Long story short: Hellraid is just plain bad. I've played for a few hours now so I gave it a decent chance, it however failed to win me over. Mind you it LOOKS pretty good. The design, atmosphere and overall visual quality is great. It's however exceptionally boring gameplay-wise.
Main issues:
- Stripping parkour, immersion, varied enemies and the library of weapons from the vanilla game serves to highlight how terrible the combat is. All you can do is swing aimlessly at skeletons with no variation. This is not a videogame, it's a massive chore.
- This is made worse by the fact everything staggers you and many enemies even knock you down while most enemies DO NOT get staggered in return. Doing endless 1hit > dodge > 1hit routines is just dull. Sure you can cheese by abusing their terrible AI but that also gets real tedious real quick, and isn't always possible.
- Has absolutely nothing to do with Dying Light. And the way to access and leave this mode is awkward and confusing.
- Perplexing level design often with no way to know how to progress. Cleared the room but the gate won't open? There was a switch 2 rooms back. Cursed door stays locked? There was a single skeleton in a corner with broken pathfinding. This makes the moments in-between fights feel even more like you're wasting your time.
- No real progression. There is a level-up system, but it does NOTHING aside from the first few levels granting you "new weapons to find". Which is dumb as hell. Pun intended. Shows how little thought went into this mode.
- The "story" is uninteresting at best. At least the voice acting is pretty good.
- Buggy. I've managed to clip through the level twice and both times the whole game got confused and I had to exit and restart all over again. Also enemies morphing through closed doors/gates or spawning completely immobile are a pain.
- I was forced to try this DLC because I'm a completionist and they added some bare-bones achievements as an incentive for people like me. Huge waste of time.
And there's a plethora of small gripes as well. Like how pointless the weapon-system is when they're all the same. How useless 90% of the throwables are. How everything looks and sounds the same with ZERO variation. The list goes on.
Hellraid was a dev-experiment gone wrong and it shows. They should've just buried it instead of trying to sell it.
Avoid at all costs. Don't even buy during sale, it's THAT bad.
izigame.me
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