Actually i could talk for miles about Remember Me as well, how it led into LiS, why they’re in some ways a two-part game, ect. With Remember Me - Art direction: fantastic. Musical direction: great score (not as great as LiS, but comfortably above average). Subtle unnecessary progressiveness: yep. Characters: eh. Narrative: eh (aside from environmental) to wha?. Raises question it doesn’t have time to answer: LiS.
But combat? Oh, man. Even i can’t overlook the combat. It reminds me of the combat in Dante’s Inferno, that last gen action-combat game where the combat was both not that compelling with very irregular and unexpected difficulty spikes. The hardest fight in R.Me was just a random mini-boss chain. DONTNOD fixed this in LiS by getting rid of combat entirely. So i’m worried whether this was a lesson they learned and applied to LiS consciously (in which case they’ll think hard about the combat in Vampyr) or whether it was the happy accident of aping/ripping off a Tell Tale style adventure game where there are no combat/action sequences (and where they might not have learned what they did wrong with combat in R.Me).
I didn’t mind the combat in Remember Me. It was more of a rhythm game than an actual fight simulation. But it definitely wasn’t the best part of the game.
The problem with the combat is that it made a 90% game into a 75% game, to use reviewing parlance. If they had gotten rid of the combat and made 16-20 rewind sequences instead of just 4 we are in GOTY territory.
Well sure, that’s the problem with combat if you hate the combat. I didn’t really, it was almost like dancing. Maybe I played at too low a difficulty level or something, I just don’t remember it really being a factor.
We’ve discovered a “technical bug” which we totally fixed super quick, but it set us back by six months. Absolutely not a marketing / QA / game’s not done decision.
Let me know if they get down to one or two needed to push them over. I love these guys and what they’ve done but I am so not interested in vampires. Or vampyrs, or something.
