The exploration and cheesy but awesome 80s sci-fi story is where this game shines. The flat, outdated cover shooter gunplay and constant ambushes that sap all the joy out of the game is where it faltered.
Highly enjoyed essentially walking around the pages of "Neuromancer". Early stages have a great balance of atmospheric space horror, metroidvania puzzle-solving and immersion. The design on the space station is a cyberpunk masterclass, SHODAN and her many robotic and bionic aberrations are excellent antagonists.
The deeper the game goes, the more some of the most tedious elements take over. Every shootout has one dimension - you have to lean from cover so that the stupid enemy ai shoots into the wall, while you shoot into them. If you happened to be leaning from a wrong angle, well, bad for you, because you're going to be shooting the wall and eat all the bullets instead.
Despite having many survival horror tendencies, the game doesn't offer you any alternatives to shootouts. Stealth is non-existent, the enemies always automatically know you're there. Running past them is mostly not an option - they've got perfect aim and hit like a truck.
Perhaps the worst idea in the game - and it gets used a lot - is ambushes. Every level has at least a couple, and often more, encounters where you just open a door or get off the elevator and immediately get blasted by a pack of enemies. Other times you will be just suddenly attacked from the back or from the air by motherfuckers who are somehow silent like ninjas despite being a mutated sack of flash or a bucket of bolts.
When this happens in a Souls game, it's funny, because you expect to die a lot. You take your slapstick death, pick up your souls, and do better next time. In a survival horror scenario with limited resources, it's pure sadism. Your rare and precious health items get wasted like nobody's business in situations that you have zero chance of preventing. I have never abused save scumming as much as I did in this game, and boy does it get old fast.
The final straw for me was Beta Grove. The combination of time constraint, constant ambushes, and exploration boiled down to just running in circles looking for switches was one of the least fun experiences I've had with videogames.
I'm a huge fan of everything this franchise inspired - from the more actiony version in Prey to pure exploration in SOMA - and this version had a lot of that DNA going for it. However, the gameplay eventually just got too tedious for me to bother finishing the game, even though the story was so captivating.
Highly enjoyed essentially walking around the pages of "Neuromancer". Early stages have a great balance of atmospheric space horror, metroidvania puzzle-solving and immersion. The design on the space station is a cyberpunk masterclass, SHODAN and her many robotic and bionic aberrations are excellent antagonists.
The deeper the game goes, the more some of the most tedious elements take over. Every shootout has one dimension - you have to lean from cover so that the stupid enemy ai shoots into the wall, while you shoot into them. If you happened to be leaning from a wrong angle, well, bad for you, because you're going to be shooting the wall and eat all the bullets instead.
Despite having many survival horror tendencies, the game doesn't offer you any alternatives to shootouts. Stealth is non-existent, the enemies always automatically know you're there. Running past them is mostly not an option - they've got perfect aim and hit like a truck.
Perhaps the worst idea in the game - and it gets used a lot - is ambushes. Every level has at least a couple, and often more, encounters where you just open a door or get off the elevator and immediately get blasted by a pack of enemies. Other times you will be just suddenly attacked from the back or from the air by motherfuckers who are somehow silent like ninjas despite being a mutated sack of flash or a bucket of bolts.
When this happens in a Souls game, it's funny, because you expect to die a lot. You take your slapstick death, pick up your souls, and do better next time. In a survival horror scenario with limited resources, it's pure sadism. Your rare and precious health items get wasted like nobody's business in situations that you have zero chance of preventing. I have never abused save scumming as much as I did in this game, and boy does it get old fast.
The final straw for me was Beta Grove. The combination of time constraint, constant ambushes, and exploration boiled down to just running in circles looking for switches was one of the least fun experiences I've had with videogames.
I'm a huge fan of everything this franchise inspired - from the more actiony version in Prey to pure exploration in SOMA - and this version had a lot of that DNA going for it. However, the gameplay eventually just got too tedious for me to bother finishing the game, even though the story was so captivating.