The Sinking City 2

SLAVA UKRAINI <3

I love this game. so what if it is not open world, and looks like resident evil? why are these stupid people who cannot form their own opinion, type the same negative review? are they against new things? despite this game being, looking and performing good? there are more games that have similarity in them. (gta, red dead redemption, mafia - need for speed, forza, crew motorfest) ... is the game "repetitive" because you travel on a boat and open gates? I think the negative reviews are the result of global decline in iq. where teachers are unable to teach kids the basis, and they grow up to be stupid af and cannot form opinions so anything different or new that feels good to them, is automatically a threat.

The graphics look great for the most part, although the cutscene animations can feel a little stiff. Some sections throw way too many enemies at you and things can start feeling a bit samey, but overall I had a good time with it. Definitely impressive to see what such a small team managed to pull off.

Developers worked hard on this game, I appreciate that. Thanks guys and good luck with your future projects :)

I absolutely love the fact that instead of hollow repetitive open world of the SC1 we got a tight survival horror where the city is just a single location. I enjoy this game a lot.

I'm at a party, and people keep saying someone who "looks JUST LIKE Brad Pitt" is about to show up. Cool! But the guy shows up and he's 500 lbs. Initially, I'm utterly shocked and confused. And even if he has a lot of cool things to say, at first, I find it impossible to pay attention to him--I'm just focused on how UNLIKE Brad Pitt he is. This game was the 500 lbs guy for me. I actually almost reflexively refunded it due to unfair comparisons made by other reviewers. But the more I played it, the more I caught myself having fun and actually being pleasantly surprised by cool moments. By the end, I was actually REALLY into it and glad I played it. I was legitimately having a good time. The more time I spent with it, the more comparisons to Brad Pitt left my mind, and the more I listened to the fun and interesting things the 500 lbs man had to say. -- TLDR: If you're a massive survival horror fan (even the non-scary ones), and you love AA titles, I would definitely check this out when it reaches like $10-$20 on a sale. Only get it at full price if you are a genre fanatic and you feel good about potentially helping a studio make even better games. --Brief talk about comparisons -  For me, Resident Evil 2 Remake is Brad Pitt. I think it's very unfair and crazy and shallow to compare these two games. I definitely do think Sinking City 2 took some inspiration. Sure. But what makes RE2 Remake so good? There is a very interesting dynamic especially present in the police station. When you first arrive, you are absolutely overwhelmed and you are DESPERATE for ammo. You wish you could shoot everything. But the more you advance, and the more ammo you obtain--the stranger things get. Eventually, it actually gets to a point you desperately wish you DIDN'T have to use your gun! But you often feel FORCED TO! It flips the initial desire completely on its head. It's a very thrilling, suspenseful experience that all feels like a really cool puzzle to crack. I honestly think it's brilliant. This game plays much more like Alan Wake 2 or Cronos: The New Dawn. The combat in those games have weak points you have to target and projectiles being flung at you. Both games are also heavily inspired by Resident Evil: there's backtracking, locked doors, etc. But the levels don't really have that "Spencer Mansion feeling" of traveling through an increasingly strange labyrinth that keeps folding in on itself and revealing weird twists.  I think an AA game that actually has that feeling is Tormented Souls 1. And yet surprisingly, I think I would say I had an equally good time with Sinking City 2. But I really like these types of games--even AA or super indie ones. I bought Directive 8020 for like $50 and laughed a lot and had a good time with that one too. -- In any case, I'm actually happy I played through Sinking City 2. For genre fanatics and AA enthusiasts, I definitely think it's worth checking out. But if you're one of those people who watch game trailers and think, "Eh. The frames are dropping a little. And the lip syncing needs adjustment," then ABSOLUTELY skip this lmao. It would be like placing a bleaching sun upon your exacting, dainty, vampire eyes.

Having enjoyed Sinking City 1 a lot when I tried it on Steam a few years ago after devs Frogwares got control of their game finally, I was looking forward to 2 even with the clear departure it was taking from the start, doing something I had kind of hoped from SC1 in taking more inspiration from Resident Evil 2 remake than the clunky combat & resource management of their previous game. It is slightly sad that SC2 has only the vestigial remnants of its previous investigation systems, but they made a really good RE-like survival horror game, with excellent metroidvania levels, with that classic resource scarcity, great atmosphere, combat that punches above its weight even if it's not as juicy as the RE series has, it's still really great-- --If I were to have negatives, number one is how annoying it is to tinker with Unreal Engine every time to get it to run okay and not look broken. Probably quite a few of my 22 hours were spent on just tinkering with engine ini lines, going back-and-forth launching the game, clearing the shader cache, seeing if I reached something that looks at least slightly on par with RE2R (albeit blurrier) and not running at 15 frames a second. In the end, I had to swallow my pride, play with DLSS+framegen at an awful 60 (=30 in reality) fps, on high settings with a few more performance-memory tweaks, and got it to run consistently. At least Nvidia Reflex helped quite a bit with the latency, just be aware that it's broken on "auto", only at 2x framegen does Reflex work. I don't even need framegen to play Cyberpunk at a locked real 60fps which looks great. Man, why can't we get settings where games can look as good as say RE engine games from 7-1 years ago as well as run as well as they do? That's UE5 for ya. My other criticisms are minor punditry nitpicks. The dialogue is a bit out of place, your main character is established as having already some knowledge of the occult and having a history doing dark rituals with another main character (none of these are spoilers, you hear/read these in the first 5-10 minutes of the game), but come gameplay, and he talks out loud like an innocent stock character who is surprised by the things he sees-- He's been 3months surviving the flood, I expected a bit more of a jaded dry burned out delivery, like a Max Payne who's not surprised by anything at this point. Ending also had them say out loud certain things I kind of wished they would have conveyed more visually to us, but overall I didn't mind the ending, pretty classic Lovecraftian stuff. But that's not a big deal, it's not constantly in your face, for the most part you just silently explore the excellently crafted environments where you hunt for clues and keyitems, dodge and fight enemies and scavenge for resources. The devs made really nice locations to explore, from a Hotel, to a Hospital, to a Fishmarket, each with great looping gatekept design, nice progression of upgrades and weapons and enemy introductions, though the very last area seemed to tease a new enemy which I was very mildly disappointed weren't introduced and we fought the same roster of enemies instead. The rifle upgrades also felt like they came surprisingly late where you're not going to get too much use of them anymore, hunting for those rifle "feats" is going to be painful for the extra points to spend for the new game stuff where just like in RE games you can unlock new skills, weapons early and infinite ammo for them for future playthroughs. The last location overall felt maybe a tiny bit rushed now that I think about it, It's still cool, but the hint of a new enemy we never see, and also the location makes no use of evidence gathering and linking felt a bit weird, it had the bones of being another last area before the final boss, but they made it a lot more limited. A small detail that's neat, there's a lot of optional dialogue that you trigger mainly if you look at certain things and linger for a bit, you can miss a lot if you just run through areas and don't stop and look, that dialogue also didn't suffer from my previous gripes above. SC2 doesn't win prices for novelty or breaking the mold, it's very much inspired by RE2R, SH2R, DSR and all of their successes, but it could have been easy to make an annoying game that takes the wrong lessons from those as well, instead SC2 is I'm going to cheekily say a tiny bit superior to RE games in that at least there aren't those gimmicky sections where you're suddenly playing a different game, elaborate QTEs or forced stealth sections which Capcom keep littering into their RE games. BTW, if you get the Premium Edition you get an extra "mission", a Manor with its own self-contained story, you unlock a new weapon in it that you can then use in the main game, I'll say the Manor is again a really well designed location, a fun small Lovecraftian story, it's just again a solid 2-4 hours of great survival horror gameplay. It feels a bit weird to have day 1 a separate mission you kind of have to pay extra for, for any AAA company I'd frown on that, but here when the base game is cheaper than average and the premium only bumps up the price to standard levels, and the game is by a smaller self-published AA studio who have had some enormous struggles and relied on Kickstarter backers to help get this done (credits had like maybe 30-80 devs listed and then backers were 90% of the rest of credits), the extra mission seems more like it was something they did for backers and less to be scummy AAA devs who carve out content to make an easy buck. Anyway, outside of UE5 being UE5, the game's overall excellent, there's not much I can say that isn't a copy of praising say the RPD or Spencer Manor and equivalent well-crafted locations to do your surviving in, the combat's great though not as good as AAA studios can pull of, there's good replay value like in most RE games or Dead Space, Silent Hill etc, but it is fun to have a classic Lovecraftian setting for once in this well established genre, pretty well realized one as well.

General thoughts: I Played through in two days. Took my time, explored, read everything. Firstly. THE GAME APPEARS TO BE IN A FINISHED STATE. How wonderful! In these trying times its rare to get a game on release date that is actually in a finished state. This on its own is enough for a positive rating (the bar has fallen that low). But my positive rating is based on more. So firstly, the types of games I like related to this: walking sims and horror games like silent hill, resident evil, and alan wake. This gameplay is probably closest to Silent hill of those three mentioned (SH2 remake and SH f). If you like those, you will probably like this one but don’t expect fast smooth action combat like with RE and a ton of boss fights. There was just a few bosses. I think its important to understand what kind of game this is so you can manage your expectations going in. Its very comparable to Silent Hill 2 and f IMO. Things I liked: Doesn’t contain gameplay elements that serve no purpose like having to reply in dialogue (especially when it doesn’t effect the game outcome). Speaking of, game is pretty linear. I think that is nice. Often linear games have better stories. Beautiful game. They really brought in some great artistic and musical talent to bring this game to life. I kept finding myself stopping to just look at textures or designs up close. Really something. Wonderful voice acting though some dialogue was a little odd. I think that’s probably a translation issue. Tone doesn’t always translate even if you use similar meaning words. There was a mermaid. And she was perfect. Right amount of horror and beauty. Faithful to the lore. About time a lovecraft story had a siren in it. I liked the three main settings for each arc. There is also an apartment you start in and it was eye candy. But I was slightly disappointed in the very last area. I also love old big ships and would have liked to explore the ship more. Love that its set in the 1930s. Art deco was popular and probably the last time (in the U.S anyway) where they made beautiful buildings. No technical problems. I didn’t encounter any bugs that I noticed. but I think I saw frame rate drops a few times during combat. Nothing too dramatic. I have pretty good specs though so others might have problems I didn’t. The menu settings had a few options to help with motion sickness and also the game is in 3rd person. I am prone to motion sickness in games but had zero problems with this one. If you are like me in that regard, turning on the reticule is a big help. This must have been something the devs put in extra work on because there are a lot of little things they have to do to reduce motion sickness and so many studios just don’t do it (maybe they don’t realize it’s a big deal for a lot of players). I liked the bit in the hospital prosthetics room that was homage to Ukrainian soldiers. Heart breaking. But I read every single one. It makes this game even more impressive when you know a bit about the dev teams situation. Things I don’t like: Crafting in survival games when there is a very small inventory allotment. All this does is force me to constantly waste time running back and forth to stash containers. And I don’t like my time wasted on tedious things like this. Even more so when every setting is a maze that changes. Likewise I generally don’t like small inventory space for a number of reasons like the one I just said but the second problem is the weapons take up a lot of space. So here is the deal, you don’t get a lot of ammo, but you do get variety. Yet you cant carry more than 2 weapons at a time otherwise your inventory is full. And this is pretty much true all the way until near the end when you finally get a bit more space. Because the ammo doesn’t stack very much. Only 10 for the rifle. I forget the others but its way too small. And then you need crafting items to make ammo. 3 types. AND you have to carry around items to unlock things. And if you need health items, forget about it. Anyway I found myself only using handgun and shotgun for the entire game until the last boss. because it just wasn't practical to carry more than that and those are the two most versatile. Although the rifle does better damage, you also NEVER get opportunities for ranged attacks. so why is there even a rifle in the game? Only came in handy during boss fights. I just really don’t like this in games and really wish tiny inventories stopped being “a thing”. Combat was, in my opinion, very difficult. It was a bit clunky like silent hill 2 (remake) but you get swarmed often like in a RE game but without the speed of movement of RE. I ended up switching to easy difficulty after an hour of game play. and after a few hours more ended up switching to invincibility. I am not particularly skilled at combat games but I can usually get by. Not with this one. Other minor complaints. Early in the game you find a letter from your neighbor about asking someone to feed her cat. But you cant feed the cat anything and never see it. : ( Early in the game there is a safe. I assumed, incorrectly, I would find more clues elsewhere to open it but I didn’t and you can never return to that area ever. You are locked out of the area near their apartment very quickly so make sure you look up the code and get the safe continents. I never did figure out what the code was anyway or how to determine it. There was one puzzle for the mermaid lyrics. I looked up the answer and still have no idea how the numbers are derived from the lyrics. I am okay with not getting a puzzles answer but typically I should be able to see how it’s the answer after its given. If I still cant, then there are issues with the puzzle design. Neutral or mixed feelings: (more like suggestions or thoughts I have) Limited detective gameplay features. The first SC was heavy on detective gameplay but it didn’t work super great. I was a little surprised to find this one has almost none and what there was is optional and not really necessary. But I am not sure how to make it better. The game “nobody wants to die” and “alan wake 2” have some of the better detective gameplay ideas I have seen. Might be worth using them as inspiration. “The city below” is mentioned multiple times in the game and I was a bit disappointed in what that ended up being. Or at least what I saw of it. Maybe there will be a DLC with an actual city? No deep sea diving. In fact you never get in the water except knee high water. Or a boat. Maybe this was dropped because there is dialogue that alludes to there being deep sea diving. Dark water that is chin high is creepy. They could have added some of that in for the vibes. Never felt like I found some little hidden spot. Player is forced through specific paths with no deviations or little hidden spots. Would have liked more lore. I honestly did not really understand the ending. I don’t know what happened. So I will have to watch a youtube video explaining it. (I read everything) So maybe more should have been added about that and what was going on. I think that there could be more story in the hospital setting with the creature god thing and what their objective was and also explain a bit more about Fays power or whatever it is she is. Idk it wasn’t explained much. Like many linear games, once you leave an area you cant go back. But the guy at the university seemed like he could have been a character you go back to multiple times and interact with. i feel like he was wasted potential as a character. -Lastly, there are always things to criticize about any piece of art. The artist (devs) have to make compromises and work under constraints. i acknowledge this. I really enjoyed the game and I think its worthy of praise and something the dev team should be proud of accomplishing. Its at AAA level (imo) and maybe better since it actually seems finished on release.