| Author | Review |
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WeisGuy9
367,546
TA Score for this game: 89
Posted on 05 May 09 at 22:48, Edited on 13 April 11 at 10:26 |
This review has 83 positive votes and 35 negative votes. Please log in to vote. |
Here we have a game that has a really great concept for the story....and that is all it has. Not having the intestinal fortitude to complete the game myself, I will give you my impression of the game from the parts I did play. If you would rather skip all the reading to follow, I will tell up front that this is probably the steamiest pile of crap ever imprinted to disc. If not...then, are you ready? Let's break it down.
Genre:
Survival Horror
Game Play:
You play the game as Edward Carnby in an apocalyptic New York City invaded by hideous evil. There are guns available as weapons but the scarcity of ammo (a la Resident Evil) will keep you sticking mostly with melee attacks to defend yourself from the deformed fiends infesting the city. Notice I said "defend" as you cannot kill ANY enemies with melee weapons or even guns...only with fire. This is normally accomplished by finding containers of oil to pour on them and then setting them ablaze. Oh, did I mention that containers of oil are more rare than 100 carat diamonds? You access your inventory by opening the front of your coat and looking down to see what you have in the pockets inside. This seems a really cool idea until you notice that you only have like four pockets....and until you find out that enemies don't stop doing what they're doing just because this Carnby idiot needs to check his coat pockets. The AI in the game is also a bit quirky. At times you will be stunningly outflanked and overwhelmed. Other times several enemies will stand patiently nearby as you open your coat to laboriously construct gasoline bombs to hurl upon their unfortunate heads. Which brings up the concept in the game of scrounging mundane items to piece together into WEDs (Weapons of Evilness Destruction). Great idea, tediously laborious in execution. Are you seeing a pattern yet?
Rating: 2/5 stars
Controls:
The only fault with the controls is...everything about the controls. Our intrepid Mr. Carnby moves like a glacier headed uphill. This is doubly frustrating considering that all the enemies in the game are as agile as Chinese acrobats. After dying for the 10th time at the hands of the lowliest enemy in the game who hops around you like a flea on amphetamines while you lethargically keep trying to turn and face him, you'll be ready to drive a screwdriver through your forehead and swirl it a few times for good measure. Which brings up the camera, over which you have absolutely no control. This would not be a bad thing if the camera would ever look in the direction of enemies, objectives, items of interest or even somewhere in the general vicinity of where the game wants you to go. The right stick control for melee combat is great. You can easily flow strikes from side to side, vertical to horizontal. You just can't hit anything with whatever you happen to be swinging. If you do manage to get your weapon headed in the general direction of an enemy, they normally hit you before you can complete your swing and interrupt your attack. Fun, huh?
Rating: 1/5 stars
Sound:
The musical score is quite excellent and the varied selections do an excellent job of conveying the mood of any particular scene. Job well done.
Rating: 4/5 stars
Graphics:
The graphics overall are outstanding and the fire in particular is nothing short of absolutely gorgeous - it even spreads. The graphics in the set-piece scenes are truly spectacular, if you can get past your frustrated hostility at the developers long enough to look around and notice them. I have to take time here to tell you about one set-piece in particular. This is a sequence where you drive a car through the streets of New York to reach Central Park, where the majority of the game takes place. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? As you drive maniacally through the streets, they begin caving in, buildings topple around you and some monstrously huge demon is eating the streets behind you so don't slow down whatever you do. Still sounds good, yes? Wait until I tell you about how the spastic driving controls send you careening off into chasms or smashing headlong into walls at the slightest movement of the stick, unless of course you're at one of the sections where even moving the stick as far as you possibly can won't turn the car through a gentle curve. Or how going over a 2 foot high ramp of about 6 degrees inclination will send you carooming 100 feet in the air. Or how you can easily plow right over a 12 ton boulder but somehow manage to stick on a curb. Or how this driving set-piece seems to be about 87 minutes long and if you crash one time or let the demon catch up to you, it's game over, go back to the beginning. No checkpoints. It rocks!
Rating: 4/5 stars
Co-op:
None
Multiplayer:
None
Replayability:
You're kidding me, right?
Rating: 1/5 stars
ScoHo Info:
There are lots of achievements (49) in the game. Only having suffered long enough to obtain a few of them I have no first-hand info on their obtainability. Scanning through the list, you'll find all achievements available in single player (obviously), and for the most part they seem story-related, so the game shouldn't be to tough to get 1K in as long as you can get through it.
Rating: 3/5 stars
As you have most likely figured out by now, this is a game full of great and innovative ideas poorly executed. Extremely poorly executed. I never tell anyone not to play a game. After all, some say potato, some say potahto. However, if you choose to play this game, please take my advise and consume about a dozen qualudes before you start. It will go much more smoothly.
Overall rating: 1/5 stars
Smiley rating:  out of    
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Draconic Lord
93,744
TA Score for this game: 1,497
Posted on 27 March 11 at 21:53, Edited on 29 March 11 at 19:11 |
This review has 31 positive votes and 0 negative votes. Please log in to vote. |
This is a true challenge to review but here goes my best shot.
Story
You start the game in a room filled with strangers, some of them not very friendly and fond of you, talking about a certain stone and the path of light. After a bit, you discover two things: some serious paranormal stuff is going on with the walls “eating” people and you have no clue who you are. Of course, if you played any other AITD you know exactly who our character is, but that can be considered a spoiler so it’s better not to head that way.
So, if that wasn’t enough to ruin your day, you are now faced with a burning building that’s collapsing around you and of course, you need to escape. And that’s just the first of the many amazing action scenes this game has to offer.
The game plays like a TV show, much like Alan Wake. The Story is divided in several episodes, each with different checkpoints. The interesting thing is that you can skip ahead sections of the game if you want to. Only the final part of the game requires you to do some specific actions before you can unlock it.
Overall, it should last you around 15 hours. It doesn’t have any difficulty settings, so only one run is required for the achievement hoes out there.
Gameplay
This is where the sh*t hits the fan. I’ll be honest here. Not everyone will be able to stand the controls (AKA, the majority of the players). I’ll try to resume the different areas of the game.
First things first: movement and actions. You’ll notice how awkward it is to control your character once you start playing. Left joystick is for walking, Right joystick is for the camera, problem is, walking doesn’t feel that natural, it’s a bit hard to control his direction. That’s problem number 1.
Number 2 is the overflow of controls in dire situations. Oh yes, get ready. I’ll explain in a bit but I need to clear something out of the way first.
The enemies in AITD are like the Necromorphs in Dead Space (I can already hear the *gasps* because I just compared these 2 games). In DS, you could headshot the enemies and hit them in the torso (almost) all you wanted, they wouldn’t die. You had to dismember them. In AITD, you can shoot the humanoid enemies all you want, the most you’ll do is knock them out after lots of rounds. You need to burn them, more specifically, the cracks in their body. How do you do that?
Your weapons of choice are fire bullets (I’ll get there soon enough), cans of spray + lighter, and explosives or set something made of wood on fire and wack them with it. Yes, fire plays a big role in this game.
You remember those fire bullets I mentioned? That’s made by combining ammo and flammable liquid. That’s right, there’s a crafting system at work here.
You create your arsenal using duct tape, bottles filled with flammable liquid and tissues. Combine a bottle and duct tape, and you’ll get a “sticky bomb”. Combine a bottle and a tissue, and you’ll get a Molotov cocktail, and that’s only if you used a glass bottle. With a plastic bottle you got yourself a time bomb.
Confused yet? But wait, there’s more!
To heal yourself, you have to press left or right in your d-pad so you enter in a strange first person mode where you can see your wounds. IF you have any health sprays, you can spray your wounds and you’ll heal yourself. If you are too badly injured, you need to use a bandage to stop the bleeding or you die after a certain period of time.
Speaking of first person, you enter first person mode every time you want to shoot your gun. Why? Dunno, guess they thought it would make more sense. That, or they just wanted an excuse to add BLINKING TO THE FREAKING GAME. Click the right joystick and your character will blink. Spam the thing so you can clear out the “goo” certain enemies hit you with.
So as you can see, you need to carry a freakin’ lot of stuff, uh? Bottles, duct tape, ammo, tissues, bandages, sprays to use in combination to the lighter, health sprays, ah yes, and batteries for your lantern because in certain places it’s really, really dark. Guess you have a lot of inventory space, eh? Yeah, ye wished. The game goes old school here. All you can carry is what you can fit in your jacket. That means you have to be really, really picky about what you carry around.
And guess what, the inventory works in real-time just like (again) in Dead Space. Every time you enter “inventory mode”, you have to worry if some enemy isn’t about to bash your brains out, but unlike in Dead Space, YOU ARE LOOKING AT YOURSELF, not at an awesome hologram that allows you to see if some Necromorph is about to rip you a new one.
Let’s do a short recap:
- You ALWAYS need fire to kill the humanoid enemies.
- You need to carry stuff that makes fire.
- You need to use that flammable stuff fast if you want to kill your enemies.
- You have low inventory space.
- You need to combine stuff to make more effective weapons.
Now, try doing this with bad movement controls and you are trying to access your inventory in dire situations where something goes wrong and suddenly you are out of fire bullets or out of spray, while the enemies are happily about to strike you. It’s a mess. “Certainly there’s a way to select the item you want without using the inventory screen” you may ask, and yes. Press LB and RB and he’ll happily go thru every usable item in the left/right side of his jacket. Want that spray real bad because you are about to be hit by the enemies? Start pressing RB and hope your lighter is already in your left hand.
That’s my main problem with this game. They tried to insert so much stuff at the same time, the controls are a mess. Sure, they are workable, but they aren’t user friendly. And that’s a big problem. For me, the game managed to grab my attention and I resisted and learned and eventually got used to the controls but I am sure that many, many, MANY other gamers would just throw the remote against the wall.
Sound / Graphics
The music is amazing, simple as that. They really did a good job with the music that plays in intense moments, with mysterious and strange lyrics while sh*t is exploding around you, or you are hanging for your life and trying to climb to safety while (once again) sh*t is exploding. Master piece when it comes to big action moments!
The dialogues can be pretty funny as well, again, reminding me of some kind of action movie.
The graphics are good, with great attention to details. Like I said, your character gets wounded but you also see those wounds and after healing, the cloth stays ripped. It’s those little details that show they cared.
As I said before, Fire is pretty important in this game, and it shows. It spreads, it dies down, it burns down debris that block your path *HINT, HINT*, and it’s pretty good to look at. They really did a number on this, and considering only Far Cry 2 comes close to this realism, they deserve a pat in the back.
My big complain is the lack of diverse enemies. You have 3 types of “critters”, one very original, 3 humanoids and bosses. That’s it. I’m one of those players that when it comes to games with monsters, I’m all up for the craziest stuff the developers can come up with.
Achievements
Awesome list. There’s no difficulty achievements so it’s just one run, boom, that’s it, campaign related achievements are done.
Lots of achievements are related to actions you SHOULD be doing, like creating bombs, molotovs, fire bullets, etc.
And of course, there’s a list of goofy ones, like shooting a gold fish (the heck?) or kicking 10 “Ratz” for the achievement “Goal!”.
The main problem is the “collectibles”, aka, the roots. The good news is that you MUST “collect” at least 75 out of 100 to actually complete the game AND their locations are shown in the GPS so it’s not some huge gigantic “grind” like the flags in Assassin’s Creed.
The bad news is that they are still pretty boring to get.
Overall:
As I said in the beginning, I enjoyed this game. Sure, it had clunky controls, but it shows they really cared about this game while making an awesome action experience mixed with survival horror.
And as a gamer since the Famicom (or NES for our American friends) generation, I have had so many bad controls experiences it was somewhat easy for me to adapt, but for the newer gamers, the ones in this game are probably going to hurt like hell.
6/10 -> A good game ruined by poorly designed controls.
EDITS: Several typos and I'm sure there's plenty more. English is not my main language, so bear with me.
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Aura of Heroism
156,947
TA Score for this game: 1,497
Posted on 16 July 09 at 21:07 |
This review has 34 positive votes and 7 negative votes. Please log in to vote. |
I've had this game for quite a long time and I just got around to giving it a review. There are quite a few problems with this game, but I dont think it was as bad as all the reviews, (not just the ones on this site, but all reviews.) The controls were a bit lackluster, mostly in the areas of melee battle and driving. If you took all of five minutes to practice it, killing things with firebullets and bombs became a breeze so there was no need to kill hardly anything with melee attacks. The storyline to the game and the way that the game was set up to resemble a movie was fantastic. The graphics for the game were great. The soundtrack for this game was a huge success as it was done by Olivier Deriviere (who also did the soundtrack for Obscure for you horror game fans.) If your reading this because your thinking about getting this game, hear this: Rent it first because its not a game for everyone. However, in playing it, actually give it a chance, play through at least until you GET to central park. Since up until that point your trapped in a building and it isnt until central park that you get to experience the games style of play. Yes, it gets frustrating when you die, but often times there are very simple ways of killing the enemies that kill you, you just have to look for them. Overall I would rate this game a 8.5/10. The only dragging down factor is some of the controls. Everything else about this game was great.
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HWNDarkside
569,384
TA Score for this game: 1,497
Posted on 04 February 09 at 11:52 |
This review has 35 positive votes and 19 negative votes. Please log in to vote. |
Did anyone test this game before releasing it???
Alone In The Dark has by far the worst controls of any game I've ever played. I cannot believe the clunky Resi-Evil-spin-on-the-spot is still being used. It was bad enough in 1996, but did add something to game and helped increase the tension (mainly due to lack of control) Here it's like driving a tractor in the 24 hour LeMans race. Switching to first-person doesn't help much - the controls are fixed so left-handers are doomed to fail.
The item menu is a good idea - opening up your coat to reveal slots on each side - but is terrible in execution and made even worse by the fact the game carries on around while struggle to mix yourself a new molotov cocktail.
Combat - God help you! A nice idea using the right-stick to swing items around but given everything dies by flame only it's pretty pointless. At one point 2 Brutes (knife-throwing Humanz) stood patiently for me at one end of the corridor, throwing the odd knife, while I stood in plain sight building bombs. They just stood there. Oooooo that was SOOOO scary!!
Driving - apparently Central Park has approximately 50% of the gravity of rest of the planet. And everything is made of ice. Certainly makes for an interesting driving experience, especially when performed through first-person view.
Camera - no control whatsoever - you WILL look where the game wants you to regardless of the fact the thing about to kill you is in the opposite direction
All of this just sucks the fun out of the game. There are plus points, but as with Assassins Creed, they are totally destroyed by the sheer frustration of actually playing the game.
Avoid.
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