Picked it up yesterday after following the pre-release stuff for a while. Even after the Edge 6 / 10 I still thought this was worth a go but after playing it for 5 hours (and being 90% of the way through it) I think even that might have been a little generous!!
Sad to say that it feels rushed and lacking a lot of polish.
The games USP, swinging using your bionic arm, uses a blue recticle to indicate what you can and cannot latch onto to swing works amazingly well one second and not at all the next. The latter is usually when you are swinging over a pit of instant death and would have to face a tedious trek back to where you were because of the lacking checkpoint system.
It looks quite nice in places. Some of the vistas are amazing and the speed at which you whizz through the skyscrapers using your bionic arm is awesome! Other times it looks like a last gen game with some dodgy textures, shocking frame rate and piss poor environments. You spend a fair bit of time underground in generic tunnels between various outside sections and they quickly get repetitive as you can't seem to use your swing ability and the whole game slows down and becomes another generic 3rd person blaster.
Combat feels clunky and the weapons are really uninspiring with your typical shooter line-up. Using your wire-arm to grab enemies and throw them around is fun for a bit but lining up the target in order to highlight them can be a bit erratic in it's desire to pick-up an enemy for destruction. Close quarters combat isn't much fun either with slow punches and no real feedback as to whether your blows are connecting until the enemy falls over.
The game is also very stop-start in the way it gives information to the player in order to complete special challenges (to get your Trophies / Achievements) and also to provide you with information about the world you are in and what everything is. Constantly having to press 'select' to pull up the in game menu to know what is going on when the instructions could have just as easily been a ticker tape along the bottom of the screen with the option to review if you want to would have been much better.
This game really enjoys reveling in it's arcade heritage as it seems to take great pleasure in killing you though no fault of your own and then making you replay whole sections in order to get to where you were before. It then kills you again and expects you to replay that section again, and again, and again. There's no health bar either, the screen just gets redder the more damage you take, and it goes down stupidly fast.
I must admit that at times the game can be a lot of fun when you're allowed to swing through the nicer environments but for the majority it just kind of plods along in a really unimpressive fashion.
Grin seem to be a popular developer amongst publishers at the moment but after Wanted and now this I don't see why they are held in such a high regard.
Sad to say that it feels rushed and lacking a lot of polish.
The games USP, swinging using your bionic arm, uses a blue recticle to indicate what you can and cannot latch onto to swing works amazingly well one second and not at all the next. The latter is usually when you are swinging over a pit of instant death and would have to face a tedious trek back to where you were because of the lacking checkpoint system.
It looks quite nice in places. Some of the vistas are amazing and the speed at which you whizz through the skyscrapers using your bionic arm is awesome! Other times it looks like a last gen game with some dodgy textures, shocking frame rate and piss poor environments. You spend a fair bit of time underground in generic tunnels between various outside sections and they quickly get repetitive as you can't seem to use your swing ability and the whole game slows down and becomes another generic 3rd person blaster.
Combat feels clunky and the weapons are really uninspiring with your typical shooter line-up. Using your wire-arm to grab enemies and throw them around is fun for a bit but lining up the target in order to highlight them can be a bit erratic in it's desire to pick-up an enemy for destruction. Close quarters combat isn't much fun either with slow punches and no real feedback as to whether your blows are connecting until the enemy falls over.
The game is also very stop-start in the way it gives information to the player in order to complete special challenges (to get your Trophies / Achievements) and also to provide you with information about the world you are in and what everything is. Constantly having to press 'select' to pull up the in game menu to know what is going on when the instructions could have just as easily been a ticker tape along the bottom of the screen with the option to review if you want to would have been much better.
This game really enjoys reveling in it's arcade heritage as it seems to take great pleasure in killing you though no fault of your own and then making you replay whole sections in order to get to where you were before. It then kills you again and expects you to replay that section again, and again, and again. There's no health bar either, the screen just gets redder the more damage you take, and it goes down stupidly fast.
I must admit that at times the game can be a lot of fun when you're allowed to swing through the nicer environments but for the majority it just kind of plods along in a really unimpressive fashion.
Grin seem to be a popular developer amongst publishers at the moment but after Wanted and now this I don't see why they are held in such a high regard.
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