I’ve gotten a copy of this for my PC yesterday, put in a few hours so far. No review right now, just a basic overview of how it plays.
City Life
The first thing you’ll notice when playing is that the graphics are quite good and the game is quite dark and gory. If you’ve played inFAMOUS on the PS3 this game is somewhat similar, but far, far bloodier. The story is pretty simple: genetic company and military/government in on this dangerous research, conspiracy, cover ups, blah blah — your character was working for them, got experimented on/infected and is now wanted and out for revenge as Manhattan turns into a death trap of infected zombie-like people. If you’re in it for the story you’ll likely be disappointed, but if you’re in it for some action — you’ll have a very good time.
No screenshots of the action at the moment; it’s rather difficult to take them, pause, tab out, and such since the game doesn’t have a built in screenshot that I can find. I might have to look some more. Anywho, your character has the ability to sprint really fast and jump really high and run up the side of buildings while performing some over the top parkour moves. All of these abilities and more are upgradeable with what is essentially experience points you get from completing objectives or defeating enemies. One of the most useful abilities, I’ve found, is Glide. Run up a tall building, get a good jump charged up and spring it — then glide for blocks. Using the rooftops as travel typically keeps you out of the military’s eyes, with the exception of helicopters which you’d need to watch out for.
Most of that travel I just talked about will happen outside of missions. In the game there’s a sort of free roam mode where you can run anywhere in the city and check things out — including finding secrets and doing Events, timed challenges for extra rewards. One important piece to talk about is consuming: literally absorbing someone or something. Absorbing a person grants you their abilities, skills, and appearance. Throughout the city are certain people that have memories associated with you or the experiment — hunting them down will reveal more of the story. There’s also military bases scattered about — inside these are different personnel that can be consumed to make use of their appearance or skills (like better use of machine guns, assault rifles, vehicles). Consuming also restores health, so you will want to use it during combat too.
There are various weapons, both innate and outward, to use to kill or destroy just about everything. If you’ve ever played a Marauder in Warhammer Online you’ll know how this works. With the exception of the claws, most of the powers you will need to unlock through the upgrade menu. The innate weapons I’ve encountered so far were: claws, whip, hammer hands, huge blade. For other weapons there’s: assault rifles, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, machine guns, APCs. Your innate weapons are certainly the most powerful, but they do tend to lack range — with the exception of the whip. It’s quite easy to take out tanks and APCs with your powers, even bring down helicopters. Infantry are even easier, but they tend to be very numerous. If you don’t like gore, this is certainly not the game for you — your various blades will allow you to literally slice through people and reduce them to chunks.
For good/evil aspects — I haven’t seen any. There’s plenty of civilians around and you can do whatever you want to them. At the end of missions/events that are combat based there is a score card of how you did and the number of casualties inflicted — civilians do show up here but I’m not sure how they factor in, I’d guess they bring your score down. Really, your character isn’t so much the ‘good’ guy, just the ‘slightly less evil’ guy.
If you’re wondering how the game controls on the PC, it’s handling pretty well. You can tell it was designed from the ground up for consoles, but it hasn’t given me any problems and I rather like using the mouse and keyboard more.
Mmmmk, that’s about all for that. You might want to check out this game if you like a darker action/platformer/adventure/whateverthehellthey’recallednow game, or like a fast paced action title with over the top combat.
