What actually happens boils down to unlocking regional facilities like water towers or electrical substations and choosing who gets them in return for upgrades. The original pitch was that everything you did would have ramifications - the world would grow and change radically according to what you did in it. It's also quite disappointing to discover that your choices and actions really have very little impact. Unrelated, but there's also a full on stereotype voodoo priestess character, with the face paint and accent, for no clear reason. Someone calls a female character a "Vagina dentata" as an insult at one point, displaying a spectacular lack of understanding of the phrase. There's also a scattering of odd semi-misogynistic, sexist dialogue just really weird stuff that feels like no women were present for a sense check. It's far from ruinous but can break immersion and often feels like you're meeting theme park performers reciting lines to keep the show moving rather than real people living in a world. I can't tell if it was rushed or written around elements of the game that couldn't be changed. There are a lot of strange moments like this where characters clumsily lever unprovoked backstory into a simple fetch request. When asking to help a woman she immediately replies "To help with what? My poverty? My drinking problem?". (Both "dying light" and "stay human" are worked into conversation at one point for fans of 'people saying the title of the thing'.)Ī lot of character interaction feels disconnected from the game as well, or unaware of what might be on the screen when it was said - confirming things verbally rather than visually. There are plenty of questionable performances, especially with side quest characters delivering lines that appear to never have been read out loud until they were recorded - odd phrases and vocabulary choices that probably looked fine in print but sound weird and unnatural off the tongue. Only a few people have any memorable presence or charisma, for example, while the writing is all over the place in terms of quality (possibly due to the removal of a big name writer after harassment accusations). However the story, characters and your ability to impact any of it is less impressive. Overall, though, day to day existence in the world is good, with plenty to discover throughout the map. Where your increasing freerunning skills constantly feel more empowering, I oddly found combat against the living frustrating the further I got in, despite growing power and skills. These layers quickly overwhelm in larger encounters and the beautiful precision of smaller street scuffles becomes more of a desperate mash to gain control. Later, though, human opponents increase in numbers and they start to feint attacks, add in unblockable strikes, and attack at range with bows. The entire first half's fighting is shaped by waiting for the perfect moment to hoof enemies into oblivion. At the start it's all about using blocks to stun opponents and vault over them to unleash a devastating two-footed kick that gives Deathloop some competition - enemies crunch into walls or fly from rooftops, to soar for a few beautiful parabolic seconds until the ground gets involved. But the system is muddied in the mid-to-late story by too many enemies layering too many attacks. When it all falls into place you can just sort of wake up blinking at the end of a mission not entirely sure how you got through it.Ĭombat can have moments like these too, especially when you nail dodges and blocks. Things like a paraglider let you soar across buildings, while a grapple hook can be flung out in a heartbeat to swing across gaps with barely a thought. When the tools and skills you unlock click you can enter a total flow state - pivoting on a footfall to avoid danger or leaping from rooftops without looking down, confident you can fix the issue before it's too late. It's an enjoyable open world zombie game that realises that core fantasy well as you try to survive its corpse infested city: exploring, seeing what you can find, picking up missions at random, and - when all hell breaks loose - making split second fight or flight decisions as you run through streets full of undead. There are some issues I'll get to later but nothing that puts me off recommending it. It's a big game then and, for the most part, a good one. Platform: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series 1, PC
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