izigame.me

A lot of the magic and atmosphere is lost from the original trilogy.
This game feels more like a self referential theme park. For instance, in one mission you are tracking down evacuees in a town who decided to hold up in a theatre. When you arrive they are all dead, then the stage lights turn on and diegetic house music blares at you as you fight a boss on a rotating stage. The whole thing is so camp and tone deaf it takes away from the horror the original trilogy did so well to capture. The design of the new monsters are lame, in a 'let's just put some spikes on the old monsters and let's call it a day' kind of way.
The writing is so formulaic you can predict what each character will say at any given moment. After every encounter someone will say something along the lines of "let's not do that again!", or "can we go now?", or some other sarcastic, comedic remark. And it never stops. Any potential character development is immediately shut down by some poor attempt at humour. Cole and Baird served this role in the original trilogy but the writers knew not to overdo it. This game is such a whiplash in it's tones that it just leaves you checking out for most of it.
The encounter design feels mostly unimaginative, with the exception of some boss fights that had the odd interesting mechanic, like freezing a berserker by shooting the ice below it. Basically the game introduces a new monster, and then later decides, 'hey you know that monster from before, now you're going to fight 70 of them in succession.. yep that's the whole level design here.' It does this multiple times every act and it is so immersion breaking. I don't want to play a level with 30 guys with torque bows. I feel like a 12 year old got control of the world editor and just painted mobs everywhere of a single type.
Some new elements I did enjoy, like the robot companion and customising it's commands adding some interesting elements to the game-play.
The open world stuff slows the story down. Whilst I like that they were trying something new, it just feels out of place. This would be a good opportunity for interesting character development, except there is none as mentioned before.
Visuals are incredible. The cinematics, music and sound design are solid. And it still feels satisfying running around with your trusty chainsaw gun, but for the reasons mentioned above I wouldn't recommend it to fans of the series.