Roberto Elias

It's pretty funny that the culture warriors giving this 1 star and 5 stars actually resulted in giving this game a fair to middling score that accurately represents its quality. Also disclaimer - I haven't finished it yet, I'm up to the last boss though. First, the good. It looks pretty good. The load times on the PS5 are excellent - press play, fade to black, you're up and running. The movement, whilst occasionally annoying and imprecise, is good fun once you've got it upgraded so it has no stamina cost. The world itself is interesting, the lore appears to be pretty deep and well thought out but I didn't really explore it. The magic looks extremely cool, and most of the time works quite well. Now the bad. Frey is not that annoying, but cuff is annoying as ****. The dialogue in the cinematics is ok I guess... But the dialogue between cuff and Frey during combat and exploration sounds like some annoying Marvel tier banter. It's off putting. And it's repetitive. The lock on is terrible. The long range spells have a max range of about 60 - 70m, which isn't the worst, but when your opponent is a flying opponent that goes really far out, it turns fights that should be over quickly into a slog. This is even worse if your enemy is an altered beast or some sort of boss that behaves as a bullet sponge. The world feels empty. This is more my personal gripe, but when you press the magical dodge button, Frey does this little flip and then starts jumping really really far. Why not just jump really far? It looks cool if you're an idiot, if you're not an idiot it's just annoying. One might call this a small criticism, but I'm sure anyone will agree with me when they face an enemy with AOE attacks. Anyway, moving on. The mechanics of going into cinematics for dialogue or whatever feels like something that would have been laughable in 2014. No one wants to have to stop what they're doing only for everything to fade to black, just so Frey can call a cat cute or something, before you can get back to doing what you were doing. Annoying, yes. But forgiveable, I can work around all this. There is however, one enormous flaw that is unforgiveable, and is actually the reason I'm writing this review. Spoiler alert. There comes a part where you have to go through a town in a valley with twisty streets, full of dudes. Naturally I slaughtered a few then just got over it and flew over the rest of it. At the centre of the valley is a castle, which you climb. When you get to the top, magical story stuff happens and you lose all your powers and a very very powerful enemy starts chasing you. This could have been the highlight of the entire game - a tense chase with no powers but parkour, a solid long chunk of the game that has nothing but action and one goal - Escape! This could have been Control's Ashtray Maze, This could have been Jedi Fallen Order's meeting with Darth Vader. This could have been SICK! The game tells you "You have no powers, you better run!" with some text on screen like a game from the early 2000's. You run around the room for about fifteen seconds. You get to the door. You press the triangle button. And then you're outside. And then you escape, in a cinematic, through a wormhole. The empty open world, the poor cinematic mechanics and the cringey dialogue would have been worth it only for that part. But it didn't happen. So now all I have is a game that is memorable only for the money I spent on it. Wait for Sale/Deep Sale.