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Its unusual premise and daring ambition is endearing but the end result is barely playable and constantly frustrating. But with Left Alive we just feel slightly guilty that there’s no way we can really recommend it to anyone.
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Sometimes it can be enjoyable writing a negative review of a truly bad game, if you feeling you’re visiting righteous justice upon something that’s trying to con unwitting customers. Occasionally getting the chance to pilot them yourself is a great way to break up the action but there’s few people that would buy a game just for that, so it all largely goes to waste. Which is a shame because both Metal Gear Solid character designer Yoji Shinkawa and Mobile Suit Gundam 00 mech designer Takayuki Yanase have contributed to the game, leading to some really wonderful robot designs. Graphically the game is just as outdated as the gameplay, with animation that is robotic in all the wrong ways. Why I said no to Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom at 60fps on an emulator - Reader’s Feature But the stealth is ruined not just by the controls but the x-ray vision that every enemy seems to possess and the fact that there’s no such thing as stealth kills. At which point you realise, as you desperately try to ignore the incoherent story, that one of the main influences here is Metal Gear. Movement (and animation) is absurdly stiff and unresponsive, and the gunplay is so sloppy and imprecise, with absolutely no feedback, that we genuinely thought there was something wrong with our controller at first.īecause you’re always underequipped, compared to the enemy, there’s also a strong stealth element to the game. The controls are hopelessly awful in a way we wouldn’t have thought possible for a modern game. The only problem, as we alluded to earlier, is that the game’s completely rubbish. The game is clearly going for a Second World War style atmosphere, as patrolling enemy soldiers coldly execute civilians and plucky survivors whisper you into dark alleyways.Īdding giant robots to that mix is a really interesting idea, as it keeps the whole mech angle grounded and helps you to appreciate their size and power when you do eventually get to have a go inside one.
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You end up playing the game as one of three different characters but start as a pilot whose mech (which are, slightly hilariously, referred to as wanzers) has been downed and is left alone in an enemy-occupied city with no supplies or weapons. The game’s story begins with a war between two fictional European states in which your side is the loser.
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