Recent reviews by Ocean Man

I ragged on it really bad when it came out, but it really isn't too terrible. There are some significant UI issues and they've rendered classes essentially irrelevant in this one. You can use any primary with any class now, which is a little off kilter, but it lets you keep grinding out weapons playing any class. the downside is that there are significantly fewer weapons than past battlefield games and i think that is because they spent too much times with the operator scheme they stole from COD. I cannot tell you how much i hate the operator system from COD or how much i hate it here, because it it simply illogical. Charms are dumb, playercards weren't a thing in other battlefields, etc. I really just want updated battlefield 4 with not micro-transactions. It still keeps the guns closer to reality than COD. the micro-transactions are gay, but not nearly as offensive as the COD ones. This game is acceptable.

too clunky, and frankly boring

Unfortunately is it far too system intensive for me to be able to play reliably. I had heard of optimization being rough at launch, but for now i cannot call it good.

too bad it is sorta old and no one is playing it. It's great!

BROTHER BOUGHT IT FOR ME. THE ANSWER IS YES, GOOD GAME.

I am a CALL OF DUTY addict and I can attest that this is an excellent game

BASED AF

I played the prologue and loved it. Just now getting into the meat of it and It is still as fascinating as the first time I played. The visuals are great and are unexpectedly detailed in a lot of areas. Great game 10/10.


Updated After Finishing:
I was super hyped for the title and I've been waiting several months for it to come out. I'm not disappointed with the game overall, but I think after the prologue portion the story declines and rapidly. The further into the game you get the more it moves away from a crime novel type of story and the more it moves towards sci-fi and apparently some undefined political commentary. The story introduces these sci-fi elements rather abruptly. I honestly was not expecting it and I'll address that more later.

Visuals:
I found them perfect personally. The meshing between the 3D depth and the 2D landscape was great and I was surprised to see how some of the elements in the game appeared fairly realistic such as the water. I have no real criticisms on this aspect of the game.

Game-play and Controls:
There were a few aspects of the game-play that bugged me. For starters, the game auto-saves only. Which means if you have to leave and do something else, if you close the game it will reset the conversation you were having to the beginning of the closest scene. There was also the problem that if you accidentally press a myriad of possible buttons on your keyboard you can pick a dialogue option and you cannot go back, which for a dialogue game seems important. I tried to adjust my volume a couple of times, and for some reason the F8 key-bind also makes you select all the dialogue options rapidly and you can completely lose entire conversations because of that. I actually took advantage of the weird auto-saves and shut down the game and restarted it when I did that so I could run through the missed dialogue.

Some of the other issues with the game-play was the fact that the few mechanics introduced in the prologue were not actually used very much in the actual game. There was only one other puzzle and it was not particularly difficult and mostly involved talking and reading. it was mostly minor. The sneaking mechanic only came up a few times, and was really inconsequential. The game became almost totally a graphic novel, which would have been fine overall, but I was really expecting more than dialogue fetching missions if this was meant to be read as a video game.

I enjoyed the ability to interact with a lot of the bystanders and make small talk, but it seemed apparent that a majority of these interactions didn't actually affect the story at all. I don't believe your dialogue choices actually affect the story at all and you could probably select any sequence of dialogue you wanted and still progress the story, even in reference to main characters.

There were also a couple points where you needed to retrieve objects in order to get through the map, like a key and door system, however, the "keys" were literally right next to the doors. I believe this aspect of game-play is usually incorporated to make players explore the map a little, but when you literally get interrupted in the progression of exploration simply to have to walk 10 feet and pick up a key, it seems like more of a speed-bump and less of a feature.

I don't like how inconsequential is seems with your dialogue choices. I sat on the edge of my seat thinking that there would be points in the story where a bad choice of words might get you killed, but if that option was in there I certainly didn't experience it. The opportunities to fail at any point in the game just really didn't appear.

I'm not sure if it's a bug or not but I found that you still got dialogue interactions for things you didn't do in the game. On my second play-through of the prologue, I forgot to check inside the cab of the cider truck outside "The Bite". I noticed I had forgotten only after I received a dialogue option for it in another conversation in that same play-through. Given how I had played that run there is no way Howard had any knowledge of what might have been in the truck, because I didn't interact with it.

The rabbit woman I had talked to in the prologue also didn't seem to recognize me when she showed up in the story later, although I had clearly interacted with her and she had explained a large piece of the story early on, which also seemed to break the immersion a little, contributing to that lack of dialogue selection importance I talked about earlier.

You also seem to travel through city sections once, and then you don't return, although there were maps in both living arrangements that I expected to be interacted-with like a pseudo-open world.

There appeared to be an allusion to a mechanic that would've let you read hidden messages that were on park benches and stuff if you learned it, by reading some sort of street language? maybe I read too far into that, but I didn't see it again in the game.

Story: (I'll not intentionally give out any spoilers but if you're worried about that skip this section of my review)

The story starts of very strong with the classic detective drama atmosphere that drew me to the game. The dialogue, although dry at times, was genuinely unique, at least in the prologue, because the options were fairly in-depth and really allowed you to make responses that mirrored what you actually might've thought. This unfortunately doesn't seem to actually matter too much because there aren't really any stonewalls for how you behave, Howard the saint or Howard the devil, you'll progress. You can flirt or jab, but it doesn't seem to matter too much, you cannot romance (I did try), and very few people will meet you again. The story continues on the detective narrative for a about the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the game, then abruptly and nearly at the speed of light transitions into a sci-fi thriller/horror fest. Some of the plot points don't make very much sense to me either. Why was the search for the girls basically dropped? Why didn't I know there was even a wall around the city until half-way through the game (Doesn't come up in dialogue until around mid-way through)? What is beyond the wall? What caused there to be a wall? What is the purpose of the artifact at all? Why did a particular main character get killed in the very specific way (Spiked arm) we saw, and yet we never saw anything else similar happen again, even in intense or stressful situations? What was the point of the bridge section? Why is Clarissa basically omnipotent? And what was that "Explosive" ending for? It answered almost no questions, and I feel like I've just been left hanging? I'm not opposed to being able to set up a sequel but in order for there to be a sequel, I think I need to know a lot more about what any of it means or what is going on?! Also, y'all did Howard dirty.

Story Issue theory?

I suspect that the issue for the story comes possible from translation issues, and the need to keep raising the bar on the story, and way too heavy of reliance on symbolism. I believe the developers are from Europe, so a perfect translation was probably going to be hard to achieve, but a few times the dialogues feels a little choppy or repetitive. It wasn't really that big of a problem, though. I suspect that the story got over developed sometime between the prologue and release, although I have no proof. While generally a good rule I hear is "show don't tell" I think the explanations were far too abstract. There was an abstract section involving a parade, showing a lot of symbolism and trying to tell a story, and a significant amount of the story telling floats in the parade were too abstract for me to glean a lot of meaning from. They just looked like angry volcanoes, and I still don't know what they were supposed to mean.


I'll give it a 6/10. I'd have plenty more to say, but I think I'm out of room.

addictive, launcher stays open when u quit tho.

Wish it was finished so I could binge the rest of it! Hoping they release the full game pretty soon. Great visuals, and dialogue options are realistic. Thoroughly enjoyed it.