Another game completed. This time its Forgive me Father - a cthulhu inspired shooter.
TLDR: Top presentation, nice ideas, a bit too repetitive in the combat/gameplay until near the end.
Visually its fantastic, the cell shaded graphics are nice and quite varied as there are a wide variety of locales and biomes to visit and for the liquidator enemy there are a fair few varieties. The audio soundtrack is also top notch as they are fantastic heart pumping tracks that get the war bladder going.
Gameplay wise its a little more mixed. The combat, whilst simple and functional is nothing really special. its kinda strange, it feels like that the devs had intentions for this to be a quick shooter (like neon white?) as the more you kill, the more it boosts your insanity meter to replenish abilities and do more damage yet it doesn't work that way.
For the most part its corridor shooting before moving into an occasional arena for more heart pumping action. What kills it off is that in the first half its mostly tight corridors and small rooms rather then arenas. outside of boss encounters, Its not until the second half of the 4th chapter and the 5th chapters do we see more exciting arenas or ideas. FMF can finally let loose after giving you all the weapons, your character has upgraded, sufficiently and most/all of the enemy roster is finally revealed. I partly blame the biome/environments - they don't give much opportunity for creative combat/design. Sure a few good ideas here and there, but again, the majority of them only in the alien/hell world. Until then, circle strafing with your tommy gun or SMG.
To its credit, the game does have a lot of levels which are mostly quick and breezy shooting galleries, but the repetitive nature of most of the combat it can get exhausting very quickly. I couldn't play more then an hour at a time before i called it quits for the day.
In fact i should point out i'm not entirely sure if its my fault. The upgrade tree is interesting as you can convert your weapons in a variety of ways so they play differently. unfortunately most of the changes made them more powerful/unusual, but also switches to more expensive/rare ammo. other times taking the sensible choice locked you out of health/armor upgrades. Thankfully, you can reset the stats so later on when you have more points to play, you can switch to more interesting ideas.
There are a few other game modes, like wave mode and new game+. The former i found pretty annoying as they don't give me enough ammo to fight the enemies and the latter is just the same game allowing you to mess with the mechanics of the game so you can customize skills, ammo allocation, damage etc.
So do i recommend a play? Not sure tbh, i don't regret getting it as part of the humble bundle deal. But for 16.99? no its not worth that. I'll give it a 6 or 6.5. its creative, well presented and plays competently, but i found it dull enough that i can't stomach it for more then an hour or less. hell, after 7.5 hrs i'm not exactly keen to go back for a second playthrough. Which is stupid; i spent more time playing arcade paradise then this game. Maybe because it was too easy, maybe it didn't really grab my attention or something wasn't mixed properly.
I'm disappointed. its full of good ideas and it started strong and set expectations onto a winner and then had a iffy middle and a strong finish.