Remember Me
Combat here is way better than I was led to believe previously. It is similar to the Bateman Arkham games, but only you actually have to develop some muscle memory to get the timing of the combo system so you can get better at dealing with enemies. The closest comparison I can think of is links in fighting games such as Street Fighter in that in order to link 2 normals together, there is a specific timing involved. Sometimes that window is only 1 frame, and really difficult to consistenly pull it off unless you use plinking which extends that 1 frame link into 2 frames. However, in Remember Me, it is much easier in comparison. The idea is that you press your next button for the combo as soon as you land the hit; so you'd press an attack button, wait till it hits, and then quickly press the next attack button. Luckily all the attack animations seem to have the same length so the timing is usually the same. That being said, even in later parts of the game, I'd still occasionally drop a combo.
Another thing that differentiates it from the Arkham games is that there is no counter for when an enemy attacks, there is only a dodge that you can do. If you dodge in the specific direction where you jump over an enemy, you still keep your combo chain. Any other direction and you drop your combo which wouldn't matter if it wasn't for the "customizable" aspect to the combo system. An interesting aspect where each attack (with the exception of the first one) has specific properties and animation. So there is 4 types of attacks: one for dealing damage (Power), another for healing (Regen), shortening cooldown on special abilities (Cooldown), and another that doubles the effect of the previous move (Chain). The farther down a move is in the combo, the greater the effect so if you manage to land a 6-hit combo that ends with a Regen attack, you'll heal way more than you would if it was on the 2nd hit of that 6-hit combo.
I love the idea of this, but unfortunately you only have 4 preset combos (i.e. first combo is 3 punches, the next one is Kick Punch Kick Punch Kick) throughout the game so the only thing you can really customize is in what order goes specific properties. Enemies themselves are also fairly standard for the most part, and there is enough variety. Certain enemies can only defeated with certain abilities. Like you can only kill robots with your projectile, invisible enemies are invulnerable unless bait them into an area tha has light or you use one of your special abilities that's like a ground pound, etc. Certainly way more variety and more challenging than Arkham Asylum (only Arkham game I played).
As for everything else, the music is great, the levels are incredibly linear (but look great in general), platforming is alright (it's like AssCreed so nothing interesting) and the story is fairly straightforward that tries to explore the aspect of how much of our identity is based on our memories. In between each episode we get an introspective cutscene of Nilin who ponders about her current predicament that she's in, and questions her actions as she has no memory of her life so she can only follow those who seem to know her since she's a fugitive. However there is no real resolution to that because it turns out that she was on the right side all along despite whatever atrocities she helped commit.
It's an interesting world for sure in some ways. People don't seem to be all that much better at remembering things despite the digitalization of memories, the brain implant that allows people to go over their memories, supress them, upload them to the net, share them with specific people, memory-based issues that degrade the human body based on all these different aspects that developers cooked up for the game. It's a shame we just didn't get a more interesting story from it.
