Gosh. Simply put, it would have been really awesome, if it weren't for the fact that it sucked. So. Badly. When you first start out, the action is intense, the atmosphere excellent. But as you play into the second hour or so... The screen freezes. The sound suddenly plays in a thralling loop. You go, what the hell? And then, you find yourself staring at your desktop, with a little error message about a random memory leak.
Okay, never mind. Probably just a random occurrence. So you boot the game back up and continue playing. You wait an excessively long time for the character selection screen to load. Then you wait an even longer time to get into the last station you were in. Now, you realise, with some disappointment, that you were almost finished with the quest when the game crashed. But still, you think, it's alright, it's fun anyway. So you go ahead and do the level again.
Now, you've cleared an entire sewer. Rid it of it's undead and demonic denizens. It's a long way back to town, so you open a portal. You step into the portal, expecting to appear back in the subway at any moment, but suddenly, you're back at the login screen! And why? Network connection error.
Bloody hell, you think, but whatever. All online games have connection issues. So you get back on(again waiting an excessively long time for loading). Alright, let's go undertake another quest! This time, you decide to party up. So, you head off into another dungeon with your newfound teammates. The few of you rush out and face some monsters. You unleash your most devastating skills, but there's something wrong. The monsters aren't taking any damage! Crud, I'm lagging, you think. But here's the snag: You are still dying. You have no way of defending yourself. You inevitably die, and revive feeling cheated. Every online gamer who has died due to server latency would understand this.
You rush back up to the party, who is waiting for you. Now, you carry on, explaining what had happened. Unsurprisingly, one of your teammates shares a similar anecdote, only to have another person mock you for having a crappy Internet connection.
Fine. So my Internet connection sucks, you think, but you move on anyway. Eventually, you reach a ledge and try to jump over it. But wait, you're stuck! You are now suspended in the air in between the ledge and some other object near you. You realise that you can't move an inch in any direction. You say something in the chat box to check if you're still in sync with the server. You are. You have become the victim of a horrible glitch, and the only way you can overcome it is by logging off and back on. And this forces you to wait for an extensive period of time so...
That's not all. There are monsters that turn invisible. It's not an ability, it's a glitch. They leap at you to attack, but sometimes their animations freeze at the moment of leaping. They're still flying through the air, but it looks like they're stuck somewhere. This leaves you helpless and unable to predict attacks. You die again.
The entire concept of the game is awesome. I love the idea of an action-RPG + FPS. And when the game is not killing itself, it's the most fun I've had on a video game in a long time. The only problem is, that it kills itself way too often.
Way to spend seventy bucks. I guess I was too anxious to finally get a new game that I could play online. And the fact that it was made by the creators of one of my favorite games helped in my decision.
This game needs very extensive polishing. Fix the bugs and glitches. Ramp up your servers. Fix the damn buddy system. It doesn't even work. I'm just gonna lay off this game until they release a patch that corrects these issues.
Fricken' memory leaks.
-Joe