So earlier, I mentioned that I'd been burned by a bunch of ****ty games lately. Here's one of them:
I know that people tend to exaggerate when they **** on a game, for comedic effect. But I'm being completely serious when I say that this is one of the few games I've ever played that actually made me physically ill. It was like Thor ripped open my skull and ****ed my brain, giving me a bitch of a headache.
The problem is the camera, you see. It sucks.
You know how some games have fixed angles, where the developers want to be able to control where the player is looking? And then there are games that let you look wherever you want? This game tries to do both. At the same time. I'm not talking about the game stopping every now and then to swivel the camera around in a cutscene, like "Hey, look at this big environment filled with stuff to climb". I'm talking the game just randomly jolts, and I mean
jolts, the camera in some weird ****ing direction, right in the middle of ****ing platforming segments. No pause. No warning. And if you happen to be moving the camera manually when it tries to switch to a fixed angle, the two camera systems fight for supremacy, and the camera freaks out and jitters all over the place.
Motion sickness. So much motion sickness. And randomly flying off of cliffs because the camera is in some weird existential struggle, and can't decide what it ****ing is and what it ****ing wants.
The rest of the game is just as confused with itself. Half of the time, it tries to force you to be "stealthy", constantly pushing stealth mechanics in your face and begging you to play the game "the right way". But the "stealth" (read: a girl in a bright red kimono crouch-walking in circles like a jack-ass while guards watch and yawn) is so clunky and pointless, since you can just murder everyone in five seconds, that it makes me wonder why they even bothered implementing it. And the other half of the game just immediately throws you right into hordes of enemies and bosses and ****, as if they realized partway through development that nobody was going to play it stealthy anyway, and just said "**** it, have some mobs."
The one good thing is the main girl's starting weapon, a wire that can slice people up from afar. But it gets old pretty quickly.
And yet, in spite of all that, there are worse games out there. Games that were released before the developers had even properly finished them. So hey, props to Vivendi for at least trying.