izigame.me

Game is not great. Its far from the worst game out there, but the myriad of bugs and some wonky design choices really ruin what was probably a different version of what they wanted from the outset. Awful experience singleplayer, but passable with friends.
-First off is the performance. Its pretty bad across the board. It has constant frame stutters when just walking around, and drops FPS to the mid 10s for a few seconds while stuff loads in/enemies do things.
-Next off is the AI. Oh boy are they braindead. Kinda wild how DIshonored from over 10 years ago got it fine but this one messed up so badly. They will prioritize repositioning or going for cover despite you being 2 feet in front of them. The damage is completely random, from no damage to 2 hitting you. Vampires AI is pretty basic as well, as they only have a lunge attack and a teleport attack.
-Next is the UI. I don't know how to explain it, but its by far the most unresponsive / unintuitive / buggy mess that Ive ever used. A window pops up every mission complete, that you have to HOLD DOWN to close, which takes up half your screen and prevents you from using melee. The UI constantly is wrong, where ammo counts dont update, quest objectives disappear or stay on the map when complete, getting locked in the pause screen, or simply missing basic features of a loot&shoot like marking guns as favorite/junk to easily scrap or delete.
Design choices.
- The character's abilities are neat on paper, but they dont really work with how the game goes. Medic character is useless, Dev is OP with their teleporting and god tier lamp ultimate, Layla has ups and nothing else so you might as well play Dev, and Raven guy has awful lines and skills that should be more powerful than they are.
- Its 2023 and coop games STILL don't do saved progression. I cant understand why developers think this is acceptable. NOBODY and I mean NOBODY wants to play a game with dozens of useless quests and annoying side missions more than once unless they are playing with a new character (and if your game actually is worth replaying which this is not.) Their reason for not doing this is nonsense too, as their are zero choices in this game that do anything, and even if there was, it encourages a new playthrough, rather than having to replay the stuff you already did. At least character specific levels and items are saved, but still.
- The skill tree sucks. All the abilities that you get should come as basic parts of the main skill.
- You can only hold 5 health packs and 8 lock picks. Why?
- You all have to be in proximity of an objective to activate it. Or accept a mission, or pick up random things. Do it like Dying Light and let us teleport to them if theyre waiting. Or dont do this.
- The guns are pretty mediocre. Theres like 10 legendary guns and only 2 of them are actually good. The rest are mid or garbage.
- The nests are a huge waste of time. The rewards from them are always trash. And you're better off just doing stuff to get the Rook to spawn and kill him. He drops good stuff sometimes.
- Characters talk over themselves and others constantly.
- Final boss is the biggest waste of time. Once completing it, you get credits, and then NG+, with no chance to keep playing your save.
- Cant go back to the first map once you get to the second. Why?
- Cutscenes are cheap and still and not worth watching.
- Story is a cool idea, but the rest of the game makes you not care one iota about it.
- Music and sound is fine, but the glitches either mute it, or make it simply not play.
- No drop in drop out coop. You have to play from the lobby.
- You cant pause the game, even in singleplayer. ????????????????????????????????????
- No gun trading / dropping. Not a big deal, but a looter should probably have this feature.
- Enemys seem to level up with you. You dont really get stronger, you only get more mediocre skills as you go. Weapons are level based, so as you level it forces you to use new guns, which is fine, but the weapon amount is so limited that hoping to get 1 of the 2 useful guns is a pretty weak gameplay loop, which this game boxes you into.
- The game would probably benefit from some random stat buffs/nerfs per weapon so it makes looking at the gun's stats actually mean something rather than throw everything away that isnt an orange legendary. \
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This game feels like it was a different game but was changed to a coop game mid development. The UI feels like it was either subcontracted to someone else, and thus ran into the same problem Halo Infinite has, or was done in the last week of development. I expect more for a CDN$ 90 game and the studio that put out Dishonored and Prey. It feels like every skill/ability for every character was combined into 1 large skill tree for a single player game, making it interesting and fun to play with builds and playstyles sort of how Dishonored did it.
Its such a shame this game turned out like this, as itll probably affect how the industry looks at these style of games with distaste as they 'don't sell well' or 'arent fun' which is a lie. Borderlands, Dying Light (1), and even some roguelites like Gunfire Reborn and Risk of Rain got it right with their weapons and gun play, and even they had a story akin to what Redfall was trying to pull, but where Redfall fell flat with their design choices, Borderlands and Dying Light excelled because it was fun to play and had some memorable guns, weapons, story, characters, dialog, and SHARED STORY PROGRESSION! Redfall has none of these.
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Story - 4/10
The ideas are there, and the concept is real cool, but imagine if this was a Wizarding World game and Harry Potter had the personality of drywall who was annoying to listen to. (Not to say this world comes even a step close to WW's universe.) Puddle depth characters, still exposition "cutscenes" and a lack of a real narrative makes it not worth it to pay attention to. The only dialog you get is 1 of 4 quips/banter between the characters or a guy whining about his weird bird. The villain gets a better story than the main characters.
Gameplay - 3/10
The lack of abilities and how they make you feel strong makes it a chore to do anything the game intends you to do. Its more appealing to just run past everything to get it over with faster.
Graphics - 6/10
I get the style they were going with, but a game from 2023 should be better. Higher poly, more dense foliage, better lighting. Its the Unreal 4 curse.
Performance - 2/10
With graphics from 2010, a game like this should run flawlessly on any mid level machine. I suspect Denuvo is the culprit here, and companies should take note of how their game is seriously impacted by it. At least it was playable at ~28-40 FPS on lowest settings.
Sound - 6/10
Music and guns sound good, although theres too many bugs that affect it, and the dialog keeps overlapping making it a headache to linger in the populated safehouses.
UI - 0/10
It straight up barely works. Im amazed I could finish the game with it. Stop with the press and hold to do basic actions, like buying or closing a menu. Trying to find some mission logs with images for clues was a chore and a half.
Design - 2/10
The flat abilities and lack of guns in a Loot and Shoot makes me question what happened to the game. Design couldn't have been this bad from the outset, and if it was it raises questions of what M$ and Arkane was thinking and if they have even seen a successful Loot and Shoot, or if they just threw a dart at a board with game genres and went with it.
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Overall - 3/10 A disgrace for the legendary Arkane Studios. Thats two game in a row that missed its mark horribly. M$ needs to seriously look into their leadership at Xbox and see why almost all their new games in the past few years have been commercial disasters. Its hard to even pretend to stick up for Xbox and M$ at this point when Sony has been killing it with quality games for the past few years.