By Sam Coles:
There are games that gain attention for reasons not for
their gameplay or mechanics, but instead their premise. Agony is one of those
games that got attention due to its edgy setting of Hell with its erotic
context which sparked controversy because of course it did, remember kids
graphic violence is A-Okay but a nipple is unacceptable. Who would have thought
that Agony’s title would live up to its name, because it is one of the most
frustrating and terrible games I have played in 2018. Let’s get into it shall
we.
In Agony you play as a tortured soul that has been sent to
the blood soaked depths of Hell, you find yourself at the gates of Hell and you
must explore and find the Red Goddess to help you with your salvation. I like
the concept of the game, as the only game I can really think that has the Hell
setting is Doom and there you’re not really vulnerable as you can tear demons
in half with your bare hands. The
concept is a good idea, it’s just a shame it stumbles and then falls down a
mountain when it comes to gameplay, visuals and performance.
Gameplay is a first person horror stealth game in a similar
vein as Alien Isolation, but unlike Alien Isolation it is not clear about how
the stealth works, is it sound or is line of sight. I say this because I could
walk crouched and the demons still hear me, where then proceed to mount me and
then eviscerate me, oh and by the way you die in one hit. Once you die you
enter an outer body state, when you are in this state you can inhabit other
torture souls to revive yourself, but you can only take control of souls that
don’t have bags over their heads as you have to take them off their head which the
game never explains that. Your default moving speed is painfully slow, you move
at the rate of depleted uranium and you only have a limited amount of stamina
for sprinting, which turns this into a painfully slow slog.
It’s not only a stealth game, there are some light “puzzle”
elements and I say puzzles but honestly they are simplistic where you collect
skulls or hearts and put them on alters or drawing sigils on walls. In the
latter half of the game, puzzles devolve to drawing symbols on walls, how are
you supposed to know what shape to draw? With vague clues and where bodies
maybe gesturing the shapes, it’s not fun to find these clues as the environments
just blur together.
Let’s get into the presentation and performance, this is
where the game goes downhill it’s not that it’s all bad but it is inconsistent.
The game runs on the Unreal Engine 4, but honestly it looks like an early
Unreal Engine 3 game, with some questionable looking character models where it
looks like some hit the randomise button in a character creator, and don’t give
me the excuse it’s hell they are supposed to look disfigured because they look
laughable and not scary. Lighting is also a big issue, now I understand they
want to build a dark and brooding atmosphere but it is just ridiculous in this
game as I could barely see anything in some areas, where I was guessing where I
was going. Performance wise this game runs terribly, it runs at an uncapped
frame rate and it darts all over the place mostly dipping to the mid-twenties,
coupled with horrendous screen tearing.
Another aspect that completely broke my immersion is that
the game has audio issues; character’s dialogue will cut out half way through
speaking for them to start their exposition again, or they will finish their
lines for them then to repeat themselves. This happened so often that I wanted
to slice my ears off with a paper guillotine because the voice acting isn’t
that good to begin with.
Overall Agony is one of the most awful experiences I have
had in 2018, with technical issues and gameplay that is tedious and
frustrating. It is going take more than monsters with vaginas for heads to keep
me playing this radioactive mess.
And god said let there be boobies and then there were boobies.
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