Eternal Darkness was pretty good, it did a lot of things right. Also did more than a few things wrong but nothing major.
The characters kind of feel like mental midgets though. They see a couple zombies, and suddenly it's like they're having flashbacks from all the acid they did in Vietnam. The Left 4 Dead crew are adamantium-willed demigods by comparison. And the game makes all this hoopla about the Ancients and how they're beyond comprehension and everything, but, I mean, I get it. They're big powerful things who don't care about makind much and they're trapped and trying to get out. It's not that hard to figure out.
Still a fun game though. Kinda wish they had made a WW2 chapter with Hitler trying to get his hands on an artifact but I guess that would have made the "let's rip off Indiana Jones" cup overflow.
In other news, Zeno Clash is okay, in a way that I can only explain by comparison.
I really like the melee combat in Dark Messiah; it's by far the best aspect of the game. Zeno Clash's combat is not as good, in my opinion, but it's still fun. The thing is, ZC is pretty much all combat, while DM does a bunch of things that aren't combat. So in the end, ZC is more condensed, and has more of the good stuff, even if that stuff has been done before, better, but in a less focused way. So I'm enjoying it on that level I think, at least partly because I'm a sucker for well done first-person melee combat.
The shooting bits are pretty terrible though, mostly because all the guns suck and the interface mechanisms surrounding weapons are fairly clumsy. The lock-on could use some work also.
The setting of the game is kind of meh, too. They make a big deal about being original and designing new stuff, but part of me keeps thinking I'm playing "Planescape: the FPS" and that they just should have got a license. Sometimes it feels like I'm running around the Outlands trying to figure out what can change the nature of a man, you know? Only it's not remotely as good as Planescape; it's just weird for weird's sake. And it's got retarded made-up expletives, and makes you beat up a girl in the first minutes, which, hmm. Well she started it, I think. But yeah, I didn't enjoy that. Maybe it's by design, I'm not supposed to enjoy it. But if I want games I'm not supposed to enjoy there's probably any number of pretentious developers out there who'll serve that need.
Still mostly fun though. It's okay.
