"Remember Me" - new game from Capcom

Finished this the other day, and in a way it reminded me of those ambitious but uneven 'mid-tier' games of the PS2 era. This is both a good and a bad thing.

Its various gameplay systems are quite intriguing. I grew to really like the combo system as the game wore on. It nudges you in the right direction, but also trusts you enough to determine your own playing style. For example, I only learned late on how valuable it was to exclusively assign healing and recharge presens to the short combos, and that really suited the way I was fighting through the game. Similarly, the 'remixing' sequences were a curious idea, that tied in nicely with the game's narrative arc and themes. Especially interesting was the last one, where
But it's a game that frustrates in execution. The remixes felt fiddly. The enemy designs were often idiotic: the invisible ones, with the designers forcing you to constantly switch on floodlights for brief periods, were some of the most irritating, contrived enemies I've encountered in a game since the Flood. The Enforcers weren't much better, although at least with the health pre-sens they at least sort of worked. Most criminally, though, was how much they wasted the setting. For a rich, diverse dystopia, it was unfortunate how often they funneled you down bland industrial corridors or half-assed platforming sequences. It all blurred into itself from an early point onwards: the occasional skylines indicating a strange, fascinating world just outside of your reach. The level design itself was similarly bland. Also, the delivery of the story was a bit ****ty.

It's an interesting game, and in a way I'd like to see the ideas refined because there's a lot of potential there, and irregularly that potential is just about realised. But too often the application of the ideas is too uninspired, and too often I was left with a game that was so much better in theory than execution.