FFVII - Dirge of Cerberus... meh

[BitVyper]

So I rented it today, and so far I'm pretty unimpressed. There's nothing really wrong with the gameplay, but there's nothing particularly good about it either. Essentially, it's about as generic as generic gets. Vincent can't really do anything cool (except in cutscenes, where he seems to actually have some of his power back), and using different guns doesn't really seem to alter the gameplay much. You shoot a little bit faster with one, do a little bit more damage with another, but nothing that really makes you want to use different guns for different situations. Frankly, I've just been sticking with the basic gun so far. Your hand to hand abilities are a little cooler.

The controls are pretty easy to master. Switching between hand to hand and shooting modes is seamless enough that you can be smacking someone down one second, and shooting something the next, so that's good.

You can jump, but that ability is utterly useless. There's no platform element, nothing to jump over or between, and it has no combat application that I can see except occasionally shooting over something. So far, the only thing I've found that I can jump over or on to are little waist high boxes littered throughout the game, but said boxes aren't really in any helpful positions. It's too bad, because I think this game could have benefitted from a platform element. At the very least, it would have been cool to be jumping between rooftops.

Vincent seems to have been largely castrated, which I expected, but not quite to this extent. I mean, he's barely stronger than the mooks, and aside from limit break (which I've done all of once so far) has no abilities that really distinguish him from anyone else. Frankly, I expected Vincent to be a little more.... supernatural. I was hoping I'd at least get to dodge some bullets or something, but he doesn't even get superspeed.

So far, music seems more or less non-existant, and the graphics are nice, but nothing special. Again, there just isn't anything to draw me in.

Plot seems okay so far, but not even good enough that I can get into my "just slog through to the next cutscene" mode. Voice acting is okay in some places, and sub-par in others, and so far, there's no particularly compelling dialogue.

Basically, the game isn't bad, but thoroughly uninteresting. On the positive side, the setting at least, is better maintained than it was in FFVII.