Remember Me has an astoundingly fitting title, though not in the way Dontnod and Capcom would want. Instead, it's remembered for trying to do too much of what it thought was right, and failing miserably, falling behind only the Children's Crusade in this category of legendary failures. It attempts to prove its competence in multiple genres in the most painful of ways. Imagine attempting to prove your skill at walking by doing so on ice, through an oil slick, all while wearing treadless teflon-coated shoes.
The platforming aspect has an on-rails feel to it, with the ledges you can interact with highlighted by a yellow arrow, as if to say, "We shall allow you to continue here, and nowhere else," and normally, you have to be in fairly close proximity to even get these markers to appear. However, as the game progresses, there are times where, for no foreseeable reason, even though the marker appears, and Nilin is in position to make the jump, you will fail, leading to an ultimately unsatisfying death.
The combat is slow-paced and tedious, with nearly no room for the creativity as far as what attacks to use and when. There's no reel animation or hitstun, and every attack is incredibly delayed. If you try to transition between combos or hit multiple enemies, the guy you just dropkicked can punish you for it. It's problematic as hell. The oft-touted Combo Lab is way more convoluted than it should have been. I get that the interface was trying to be minimalist, but when I don't have enough information to figure out what I'm doing, then you're just wrong. It's even worse because it was meant to give you more freedom, but really just restricted you that much more. Each Pressen could only be used once across all combos, and each of the same button and category does THE EXACT SAME THING, with only the number of moves before it altering the outcome. They didn't explain that very well in the tutorial either. Dodging also feels incredibly delayed. While there is a way to dodge in the middle of a combo string, and continue it afterwards for maximum payoff, at times the game arbitrarily decides to make you start over, even when executed perfectly. About a third of the way into the game, you acquire a projectile weapon. It has incredibly low damage, and the controls for it are terrible. It has an energy bar instead of ammunition, though it drains around six times as fast as it refills. There's no manual aim, only auto-lock, and trying to get the proper target in the midst of combat is incredibly disorienting, as it makes the camera jump around in haphazard ways.
The platforming aspect has an on-rails feel to it, with the ledges you can interact with highlighted by a yellow arrow, as if to say, "We shall allow you to continue here, and nowhere else," and normally, you have to be in fairly close proximity to even get these markers to appear. However, as the game progresses, there are times where, for no foreseeable reason, even though the marker appears, and Nilin is in position to make the jump, you will fail, leading to an ultimately unsatisfying death.
The combat is slow-paced and tedious, with nearly no room for the creativity as far as what attacks to use and when. There's no reel animation or hitstun, and every attack is incredibly delayed. If you try to transition between combos or hit multiple enemies, the guy you just dropkicked can punish you for it. It's problematic as hell. The oft-touted Combo Lab is way more convoluted than it should have been. I get that the interface was trying to be minimalist, but when I don't have enough information to figure out what I'm doing, then you're just wrong. It's even worse because it was meant to give you more freedom, but really just restricted you that much more. Each Pressen could only be used once across all combos, and each of the same button and category does THE EXACT SAME THING, with only the number of moves before it altering the outcome. They didn't explain that very well in the tutorial either. Dodging also feels incredibly delayed. While there is a way to dodge in the middle of a combo string, and continue it afterwards for maximum payoff, at times the game arbitrarily decides to make you start over, even when executed perfectly. About a third of the way into the game, you acquire a projectile weapon. It has incredibly low damage, and the controls for it are terrible. It has an energy bar instead of ammunition, though it drains around six times as fast as it refills. There's no manual aim, only auto-lock, and trying to get the proper target in the midst of combat is incredibly disorienting, as it makes the camera jump around in haphazard ways.
The stealth and non-remix(We'll get to those in a moment.) puzzle sections feel like they were quickly tacked on during crunch to make the game have more "substance". The stealth sections consist of avoiding patrolling droids, under penalty of insta-death. It's not fun, there's nothing clever about it, and it really takes away from the whole experience. The puzzle sections, on the other hand, involve doing one of two things with the projectile weapon. One involves locking on to a target and breaking it, to release a door, or something to that effect, and the other involves transporting power cores around, like the dark matter orbs from Half-Life 2. Neither of these really adds much to the game either.
The memory remixes, which are supposed to be major plot points, were a kind of cool feature, but the execution was flawed. Needing to grind out circles on my analog stick to rewind and fast forward through the sequence to see if I had found(and activated) the proper pieces to complete the puzzle took entirely too long and made me hate doing them. The pre-determined conclusions, as dictated to you by the game, were a little ridiculous as well. The first memory remix happens when a bounty hunter surprises you, and is about to kill you. To complete it, you need to convince her to join your side by altering her memory in such a way that a doctor kills her husband in treatment. It's way over the top, and for a secondary character that was just introduced, and acts as a glorified taxi in-between chapters, it's entirely too much.
Overall, I'd strongly recommend skipping this atrocious pile. I had wanted it to be good too, but it wasn't. I wanted it to be good so badly that I was willing to pay 60$ for it and not pick it up for 20$ in 6 months at -insert used games retailer of choice-.And I'm not just talking about the awkward controls, or the random bugs like the one that redwashed everything on screen for half of chapter 7, or the terrible combat, or the atrocious platforming, or the camera. I'm not even talking about the Aug Eye, which does nothing until you get a prompt(which is usually when you're lost) to point you towards your objective, even if it's on the other side of 16 walls. I'm not even talking about the underdeveloped setting, or unlikable characters, or the counter-intuitive(at best) boss fights. I'm not even talking about the story which ends so poorly, and I mean the entire final act, not just the ending, that M. Night Shymalan could do better after a frontal lobotomy and a bottle of Jagermeister. I'm talking about the entire package. I didn't want to believe it either. I thought "It can't all be this bad," and yet, it somehow finds a way to keep disappointing.
Pros - Game is short
Cons - NOT SHORT ENOUGH.
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