Deadly Premonition was by no means the worst game I’ve ever played, but it was not the best, either. It had a lot of promise, and I had high hopes for it in the beginning. I read a lot of the positive reviews for it, and decided to give it a chance when I saw how creepy and eerie the storyline sounded, and how there was some “depth” to it. I became thoroughly disappointed as the game’s story progressed, as well as with the gameplay itself. Despite everyone else having an issue with the game’s graphics, I don’t have a problem with it (although it would have been nice to play a game that didn’t look this cheesy). My complaints are as follows:
1. The combat gameplay is sluggish and boring.
2. The story is ludicrous and makes no sense.
3. There is way too much traveling and pointless conversations to pad the game’s length.
4. The characters aren’t very likeable.
5. The music is… something else.
6. You earn tons of money and have nothing to spend it on.
7. It’s just really corny.
The story and gameplay start out as a sort of mystery horror game, which was great. It really grabbed my attention and curiosity. I love investigating crime scenes and hunting perpetrators and shooting bad guys—it’s fun, and it started out fun. Then I began fighting “monsters” (or whatever they happen to be?) and learned right away the first thing I wouldn’t like about the game: the combat.
First of all, York, the main character whom you play as, reloads slower than my grandma drives. This is a problem for when you’re fighting in close quarters combat, or hell, any combat, because you CAN’T MOVE while he’s reloading. He will stand there, as enemies swarm around him, reloading his clip, taking his sweet time as a “shadow” (or whatever they’re called) hits you over the head with a pipe. You absolutely have to watch your ammo, at all times. If you’re down to the last bullet, you have to run away like a ninny and get out of the way in order to reload just so you can start firing again.
Second of all, the enemies. What are they? WHO are they? I hope you don’t want an explanation, because you never, ever receive one (unless you happen to pick up and read trading cards, and even then, the verification is tenuous at best. It really makes no sense). When you first see them, it is a little startling because they do, in fact, look sort of creepy (and sound creepy), but then you get to know how horribly they fight. They’re slow— very slow. All you have to do is run a couple of feet, aim and shoot. You’ll kill them before they ever reach you. The AI is so bad that they can’t climb certain sets of stairs. I was able to just stand atop some steps and shoot them down without getting hit once. It’s easy as hell to get headshots, and you just rake in the dollars. All in all, the enemies… they’re non-threatening. A newborn kitten has a larger chance of damaging you severely (unless you don’t know what you’re doing).
The only times the enemies have an advantage is if they have guns, and even then they’re easy to take out. Just shoot them in the head a bunch of times to make them stagger back. They’re dead by the time they can aim at you.
Some enemies exist for no other reason than to make the game longer. There is one in particular that can turn invisible and phase along the walls. It is very easy to dodge its attacks, but it has so much health that you spend about ten minutes killing just one of them. Just when you think you can press on, another one comes out, making you repeat the process. It’s… so… BORING killing these things. Imagine nothing happening for thirty minutes other than you shooting your gun over and over. A textual description doesn’t do it justice. You just have to try it and see for yourself.
Running from the Raincoat Killer is abysmally numbing. I don’t like real-time events (no one does) and I don’t like having to rock my thumb repeatedly on the joystick for several agonizing minutes. After doing it for a while, York will come across an obstacle, which he then requires to climb over for you to advance and continue running. You will hit the A button with all your might, and sometimes he will just walk into the thing you’re trying to climb like he’s taking a stroll through the park with his coffee and cigarettes. I can’t recall how many times I screamed “GET UP THERE!!” But I’m betting it was several. When he DOES manage to climb onto the object, he does so casually, and takes many long seconds to do it. Holy crap, hurry up, man, you’re about to be hacked into pieces!!
There is no auto-aim feature. This has been a severe handicap on a handful of occasions. Sure, it added some challenge (and gods know it needed it), but when you’re just trying to put your crosshairs back on an enemy after dodging its attack, and you’re trying to center on its head, this can be a giant pain. Everything feels sluggish and slowed down. There’s no action to the action. York moves SO SLOW, and the controls are sometimes totally unresponsive, that trying to put your aim back on something is harder than it should be.
The graphics are bad, but that’s not the whole reason I dislike the game. My objection is the environment itself. I really hope you enjoy boxes, because you’re going to be seeing, pushing, and climbing over a LOT of them.
Now, the story. *SEMI-SPOILER ALERT*
It’s ridiculous. I’m sorry, but it is. It started out mysterious and interesting, and I really wanted to find out what would happen. I love mysteries and stories about serial killers. Then it took a nosedive into the extremely far-fetched category. According to the game, the town of Greenvale is the home of a strange “magic seed” that apparently invokes powerful rage in people. And also according to the game, if you eat enough of them, one of two things happens: you turn into the Hulk, or you die (I guess?). Some residents of the town released the seeds in gas form to terrorize the town many years ago, and some guy in a raincoat killed a bunch of them. Why? Who knows? Everything is presented to you for you to rationalize, but leaves you feeling empty, because it’s not rational— none of it, and therefore it’s hard to take seriously. I realize that some people enjoy it for its oddness, but odd is fine if it makes some sense, and this doesn’t. At all. You could say “maybe it’s not supposed to,” to which I’d reply, “Maybe I shouldn’t have purchased it, then.”
*END OF POTENTIAL SPOILERS*
I admit that I didn’t see the ending. I stopped playing it at the final boss battle and tossed the game aside. I did, however, read how it ends, and it still doesn’t answer my questions.
The traveling. Good lord is there ever so much traveling. If you’re not driving, you’re running. Far. It’s as boring as it sounds. They added something to make it less boring: York can talk to his imaginary friend Zach while you’re driving! This isn’t as interesting as you might think. His conversations with Zach almost always fall back on movie trivia, and not the entertaining kind. I had to get out of the car several times to get him to stop talking about it, but I also wanted to listen to him, because there was nothing else to do but hold the button down and drive! Oh, and the cars have gas which you have to refill if it gets too low, and if you’re nowhere near a station or another car you can swap the old one for, you’re screwed. If you do manage to get gas at the station, you’re in luck if you’re a hornball, because a pink slut will emerge and shake her boobies at you and make obvious innuendos in the corniest fashion possible.
If there isn’t traveling getting in the way of you completing your objectives quickly, it’s the meaningless conversations you have with people that go nowhere. I can’t count how many minutes were wasted listening to York lament over his past, or how pretty he thinks Emily is, or how nasty her food is, or how her coffee tastes, or how he’d like to bone her. If that’s not enough, you get about a half an hour of useless dialogue at the tail end of the game. The final home stretch involves you running across town following a dog that’s tracking the main character’s scent. You have to run… the WHOLE way… listening to the most god awful music while watching your character jog like a goon. It’s just running, running, running, running. Then the characters you’re with stop and have a boring conversation about nothing that adds to the game whatsoever. Then you run, run, run some more. Then they stop, talk about something else that has nothing to do with the game. Then you run again. It just goes on like that, and it feels like FOREVER, because there is literally nothing happening. It’s just holding the button down following a poorly animated Dalmatian. There are so many scenes like this in the game, and none of them are fun.
These conversations would normally add to the immersion of the game if they had been at all interesting. Instead, they’re just time-wasters meant to make the game longer.
The characters are unbearable. No, it’s not because they’re “odd” like everyone calls them, because they aren’t odd. They’re stereotypes, exaggerated a hundred fold. They even make mention of the fact that they’re stereotypes in the form of in-jokes and fourth wall gags. York is the only one the least bit unique, and even he comes dangerously close to making himself out to be a stereotype as well. You have the woman stereotypes (they’re either sluts or henpecking housewives), you have the dude stereotypes (frat boy style “bros” or rough-tough cowboys), and there are some I won’t mention because it will spoil the ending, but they’re borderline effing OFFENSIVE. If you’re gay or a transvestite, I think you’ll see what I mean if you play it to the end.
Emily doesn’t have much of a personality. She’s the usual red-blooded Hollywood American female. I thought she was going to be dignified, strong, and a character I would like. I was hoping she wouldn’t go goo-goo eyed for the main male character, because she at first seemed pretty independent and willing to stand up to him if she thought he was wrong (even though he was right almost all the time). Nope. Went gah-gah for him. Same old sappy romance story number one billion. She thus became just another trope almost immediately, and did every common, overused romance BS in the Hollywood Guide to Keeping the Tradition Alive. Her actions then were determined by how much it would help York, instead of how much sense it made.
York started out interesting, but then he got annoying. See Emily above. The same reasons pretty much apply to him.
The music. Some of it is actually pretty good. The acoustic number on the title screen is gorgeous. Then, they later descend into Elevator Music Hell, where every old Jazz musician is raping your eardrums and throwing slurs at you. Some songs exist, I swear, JUST to annoy you. They’re that bad. I don’t even know what to call it (it’s kind of similar to if Vanilla Ice and Millie Vanilli had a child, and that child came out retarded and decided to write synthesized renditions of stepping on a cat’s tail).
What the worst thing is about the music is… you can’t turn it off. Oh, don’t get me wrong, you have the OPTION to turn it off, but you have no choice but to leave it on. Some scenes of dialogue are ONLY attuned to the music, meaning that if you don’t want that entire scene to be dead silent with subtitles, you need the music on, or you’ll hear nothing at all. Isn’t that fun?
Money. It’s there to make you feel good for killing stuff. It has little to no use. I never needed to buy health kits because the “shadows” dropped them often, and I almost never got injured. I was fully stocked on several occasions. Your handguns have infinite ammo, so you don’t need to use any other gun. You don’t need to ever buy food because the stuff is lying around in the environment, and your hunger goes down really slowly. What do you do with the money then? Well, you could try your hand at the worst fishing design yet to exist in a game. Like playing slot machines? Then you’ll love the fishing in Deadly Premonition. Buy about twenty grand in bait and enjoy yourself. What else are you going to spend it on?
In conclusion, the game is corny, and just plain stupid and very repetitive. Sometimes, that can be a good thing (like Raw Danger. That game is corny as all get out, but I love playing it). In this case, it’s not true. The dialogue is atrocious. It’s Tommy Wiseau-level bad. The things they say to about each other are nothing like real life. So many times, I busted out laughing when York would say some cheesy, over-the-top line about Emily in a dress. It felt so lame and so dweeby that I wanted to give myself a wedgie just for hearing it.
You have the option of shaving and changing your clothes. What the hell for?!?! I found it does nothing whatsoever, and they even pay you to do it. Why?!? I’m sorry, but when a game features something, I like there to be a reason for it. There’s just… no reason for this. It’s, again, a total time-waster.
I guess you could say this game borders on being a “sandbox”, but sandboxes are usually fun. Exploring in Skyrim, or in Red Dead Redemption, or Minecraft is fun. This didn’t have that “fun” feeling to it. It just felt boring all around. I don’t need blood and guts to be satisfied, but I would like something other than this. It felt lacking. I will admit that Deadly Premonition does have a personality all its own, and it does stray from the norm. I’ll give it a couple of points for that. But I have to knock off several others, because what people commonly misunderstand is that “original” and “weird” doesn’t always mean “good”. Sometimes being “unique” is a bad thing. And this really wasn’t what everyone made it out to be.
This product is available as Renewed.
Deadly Premonition - Xbox 360 (Renewed) $68.99 & FREE Shipping
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