PARKSIDE: DECAYED SOUL MANIPULATION

Decayed Parkside is what I'd say is a "Cruelty Squad + Deus Ex" game, the visuals aren't a horrendous intentional mess but there's a gameplay feel and setup here that is reminiscent of Cruelty squad, in addition the different upgrades you can get as you progress and the weird background politics with your main story and this horrid futuristic world at large feel at home in the same type of game DX would be. That all said, the game is good, providing decent first person shooting and varied ways to play, I found enjoyment in wandering the maps, finding any secrets or side quests and building my character mission to mission in order to expand my arsenal of stupid *** I can do. However, as I did play more and more and my arsenal expanded, I found myself becoming more and more uncaring, there's a stat system that tries to make you care about rep and morality but I neither saw no intense requirement for it as I had low respect and no one gave a noticeable *** but morality is said to align me more to the brethren.. who I destroyed despite having low morality. I even got a relatively decent ending for my character in the aftermath. In addition the game started to not make me feel as if I should care, the missions progressively get more and more kill-heavy, though not required you might as well since getting shot at sucks and your cloak doesn't last forever, and even the final runup of my path I was just doing a LOT of combat or running past things, it doesn't help that said missions start to become more linear rather than exploring a environment for your objective. Overall game good but I feel the mission pacing was a bit off.

Shooting feels weightless and trying to hit the erratically moving enemies feels as bad as Cruelty Squad, while they also snipe you across the whole map without any hit indicators. Is this the *** Godot engine again? And why is the game locked at 53 fps? Also, police and guards still randomly aggro. Why? Idk, I was driving a car down the street without hitting anyone.

This game has a lot of potential, but I have a few issues with it. First off: enemy AI. Enemy AI when in combat is super awkward because they strafe left and right constantly like they're a CS2 player. the movement is very unnatural and it makes combat difficult because of the speed at which they move. If you think the strafing movement might be a skill issue on my part, then I have another issue and that is the stealth. it feels like it's way too easy for enemies to see you, even if you're in a dark area. I've had multiple instances in the dark cathedral level where enemies would spot me almost instantly, even though I was crouched in pitch darkness. My second issue is optimization. My computer is not the best, but it can run games that have way more graphical fidelity than Parkside. I got really bad frame lag in a lot of the bigger levels (Casino and Convention Center for example). It was so bad in some areas that If I turned around to stopped looking at the area that was causing the lag, then my framerate would stabilize again. The story is interesting and the mystery around the secret organization that kidnaps the player character was enough to get me to finish the game (despite my aforementioned issues with the game), but it's not entirely obvious what the consequences for a lot of the dialogue options are, and it can lead to some difficulty with decision making. There is a lot of potential with this game and there are a lot of things I didn't do in my playthrough, but my issues with the enemy AI, and lack of optimization make me hesitant to do another playthrough of the game, and I would not recommend it to others in its current state.