I hate to be a bummer but...I really did not like this game. I mean I really really really did not like this game.
I won't go so far as to say I hated it because I could kind of understand what the developers were doing, and I can understand why some people loved it, but to me it felt like a boring tech demo stretched out over 3 hours. Well I played for about 3 hours, but it felt more like 5 or 6. I was shocked when I got the achievement for completing in under 180 minutes.
The story is just so much vague nonsense and I was surprised that there was a separate story editor who came up with it. I suppose it is designed to be mysterious and intriguing but all it made me do was remember that I haven't finished Returnal and that game is leagues better than this one.
The game definitely looks nice (though there's some pretty bad pop in even on the Series X and the underwater and in cloud segments look flat out bad) but it's just so monotonous. There are minutes where all you do is travel in a straight line dropping and flattening to try to speed up if you want to, and it is the most boring thing I have ever done in a video game. I hated it. Meanwhile the 'platforming' segments were beyond frustrating with the limited control and I legitimately hated them. I would have turned it off if it hadn't been for the club (and I did turn it off and delete it the first time I tried it a few months ago.)
The Super Mario Galaxy style level could have been cool but the camera made it hard to see what you were doing in terms of trying to shift gravity and again it just took SO LONG to break out of orbit. My biggest complaint with the game is that often even if you know the right thing to do actually executing it is beyond boring. It makes Ubisoft open world bloat games where you have to collect everything seem downright focused in comparison.
So it's this weird combination of extreme boredom punctuated by frustration and boring frustration when I tied the same jump over and over and had to take another minute to set it back up. That power up on the water world can F all the way off with its placement.
Add in not caring at all about the story and, well, I had to listen to podcasts just to make it through and even then I was legitimately angry when each new level appeared and I had to play more.
There are a few moments when you're wave skipping or seeing a new world for the first time when it can be tolerable, and maybe if you took the time to master the controls it could be kind of fun to fly the gravity ship (it was kind of fun even as is, but the level design killed that by being so long and boring) but overall I did not have fun with this.
Maybe if I were in a more contemplative mood I could have gotten into the zen of just flying, and maybe it's a game best played one world at a time with breaks in between instead of finishing it all in one day (though I did go out for brunch with some friends in the middle so it was not just one long session) I could have gotten into it.
I do hope others enjoyed it more than I did. Looking forward to your impressions!
Log in to comment