Recent reviews by 𝅵𝅵hollow

A review of the campaign, I'm not interested in multi-player.

Pros:
- Stunning graphics, cutscenes, story despite the game being 8 years old.

Cons:
- Primitive lighting. I'm getting used to Ray Tracing/Path Tracing and old games now show their age.
- You can LOSE your binoculars. EA never bothered to fix it.
- The game insists that you use different weapons. Ammo is specific to each weapon. See next.
- It's almost impossible to finish the game in stealth mode. Not enough ammo, and some soldiers have to take two hits and always alert everyone around them after the first one.
- Occasional stuttering (e.g. when using the zoom mode of your weapon).

I'm not sure if I'll finish the game, so far I hate it with a passion:

These are deal breakers to me:
* FOV is so narrow it's claustrophobic as hell, the protagonist occupies roughly half the screen
* It's pitch dark

The rest of the game is actually great:
* Very beautiful graphics
* Decent acting, cut scenes, animations
* Has puzzles you can solve
* You get a plasma gun from the get go (ammo is very scarce and you need to learn to use it properly)

What you might not like:
* You can only walk and run (as for fighting: stomp or kick) - you can neither jump, nor crouch
* It's third-person only
* It has no training mode (discovering how you need walk it through after dying non-stop is not so funny)
* Shooting mechanic is quite different from other games
* There's no dedicated flashlight (your gun is the thing, except that you have to hold down the right mouse button, which is annoying as hell)
* The game takes some getting used to
* It requires a fairly powerful GPU to enjoy it, my 4070S struggles at 1440p with DLSS set to quality
* There is no ray tracing support, which is odd for an AAA title coming out in 2023.
* It's expensive as hell, luckily I bought it with a 75% discount.

If I can fix the FOV issue, I might give it a try, but the fact that it was released this way is just crazy.

Pros:
- Free.
- Your children will be happy.
- Needs a potato GPU.
- Beautiful.

Cons:
- None that I can think of.

Isn't worth it. The main game is so much more complete.

This was a quick and dirty job: very basic levels, very basic textures, the mission is very short.

Funny and sad how a 20 year old game has much better physics and destruction system than most modern triple A titles.

Original review: NOT recommended

This is definitely not my type of game, as it seems to be made for you to destroy your mouse and keyboard.

There's basically no stealth mode, just mindless running all the time and slashing, which means pressing your mouse like crazy.

The graphics are decent, but often the faces of the protagonists are so badly rendered that it looks like the game was released in 2013, not 2023.

The music and story are nice, but all the missions revolve around killing someone one way or another. It's kind of depressing, really.

Zombies are spawning all the time, you cannot clear city areas of them.

You can't finish the game without looting all the time, but it's so badly implemented that you have to press F, yeah, again, all the time. Check out Atomic Heart to see how it could have been implemented much better.

The movement and traversal mechanics are the best of any game I've ever played. I wish every game was like this.

In some ways the game is slightly similar to the Far Cry franchise but with a lot more of variety and missions.

Runs fine on my RTX 4070 Super at 1440p with RT medium quality effects on and DLSS quality mode which also means it's quite demanding but not at the level of Cyberpunk 2077.

Overall I cannot and will not recommend it because I simply prefer classic shooters and now after playing the game for 20 hours I have yet to find/receive/earn a single gun and it looks like guns are not prominent in this game as ammunition is extremely difficult and rare to get by.

UPDATE after playing it for 80 more hours, heavy spoilers:

I've finished some side quest and destroyed ... the universe, sadly the quest cannot be replayed and I cannot face/fight myself again and get some crazy loot. Darn.

The game, despite everything written above, is so rich and has so much interesting stuff, dialogs, graphics, music, it's worth playing regardless. It's still largely a slasher though.

Crashes to the desktop while loading the first mission.

Tried everything posted online, nothing works. An AV (Windows Defender) is disabled completely.

Uninstalling.

The campaign felt like it took 40 hours but Steam says it's just 10.

I liked it except like in previous installments, enemies see you through the walls at all times. It's annoying and tiresome as hell when you're playing on the highest difficulty which I always do.

The cinematics actually felt nice, hopefully we'll soon get the actual games with this image quality and animations or maybe they already exist but then I've yet to play a single AAA UE5 based title.

I've not played multiplayer or the zombies mode because I'm not into it.

This is a review of the campaign because I buy CoD games only for this. Not interested in online mode or anything else.

I always play at the highest difficulty level however this is the first game in the series where I do NOT enjoy this mode at all. Why? Like in previous CoD installments enemies see you through the walls. I am totally fed up with this.

Fire up realistic game mode, eliminate all but one enemy at the location, miss it accidentally, one shot and ... you're dead, start from the very beginning. Sometimes it takes 30 attempts to complete a single location out of a mission which may contain over a dozen of them. This is just insane.

Now, despite being almost a decade old graphics is really good but the engine is buggy as hell. I'm playing on the GPU that is three times faster that the best that was available back in 2015 and the game is still laggy as hell with FPS drops to around 20. Only when I disabled the frame cap (set it to 0) and enabled VSync the game started running decently but not perfectly. FPS is still extremely low for such an old game.

I liked the sound track.

Woman as a main character is laughable and shouldn't have been there. There are female enemies as well. That's just ridiculous. I'm not against women serving in the army but in this game they are portrayed as fast and as strong as men and that's just insane.

This is the best game I've played in the past 15 years, I'm not joking.

It's maddeningly beautiful, rich and fulfilling at any difficulty level.

There are some minor bugs here and there but considering the scope it's just a fantastic job all around.

Highly recommended.