First off, I might be a little biased in my views, cause I feel ripped off. I bought this game in my friendly neighborhood game store. “Support the little guy” and all that. But 700 SEK, and I’m not even half satisfied. Oh well.

Wall of text coming you way!

To sum this post up, this is my experience so far:

1. Hard as hell
2. Die repeatedly
3. Savepoints fuckin everywhere
4. Feeling disrupted
5. Routine
6. Indifference ensues

You never have time to get scared. You might get startled sometimes (very rarely indeed), but never scared. Especially not after getting killed by the same monsters 10 times in a row, and when you
finally get pass them, there’s a few more around the corner. And you know it.

The problem is that even the developers seem to know it. Their game being hard, and
their loading times long. Thus… savepoints everywhere, so you won’t have to replay too much. Which of course makes the game even less scary. The creepy feeling keeps getting disrupted by never ending save zones, which are very badly designed might I add. If you don’t want to overwrite some previous save, you have to scroll aaaaaall the way down to the bottom. I don’t get it. Why would you do that?
And ok, fair enough, the game has 3 difficulties. I could easily have picked “normal” or even “easy”, but I want a challenge when I play. I tend to always pick “hard”, but this game is really really hard. At least in the beginning, which is pretty critical. But.. I’ve got the technique down now, and the “cut-of-the-limbs” thing is routine. Routine being a bad word in this context, cause who wants routine in a horror game? And this just makes the save points even more disrupting, cause when you finally feel a little bit of flow, you have to stop and save, cause let’s just face it. If there’s a save zone, you save. That’s it. You don’t just pass it, cause there COULD be a big fat hairy super monster around the corner (and sometimes there is), and you don’t want to run all the way back there.

And now, 3 hours deep in the Planet Cracker USG Ishimura, I find myself quite… I don’t know. I wouldn’t say bored, because the game is beautiful, and the gore is tasty as hell. Overall I’d give the environment and atmosphere 9/10. They’ve done a really good job. The story is also pretty sweet, and it develops nicely so far. But I’m not close to getting scared. The overall score so far is a mere 7/10,. and I wouldn’t buy this game today, but I will keep playing it. After all it did cost me 700 kr.

Also.. the upgrade system is just silly. You BUY weapons in a store, for money you loot from dead monsters. What is that? WHAT IS THAT?!?!?? And I’m tempted to explain even further the silliness of this system, but that would mean spoiling.

But at least it’s safe to say this; Dag can safely play this game and keep his pants clean.
I’ll keep you posted as I play.