A nice addiditon, albeit a short one, to an underrated game.
With that said, the first DLC release titled 'Reverie" gives a solid chapter continuing the story of our tormented protagonist Gabriel. Now the major knock everyone is dishing out is the length. I can't argue the point that this DLC only provided me with about 3 hours of content. Bear in mind that this is playing on the hardest difficulty and completing all of the trials after playing through it once. So really, if you played on normal and didn't get stuck to long on the puzzles you could finish this an hour or two pretty easily.
However, the 3 hours I got were pretty entertaining overall. The art direction maintains its swagger by expanding our adventure into the depths of the castle.
The first stage is a simple revisit to the 'castle hall' level from the original game (with different lighting effects and a new puzzle at the end). The length of this stage was also of the short variety which was conerning given only three stages accompany this download.
However, both the second and third stages take place in completely new environments, and as I gushed in my review of the original game, absolutely deliver in terms of presentation. They were both much longer as well in comparison with the first stage.
There are no cutscenes using the in-game engine this time around. Instead, we get some comic style art along with dialogue. I didn't particularly like this change, but it wasn't horrible or anything.
As an added bonus, we also get some more art that you can purchase in the extras section using experience points. These include funny caricatures of the mercury steam team as well as concept art for the new chapter.
Reverie is largely focused on puzzles and platforming. There is combat, however it is fairly light and unfortunately introduces no new abilities to Gabriel and the enemies are fairly stock throughout (think ghouls...lots of ghouls). You do get to play as Laura though, and that was both painfully frustrating and extremely rewarding at the same time. As mentioned, playing on Paladin (the toughest difficulty) can seem easy at many points, but there are random spikes in challenge. Playing as Laura on this difficulty setting is definitely one such spike, especially if you are playing her for the first time. So this definitely increased the play time for me because I died many many times.
Regardless, it was fun to play as a different character and her blood-sucking animations were fun to pull off.
As mentioned there are puzzles, LOTS of them. Just off the top of my head, there are four major puzzles (one of which took me about 40 minutes to finally finish) as well as a few platform based sections. A lot of people are griping about the wall saws but I found this to be extremely entertaining in terms of actually getting a little difficulty in the platforming. I feel like new games tend to hand-hold too much. Lords of Shadow was pretty basic in terms of platforming so it was nice to see the developers going for a little more challenge. If I'm not tempted to throw my controller more than a few times, then the game just isn't challenging enough.
So finally we come to the big debate. Is it worth 9.99? If you are a fan of the game, the franchise, or the small company, I say yes. The way I see it, would you prefer to wait 2-3 years for a full sequel and pay your full-price, or would you prefer to pay for more story and gameplay/entertainment to fill in that long wait. I got three hours out of this. A movie generally lasts abouts 2 hours, costs at least 10 bucks around here not including transportation and/or buying concessions. What's the difference? People will complain about cost regardless of what it is. That is how it has always been.
Call it as you will. I'm one to review the content based on what's there, not the cost.
So in summary, Reverie offers a nice addition to one of the most underrated games of 2010. Sure, a little more length would have been nice, but the quality of what you get is still on par (for the most part) with the original.
While the ending is underwhelming (AGAIN!), and the combat development/diversity was dissapointing, I still am extremely interested in how the story plays out and look forward to Resurrection.