Reviews

I really love the setting and premise of this game and really wish that the idea of a city slowly sinking was used more effectively. The game captures what you'd expect out of a Lovecraftian game well enough but there could definitely be some more madness effects. I love a lot of the things the game does from ape hybrids to having the denizens of Innsmouth be refugees after the city's destruction. There are some good underwater sections that can be pretty freaky if you don't enjoy colossal monstrosities. The gameplay isn't the greatest but I don't expect too much from the people making Sherlock games as there isn't much combat if any in those games. It is serviceable but the devs bring all their detective talents over and that is where the game really shines. There is a lot of good deducting the players will do as the game doesn't exactly hold your hand. I'm fine with this but I do wish there was a better way to show where hints are as some places will have to scouring the same scene because the prompt didn't display properly. The game does not lack in content in the least. While the main story is fairly short, there is a ton of side quests and little errands to do to keep players busy. When it comes to traversal though, the game can get a little tedious. There is fast travel from phone booths that need to be discovered first and their placement isn't always the best and then there are multiple flooded streets requiring a boat to traverse. For the most part it's manageable but it can get old needing to go to Reed Heights multiple times if you didn't find a fast travel there. All around I enjoyed the game a lot and it does a great job of portraying a detective in a Lovecraft story.

I think this game is good for the most part. It definitely captures what you'd want in a Lovecraftian game, which is mainly the inescapable insanity. Some of the story is meh but there are some good parts. I like all the nods to various Lovecraft stories and some of the lore they added.  I really enjoyed the cosmic tearing at the games climax. It's a small thing but it was handled well. The game does suffer from some old design flaws, worst of which is progression without backtracking. This comes in both the most obvious form which is if you progress too far within the story, you cannot go back. Any clues or conversation you missed are lost and the game has a pretty harsh autosave. Most games that respect a players time will have an option that shows this will move the story forward. You've probably seen this a lot where you can say 'not yet' and go about your checklist of actions. The other issue is in the dialogue tree it's not apparent which choices are branches to another topic or which are choices to close off a branch. Most of the time you can ask almost everything but the ones on the right which usually indicate that is the progression. All that aside I think it's impressive that a team, who's catalogue mostly consists of bicycling games, did a pretty good job with the license. I don't think anything will ever top the 2005 Call of Cthulhu but that has a lot to do with nostalgia.

Many thought that WB Montreal was going to deliver an Arkham-esque game with this one, but that was for sure not the case.  Although it was made clear we would be stepping into Batman's shadows and forced to embrace different styles of combat and general gameplay mechanics, this game proved to be very boring at times.  I appreciated the attention to detail with regard to the varying dialogue amongst the 4 playable characters, but the game did a poor job of making sure I would switch from character to character every once in a while.  Upgrades you earned as one character was only for that character, which basically forced me to max out Red Hood and play as him for the majority of the game.  Because of this, I missed out on some other focal points that the other characters maintained, like stealth, which would have let me reminisce about the Arkham games, at least a little bit.  Aside from the fundamental feel the game had, the low frame rate on the Xbox Series X was a turn off from the start - and it is not even like one of those things where frame rate is sacrificed for better graphics.  Rocksteady's 2015 Batman: Arkham Knight had better graphics than this game.  To top it off, the top speed for the bat-cycle was comically slow and was a perfect reflection of the game as a whole: badass before playing it, disappointing during and after playing it.