Foreclosed (Review)
Source: Review Copy
Price: £13.49
Where To Get It: Steam
Cyberpunk. Proper cyberpunk, not neo-futurism or cyber SF. Comic book aesthetic. Stealth, gunplay, hacking… You’d think this was right up my street.
But, in short, it’s not. I quite Foreclosed pretty early, and I’m not ashamed to say that. Because, on several levels, it just. Didn’t. Work for me. We’ll get into it after I explain what the game is.
So, a third person (occasionally switching to first person, more on that in a bit) shooter with levelling, stealth kills, stealth, low health (at least to start), and “hit arrows in the right order” based hacking minigames. Oh, and the stealth kill is a QTE, button mashing 2. That’s your basics, right there. So… Let’s get into the few parts it got right, and then… The bits it got wrong.
In terms of general aesthetics, the music was good, tense stuff, chilling out during the quiet moments, the comic book aesthetic was indeed like some gritty inks I’ve seen in the past with colour, the voice acting (what I heard of it, anyway), was good, the comic booky bits looked good, and…
That’s pretty much it. That’s… Pretty much it. Our protagonist takes up a lot of screen real estate, switches between walking and running… Well, seemingly in predetermined areas that nonetheless feel random, it switched to full screen mode whenever I came back to the main menu, keys don’t appear to be rebindable, default mouselook is fast, the first person camera has headbob you can’t turn off (and has a disorienting switch), the third person can sometimes be fucky, and there are segments where you’re forced into a different third person perspective than “behind the protagonist” (thankfully with absolute movement controls, so left is still left, right still right, and so on.)
And this was just what I saw in the first… checks… Half hour. I died precisely twice, once in the first stealth section (that one was most definitely my fault), and once in the first proper shooting segment (that… The protagonist is pretty squishy, the cover’s not great…)
I’d have maybe switched to a lower difficulty (yes, there is a lower difficulty), but when I see this many problems this early on? Foreclosed was definitely not for me. I’m honestly glad I found this out early, even considering this is a review copy.
It’s a shame, really. There’s enough of interest here that if these problems were fixed, maybe it would be a fun, interesting romp, much like one of its main inspirations, XIII. But alas, it was not to be.
The Mad Welshman sighed as he looked at the television screen sky, and puffed on his neon vape. Time to get back to the grind…