I'm at the end of chapter six and having a bit of trouble. Looks like I need to either get some more ammo for the Contact Beam or improve my aim with telekinesis!
If you are talking about a boss battle, I killed the tentacles with cutter and the rest with kinesis. It didn't require much aiming skill for kinesis though. Since I didn't have to move much, it was a simple catch and throw game with plenty of time to target.
Anyhow, so I played this baby of Half Life, Doom 3 and RE4 threesome.
Up until last couple of chapters, the game wasn't scary at all, and felt repetitive and predictable. During the last chapters the main difference was ramped up difficulty, making moving shadows and unexpected sound effects significantly more stressful.
I guess it delivers in terms of scary surviver horror premise. And such production values were there too. Unfortunate the game is not for me at all. Of all the hyped ideas the game had, the thing that delivered was mobile visual story telling, and that's because story was so bad, I wouldn't be able to watch or listen otherwise. Too bad there wasn't a way to escape boring starship setting, and likewise unoriginal bloody flesh monster design.
One can argue inconvenience is probably heart of the genre, still, for me it's just bad design. Thankfully combat felt much better than RE4. I really liked "cutter", and targeting limps was quite fun. Of course the game didn't want me to enjoy that because it kept giving me the ammo that I didn't need. That became an especially serious problem before boss battles or stuff like protect the NPC mini games. My inventory was full of "Ripper" ammo that couldn't reach anywhere, leaving me no way to progress. Normally there is no need to panic, just go to a store, buy the damn ammo, right? Where is the store? The other side of the ship. That is bad design. I had to sell the ripper after so many upgrades, such a waste of money.
What else? Checkpoint is only spatially triggered. You enter an area, encounter 20 waves of enemy, move shit around and die before the last guy (because camera sucks when you wisely put your back against a wall), you start over. While I'm at this, is there not a single third party game that can restart from checkpoints without loading? It shouldn't be a rocket science.
I'm not big fan of realtime inventory management either, aka pointless self torture in the middle of combat. One thing that really bugged me in terms of gameplay though, was that stasis module would be much more fun if recharge stations weren't far and between, or better yet with auto-regen however slow it might have been.
Well, I can go on. The game wasn't bad at all, at least good enough for me to want to continue playing, that means a lot nowadays. It's just that, and I cannot really get it out of my head, how better this game could have been with little touches here and there. Really surprising that they bothered to show the objective path.
On level 6 on 12 now...
