I'm not really enjoying this game. Metroidvania games are arguably my favorite genre of all time, and this one is pretty disappointing.
It's serviceable on a surface level. The graphics work, I can tell my guy has a helmet on. Ok.
The game world doesn't work. It's not Megaman ZX levels of crap, where your map system is utterly useless. It's just boringly put together.
There's two basic areas, in the sense that there's a "front end" and "interior." (The game doesn't call them this; this is my own description.) Did you play Goonies II on the NES? It's something like that, but not nearly as complex or intriguing. You spend most of the time in the front end, where you ride elevators, open doors, access save rooms, etc. However, there's functionally no secret areas because this is all relegated to the "interior." The interior might let you move from one location to another in order to bypass a locked door, or perhaps you'll walk through some ventilation shafts to find an ammo cache, but otherwise, it's all very predictable. The interior areas are very small and self-contained; you'll run around in them for 2-3 minutes and then just backtrack out. That is to say, it's not overarching like Goonies II, where you could warp to all sorts of different areas.
Imagine a long hallway, with a door every ten feet. When you go into a door, there's a closet. You rifle through whatever is in there. Maybe one has a few pairs of shoes in it, maybe the next has a box that says "party supplies." The doors don't have secret passageways connecting them, you can't find anything fun or interesting in them, but you sort of keep opening them out of morbid curiosity. That's what the interior areas are like - small, repetitive, and pretty much devoid of anything fun or useful; they really only exist as stopgap solutions to artificially lengthen gameplay.
To get to the interior, you have to find a hatch and blow it up with a grenade, but it's just so...benign. Get to the end of a long corridor? There's probably a hatch. Can't get around a door? There's a hatch right next to it. Want to waste your time going through a boring empty series of shafts in order to find an ammo crate you can't even pick up because you're already holding the maximum amount of grenades? Why, welcome to Hatchville, North Hatcherbrook, and Hatchway! This game put them on the map and it can do it for Hatchfield too!
Super Metroid, for example, had walls you could blow up, or hyper run through, or drop through, or super bomb, or false walls you could just bypass, or you could spider ball into a secret area, etc. Symphony of the Night let you break down walls, mist through grates, swim, use familiar to hit switches, etc. Lots of games have pits you can drop down into and find hidden items. Cave Story has lots of little "puzzles" to sort through where you pick something up and take it somewhere else in the game world.
There's NONE of this in A:I. The hatch always looks the same, it even GLOWS, and it's always right *the fuck* there. There's no mistaking it, you can't miss it. And this is arguably what makes this genre - the exploration, the feel that you can get into new places and discovery power ups or bypass enemies, maybe take a breather, whatever. This is absolutely gone in this game. By comparison, MONSTER TALE has more secret areas, and even there, it was nothing but some extra gems up on a ledge, in plain sight, but it puts A:I to shame. Monster Tale. The diet coke of the genre.
Yeah sure, ok, sometimes you get, say, a wrench, and this is going to be needed to ...unwrench something. But it never reaches the sense of primal itch these games are supposed to be infused with. It's very much "I wonder how I get past that thOh there it is ok."
This is made worse when you consider just how sluggish your character is. Samus Aran is acrobatic, and you're able to kick ass from all angles with her. Same with Alucard - you can backdash, or morph, or double jump, or super jump, whatever. Henry Hatsworth can stick to walls and have TEA TIME. Your marine in A:I can't do shit. He walks, runs (if you don't exhaust him), ducks, shoots in three directions, grabs ledges, and can evade roll (which will still get you hurt if you're anywhere near an enemy).
It's BORING. When I'm playing a game like this, I want to feel like a badass. I want to be jumping over stuff and assault enemies in a blur of death. Your marine trumps up, shoots, and hopes nothing is moving fast enough to get to you and kick your ass.
Which, by the way, given how lumbering you are, IS going to happen. This is the future, ok? I ought to be able to equip a space suit with rocket feet, or pop a stimpak and wreck some shit, or SOMETHING. But no - I get a flamethrower that can't even roast a typical xenomorph in less than ten seconds. And the whole time it's on fire, it runs over and starts humping my leg, draining my life. "So why not keep the machine gun, Strell, if you're so great?" Because you can only change weapons in the save rooms, and sometimes you have to use a flamethrower to open certain doors. Some people hate how Halo restricts you to holding two main guns, where as Doom/Quake let you walk around with a full arsenal. The idea is somewhat recreated here.
Enemy variety is very low - maybe two iconic xenomorphs, facehuggers, chestburster worms, a queen, and then some other variants. It's very low in terms of variety; these games work best when you feel like you're taking on an army by yourself.
I'm probably around the half way mark, and there's been one unique action sequence. It was ok, but the controls were pretty bad (vehicle stuff).
Other things are just annoying. You can switch the second screen between a map and inventory, but it never seems to go the first 3-4 times you try it. The game doesn't tell you that your gun can fire missles, which would have been nice to know on the first boss fight. You have limited ammo, which might enhance the survival horror aspect of the game, and might make you play more conservatively, but still just seems like another unneeded restriction. The game shifts maps as if you're playing a finish-a-level-move-onto-a-new-level type setup, which is a little jarring and breaks the momentum of exploring the largest map (i.e., the "hub" map is the Sulaco, and you'll finish an objective and move to another map entirely, then go back to the Sulaco, then another map, then back to the Sulaco...). If you jump facing right and move left in order to grab a ledge, your character doesn't turn around in midair, so you'll screw up jumps here and there.
It's just sloppy. Supposedly, this game was in development a good while ago at Wayforward, got canceled, and then only recently got resurrected in order to be released alongside the upcoming console game. This makes me think that there was a game "core" that sat dormant for a while, and Sega finally decided to release it. It makes the game feel disconnected, as if different teams worked on it without communication, and the incongruity created this malformed result.
Maybe if you're a huge Aliens fan, you'll get more out of it. I don't know. Right now I'm just not feeling the game at all; it feels fourth string and doesn't have consistency. I'm probably going to finish it, and I'll hope to be pleasantly surprised, but it's just not a good game.
ing awesome, I will be waiting on opinions and whatnot.
