This was tough because as a fan of WoD and someone who genuinely wants to give even janky games a fair shake, I wanted to be generous here.

This game isn’t at all an outright disaster. There are fantastic visuals with the sprites, some genuine freedom in how you approach the encounters, and the actual werewolf gameplay can be good mindless fun.

The problem is that everything else is either average or worse. The voice acting ranges from serviceable to laughably bad. The story is…there…which is a crime for something set in WoD. Even VtM: Redemption managed to provide a good story with memorable characters and it came out over 20 years before this.

The biggest issue though is that the whole thing eventually just wears thin. What you do in hour one is pretty much the same as halfway through the game. The handful of skills don’t feel substantial enough to feel like a major gameplay shift and the stealth/combat are not complex enough to carry the runtime.

All in all it’s not outright terrible. It’s just kinda there.

I have been a W:tA fan since the 90s. I wanted to love this game. I wanted to be able to recommend it. I just can't.

Spoilers ahead.

Its biggest failing is that it is bad for someone with no idea about this world, and it's bad for someone like me who knows a lot about it. It's too difficult to understand if you go in blind. What's a Fianna? Why does it matter? Gaia? Endron? Like you can get the very basic idea (werewolves vs. evil polluters) but that's about it.

If you know a lot? They mush the Uktena and the Red Talons together nonsensically. Tell me why the alpha of the we hate humans tribe has tattoos and earrings. She's always in homid even after being rescued from her cell at Endron. While some younger Talons do use their homid forms (usually to lure and kill humans) she is presented as a wizened elder who would not stoop to such things. Not to mention I have a really hard time believing the leader of the Red Talons would ever make a deal with Endron, corrupted or not. Even if Endron claimed they would leave her caern alone.

They don't do enough to differentiate frenzy from the Thrall of the Wyrm. I am almost positive that they were trying to say Cahal exiles himself for going into Thrall of the Wyrm (a frenzy so intense the spot of corruption in every werewolf's soul comes out) in the beginning and killing a kinfolk while doing so. But it kind of loses its punch when you can enter frenzy every five minutes in combat with no bad effects. Not to mention exiling one's self is the worst thing you could probably do after something like this, though to be fair that never stopped a Garou from doing something dumb anyway.

I don't think they even mention auspices once. This is a foundational concept for all Garou culture. Also they do some things to set Cahal up as a lone wolf but it is weird to play a W:tA game where the pack is nonexistent.

Ultimately it is just too generic and not enough time and attention was paid. The environments are so close together as to be lazy. They are also all essentially the same big room filled with guys. I will say the combat does feel fun in places except for the fact that half the time, mouse inputs don't work at all. Kind of a problem for a game where you need to react quickly. The boss battles sometimes have cool concepts behind them, but they are badly made.

For example, when you fight the Red Talon leader and the caern spirit, the caern spirit has wings. When he comes down to heal the leader, his wings wrap around the arena. You then need to attack him. However, if you do so at basically any angle, the wings block your view of what you're doing. All of these fights felt annoying not because they were a true challenge, but because they were so badly constructed.

The end choice does not feel very important. There's no true epilogue as such. As far as killing Aedanna I assumed you would have to do something like that. It is Werewolf after all. But they don't really get into why her being a werewolf who hasn't changed yet leads her to being turned into some monstrous larval thing. And also, her First Change is presented as a choice she has to make, when this is not how a First Change works.

This game needed to be a lot bigger, longer, and more detailed for it to succeed.