I just registered on this site although I had visited it a few times in the past years. Seems to be a pretty cool place. I've been blogging and enjoying the community of Gamespot.com for a lot of years and thought I'd post my blogs over here too when I make them. I'll keep posting them here too if people don't hate them haha. If you want to read my older blogs you can find them here: http://www.gamespot.com/users/lazyhoboguy
Wow. I wasn't expecting to enjoy this game so much. It feels like a mixture between Resident Evil 4 and Doom 3 which were both games I liked quite a bit. It feels extremely inspired by Doom 3 to me. The space setting, use of lighting to make things scarey, and slow-paced nature of exploring corridors all make it feel a lot like Doom 3. It even has random audio and video logs scattered about just like Doom 3. The game feels like Resident Evil 4 since it is a 3rd person perspective and you have to do a lot of ammo and item management. I've also read around on the internet that this game is supposedly influenced by the Alien movies, but I wouldn't know since I haven't seen them yet.
If you have played Resident Evil 4, Doom 3, or survival horror games though do not start this game on the normal mode. I reached chapter 4 on this mode and never died once from an enemy. I died only once from an environmental danger that I didn't notice until it insta-killed me. On normal mode the game doesn't feel like survival horror at all and felt like a piece of cake third person shooter. I rarely ever got hit by anything and because of that I had tons of health items and ammo that I was never in any of danger of needing. I wasn't all that impressed with the game while playing on this mode. As soon as I started playing on hard mode though the game really started getting fun. On hard mode you have to be much more precise with your aim since there is less ammo and enemies take more hits. One important and cool aspect to the gameplay is that you have stasis which lets you slow down an enemy for a small amount of time. You really have to make good use of this on the hard mode since your supply of stasis is limited and many of the enemies are fast and attack in groups.
The game doesn't really feel scary to me, but neither did Resident Evil 4 or Doom 3 really. It has a creepy atmosphere like those games since you know enemies might pop out around any random corner. That is not really a flaw at all though. I didn't get the game because I wanted it to be scary. The only real small flaws I will mention are that the melee combat feels a bit awful. You can b****slap or stomp on enemies, but aiming these attacks feels really imprecise to the point that they are pretty pointless to ever use unless you have no ammo for any gun at all and there is absolutely nothing in the environment for you to toss at an enemy (yea there you can magically pick up and toss s*** at enemies with your hand like in Timesplitter's Future Perfect).
I hear this game has a new game plus mode where it gets harder and you keep your upgraded stuff. That sounds like something up my alley. This might turn out to be an extremely repayable game then. It already feels quite lengthy as I have put in a good amount of hours and am on like chapter 5 or 6. I might be wrong, but I believe i heard there were 12 chapters total.
After beating Dark Souls 2 times every game I tried to get into just couldn't match up haha. This is the first one that got me engrossed and not missing dark souls the whole time while playing it. Although, I still am playing Demon's Souls again sometimes because I am a weak addict.
