This game is really... something else.
Deadly Premonition is just... WOW! I mean I was seriously impressed over how much I got into this story.
You play as a Special FBI agent sent into a small mountain town to investigate a murder. From the first cut-scene of the game you are immediately drawn into this game. For example, the main character (FBI Agent) Francis York Morgan has an imaginary friend named Zack. Yup, the main character will talk to himself from time to time, summarizing, asking for advice or simply chatting with his other personality, and guess what, YOU are that other personality, you are Zack. Strangely, this simple feature feel perfectly natural. The main character will really seem like he is talking to you, rather than another person and when he is asking about what to do next, YOU get to decide. This game simply wouldn't be the same without the TWO main characters (York and Zack).
As for the other characters, well, most of them are fine. There are some lousily made ones, and some really interesting ones. As you start investigating the story you will uncover more and more about the town, it's residents and the murderer. You will investigate different locations, search for clues and finally uncover just what the heck is going on in the town you were sent to. I really wish I could tell you more but, I really don't want to spoil it for you. All I can tell you is that if you like anime or some weird stuff just play this game. You will love the story, maybe not the ending so much, but the ride will definitely be an unforgettable one.
I give this game a 7/10 and that is my review... Over and out.
*tries to leave but gets pulled back to finish the review*
Oh, come on guys, I told you all the good bits about the game, let's just end the review on that, please??
Let's not talk about the gameplay, the graphics or anything else, I mean do you really want me to ruin everything nice I said about this game. Ugggghhhh... Fine.
Story aside this game is... just, just awful! It's terrible beyond belief. It's so incredibly bad, boring and uncreative.
When you are not watching those wonderful cut scenes you will be reminded that you are IN FACT playing a terrible game.
So what will you be doing? Finding clues, profiling murder scenes and all that good detective stuff? Well, yes and no. You certainly will be doing that detective work but those instances pass by faster than sonic the hedgehog with speed shoes on. What you WILL BE DOING the most thru-ought this game, is killing zombies. Yup zombies. So is it like Left 4 Dead zombie killing :))))))) or maybe like Dead Rising :)))) or maybe Resident Evil 4 :))))))) ?
Well, it's kinda like resident evil 4 except it just SUCKS! It's like Resident Evil 4 played on a broken controller, with messed up aiming, stupid AI enemies and no fun whatsoever.Everything about it sucks, and I'm trying here to be as fair as I can to this game. Ok so you control Agent York from a third person view (kinda like in RE4) and when you aim you will experience some of the worst aiming in history of gaming. It's just too loose, and even when you get used to it you can still mess up, and to top it all off you have an auto-aim option that always aims at the crotch, yep, right in the family jewels!
And the zombies, oh my god, the zombies!!! If there was ever a "Who is the lamest fictional being" contest between lame twilight vampires and zombies from this game, I guarantee that the twilight vampires would win (barely, but they would still win XD ). These are some of the worst enemy AI in any game I have ever played. I mean what kind of enemies turn their backs to you, bend back to do a crab-walk and slowly approach you, I mean how lazy are they!!??. They take forever to kill as well, and firing at them feels like shooting a pillowcase, but the best solution against them is just running past them, yeah you can even do that.
But what really pisses me off about these zombies is that some of them carry shotguns! Zombies carry around shotguns. That just makes no sense!!! Zombies can't carry firearms, they just can't!!!! They are mindless, ergo they can't use firearms. Oh what's that? They are not actually zombies but "shadows"? Well, excuse me, if they are corpses that suddenly sprung back to life, and their only purpose is to infect or devour anything living they see, you can forgive my assumption for mistaking these "totally original" creatures for zombies. So what do these "shadows" have to do with the actual story. Next to nothing, I swear that they were added in the last minute just so Deadly premonition can have more gameplay.
So, from time to time during the investigation, the world will just become dark and zombies will start spawning, but not really attacking, unless you get close to them, and stand there for 5 minutes, and then MAYBE they will attack you... So are there any smokers, witches, boomers in this game. There are only three types of enemies in this game. The regular shadows, that I just spend an eternity describing, the crawlers, that crawl on walls, take even longer to kill and are boring as ****, and the Raincoat killer.
The raincoat killer adds some twists to the gameplay that should have been cool, but just failed because they were done so poorly. Sometimes he will ambush you and you will have to do a quick-time-event to avoid it. Other times you will have to hide in a room while the killer is searching for you, and you have to hold your breath so he can't hear you. This would have been cool, except all you do is hide under anything and just wait for the killer to search the room and be on his merry way and occasionally hold your breath. And finally when he does find you, he will chase you, so you will have to tilt your analog stick from side to side as fast as possible to run. Sound exiting? LOL
Listen to this... If the killer catches up to you, he reduces his speed, and starts walking instead of running and even if he gets to you, you just press one button to dodge him. Also, sometimes while you are running away there will be a box in front of you and instead of jumping over it you will instead push it, as slow as possible, while the killer politely waits for you to start running again.
So as you can tell dealing with enemies is pretty messed up, but luckily it's really easy (even on the hardest difficulty) and these sessions don't really take that long.
Other than zombie shooting, you also have driving sequences and side quests. Driving works terribly, obviously, and side missions are boring. Sometimes they can be related to the main story but most of the time they are fetch quests or weapon challenges. You can get various things from these side missions, such as health boosts, infinite ammo for your weapons, faster cars and what game would be complete without trading cards :P. Did I mention that this game has an open world? Why? I don't know, I think they were trying to compete with Rockstar games, the jury is still out on that one XD.
One thing I kinda did like about the gameplay, and was yet completely pointless, is the hunger meter, sleep meter and the need to shave and change clothes. If you don't eat, you die, if you don't sleep you die, if you stay in your clothes too long you start to smell and flies fly around you and you can grow a beard over time. You don't really have to worry too much about eating and sleeping because they drop really slowly (you can probably beat the whole game by sleeping only 4-5 times and eating after every sleep), and if you don't mind the flies and the beard you don't even have to change clothes and shave.
The graphics
That's a real turn off. The game looks like one of those first Playstation 2 games. The graphics are really outdated, and seeing how this game was made in 2008, you would be expecting a lot more. But to be fair the game was in development for quite a while and the graphics while outdated aren't really ugly to look at.
The music is pretty good actually. You have a lot of catchy themes, some bad ones as well, but all in all you won't be turning off your volume. The voices on the other hand are mixed bag. Some are good others are bad, most of them are mediocre, and the lip-synching is terrible.
So that's about all I can say (Trash talk) about this game, and how does it hold up.
Surprisingly, even after everything bad I said about the game it's still a very enjoyable ride because of it's story. You can tell that the developers didn't really know how to make a good game but knew how to make a really enjoyable story (well the ending wasn't that great...).
Overall, you will not enjoy actually playing this game all that much, but you will certainly appreciate it's unique story, interesting character and the atmosphere. If you can get it cheap or rent it, try it out and you may even like it. I know I did.