Patrick O'Keefe

The bones of an excellent game and story are clearly here, but the repetitive, surface level combat, and inconsistent mechanics hugely hold it back. Edit: Unfortunately I experienced a game breaking bug during the last chapter that caused me to revise my review. I started the very last chapter of the game with none of my health, stamina, or combat upgrades, and upon doing some research, discovered that this bug has been well documented for a year. The fact that the developer has not addressed this is absolutely astounding since it ruins the experience entirely. Avoid this game, get your money back if you encountered this bug.

This game has so much fantastic potential, and areas in which it truly excels, however, it stumbles in other critical areas that hamstring it from being really great. The story of this game is intriguing, full of mostly great twists and turns, and the atmosphere is absolutely phenomenal. Much of the voice acting is also very good, with the vast majority of the characters feeling quite well acted. Where the game stumbles, however, is in the core mechanics, and some of the premise. The game is sold as being significantly more survival oriented than it is. Yes enemies are always a one hit kill, but your options for fighting back are wide ranging and plentiful. Further, the core mechanics of the game just get very, very old pretty quickly. Each enemy encounter or boss fight relies on the same basic set of ideas, never really varying, or straying from the formula. In particular, the last boss fight is really just plain bad. Additionally, because of how poorly fleshed out the crafting is, upgrading your gear never really feels neccesary, and as a result, there isn't much of an incentive to thoroughly explore each area. Overall the game has excellent atmosphere, and some great ideas, but stumbles on executing those ideas in a way that is consistently fun and interesting to play.

Solid game, but a combination of absurdly long load times, and game crashes/freezes at workbenches knocked a star off for me

Really still quite bad. The protagonist is way too smug, with none of the charm, drive, or motivation of many other AC protagonists. Further, even 6 years later, the game still has an unforgivable amount of glitches, including ones that require you to start entire missions over to fix. The lack of a "restart checkpoint" feature. or manual save system in a game this buggy is pretty unacceptable.