They don't seem to be giving this a fair shake, but honestly, the game kind of sucks.
It is improved technically from the "demo," but it's still marred with issues, crashes, soft-locks, just general all-over jank.
The story is pretty bad. Starts out kind of strong, but goes absolutely nowhere and just kind of ends. The main character suffers from the same issues that Rider did in Andromeda, there's no gravitas to him/her. They're just a fun-loving wise-cracking empty shell of a Nathan Drake. The characters don't really do much except give you exposition dump, and all the story is just shoehorned in with first person stuff. Villain is a big nothing. I don't think we can just blame the BioWare Montreal for why Andromeda had such terrible writing. Much of the same stuff is on display here.
There's not much content. Not much endgame. Not much variation in loadouts. The environment is almost entirely the same in every zone.
This game is unfinished and bad. The core gameplay is competent, but that's it.
Oh, and that tombs mission? A critical path mission that forces you to perform checklists of open world patrol busy work in order to progress? Baffling that somebody decided that was okay to put in the game. You can't even track the quests properly for each individual tomb.
Is this the Greta Van Fleet of Zelda games? Or was that Blossom Tales?
I never have interest in playing games that are direct copies of better games. It's just a real lack of creativity. The aesthetic isn't even unique, as it's just taken whole-cloth from Mother. It certainly looks competent, so I guess I'll give it credit for that.
I hope Alex actually uses his powers. Like, I get it, he likes the pistol, but killing literally everything with the pistol is the absolute dullest way to play this game and the last.
The more I think about it, the more it's clear that the scenario is really one of the most important parts of a game, and an aspect of game design that has progressively just languished under the presupposition that "content" comes before all else. This game and RE4 have some of the best pacing I've ever experienced in a video game, and while some of that is attributable to power and enemy progression, the scenario makes up most of the feel of that. Arkham City is another game that has a extremely well-paced core scenario, with each new section bringing something new, and each section more or less transitioning into the next.
This game is maybe my new gold standard for pacing in a videogame. And imagine that, it's not a bloated 40-60 hour experience, or even something like what I felt was God of War 2018's bloated 30 hours.
You play RE4 for like 8-10 hours the first time through on one character, and really, there's not that much to it. Not many weapons, not that many types of enemies, but it doesn't matter. The core loop is so engaging and the clip at which you move from area to area is just perfect. They give you just enough time to learn the intricacies of the map, so you sort of create an organic player progression outside of the game - your knowledge makes you better. That's the best kind of game to me.
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