Even mascot horror deviants deserve better than this.
I've seen a bit of this being played before so I had some kind of an idea in my head before getting into it, such as "baby's first [i]Bioshock[/i]" but after actually beating it, it feels more like someone played the first hour or so of Bioshock, thought that would be enough and decided to make this game. Suffice to say it wasn't enough. There are so many things that are basically broken in this game, I'm not sure if I'll be able to mention all of them, but I'll try.
First of all, it's an optimization travesty. This is the first game I decided to use Valve's own performance monitor, because I just wanted visual proof of the game's horrid performance. I'm pretty sure it shouldn't look like a healthy person's heart rate monitor graph, but alas it did and the whole way through. FPS dips and stutters were a plenty and I don't think the game looks nearly good enough to warrant such performance. I understand the team behind the game is fairly small but then there are other indie games that look better and perform better than this one with even smaller teams. With more in-depth gameplay mechanics at times, or story beats but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I'm aware that the these series of games have a particular look to them, same as the first game in the series in fact but this time it actually became a problem for me. After an hour so of playing it I got up to look where my cat was and when I finally found her, her fur looked an entire shade of grey off. In summary, game's art style did a number on my eyes this time and I'm not sure why, didn't happen with the previous game. Not sure if it's a [i]me[/i] issue but something which I'm sure isn't a [i]me[/i] issue is the fact that almost [b]everything[/b] looking the same in this game, as in the same color and that includes interactibles and collectibles as well which makes it unnecessarily hard to make them out. It's not that they are hidden or anything either, they just blend into the environment. When you add how both collectibles and interactibles are sorta buggy in their own right, how interacting/picking them up becomes a hassle in its own right, it just becomes downright annoying. There were many times I was almost inside a collectible/interactible, like my crosshair was right on it but I couldn't interact with them. It almost felt like I needed to look at them from a specific angle or something.
I guess I have to get combat and enemy design out of the way as well. Combat's as dull as it gets, all the enemies do is to run full speed at you and hit you. And this goes for [b]EVERY[/b] type of enemy, small annoying ones, regular mobs and even for some of the bosses. There isn't any depth, any creativity, no attack patterns for you to learn, you can't really dodge or counter their attacks in any way -not that you can because they are just a tad bit faster than you when aggroed- you might as well just stand where you are and wait for them to come at you if you are not in an area with any piers or corners, otherwise you can stand behind a pier of any kind and that helps a little sometimes, they won't do anything or you can try your best with your sorry excuse of a walking speed and attempt to strafe them which will only work half of the time. The problem is, enemies almost always come in packs and they can easily gang on you, in an unfair way because combat's lacking any kind of design sense. Yes, you can use the equally underdeveloped stealth system but the levels are not designed to account for that so you find yourself only seldomly trying that approach. When you add how you can only sneak when you're crouched and how crouching halves your already ridiculously slow walking speed even more, stealth becomes less and less of an option, at least for me.
This mostly goes for regular mobs though. There are three other types of enemies in the game and I can't call two of them anything other than "f*ck you" enemies. These two come out of nowhere, [b]literally[/b], and just hit you and take your health away. One of them works as a loud jumpscare, just appears infront of you after its loud and annoying sound effect plays and you can't kill it, you just have to walk away from its path in time. The other one is smaller little guy and despite looking cute, it's invincible, it'll always hit you a couple of times before it just goes away after you hit it enough times (or something I'm just not sure it was never explained) and that's it. Like many other thing in this game, both of those enemies lack any kind of sense, at least to me. There are no mechanics to avoid them, no way to dodge them, no way to prevent their attacks. Plain annoying.
Well, the third one is just a hide and seek minigame, which gets quite old quite fast. You need to hide in a given timeframe and the "threat" just goes away after a certain amount of time. Unlike [i]Alien: Isolation[/i] though, you can't even peep at this "threat" from your hiding place nor is there any tension of getting caught even if your hiding place isn't that covered up. Once the sound effect ends, you can immidiately get out of hiding and continue on your merry way, once again this very much recurring mechanic lacks any kind of depth to it. The problem with this whole schtick however, lies in when you aren't near any kind of designated hiding places which means you will die a certain death and have to restart from your last save file or continue from the last auto-save. It doesn't happen all that often and in a positive sense it keeps you on your toes at certain times but the seemingly random nature of this it can become very frustrating too. Wish it was designed better.
Just like the previous game, the save system in [i]The Dark Revival[/i] is also completely broken, unless I'm missing something. The game itself says in a pop-up, about how you can save at any time in the menus, which to me was an encouragement to try and find the best approach at any given situtation by reloading my save file if I mess something up, to "save scum" in other terms. So after I thought I could do better in an area I proceeded to do that indeed and what I got was something I thought was a one time bug, but it wasn't. So what reloading your last save in this game does, is to fill any room you load back in with enemies. Regardless if there were that many in that said area beforehand or not, it just works kinda similarly to those bonfires in soulslike games, which isn't mentioned anywhere at all and doesn't make a lick of sense, defeats the entire purpose of the save system this game goes for in my opinion. Either it is an oversight or a frustrating intended mechanic but I have to say again, doesn't make any sense to me.
I'm not gonna b*tch and moan about the game's story or its *⁓[i]lore[/i]⁓* because there aren't any mascot horror series that has a narrative or world interesting enough for me care about and [i]Bendy[/i]'s isn't an exception. However, I found many of the story's twists and turns rather predictable, so there's that. One thing I can criticise however are the voice acting performances; there were either just under-delievered or overacted, mostly the latter. Maybe I'm just too cynical and old for the kind of tone they went for, not sure. Regardless though, I wasn't impressed.
Like I mentioned in the beginning, even people who play these games [b]ONLY[/b] for the lore and get their kicks that way, deserve better than what this game offers. It really feels like they just went with the bare minimum on every front other than art direction, which happens to be the other main thing what mascot horror fiends look for and it is unique looking monsters, so there is plenty to like for those folk. Other than that one rare time the atmosphere hit just right, I didn't find anything I would enjoy from this game. My expectations weren't even that high to begin with but once again, another [i]Bendy[/i] game let me down. Can't recommend it.
