to look up and climb, over, and over, and over, and over, and it feels particularly dull in first person, I don't know why someone went and thought "Yeah, we need to make this parkour VIDEO GAME feel weighty instead of smooth and fast" as if moving fast stylishly and smooth isn't the whole fantasy behind parkour, regardless of if it's actually achievable in reality compared to the more weighty real world movement.
The level design just REFUSES to give you enough fun moments like just chase scenes, dashing around, instead it's dull puzzles where you sit around in place and look around for the item you climb onto to jump onto something to go around a fence or something, it's the video game equivalent of walking around a building trying to find the entrance door instead of the fire exit, the biggest bone the game will throw you is an indoor scene where you have to wall-run around a corner and then grab onto a pipe or something, also there's these pointless moments when you slide across a wall? No idea why they're in the game.
As an extra note on-top of this, right before I closed the game and shelved it, it was because I got softlocked by grabbing onto a ledge, I couldn't jump to any other ledge and I couldn't drop back down, even though it was like a 1ft drop, very annoying in a level that was already feeling dragged out.
The way the game handles movement is just, nasty. A lot of jumps are far too stingy with what it considers enough distance, I assume it was trying to hinge a lot on those cinematic "close calls" and rewarding players playing perfectly with fluid movements and little stops, but those "close calls" come at the cost of irritating moments where you just slide off an object you should have grabbed onto, or land on an object only for the game to reconsider and make you plummet to your death, sometimes you're just punished for going for a more creative solution instead of just looking for a set of 6 different ledges to climb, it's irritating.
The combat just sucks, straight up dogshit, it's just running around corners then bopping some stormtrooper on the nose a few times, and the guns are such an awful addition to the game, the only time they don't feel terrible is when they're just thrown as a shitty gimmick to shoot through a window pane and then jump through.
There's these weird cutscene QTEs, and yeah, nothing else to say here, they suck.
The controls are just clunky as hell, rolling is a neat touch if it weren't for the fact it rolls the camera around with it, making it very easy to lose your focus on where the hell you are, but sliding feels gross and awful.
Wall running has just a completely awful control scheme, you don't jump next to a wall then hold A, as if you were moving against the wall (And also allowing the developers to make the wall-run range extra long, to prevent nasty falls) you run towards the wall and jump and the game automatically puts you in a wall-run, and makes jumps coming out of it feel a bit awkward and stiff, and if you commit to crossing a gap with the wall run, you'll weirdly plummet right at the end punishing you for having faith in the movement.
If you like the idea behind this game, but are more fond of faster movement ala Source games or Titanfall, go play SEUM: Speedrunners from Hell or Neon White, they're the real deal.
The story is incredibly forgettable in the game so I'm not going to mention it much mostly because I've forgotten any context for the scenes in the game.
The gameplay is just, bad. This is exactly how you DON'T make movement in a first person game, everything is so SLOW, building up speed is weird and clunky, every action is style-less climbing that takes WAY TOO LONG, when you think of movement in a first person game you think of something like source Bhopping, Titanfall 2 wall-riding etc. etc. but this game just wants you to look up and climb, over, and over, and over, and over, and it feels particularly dull in first person, I don't know why someone went and thought "Yeah, we need to make this parkour VIDEO GAME feel weighty instead of smooth and fast" as if moving fast stylishly and smooth isn't the whole fantasy behind parkour, regardless of if it's actually achievable in reality compared to the more weighty real world movement.
The level design just REFUSES to give you enough fun moments like just chase scenes, dashing around, instead it's dull puzzles where you sit around in place and look around for the item you climb onto to jump onto something to go around a fence or something, it's the video game equivalent of walking around a building trying to find the entrance door instead of the fire exit, the biggest bone the game will throw you is an indoor scene where you have to wall-run around a corner and then grab onto a pipe or something, also there's these pointless moments when you slide across a wall? No idea why they're in the game.
As an extra note on-top of this, right before I closed the game and shelved it, it was because I got softlocked by grabbing onto a ledge, I couldn't jump to any other ledge and I couldn't drop back down, even though it was like a 1ft drop, very annoying in a level that was already feeling dragged out.
The way the game handles movement is just, nasty. A lot of jumps are far too stingy with what it considers enough distance, I assume it was trying to hinge a lot on those cinematic "close calls" and rewarding players playing perfectly with fluid movements and little stops, but those "close calls" come at the cost of irritating moments where you just slide off an object you should have grabbed onto, or land on an object only for the game to reconsider and make you plummet to your death, sometimes you're just punished for going for a more creative solution instead of just looking for a set of 6 different ledges to climb, it's irritating.
The combat just sucks, straight up dogshit, it's just running around corners then bopping some stormtrooper on the nose a few times, and the guns are such an awful addition to the game, the only time they don't feel terrible is when they're just thrown as a shitty gimmick to shoot through a window pane and then jump through.
There's these weird cutscene QTEs, and yeah, nothing else to say here, they suck.
The controls are just clunky as hell, rolling is a neat touch if it weren't for the fact it rolls the camera around with it, making it very easy to lose your focus on where the hell you are, but sliding feels gross and awful.
Wall running has just a completely awful control scheme, you don't jump next to a wall then hold A, as if you were moving against the wall (And also allowing the developers to make the wall-run range extra long, to prevent nasty falls) you run towards the wall and jump and the game automatically puts you in a wall-run, and makes jumps coming out of it feel a bit awkward and stiff, and if you commit to crossing a gap with the wall run, you'll weirdly plummet right at the end punishing you for having faith in the movement.
If you like the idea behind this game, but are more fond of faster movement ala Source games or Titanfall, go play SEUM: Speedrunners from Hell or Neon White, they're the real deal.