Be Excellent To Each Other

> This is a game about a robot suit *brrrzzzt*
> It's apparently won awards or some shit.
> It's about £8 but it's 20% off or something on PSN right now.
> I'm enjoying it even though it has *hnnngh* puzzles. They're fairly easy at the minute so, yay me.
> There's some shooting and hiding behind stuff.
> The animations are lovely and the atmosphere is nice.
> Incoming YouTube video.

It's been on my PC list for a while now, looks like good stuff.

Mark E Smith looks different nowadays.

I've finished it. In two days. I'm sure I didn't spend that much time on it neither. A couple of hours yesterday and an hour today. For £7 I ain't impressed.

Unless the game is any good!

So let's explore whether it is:

It's an old school point and click game (without the pointing and clicking) about a robot suit. With the pilot of the suit damaged and perhaps critically injured the suit boots up and takes control over the pilot. So as the robot suit you have to explore a strange planet in such in search of medical help for your injured man living inside you.

Cur one short area, one large area another one short area of puzzle solving goodness to rack your tiny brain. To say that the puzzles are largely a piece of piss to solve but fucking fiddly is an understatement. You point your gun around the screen and if a tiny magnifying glass pops up then you can interact with it. That's fine but they are so small that they're easy to miss as you are waving your gun about the shop. Bigger icons, brighter colours or permanent icons on screen could obviate this but, nope, tiny blue icons is what you get. The developer commentary boxes, if selected, are always shown on screen in a bright yellow box and normal icons could easily have been replaced in the same fashion.

Also the UI, whilst unobtrusive, also takes the form of tiny blue menu boxes. The icons for the objects you pick up are then small and barely recognisable. Tiny, tiny icons barely recognisable. And navigating the menu is pissing irritation too: hold the right stick to locate the magnifying glass, hold R1 to access the menu, whilst still holding R1 you use the left stick to navigate the menu and release R1 to select. If you want to select another option off the same menu then you repeat the lot all over again. It's a messy and unnatural system. Why it couldn't be R1 to select menu and then leave you to navigate the menu without dropping out by releasing R1 I'll never know. Plus it won't let me use the cross pad to navigate the fiddly menu either.

So what about the puzzles? Fiddly because of the above stuff. They were never illogical or difficult to understand, so that's good but because of the menu and icon crap I missed stuff I had walked right over and it took a while and some unnecessary backtracking. There's a couple of bits where you have to shoot the roof though to drop pipes, smash a window etc which were shit as the graphics are quite dark (and there's lots of black) and at one point in particular I didn't even clock a supposed window as it was just a black diagonal line in the corner of the screen. I hit it entirely by accident. That can't be good, right?

Overall though the graphics are nice as is the animation although given how little is going on its disappointing when it does the tired old fade to black when something is going on that might require a more detailed animation. Tying a rope to a car tyre: kneel beside car, fade to black, screen comes back and rope is tied. Lazy.

Whoops.

Anyway, after all that pointing and clicking and stuff I was mildly interested in pushing the story forward and when it ended with a "To be continued" rather then proceeding onto the next section (or just ending on a bombshell) I felt a little flat. It was sort of interesting, it was mildly entertaining (annoyances aside) and I was waiting for questions to answers that never came because of "To be continued". It left me feeling it was unfinished, too short and despite a strong opening sequence the rest of the game was too preoccupied with trying to be clever questioning the nature of, um, stuff. Choices, decisions, blah blah. I'm sure someone will think it accomplished some of these things but I needed it wrapped up. To be continued, was too cheap an outcome for my pennies.

So was it good? It was ok.

It'll probably be fleshed out with DLC blah blah blah and so on. It might just be worth waiting until it's a complete package since, at the moment, it isn't.

And I'm wondering why they even bothered putting the "cover system" into the game. It didn't need it and it proved to be a bit fiddly like the rest of the game. I can understand why there is some shooting, well, maybe once or twice throughout, but sections where you just walk forward and blast stuff was largely a bit crap.

ALso, also, there was a bug at the end of the game that occurred no less than 3 times. In the final fight you can regularly get pushed up against a wall as the boss is coming towards you and if he does his 'knock you over' move then he pushes you through the wall and into a corridor below meaning that you have to reload your save. THREE TIMES THAT HAPPENED. And it would have happened more if I wasn't actively trying to prevent it happening rather than, y'know, shooting the boss and enjoying myself.

Tch. Games; I've never come across so many bugged games these days. I can't remember any off the top of my head on PS3/XB360. This generation is not quite living up to standards I'm used to.