Finished Akumu mode earlier today. There are a few really tough spots, but overall it's pretty manageable if you try and play smart. I'm far from done with the game, but I'll post a review since I don't see my opinion changing much:
+ Combat is top notch. It's a bit like RE4 without the godly melee attacks and far more limited resources. You have to make every shot count and think about how you want to approach each encounter to try and conserve your ammo. Enemies can be dealt with in a variety of ways: you can throw a bottle at their face to blind them for a moment, giving you the opportunity to stealth kill them, you can shoot dynamite out of somebody's hand to kill everyone around him, you can shoot an enemy's leg when he comes running at you to knock him down, giving you the chance to light him on fire, you can use the traps that are scattered throughout the environment, you can use your crossbow to blind, freeze, stun, or harpoon an enemy, you can use an axe or torch as an 1-hit kill melee attack, or you could simply blast their head off (unless they're wearing a bulletproof helmet). Combat never gets boring because of the excellent feedback and because there are so many ways to deal with everything.
+ Sebastian is also more vulnerable than his RE4+ counterparts. His sprint is limited, especially at the start of the game. Hold it for too long and you'll start to slow down; let the meter drain and you'll be immobile until it fully recovers. He may have the cardio of a 500lb asthmatic, but it's obviously a design choice to stop you from feeling too safe. Likewise, his melee attack is only useful as a way to stun enemies for a moment when they get too close, giving you the chance to either run away or line up a shot. You won't be able to headshot somebody and run in for a followup german suplex, (un)fortunately.
+ The upgrade system seems smartly designed. Right now I feel like there's an ideal path to take through it, but maybe that's just my playstyle. Just about everything is useful.
+ Exploration. The stages are usually pretty narrow, but you are constantly rewarded with green gel, ammo, map pieces, or locker keys for thoroughly searching every nook and cranny. All of that stuff is incredibly useful (besides maybe the map pieces, I dunno what you unlock for collecting all of them).
+ The higher difficulties. Most of the encounters have been remixed, so you'll be fighting enemies that normally appear toward the end of the game in the first few chapters. Aside from that, the enemies are more aggressive, they have more health, traps are harder to disarm, and resources are more limited. I'm always glad when developers go the extra mile and rebalance the higher difficulties instead of taking the easy way out and simply changing some damage modifiers, even though only a small percentage of the audience will ever play them. I'd expect nothing less from Mikami & co.
+ New Game+. Always a great feature, and it's done perfectly in this game. You can't play through easy mode and carry your upgrades into the higher difficulties; you always have to start from scratch when moving up.
+ Good boss fights. There aren't a ton of them, but they're all fun to fight.
+ Good art and aesthetics. The environments are varied and are full of detail to make them look really run down and destroyed. The lighting also looks fantastic.
+ This game has one of the best sets of achievements I've seen in a long time. There's one for beating each difficulty, one for speed running the game, one for maxing out your character, one for completing the game without upgrading your character at all, one for finding all of the collectibles, and individual achievements for completing a specific task in each chapter. It encourages mastery and 100% completion, so I don't see much room for improvement.
= The story is alright. I like it as a way to transition between environments, but the characters and plot aren't all that compelling.
= The final boss isn't much of a boss, it's just a cinematic setpiece battle. I suppose it's one of the best examples of that type of design, but a proper boss fight would have been much better.
= There are several "walk slowly while scripted events unfold" sections in the game. They aren't frequent enough to be annoying, but it would be better if they didn't exist. Maybe they're just there to mask loading or something.
- Checkpoints are very frequent, which makes death pretty meaningless most of the time. It would have been great if the game had a Dark Souls-esque structure where the save room would act as the bonfire. Akumu mode would be brutal if it weren't for those checkpoints, though. Each one is a relief.
- The black borders. They aren't a big deal to me, but it does make the FOV quite narrow. It's easy to miss stuff if you don't search thoroughly.
- No bonus content. There are unlockables for beating each difficulty, but I wish the game had some type of challenge mode with a bunch of combat arenas, like Resident Evil's Mercenaries or Vanquish's tactical challenges.
- Chapter 1. There's absolutely nothing interesting about it from a gameplay perspective, it's only there as a tutorial and to setup the story, I guess.
- Chapter 2. It's too focused on stealth. You probably don't want to shoot every enemy you see since you're still extremely low on resources, so you spend most of the chapter slowly crouching through it. Stealth is fine every now and then for some variety, but this is just too much. (For reference, the only stealth games I've ever liked are Splinter Cell's multiplayer and the Metal Gear series. So that doesn't help.)
- Tech issues. The framerate isn't great (though it hardly ever bothered me) and it froze on me at one point. First the sound cut off, then a few minutes later the game crashed. Every time I tried restarting the game, it would crash at the start screen. I had to clear my Xbone's cache to get it to work again, so maybe that was just a problem with the console?
I thought the game was excellent overall and, for now, it might replace Dark Souls II as my #2 pick for GOTY (Crimzon Clover: World Ignition is #1). It's not Mikami's best work (that would be either God Hand or Vanquish imo), but it is yet another impressive entry on his resume. I don't think anybody else is even in the same league as far as current game directors go, to be honest.
Now I think I'll activate my "fighting chance" download and mess around with all of the new weapons in New Game+.
