Really fun so far! Storywise, it's 'future evil scientist has gone back in time and is taking over the world, you go back to stop him', so it's war-torn alt-1949 with mechs and stuff stomping around. It's very Half-Life 2, down to the megalomaniacal scientist broadcasting creepy messages over tannoy. (Except hilariously, he not only has named everything after himself - KroneKorps, Krone train station, Krone soda probably - but he's also voiced by someone who sounds very much like Maurice LeMarche to the point where it feels like The Brain has finally taken over the world. Hopefully a Rob Paulsen soundalike will show up at some point shouting "NARF".) Feels very derivative but looks very nice. It's also very linear, but it doesn't really matter because your time-suit powers make every encounter feel like a puzzle. You can slow, pause or reverse time, and it's really well balanced so you have to choose your powers and weapons carefully to take out a room of grunts, snipers, turret dudes and tanks. There are also some cool environmental puzzles like pausing time to stop electricity flow or walk on water, or rewinding time to reverse the destruction of a bridge for long enough to get over it.
The nice graphics and really solid AI and ragdoll physics make it very satisfying to slow-mo run into a group of enemies, bung a grenade at them and as they slowly pirouette through the air grab the remaining guy's weapon off him and wait for time to spring back before blasting him.
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Still enjoying this. They're just managing to keep it from going stale with new baddies (jetpack baddies! Timesuit baddies who are terrifying!), weapons and some sniping and turret sections etc
According to a walkthrough (which I haven't had to use yet), I'm halfway through.
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I'm finally on the end of game baddy, although I did need to check a walkthrough to discover that - I'm on a rooftop a fair distance away from the evil robot spider thing and figured it was just background detail!
I say finally, because the game did eventually start to drag a little towards the end. The flamethrower weapon kept things entertaining for a while, and there were some cool piston things to avoid with slow-mo, but the settings started to get a bit dull (especially the switch-maze factory and air hangar levels, getting shouted at by an incredibly naggy rebel commander every three seconds) and almost no new enemies have been introduced. It's a shame they went with WWII with a bit of steampunk thrown in, the game would have been much improved with some more inventive backdrops - perhaps something a bit more NOLFy or even some wildly different time-periods (maybe they were saving those for a sequel).
It did seem like they were moving towards an interesting plot twist where the victorious rebel forces turn out to be arseholes and you have to defeat them as well, but it doesn't look like there'll be time for that.
I'm tempted to give it a little try on the hard setting once I complete it, see if it takes away the radar or anything like that.
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Okay, shot at the glowy blue things a few times and finished the game. It was great fun, but it's a shame the fun and invention of the mechanics didn't extend to the setting or story. The opening sequence was quite tantalising, with a lot more sci-fi and the mad scientist villain who apparently insisted on big cheesy neon letters spelling his name out across buildings.
Apparently the game was delayed and rehauled multiple times through development; it seems like they swapped meatheaded clunkiness for silent po-facedness at one point when it came to story, which was probably an improvement but not by much. The setting got changed "from steampunk to a much more mass-market gritty 'destroyed beauty' type of thing". There were three separate sets of voice-acting recorded, one of the discarded ones starring Dennis Quaid and Michael Ironside! (Also apparently at one point it had some tank-destroying action that I never saw in the final game.)
Niggles aside, really satisfying and fun game. A shame this didn't do better and get a sequel that really made good on its promise.
Rating: Green.
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