A wasted opportunity
This game could have been great. It is a shame that it is completely ruined by gameplay choices. I'll try to explain because there is really a lot that represent a complete turn off for me. Let's begin with simple stuff : equipment management. It is a pain. You have only 2 slots that you have to manage to put everything you need. And I could have been okay with that. It seems like Half life Alyx style, right? Absolutely not! Because those 2 slots are occupied by your weapons too. You have to choose to bring with you a sandwich to heal or a gun. A gun or an axe. Most of the monsters are unstoppable death machines and bullet sponges that runs towards you to beat you to death, and most of the time they spawn so close to you that you don't actually have the time to kill them before they reach you and hurt you. So you need a source of healing and a lot of fire power in this game to go through. You would say : well okay you have 2 slots, one for a gun one for the food, you are okay. No I'm not. I only briefly mentioned the melee weapons. Those are completely useless in combat (because as I said the enemies are unstoppable death machines careless about an axe hit on the head, so they reach you and beat you no matter what, if you go melee), but you need to bring one with you to break wood obstacles, and to break crates where you can find ammo and food. So the math is simple : to proceed in the game we absolutely need 3 things (a gun, some food and a melee weapon) but we have only 2 slots to manage all of that. Great! At this point you could say : "you can always have your weapons in hand and put something else inside the 2 slots." That would be in perfect Alyx style and would be great. But it doesn't work like that. If you want to take something from a slot you need to drop your weapon on the floor. And if you are in the middle of a fight you can't even think about dropping a weapon to take your sandwich to heal yourself, because that weapon will always drop inside the floor pixels, or fly miles away from you for no reason. Or if you are lucky enough that it drops on the floor near you, good luck on take it up from there. While 2 or 3 foes are surrounding you, you have to struggle with the "not so precise" items grabbing behavior. And what about if I want to grab a two handed weapon from my back? I have to drop on the floor both my gun and my melee if my hips slots are full. And what about collectibles composed by multiple parts? You have to hold those in your hands bringing them with you looking for other parts... This items management system just doesn't work. But all of these things I mentioned are not the worst part. The worst, obnoxious, degenerate, toxic thing of all : the cursed dolls section. Oh boy. In the middle of those "dreams" sessions you have to run around the map looking for those floating dolls, while a never-ending wave of enemies spawns from everywhere around you. And while you are there, in front of a doll, surrounded by monsters.... You have to drop both your weapons, grab the doll with one hand, take the lighter with the other and burn the doll. Than grab your weapons from the floor, kill everyone around you and go chase the next doll... Absurd... Another thing that I can't understand is monsters respawn. It completely shuts down every form of exploration of the map. Because there is no reason to go searching for ammo or food if when I come back I have to consume what I just found, killing respawned monsters. It has just no sense in my opinion. About the weapons. There is a great variety of weapons. But unfortunately most of those are useless or have a weird concept behind them. Traps and gas cans are fun, so are the throwing knifes or spikes, but this game is not made for single use weapons (due to the awful slot management system we already talked about) so I've never used those. As we already stated melee weapons are useless in combat, but needed for other stuff in the game, and that makes them even more annoying... So what remains are the guns, the shotgun and the harpoon. The guns are cool and handy. Love those. The shotgun ammo management is a mistery to me. For every other weapon you can store more ammo than what the magazine can handle and reload the weapon when needed. Not the shotgun. You can just have those 6 bullets. Why? And than there is the harpoon. Oh boy I loved it. That is really brilliant. You can use it for open hidden paths, to reach dolls from distance, to grab hooks away from you... but you can't use it as a weapon... What a shame... It just stuns the enemy, it doesn't kill him. Why?... there is no point to stun the enemy if I have to waste time to put the harpoon behind my back and take another weapon to kill him. Anyway... Well this was a hell of a long message but I wrote it because I really think that this game could shine in incredible ways. The graphic is phenomenal, the atmosphere is great, the world is intriguing and well designed, the story is simple but cool. I just can't stand these gameplay choices. And for me the gameplay is the most important thing of all, that's why I had to give the game 1 star. I'm sorry. Of course all of my complaints comes from my personal taste and I can understand if the game works great for others.
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