Man, I really wanted to like this game. I enjoyed both of the Evil Within games, and was looking forward to this game. I started out not really liking the game because of the limited combat, but I was engaged with the story and interested to see where it would go. This game is not scary, like the previous titles from the devs Tango Gameworks, but the game looks just as fantastic as them. Its rendition of Tokyo might be worth the asking price just for the virtual tourism. The game is also very Japanese and I mean that in a historical sense, not a weeb one. You’ll be learning a lot about Tokyo, yoki, shintoism and some other Japanese traditions. The game's love of Tokyo and Japanese culture is the high point.

After about 6 hours with the game I was starting to enjoy it. It's the typical open world game with way too many map markers. The side quests for the most part seem to have a decent amount of work put into them with most of them having unique areas to explore. However what you are doing in these areas are largely the same. You either be killing waves of enemies, catching a yoki, or running around the area cleansing it.

This is where the simple combat really drags down the entire experience. The game is an FPS with only 3 weapons. Yes there are others, like the bow and the talismans, but they are not bound to the scroll wheel and are not picked up during combat like ammo for your "finger guns". Your finger guns all have 2 different attacks based on if the attack is charged or not. The other piece of combat is pulling out ghost cores. If you do enough damage, the ghost core will be exposed and you can pull it out. A ghost can be killed without doing this, and you can pull multiple cores at once. It takes a couple of seconds to do this, so positioning is important for this move. And that is all there is to combat, 3 weapons with 2 shots each and you can pull cores for 15 hours. It gets old fast especially because enemy variety is only okay.

Character design is another thing worth mentioning. From the look of the fodder enemies all the way to the main big bad, all of the enemies have a strong visual style. The bosses you’ll fight as a part of the main story are another highlight, not necessarily mechanically, but visually. The last thing I’ll touch on is the story again. After the interesting start, it ends up being a fairly generic story that you have seen before in countless other forms of media. The thick veil of Japanese culture kinda makes it somewhat interesting, but overall I was largely disappointed.

TLDR; Good rendition of Tokyo and Japanese culture, repetitive combat, generic story but great visuals.