Developer: Airtight games
Genre: Action-adventure/mystery
Release:AQ date: June 6th 2014 (JP: July 17th 2014, NA: June 3rd 2014)
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Microsoft Windows
ESRB: M - Mature
As you prowl the dark, damp streets of a beautifully detailed town called Salem you’ll attempt to bring O’Connor’s mysterious, masked killer to justice. It’s a tentatively emotional game with a strong, powerful storyline and some very interesting gameplay elements in the way of Connor’s unique, unearthly abilities. Walking through walls, possessing the living and reading their minds all become a natural part of your investigation yet it doesn't take long to discover that these ghost abilities are a lot more scripted and limited than orginally portrayed.
Unfortunately this feeling of limitation is persistent as you explore a game which feels painfully unfinished and, overall, just a little neglected. Whilst the environments are striking and extremely detailed they’re let down by how often they’re reused during separate side missions. Whilst the game tends to come across as an open world romp it quickly becomes apparent that there's a lot less to explore and, even if you did, there's not much to find anyway. The game features a fair few side missions but these quickly run out about midway through the game leaving you with nothing else to do but doggedly pursue the main storyline as you try and ignore characters repeating phrases like, ‘Sorry, can’t help you’ when you attempt to talk to them.
During the missions themselves the writing tends to be quite poor with a lot of inconsistencies and some rather poor characterizations, for example one woman, with no mental health concerns, promptly committed suicide simply due to the suspicion her boyfriend was cheating on her. O'Connor tends to be generally quite thick and, even when things are obvious, he still murmurs to himself in utter confusion about what's going on. The search for clues too is agonizingly boring as things loll about in plain sight and, when trying to piece together evidence by selecting one of several options on screen there's very little challenge as any wrongly selected pieces of evidence just grey out. You can complete every mission through trial and elimination and, in cases where speaking with witnesses, there's no option to slyly question them and usually asking them plain outright is enough to solve the case. There’s this general sensation that the developers never quite got around to implementing as many side mysteries or free roaming aspects of the game as they’d have liked to and, for the missions which are present, they're all rather low quality in and of themselves.
The enemies that you encounter start off as rather threatening and a little spooky but as soon as you realize how generic and easy to avoid they are then any lingering fear is quickly snuffed out. Whilst you can directly confront them there's alternatively a plethora of hiding spots called soul residue that, by slipping inside them, renders you completely invisible to any demons mooching about. Now, there's nothing wrong with hiding spots but these are excessive in number and, besides, there's no way to be discovered once you're nestled inside one anyway. The lack of variation in enemy encounters and the enemies themselves renders them little more than an annoyance than something challenging or eerie but, by this point, you begin to wonder if there’s anything worth fighting for anyway.
The painfully short length of the game doesn’t help matters as the entire campaign will take up a very modest 10 hours of your time with the potential to be even shorter if you’re not up for exploring everything. With only one difficulty level, one which feels incredibly easy, there’s not much room for re-playability either so in this sense some players may find it unfulfilling as there’s not much room for improvement. The complete lack of challenge and the fact that you cannot ramp it up a notch is rather damming but there is some thought put into how players can get more hours of the game. In a rather distinctive ‘L.A Noire’ fashion you can earn percentages and badges at the end of every mission based on how many clues and pieces of evidence that you find, in this sense if you find that you missed some evidence and only achieved 80% on a mission you may attempt to retry it though, truthfully, there seems little point in doing so. The gameplay is extremely repetitive and mostly ends up being a hunt for clues in various, similarly designed buildings before watching cutscenes.
Murdered: Soul Suspect has a brilliant storyline that never reveals too much at once and which is, right up until the end, gripping. The voice acting is superb and the graphics are bleak but atmospherically so. Unfortunately, that’s all it really has going for it as the characters are lacking in personality and the game, whilst boasting style, lacks substance. Even O’Connor, the one person who should at least have something going on, has very little personality and not particularly likeable due to his rather stereotypical persona. It’s a shame because this game has a brilliant premise and could have been so much more but it seems as though it’s unfinished with gaping holes littering every aspect whether that’s a lack of dialogue with NPCs or a lack of variation in side mysteries. If the game as longer with much more content then it would have been a fantastic edition to the much unexplored territory of mystery detective games. L.A Noire this is not and, currently, it’s far too overpriced for what is essentially a 5 – 10 hour game of scripted repetition.
The Good:
- Voice acting is top quality
- Lovely, detailed environments
- Powers acquired gradually
- Great premise of solving your own murder
- Gripping storylin, a little disturbing
- Very scripted feel
- Lack of content
- Repetative missions
- Easily defeated, generic enemies
- Quite buggy (as of July 2014)
- Extremely short
- Side missions poorly written
- O'Connor painfully thick
- Characters lack personality
Final thoughts: “Soul Suspect appears to be lacking some soul, I’m very disappointed as this could have been something really quite special.”
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