Anyone played
this? It seems to be a pseudo-realistic 3rd person action, supernatural-infested-Wild-West "dispatch your enemies with style and efficiency" type of deal. Looks quite cool in the vids, for some brainless, spectacular action.
Hmm, I wouldn't believe it'd be possible, and I certainly wouldn't have gone looking for such a phenomenon in a game I criticized after playing for 5 hours.
I must admit that after many and many hours (10–15+), the game has only gotten better and better. Why it reared the developing clichés ugly head for the first 5 or so hours only to start shining much later is beyond me :D
Don't get me wrong, some of the reprobate stuff hasn't gone, but I now think that the reviewers had a similar experience as me, and on top of that, played only on normal.
Because you see:
1. Missions started to not only signalize the 'no turning back' points—if you've paid attention to the game's structure enough before, that is—but also introduce some of the path-interconnectedness. Whoa!
2. It seems that there are quite a few treasures that I didn't find. And here, I thought it was rather simple! Nice!
3. As far as the boss and the semi-boss (read: reused bosses with waves of lesser creatures) fights are considered, the combat has gotten much tougher. Even to the point of a proper, keyboard-through-the-window-throwing kind of frustration sometimes. Grrrr!
4. I tried playing on normal instead of hard for a while. Turns out, the game actually really feels boring that way. In normal, you can just button-mash and be done with it. On hard, healing is sparse or you have to fight for it, and you are forced to utilize most of the learned perks, acquired skills, understand how to use monsters against each other, and truly strategically choose which danger to get rid of first and how. Button mashing often results in accidental deaths. There's no shortage of that happening in under 3 seconds from the full HP bar. Generally, by a mere mob creature landing two weak strikes after you've forgotten to mind that somewhere behind your back a stronger enemy has probably just finished charging its extra-strong attack, eheh.
There are healing monsters, monsters healing other monsters, monsters killing you with one or two blows, monsters with damage-reflecting shields, swarming monsters, tank monsters with AoEs, some(!) delayed stunning attacks (oh how I hate you again
, and on top of that, often the semi-boss (or two!) with their own skill-set of shenanigans. Banzaaai!