it stinks!

admittedly, i wavered between "this game isn't as bad as people said" and "this is a miserable mess" a couple times, but overall, i don't think the story pays off in a satisfying way or goes anywhere interesting, and the gameplay is deeply flawed. it's just shockingly dull. it's certainly never "scary" or even tense at the default settings, though the thought of having to redo the tedious vent-shimmying sections in permadeath mode does fill me with intense dread.

the combat system initially seems interesting, but there's nothing beneath the surface. it's basically just punch-out, but there's no reason to pay attention to patterns or tells - you simply alternate left-and-right to dodge until an enemy exhausts itself, and then punish. every enemy works like this. where it really falls apart is when the game starts throwing more than one enemy at you - the camera tightens so much that you lose any spatial awareness. you can't do crowd control unless they all happen to be standing in a cluster, and you only have one heavy attack that can knock them back. eventually it integrates ranged weapons and a gravity glove and they're serviceable enough.

the story is completely uninspired, relying on the same tired cliches. wherever you think this is going you're probably right. there's no clever twist, there's no subversion, it's just the same old shit. there aren't even any memorable setpieces. despite all that, the boss fights still manage to feel like the low point. there's only three, one of which you fight four times. the combat has no depth, so the only way it increases the difficulty is through adds, and the last one relies on overwhelming you with explosive mobs which just feels cheap.