I saw videos of this a few times. It looked cool. So I bought it. And now I’m reviewing it.

Only hype, detailed intros on this website, I tell ya.

Let’s go and see if this is good or whatever!

Developer: Flying Wild Hog
Publisher: Focus Entertainment
Release date: November 22nd, 2022
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbone, Xbox Series X/S, PS5 (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Action

Review

You play as Jesse Rentier. He’s a vampire/monster hunter, and also the son of the owner of the Rentier Institute, one of the big tech companies in the wild west. There are vampires. You gotta kill them. Your father developed a gauntlet thingy that should give an advantage to the humans over the vampires, as obviously vampires have massive superpowers like illusions and transformations and stuff. But your base gets attacked and stuff, your dad almost dies and whatever the shit. So you go out to kill this vampire girl because she’s evil and almost killed your dad and stuff. This story is kinda bleh. The characters mostly suck, or just aren’t given time to develop and be worth… caring about. An “important” character dies at some point and I couldn’t even care, and it seems like none of the other characters really did either.

PC performance is good, but with a really weird caveat. Namely… at least in my setup (5800X, 3080), if I had my GPU overclocked (I do a fairly modest overclock, nothing too crazy), the game would crash constantly. So no overclocking I guess. When I turned off the overclock, the game just worked. Weird! So on my base components, at 1440p, I was getting 200-300fps on Epic settings. Pretty good, though it does depend on the environment. Some levels didn’t run quite as well as others… but, you know, running above 200fps for the whole game makes that kind of a non-issue even on a 165Hz monitor. Also the cinematics are 60fps (which is fine, cinematics rarely run at full framerate) and look like total garbage.

So gameplay! Well, the game flow is as simple as it gets. Each level is largely straight corridors with battles sprinkled through them. There’s minor exploration here and there to find treasure chests and stuff, which may have power-ups that you can later buy, or money, or both. There’s not much to it as far as what you’re doing goes. Go in the straight line the game tells you to, explore very little sometimes, and kill stuff.

So as for the killing of stuff… It’s very fun. You can punch shit, shoot shit with a revolver, shoot shit with a rifle, shoot shit with a crossbow, shoot a shotgun to wreck shit, grenades to blow shit up, destroy shit with a gatling gun, kick shit, use your gauntlet to block shit (which also stuns said shit), use the gauntlet to teleport dash into enemies (and stun them), use the gauntlet to GET OVER HERE enemies (and stun them),  light shit on fire with a flamethrower, stun all the shit around you, punch the ground to send out shockwaves (didn’t find a way to add “shit” to this one…), and there’s a supercharged mode to beat the shit out of everything… Oh and you can dodge dash in any direction, and double-tapping the dodge button does a dodge roll in any direction. These are all options you have in battle. It’s a third-person action game, and basically every button on the controller is either an offensive option or one of the few defensive options, with more with a few combinations. And of course, there’s a souls-style healing item.

The main punch combo is pretty simple. Effective but rarely will you just mash that. You can also do an uppercut that sends enemies in the air (which is good for crowd control or comboing), and you can follow that up with a jump punch that sends the enemy flying. Some enemies are vulnerable to getting hit by other enemies this way, and some arenas will have traps and stuff to punch enemies into for insta-kills. You have a kick move, that will neutralize certain attacks (I think ones where they glow yellow) and give you a chance to get some hits in. The gauntlet is used to block enemy attacks (normal ones that don’t glow), which stuns enemies for a bit and gives you a few good hits in. The gauntlet also has a lasso that drags enemies to you, and a teleport dash that teleports you to far away enemies, which is super useful and again stuns enemies for free hits. For extra crowd control, you have the Quake Punch where you punch the ground to do a shockwave, this is decent when you’re surrounded.

Then you have a pile of weapons. The revolver is not SUPER damaging (though the final upgrade is really nice), but useful to get some hits in to further away enemies. The shotgun deals really good damage at point blank and causes some stagger if it doesn’t kill, extremely useful. The rifle does good damage, is good for hitting weak points, and eventually gets a charge attack. The crossbow is a crossbow… I didn’t like it. The flamethrower deals good damage to nearby enemies, frequently makes them stumble a bit, and has some additional damage over time, so it’s super fucking good. The gatling gun deals insane amounts of damage. There’s this cross thing that just does an electric field around you that stuns all enemies in range, it’s a pretty good way to get some safety, and probably the opportunity to either deal lots of damage to a big enemy, or get a kill or two on some smaller ones.

As a note, a lot of these attack options (especially the ranged stuff) have some cooldown, so you can’t just spam the best stuff.  For example, the shotgun just shoots once before you have to wait for a decent cooldown (not super long, but long enough to mean you have to be careful when you use it). Great design overall.

What’s great about all the options is that they’re all useful, and have different uses. And they introduce these options in ways that are simple to use. None of them is pointless to use, something a lot of other games forget. Even games I like, such as the first 2 Bayonetta games, give you a massive amount of moves/combos, but there’s actually no reason to use 90% of them. Here, they’re all something you may end up actually using. Some might have less use, such as blocking, but it’s still there and you’ll need it. Really the only exception I’d say is the crossbow, outside of the parts where you need it to progress (basically setting up ziplines), I didn’t find it useful.

The combat overall is just mostly well-designed. There’s a balance between ranged combat and CQC that it handles really well. Things like ranged enemies occasionally displaying weak points when attacking for your rifle to hit, some having different ways to approach you, and some having different weaknesses and strategies to beat, it all works pretty well. I’d say my biggest problem is that some parts are a bit too “here’s like 20 enemies shooting at you at the same time, have fun”.

So I talked about all the options you have. Well, each option can be made better. There are 2 ways to power yourself up. Upgrades and perks. Perks are upgrades to your base melee moveset. Fighting enemies and such gives you EXP, which I have no idea if level-ups actually make you stronger, but they do give you perk points. Some perks you find in chests, others you just get when you unlock the required attack option. There’s certainly some good shit in there, like “Very Very Frightening” or the ones that make the stun effect of blocking affect more than one enemy. Upgrades focus on your equipment rather than your base fighting kit. Most of the upgrades are simple things like “the cooldown is faster” and such, or mini-mechanics like single revolver shots on airborne enemies dealing more damage in a sequence… But most of the weapons have something that change their usage, usually in some lightning-infused way. The revolver gets a nice chain-lightning effect (which stuns minor enemies very slightly). The rifle gets a charge shot that is quite good. The gatling gun becomes a badass tesla coil that blows up enemies that it kills. The grenades generate a fucking lightning tornado. The shotgun, weirdly, summons lightning orbs that hang around after the shot to deal a bit of extra damage… nice. So upgrades and perks are clearly pretty fun in this game. They make your combat options way better, yes, but also add stuff to them that’s actually really interesting.

Honestly, I don’t really have much else to talk about here. Really the biggest complaint I have is how close the camera is to your character, so you don’t quite see around you well and the systems that exist to be alerted of enemies coming from where you can see are inadequate. It’s like the new God of War games, except the combat here is interesting.

Overall

I really enjoyed this game.

I like that it has so many actually useful battle options. You get such a huge moveset, and there’s a point to literally every move. In fact, if you end up not using certain moves, it’s probably because you forgot that was even an option, and you likely weren’t playing optimally as a result.

The story might be meh, and the cinematics might look like crap, and it might crash when you try to overclock your GPU… but none of that actually matters. A game needs good gameplay, and this has good gameplay.

I’ll give this one a pretty solid recommendation.