It took 35 hours and it felt like 70.
I've been gaming since the Atari 2600 was new and am always on the lookout for the next narrative gaming masterpiece. I'd hate to miss out on another Nier due to reviews by people who are only interested in gameplay, simple stories, and graphics. Well, here's a game targeted for them, minus the good gameplay and graphics.
1. Story.
It'sIt took 35 hours and it felt like 70.
I've been gaming since the Atari 2600 was new and am always on the lookout for the next narrative gaming masterpiece. I'd hate to miss out on another Nier due to reviews by people who are only interested in gameplay, simple stories, and graphics. Well, here's a game targeted for them, minus the good gameplay and graphics.
1. Story.
It's below-average. It starts out as "save the world from the monsters," then "save the world from the bad guy," and then "save the world and your friends from the monsters." There's no twists in the story that you can't see coming well in advance, and nothing new happens here narrative-wise if you've played any Japanese action game within the last 10 years. Good-story lovers will be disappointed with this one.
2. World.
Humanity is supposedly going extinct due to big monsters. You're in a apparently-small group of humans who is fighting back. Who knows if there's other groups. You don't get to see much of the wold and you're primarily limited to your tiny base and the 5-10 maps you repeatedly visit to fight monsters. You very rarely interact with someone not from your base, and when you do, they don't have much light to shed on the world. The world was obviously built for you to fight monsters and not for you to get immersed into it.
3. Characters / Voices.
They're not good. The characters don't seem to fit well into the world. They're like teenagers who are full of themselves and think it's cool to fight big monsters with big weapons, regardless of their friends dying constantly. There are a few instances of them trying to deal with hardship and loss, but they're handled poorly and the solution for the most part is to go out and kill more monsters. Voice acting is in English only and ranges from average to robotic to hilariously out-of-place, to bad.
4. Gameplay.
It's bad. It's about on par with the 3rd-person action games from the Nintendo 64 era. The camera is horrendous, lock-on is practically useless, lock-on is restricted for guns, guns are nearly useless, control rebindings are very limited, and some buttons perform multiple actions, even though there's other un-used buttons on the controller.
This is where the game takes a big drop in score for me. Combat is supposed to be the primary reason for playing this game, but it's just bad. This is supposed to be a Monster Hunter clone. I've never played Monster Hunter, but I can't believe that it can be anywhere near as bad as this. I have played Tera online, which is another Monster Hunter clone, and the combat and customization in that game is far better than this. Let me try to cover some of the issues with the combat.
Controls are sluggish. If you're in an attack animation, don't expect to be able to block or dodge any time soon. You simply will get hit if the monster pulls off a quick attack.
Difficulty scaling and spikes are nuts. You'll go through the first few levels with ease, never using any healing items, never blocking, and rarely dodging, and then you'll get to your first difficulty spike where you're killed by some unimportant monster. Then it's time to learn how to block and use healing items. Difficulty goes up and down randomly. Some important story-monsters, although huge, are completely easy, while the next standard monster after that might take several tries for you to kill.
At some point, I realized that attempting to block or dodge every hit was a waste of time. It is much more efficient to constantly attack the monster's weak spot while having auto-healing statuses on (healing while in burst mode and healing from devouring). Though at that point, it became a simple button-mashing game. Why would I do anything else when I was just trying to get through the repetitive combat as soon as possible?
The missions, oh boy the missions are endless and go on and on forever. I eventually started skipping all side missions and focused only on the story ones. I could tell no difference. They're all the same monster-wise except the cut-scenes in between the story missions.
Hit boxes are just stupid. Depending on your weapon, it will clip through a monster during an attack, and not hit it. And many monster attacks look like they don't hit you, but hit you anyway.
Some weapon attacks are just plain stupid. For example if I jump into the air with a spear and press the heavy attack, I dash forward and down, normally over the monster's head, which makes this particular attack useless in most situations. There's another weapon where if you're dashing and attack, you will jump *backwards* and start attacking. Why on earth would I dash forwards and then want to jump backwards and attack?
I could go on about the poor upgrade system, crafting, item management, graphics, and more, but I'm about out of space. I'm just glad it's over and will probably play a different genre before tryingGod Eater 2.… Expand
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