OMFG!
Dear Brianna Wu,
This is by far the WORST GAME I HAVE EVER PLAYED IN MY LIFE! I'M A WOMAN AND I DESPISE THIS GAME! YOU CAN'T MAKE GAMES FOR SHIT! SHUT DOWN YOUR STUDIO UNTIL YOU CAN MAKE SOMETHING GOOD! BE CAUSE YOU MADE ME USE THE PISSED OFF HADES AGAIN!
Signed a gamer who's female.
I'm serious people, this is by far the worst game I have ever played in my entire life. I played the demo for 10 minutes on my phone, and I deleted it soon after. But thanks to Let's Plays, I managed to see how much worse this game could be, because I didn't want to waste my money on this piece of shit. Oh boy did those LPs ever prove I was right, this is officially the worst game I have ever seen and played. I mean even the demo's game play is literally the same game play throughout the entire game. But let's break down why it's so bad.
Cringe inducing audio/boring sound track: The game's soundtrack is literally suffering from an extreme lack of variety and most of the time it's just something you would expect from an N64 game. Nearly every battle uses the same music, and nothing about it is memorable. And the ending song? DON'T GET ME STARTED! It's as if the singer never took a singing class in her life! Plus, the sound quality for the music is just as bad, some portions are too loud, others are too quiet, it's just a mess.
Boring/Lazy Graphics: Just look at this image. In the links below you will be able to see on how lazily done these graphics are. I mean really, this is supposed to be done on an unreal engine 3, this is the same engine that was used to make BIOSHOCK! I mean just look at this game.
applenapps.com/wp-content/uplo… The graphics look like they wouldn't even pass for an early ps1 exclusive, they're really that bad. I know some people are going to say it's an iOS game for the most part, but come on there are plenty of games on the iOS that look better than this and they don't use the unreal engine 3. I mean look at Five Nights at Freddy's, it uses a 2D engine and it looks better than this game. But now look at the "updated version", Wu's team may have gotten help from the silent hill HD collection employees. Because they just made it worse than before.
pbs.twimg.com/media/CPM0HHSWcA… pbs.twimg.com/media/CWxn6imWoA… All she did was add neon lighting and slapped new clothes on her mutated barbies. Yeah, the characters look like mutated barbies and they are so expressionless it's funny. Not to mention the animations are so robotic for nearly every character, it severly affects the gameplay and how these characters are written. I also forgot to mention that outside of certain cutscenes, none of these characters have shadows. Seriously, even games in the 16 bit era had characters with a shadow.
Lackluster voice acting/sound effects: The voice acting is the prime definition of BAD. I mean when I was listening to the voice acting, it sounded like script scanning. There was no emotion in delivery, nearly every tone sounded the same throughout the game's dialogue, and from time to time the voices weren't lip-synced up properly. Then through some means, Wu got Amanda Winn-Lee to voice act for the villain in this game. Just WHY!? And worst of all, Lee thinks this is a good game. I have no idea what she's even smoking to think that this game is good when she was Yukiko in Persona 4. I mean Yukiko is one of the best written characters in gaming and she thinks this is better? Why on earth would she think script scanning and terrible graphics make it better than Persona 4? Still, on the terms of voice acting, none of these characters even have tones that make you care for them. For example, Amelia (who's the girl in purple) is always sounds self absorbed in scenes when she's supposed to be worried or sad. Minuete (the girl with the checker board dress), always sounds cold and careless even in scenes where she's supposed to be showing empathy. Holiday (the main character with yellow testicles of hair), always sounds angry in every scene, even when she's supposed to be happy or calm or even showing some form of sympathy, she always sounds angry. Not to mention the red haired character's actress can't act for her life, she sounds incredibly robotic and said in one scene, "I'M BWOKEN!" Are you serious? Even Lee's acting couldn't save this game's terrible cast, or this game's terrible dialogue. Not to mention, the sound effects are quite terrible, they cut out from time to time, and most of them are just annoying.
Annoying/Unlikeable characters: None of these characters are likable or empowering. They have no personalities, have no deep back story that intwines with the game's story, and the voice acting just makes them even more unlikable. Not to mention Wu is a big hypocrite when it comes to character designs, she preached for racial diversity, body diversity, less sexy outfits, and sexual diversity in gaming, but how many of the characters in her game are PoC, fatter than a photo shopped super model, don't wear sexy outfits, or are even part of the LGBTQA+ community? ZERO! Way to design a cast of all white women who are all thinner than a Barbie, cisgendered, straight, wear sexy skimpy skintight outfits unfit for combat or engineering (two of which wear mini skirts and all of them wear high heels), and have less personality than a cockroach. Thanks to the terrible acting, designs, and lack of personalities, you can't feel any empathy for them. What's the point of making characters who have no personality and can't have any empathy for? Also, Wu apparently doesn't know the difference between a mercenary and an assassin. I mean how is Holiday supposed to be an assassin when she's constantly engaged in combat and seen all the time. An assassin is supposed to take down their enemies without being seen. Even the definition states that an assassin is supposed to operate on surprise attacks, not close combat.
Unbalanced Difficulty: There are too many times when the game is just too easy with the combat system, and at the same time, it can get punishingly difficult. The constant quick time events add unnecessary amounts of difficulty since they appear out of nowhere and even one wrong move can screw you up when it's a CUTSCENE! But all in all the QTEs in cutscenes don't affect the game's ending at all, they're just filler to elongate the game yet they add this unnecessary level of difficulty. I am dead serious that there are times when the QTEs are so unresponsive it makes the game almost unplayable.
Broken and Boring gameplay: Now this was the worst part of the game, the gameplay. It was by far the worst gameplay I have ever played with in my life, and this is someone who has played superman 64. Wu described the game as Mass Effect meets Heavy Rain but there was a huge difference, Heavy rain's QTEs did determine the ending, but the game play as a whole was far more interesting. The game used innovation and was aware that the gameplay was QTEs because the game played like an interactive movie. In this game, when you go into QTEs it's literally in every single time when there should be a cutscene. Because in games like Resident Evil 4 and beyond, they added QTEs as an element of survival horror, and even some critics didn't like the QTEs of RE. Because when a game relies on QTEs during certain portions of game play, one wrong move can result in your death. I've played Resident Evil 5 in co-op mode online so many times, and my level rank went down because my partner wouldn't push the button right during QTEs. We were playing and doing well shooting zombies, raking up treasure and ammo, but one bad QTE and your character is dead. Meanwhile, games like Kingdom hearts 2 do use QTEs, but they're for reaction commands to get a better combo. Once you do get into combat, it's very similar to megaman battle network. Except there is one problem with this design, it's turn-based. Arguably, this makes the game's combat system very inferior to battle network's gameplay. The enemies all give you the same experience after to defeat them, the predictable character movement can make the game too easy, and the animations and attacks are so robotic, it's laughable. Not to mention nearly every portion of gameplay design is very poorly done. In the game, the cap level for Holiday is 9 and you have a skill tree that clearly requires more than 9 levels in order for you to have all of the skills. In addition, you only have one weapon throughout the entire game, a hand gun with a bayonet weapon attached to it. Granted you can get a double shot upgrade, but it's so much weaker than the bullet you start out with, so what's the point of this upgrade? Actually, what is the point of upgrades in general if you have only one weapon in the entire game? Meanwhile the bayonet and melee combat is pointless when it requires a cool down time. That's right, there are cool down times for your melee attacks, that makes no sense in terms of combat design. I also forgot to mention that the game is very linear which allows you next to no time to rack up experience points, especially when enemies get more difficult. As a bonus, the fight segments drag on forever, regardless of how upgraded your weapons are. Seriously, each battle with just one bad guy takes like 5 minutes to defeat. Wu, the cardinal rule of any game is to make the first bad guys the easiest to defeat and as they get harder you make sure our upgrades are good enough to defeat the baddies faster.
Confusing unresponsive controls: Most of the time the game's controls for QTEs pop out of nowhere constantly and most of the time you can't do them the right way the first time. There have been segments where it took many let's players 15 tries to get past one QTE due to how badly designed the game's controls are. For me, they were just as bad, even with the first ten minutes of gameplay.
Confusing/Boring story: The story is both very boring, and of course VERY CONFUSING! Here's what I got from the story via online. The story is that, "In the future, an American orbital weapons platform has gone adrift over China, causing an international incident. Holiday is a member of Chessboard, a special operations team led by a probability-computing AI. Her team’s mission is to rendezvous with N313 and re-establish satellite control between the station and Chessboard – but not all is as it seems." I mean the whole thing sounds simple at first, infiltrate a ship called n313 to stop a nuclear war. But, it goes into this thing about how an AI shard called Crimson 09 is the villain behind this just out of nowhere after becoming self aware, and one of your team mates wants to kill you in the end. It's very confusing. Why would one of your team mates even want to kill you if they have no obvious vendetta against you? Yeah, I watched every cutscene and there's no explanation behind Minuete's or Amelia's betrayals when they've got no vendetta against Holiday, they don't even explain why. Meanwhile in the entire game we're never told in detail about what the snow leopards are, we're never told about the 5th Column aside from very basic information, and again, no background on the characters. But even people who looked at the published lethologica were equally as confused as I was, especially with all of the plot holes. Apparently 5th Column and Chessboard are in conflict with each other because the earlier is a Chinese terrorist organization that took over the government of China and stole a space ship. Okay, here's a plot hole, wouldn't the rest of the world be aware of this organization in power in China? Of course politicians would try to do something about it that didn't involve war or any kind of harm, especially with the UN in place. Meanwhile the conflict between the two organizations are not even brought up in the games at all, so why bother? Also, most of the time the pacing of the story is terrible. According to cutscenes, Holiday and the red woman who's named Unknown, were best friends for many years, and apparently Unknown has a fiance. Meanwhile Minuete has a father of some sorts and was experimented on a while ago. Yeah, we barely even know these characters and backstory points are thrown at us constantly at a rapid rate. WOW, THIS STORY HAS NO SENSE OF PACING!
Disappointment/ Critic Panning: This game was made on a 400k budget, spent 4 years in development, had an entire indie development team to make it and a studio, and it used the unreal 3 engine. Guess what we got? This mess. How can a game that spent 4 years in development, missed multiple deadlines, and had an over 400k budget be this bad? I mean let's compare this game to Five Night's at Freddy's. Here's what I know about FnAF: It was all developed by just Scott Cawthon himself, used a 2D engine, was only developed in 6 months, and every last bit of money used for the game came right out of Scott's pockets. If you must know, FnAF looks like a finished game, has great graphics, and has a very simple concept and mode of game play. In fact, it's listed on many websites as one of the best games where you can't fight back against enemies but instead rely on your own quick thinking and button pushing in order to survive. But aside from that, if you compare the games you would realize that Scott took what little he had and made something good, meanwhile Brianna took nearly everything good given to her and made a pile of shit. But instead of Cawthon, let's also look at Yandere Simulator. Yandere Sim is being produced by Yandere Dev, and his volunteers: he has high expectations for the game, he is depending solely on patreon donations for funds, and he is using his own skills the he developed over the years along with his volunteers to make this game. Not to mention, he gives updates to his fans every few weeks about the game's progress and let's fans give their two cents on the game. Take Yandere Dev's method Wu, let your fans know the features of the game before you launch it through videos so your fans will let you know what sucks. But it's not as if you actually have any real fans like Yandere Dev does.
Lack of Originality: Now let's look at the importance of N313. In the story, the agents of Chessboard have to infiltrate N313 in order to prevent an all out nuclear war. Now where did I hear about N313 before? Oh I don't know, METAL GEAR SOLID! Wow, just wow, Wu really has to go low enough to rip off Metal Gear Solid, did she really think that gamers are so stupid that they wouldn't know that N313 is a huge part of Metal Gear? But of course Wu hates gamers so why should she even bother on being original? In addition, her character designs that she used were very unoriginal too. After all, she tried to claim that the girls are this thin due to being a huge fan of Sailor moon while growing up. But in addition to that, she openly admits right here on her twitter that Minuete is a design copy of Mimete from Sailor moon.
twitter.com/spacekatgal/status…
I'm very surprised that Kojima and Takeuchi didn't sue her for plagiarism. There's literally nothing original about this game if she's not that creative about creating her own characters and her own original story without ripping other games off.
Overall, this game is terrible, never play it, never give Wu a single penny to make more. She doesn't represent women in the gaming industry, she's just a big baby who can't practice what she preaches, and refuses to admit her game sucks.