Remember Me
As great is the ambition, so is the fall. This game has incredible potential, a worthy and well-crafted background story about a bleak digitized-memory future, an original and satisfying combat system, Lara-Croft-esque environmental maneuvering, and yet all of this is made insipid and boring by an inability to tell a story and design a satisfying game.
The biggest problem is that it's just so stupidly linear. There's this big futuristic city as the backdrop, just aching to be explored, but all the levels have one entry and one exit, and you are forbidden from straying even slightly from the game path. Lara-Croft-esque jumping around might seem fun, but you can only go in the marked direction. There are no environmental puzzles. So it's not fun, just a chore.
To make things even worse, even the basic exploration is hampered by doors being locked behind you. You keep getting hints of cool secrets to discover, but if you choose the wrong path you cannot go back to find them. At a certain point you just give up, and randomly pick a direction and hope to find something new and interesting. More often than not, you guess wrong and are pushed back to the linear progression. Is this supposed to encourage you to replay in order to find the secrets? It encourages me to shut down the game.
About those secrets: many of them unlock more background story elements. They are all very interesting indeed, but if you miss the secrets—so easy due to how you're forces to the linear sequence—you will be deprived of these important details. Why punish players this way? Why not give players all the information? It boggles the mind that these intriguing tidbits are lockable and frustratingly easy to miss. I see no point in making this information a random gameplay reward.
There are so many other frustrating problems. Third-person angles are hard to get right, and this game utterly fails at the challenge. The camera is supposed to intelligently follow you around, but it's constantly in the wrong position, especially in combat. You will fight with the camera more than with your actual enemies. And of course, the heavy-handed linear narrative means that often you just can't turn the camera to look at things other than what the level designers demand. Again, you are encouraged to let go of your curiosity and just keep moving forward. It's a dismal sense of lacking any control over your character. It's the opposite of role playing.
The bad third-person angles also make it hard to enjoy the surroundings. The designers chose the worst possible field of view here, always narrow and incapable of grasping the magnitude of the vistas. It's a big futuristic city, but a you have only a tiny little keyhole from which to see it, and much of it is blocked by your character. And since the camera often won't let you even look around, it becomes an exercise in futility to even try. Little details get lost in the keyhole and big details are entirely impossible to encompass.
Another broken, but potentially cool innovation, is the memory manipulation sequences (this technique appears again in Dontnod's much better next game, [I]Life Is Strange[/I]). Unfortunately, the controls for these sequences are especially abysmal. You are supposed to spin around your left joystick to manipulate time and catch certain moments, but it's awkward requires frustrating precision. Instead of immersing yourself in an evocative mechanism, you will be fighting your controls. What a sad miss.
I did finish the game, because I became attached to the background story. But I was bored and impatient to get to the end. And so it's worth mentioning that this game is quite long indeed. Usually I would applaud such a rich amount of content, but when the gameplay is so awful, it becomes a drag.
Final nitpick: though I heaped praise on the background story, it's also riddled with clichés. The characters are larger than life, as expected, but utterly unrealistically so. For a game that pretends to be grim and gritty, this makes it hard to identify with any of the people you meet.
So. Play this game only if you're really, really passionate about this genre of science fiction, or are really intrigued by the combat system. But know that the game itself is so frustrating that you might regret picking it up.