With my King of Dragon Pass long-play proving... long, I decided to get back into my adventure game backlog on the side. While I'm at it, I may as well chance a werewolf-styled story, The Wolf Among Us having at least made it clear that lupine themes need not always be handled badly. So let us brave the Canadian wilderness for a bit of Sang-Froid. However, what I thought would be an adventure game with a couple of
strategic elements tacked on has turned out to be equal parts
hack'n'slash and strategy, with a few adventure-style cutscenes tacked
on. Bottom line: laudable concept, but imprecision and repetitiveness render it only borderline playable at best.
First reaction to the menu screen was: OK, we've got two men and one bedridden female. There is zero chance of the woman doing anything wrong, 100% chance that anything bad happening to her will be the fault of a man, and about a 96% chance of the two guys being brothers, with maybe one of them having to "Old Yeller" the other at some point. The story, six missions in, proves every bit that trite and then some, cackling moustachioed devil in a top hat included. And yes the protagonists are brothers and three sentences into the script the chick's already running from a rapist priest. Called it.
Passable art, but what's the point of scripting 2.5D cutscenes which look worse than the game's actual 3D graphics? Also, ugh... horrendous voice acting. Even in the first dialogue, in the sister's second line, the singular should be "candelabrum" and even if it weren't it still wouldn't be pronounced "candle-a-bra" - this ain't the '60s. Other such awkward moments crop up with some regularity, to the point I'm finding it difficult to discern the mistakes from the deliberately low(-brow) expectations. On the up-side, surprisingly apt music. While I thought the merry jigs an odd fit for "tales of werewolves" they do suit the 19th-century setting admirably.
As for the practical side, it's a survival game letting you set traps for your enemies before every level, tower defense style
- then having you play out the attacks in third-person-shooter mode:
The interplay between game mechanics (so many I'm still getting tutorial messages half a dozen missions in) is impressive... in theory. Enemies can be delayed with bait, have to work up their courage to attack you, and you can light a bonfire or shout to delay their attacks. Noise on the other hand can aggro as-yet passive mobs. Melee attacks require stamina and can build a rage bar for power attacks; shooting on the other hand requires severely limited ammunition and a long time to reload your one-shot musket... and you'll often need to use your one shot to set off rock drops. Headshots count and there's an aim assist feature. Mobs get staggered by your hits, and walking into melee range of them triggers autoattacks. The economic / roleplaying angles of shopping for equipment in town and specializing in guns, axes or traps add a fair bit of customization to your playthrough as well.
In practice however, the game boils down to midlessly repeating the same exact mission, fight by fight, several times over hoping for a one-pixel or split-second difference to play out in your favor: one wolf randomly wandering within melee range of you while you reload, another pathing out of your rock drop's radius before the others, autoaim refusing to lock onto a headshot, etc. It doesn't help that wolves turn on a dime, reversing their heads' position instantly, or that the definition of "melee range" is fuzzy at best, or that collision detection seems to detect or collide according to its own whims, or that the game failing to register you pressing your CTRL key to reload will result in wasting your power attack, or... well, you get the idea. Glaringly, you also can't save during missions, not even between the discrete waves of enemies, forcing unnecessarily long re-loads for fake longevity.
Great concept with a surprisingly wide array of features for a small indie title, but could've used another thousand work-hours of finessing. Doubt I'll bother finishing it, but I'm glad I gave it its fair shake.
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