Recent reviews by Traplord

Anytime something becomes the center of attention it is likely to fail once released.

Aside from all the bugs everyone is talking about ad nauseam, I wanted to mention a few things that really detract from the game play.

First: items central to the story
In multiple missions there are items that appear at the center point of the dialogue
- surgical tools
- stew that you cook
- treadmill
In the three objects mentioned, there are missions where you spend a good 50%+ of the time looking at them. Any person would think that the assets that are the focal points would have some amount of work put into them, but this isn't the case. The surgical tools, made of metal, are intersecting with one another, the objects clipping through other objects. The stew that you look at and stir looks like an asset straight out of Half Life, when you stir the pot the spoon you are holding just moves in circles without causing any movement in the stew THAT YOU ARE FORCED TO LOOK AT. Finally probably one of the worst examples of laziness via the dev team is the treadmill. You are forced to run on this treadmill MULTIPLE times but if you look down at your feet you notice that you are standing/running on a treadmill asset that was dropped in, there is no belt that moves while running even though this treadmill is central to the mission at hand.

Second: armor upgrades
You move through armor so quickly that adding upgrades to slots is essentially worthless. You cannot remove the upgrades once added to armor, and within 5 minutes you will finish a mission dropping a better piece of armor. It seems like a feature that should have been more flushed out but instead was dropped into the game with little thought.

Third: game mechanics
Early in the game you are shown how you can traverse memories to find clues, this is used one time, maybe twice in the main story line. An entire feature that you have to sit and do a tutorial on that is basically non-existent as you progress.

Similarly, dialogue options are lacking to put it politely. Probably 80% of dialogues that have options for the player to make an alternative choice (something determined by skills you possess) are blue, meaning they have 0 effect on the game because only dialogue options highlighted in yellow progress the conversation.

Lastly, the world map is lackluster, you spend the game traveling from point a to point b but none of it sticks out. Yes, you can tell that you are in a desert area, the city, or slums but other than those distinctions I find that nothing about building art or the design of play-spaces made any of it distinct or awe-inspiring.

Overall, I felt like I was playing a Borderlands game that had less customization, fewer dialogue options, no ability to change outward appearance (a bug causes you to be bald whenever you look in a mirror), and probably most importantly a world that isn't memorable.

Next gen graphics
10/10 IGN