Lots of potential that’s sadly underutilized
Remember Me is Capcom’s answer to sagas like Assassin’s Creed. It’s a 3rd person action game, with heavy scripting, that’s set in a hyper-tech future.
Remember Me is unfortunately characterized by some glaring problems with playability, camera and control and the unavoidable fact that it’s very repetitive. The music and artistic design are great, but they’re not enough to rescue what is ultimately a mediocre game.
Good ideas, badly used
Remember Me follows the story of Nilin, a “memory hunter” in a futuristic world where buying, sharing and trading memories is the basis of society. Big businesses want to change people’s memories to play to their favor, and it’s from this seed that the story takes root. At first, Remember Me’s storyline seems chaotic, but it soon gains order and becomes very interesting.
Unfortunately, an interesting story doesn’t always translate to an interesting game. At the start, Remember Me looks promising, but after 3 or 4 chapters you begin to realize that it’s not really resulting in a playable game. And in general, if you still need tutorials halfway through a game, you’re looking at a major playability and design faults.
Remember Me has 3 well-defined playable sections. On one hand, there are the platform and climbing sections, inspired by games like Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed. There’s not much to note here, other than to say they are long and repetitive. We failed to notice any evolution here, and ultimately, if the game doesn’t evolve, it’s not very interesting.
Remember Me’s platform sections direct you through the levels. They’re very linear, with the way marked clearly with a holographic arrow. There’s no opportunity to explore or get lost, which ends up being a bit boring. Occasionally, Nilin is required to tackle some puzzles, but they are disappointingly easy.
On the other hand, you have the combat elements. The game offers player customizable combos, which sounds great on paper, but doesn’t really get very far. You can’t modify everything, just the button you’re going to push, but not its position in the combo. As you progress in the game you can add more buttons, making your combos more powerful. Add that to the fact that the enemy AI is very similar, and the camera movement is terrible, and we came away from fights feeling very unsatisfied.
Finally, we should highlight Remember Me’s memory remixes. These are a really interesting element, and if the game had paid more attention to them, we think it would have ended up a whole lot more fun.
The remixes allow you to change people’s memories, “editing” the video of the memory in real time. The changes you make have a significant impact on the outcome of the game. The concept is great and the idea is well developed, which means that we really don’t understand why there are only 4 remixes in the whole game!
Camera work we’d rather forget
For a 3rd person game, Remember Me’s usual moves look pretty normal. The control, however, is downright weird. Nilin moves like a duck and at times has problems doing so much as simply turning around. Jumps are semi-automatic and not always accurate, fights are slow (although you do get used to it), and there are QTEs (quick time events).
That’s not the worst, though. We also had huge issues with the camera, which never points where it needs to. Finally, Remember Me is a game that tries to hold your hand as you move through the game, which gets very irritating after a while.
Decent design and music
The artistic design of Remember Me really stands out from the technical aspect. It looks great, offering you a world that has a personality all of its own. It looks sufficiently good, in fact, that they could take the raw material to the big screen, if they felt so inclined.
Remember Me uses Unreal 3.0 as the graphics engine. They make good use of it, but don’t quite take it to 100%. It’s definitely not a game that will leave you speechless, but it is nice to look at, and doesn’t hide behind any lofty pretensions.
The music is Remember Me is spot-on. There’s not a lot of it, but what we do hear is powerful stuff that suits the futuristic world perfectly.
Superficial
Remember Me is just an OK game. Unfortunately, there’s nothing special about it, and when it comes to playability, there are some serious problems. The game mechanics are repetitive, and the control’s chaotic. There might be plenty of players out there willing to invest the 8 – 10 hours it takes to play, but it’s very easy and doesn’t offer much in the way of challenges.
If you’re looking for a little depth in your game, Remember Me will leave you wanting more.
