Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Don't believe the hype"

I heard a lot of good things about this game so when it was on sale for 400msp I decided it was time to give it a try.

At first I kind of liked it. I felt like a zelda type game.... but not really?? Anyway it's an action/adventure game where you play a reporter trying to find out the mystery of the Domz that keep attacking and kidapping the local people.

For me a game of this type it's far to short to take advantage of it's potential. The characters are kind of interesting but you feel like given the games short span you never get to really know them or get any real story on them. The world that you have to explore is really small, and even for how small it is there's not a lot packed into it. Maybe it's the game intent to give you a little side stuff to do but not much so you won't stray to far from the main plot.

Taking pictures of the local fauna is interesting as a side thing. And there's a couple mini games. Over all the mini stuff isn't really challenging, and once you've got what you need to out of them they're not fun enough to play otherwise.There's racing you can do, but I won every race on the first try...so that's not challenging. You can always go for the record if that interest you.

For me what started to kill the game for me is the over reliance on stealth. I know that makes sense given that you're a reporter and not a soldier, but I wish it had been mixed up a bit more. And when you do have to fight it's really a pain. Everything you fight has an autolock on you, so it's really hard to maneveur behind to exploit their weak spots. This can make fighting frustrating. Also a lot of things you fight have a shield that blocks your attacks, but you aren't given any kind of block to stop theirs grrrrrrrrr. And fighting is really just one button. I really did not enjoy the fighting mechanics in this game at all.

Level design isn't really interesting neither. The problem is that there are only a few places you need to explore. The two main ones, the factory and slaughter house levels, are too big. These two levels are where you will spend the majority of the game, and they go on way too long to keep them interesting. There are only a few other places that you explore into and they are way too short...not much of a balance there at all.

What also frustrated me was that I was fighting with the camera angles a lot! There were times when the camera angles really hurt you. Also the cameral you use has an autolock. I found this frustrating because I had to force the camera out of it's autolock position whenever I wanted to look around freely. It creates a time delay that's annoying

The game killer for me was the annoying end boss that goes on way too long. I went into with 19 full healths and used them all. It's one of those figure out the pattern boss fights(which I hate). Part way through the fight you loss control and all your joystick controls are reversed. So you have to remember the bosses stupid pattern why trying to remember that your controls are reversed. That's where I called it a day with this game. I'm sure if I restarted and tried the boss battle again I would have used half of my healths, but at that point I'd had enough of this game. I think I was sick of it around the 8 hour mark but stuck it out because I knew it was only a 14 hour game...I was at the 12 hour mark at the end boss battle. Boss battles I don't mind that much, but by the end of the game I felt like one of the people of Hillys who had had the life sucked out of them. I wish I could get my 12hours and 400msp back.

Bottom line is this game is too short to really live up to it's potential, action is hindered by frustrating fight mechanics, frustrating camera angles, unchallenging side minigames. Too much reliance on stealth.

Anyway I know there are a lot of people who praise this game. So I'm sure I'll get a lot of people who don't agree with this review but that's okay. I wish I hadn't heard so many good things about this game so I would have stayed clear. I only rated this game hard because it's annoying fight mechanics and annoying end boss.