The game play is your standard 3rd person cover based shooter with some extremely light platforming. The cover system is nothing to write home about, you press a circle and the player character “snaps” behind the nearest conveniently placed box or low wall. The same can be said for the shooting, it’s compantent but it’s basic. You have a Red Dead Redemption style “deadeye” like ability that can be used with the pistols. The problem with this mechanic (and this is probably the biggest complaint about the game in general) is that it’s on rails, you don’t get to manually aim the gun, just snap between targets and press the fire button. The melee and hip fire options are completely useless because you’ll just get killed immediately. There’s a lot of QTE’s but I feel like the game got a bad rap from the media at the time for them. Yes they are there but they aren’t that intrusive to the shooting sections which are the meat and potatoes of the game play. You get a second chance once downed by drinking the holy water you carry around which involves going through a QTE event but there’s not really a reason to use it, the only times I died was from being overwhelmed which usually ended in getting killed while down or from running ahead from cover. The automatic quick save is generous enough to make death not that important anyway.
The weapons are split between “science” and normal guns, the normal guns are your basic auto rifles, pistols, shotguns, etc, they feel good to use but that's about it. The science weapons fit the steampunk atheistic to a tee, with guns that shoot electricity or have special secondary fire types, the biggest problem is how underutilized they are. I played the game on normal and it was pretty rare to see them in a level, the only time they show up is when the devs strategically place them or are just outright given them for story reasons.
Speaking of underutilized, the enemies. The game starts with you hunting down werewolves but very quickly abandons them for human enemies. I can understand why this happened, the 3rd person cover shooter doesn't really work well with the mobile werewolves. I feel like the monsters were mostly cut from the game but how they ended up implementing in the game is very lazy. They exist exclusively in the on rails sections where the only interaction you get with them is through QTE’s or designated monster combat arenas. I think the idea behind these combat arenas is for you to move through the arena dodging the monsters as they jump out from behind concealment but it’s just easier to back up into a corner and mag dump the werewolves as they run in a straight line to you. You do have to finish them off with a melee attack which I think is supposed to force you to break cover or move around, but it’s easy to down them close to you and I was never attacked by more than two at a time which made them vere easy to deal with. Maybe they are more formidable on higher difficulty settings but normal is a cakewalk.
The human enemies come in four flavors. Normal enemies have auto rifles, smg’s, pistols and grenades and they are mostly static behind cover. Shotgunners have some armor and a very lethal shotgun, they bum rush you while under covering fire from the normal enemies. Special enemies have science weapons, mostly the grenade launcher and thermite gun from what I experienced. They are heavily armored and have some mobility around the combat arena and exist to make you break cover. The Snipers are barely in the game, mostly from how confined most of the shooting sections are but when they do show up they can be a pain to deal with. The issue is that you have to break cover to shoot at them but the moment you do you get shot, it’s not a one shot kill so the best way I found to deal with them is to let them shoot me, drop behind cover to regen my health, rinse and repeat till the sniper needs to reload, them shoot him.
The story is another one of those missed opportunities. It’s an alternate universe steampunk Earth with monsters and super science but it’s barely explored or explained. The main characters are all hundreds of years old because of the holy water they drink but if you weren't paying attention to a handful of lines of dialog you wouldn’t know. The only monsters you fight are the werewolves until vampires show up out of nowhere. There’s an obvious betrayal towards the end but I don’t really understand why it happened. Your friend turns out to be a vampire but I don’t know he’d become one, he’s already nearly immortal so what would be the point in turning into a vampire. It’s possible that the game is based on some pre-existing property or has tie in media that does a better job of explaining this Universe better but it’s not in the game.
Characters are fine, a bit bland but fine. They try to pull of an emotional scenes but the lack of time we spend with the characters and how in the dark we about the setting just makes everything feel hollow. There’s a romantic subplot that exists to mostly justify why the only female in the game acts like a stupid bitch towards the main character after he is framed after the betrayal. The characters also do that thing where they don’t don’t explain what's going on to each other and I’m not even sure that the main character bothered to at least tell everyone about the whole vampire thing during his trial after he’s framed.
