This game and I have a love\hate relationship, without the love.
I start playing the tutorial and I already hate this game, but let's follow my usual outline. Tolerable aspects first, and then it's time for a Mexican standoff with all chambers loaded.
Graphics: 8.5
The graphics are great, but at higher settings cause significant slowdown even on my relatively high-end pc, and the loading times before each and every stage without exception are unbearably long. This game is like a glorified tech-demo, being, from what I understand, the first game that fully supports DX10. I don't use Vista, so there's not much I can tell you.
Audio: 9.0
Top notch. When you shoot a revolver, you're surprised at how powerful it sounds, contrary to other games where you feel like a six-shooter shoots nothing but f*cking potatoes. Back int the day a revolver would blow a man into the wall behind him, and the gun was almost just as likely to blow up in your hand as hit the enemy. Voice work is standard hillbilly western fare. Nothing unique, but I'm not saying it needs to be.
Gameplay: 3.0
What's the most important part about a game? Being able to f*cking play it. Of course, this is assuming you can get through the tutorial, because it's mandatory. Oh, see the bottles on the box near the beginning of the level? Don't move them, because touching a bottle will render progress impossible, because you'll have to use them for target practice later and moving them messes with the scripting I guess. Yeah, in literature, I believe that's what they call foreshadowing. It's all downhill from there The story mode is divided among two different characters. Billy, the pencil-neck dweeb who keeps whining about how crappy his life is (Sorta reminds me of GTA IV's Roman Bellic, who never shuts the hell up), and Reverand Ray, Billy's uncle, and a man who, quite frankly, doesn't care much about the divine. Billy plays out like a stealth platformer mostly, and every aspect of this gameplay is what makes it so weak as a whole. Think Thief: Deadly Shadows, but without Garrett, his bow, or shadows to hide in. It's essentially like they took away all of Thief's features except for the crouch button. Reverand Ray plays like an actual first-person shooter that's actually entertaining, but I suppose the developers think the players would prefer stacking boxes to solve platforming puzzles...or is that to showcase their shiny physics system? God this game is aweful. It's like every oppurtunity they saw to make this game tedious, they took with gusto. Anyway...writing this review ain't worth my time. The game sucks. End of story. I wanna nail Billy Candle to the f*cking cross.
