I’ll make this short and sweet for those who don’t want to read a long review. Remember Me has a lot of great points, sadly they’re mixed up with parts of the game where you can’t help but feel like the game needed more adding to it. For those who want to know why I feel that way, read on.
Remember Me starts off well, the year is 2084 and you’re presented with an advert for a product called Sensen, a terrific device which allows you to record and share you memories. Not like a photo or a video, but through an implant on the back of your neck. People will see exactly what you remember seeing and saying. It also offers the benefit of being able to have bad memories deleted as simply as chucking an unwanted file in the recycle bin on your computer.
However, there are downsides to this. The Sensen manufacturers are basically creating a surveillance state and know everything that happens, to make matters worse people can get addicted to downloading other peoples memories and when used too much, the implants degrade and cause mutations, these mutants known as Leapers now live in the slum area of Neo-Paris, largely ignored by the rich populous inside the main city walls who have all but forgotten about their existence whilst they live their perfect lives.
One group of people, entitled the Errorists, have decided to take a stand against Sensen and try to shut them down to stop them having so much control over everyone. You control an Errorist by the name of Nilin, a girl who was once the greatest Memory Hunter in the world but at the start of the game you have your memory removed, nearly completely, before you’re saved by an unfamiliar friend. A friend who talks to you throughout the game, helps you re-establish connections with old friends, and leads you towards the goal of shutting Sensen down. As the story develops, enemies help you out, friends turn out to be different to how you thought they would, and not every part of destroying Sensen is a one dimensional as it first seems.
By the time you reach the end, you’ll have been treated to pretty well written story. In fact, I’d even say it was a good story. Some parts are poorly written and some twists are obvious, by and large though I enjoyed it, but getting though it proved to have more than a few shares of problems.
First of all, a positive, the world of Neo Paris is absolutely beautiful. Not just from a graphical stand point either, don’t get me wrong the graphics are pretty, but just the style and creation of the city is outstanding.
But sadly, it lacks much to do. Every time you go past a bin, or a shop, a quick heads up display will appear in front of them and give you information. When the bin will be cleaned, what offers are on in the shop, what food you can order. It really makes the city feel alive, but then you try and talk to anyone at the outdoor cafe, or go in a shop, and you soon find out that there’s nothing you can actually interact with. It’s just there for show, it may be part of everyday living for the people of Neo Paris but they get to use it. We don’t, and in a way this nice touch actually began to bother me after a while of having so little to do.
There are parts of the world you can interact with, ledges! I love Assassins Creed, but I always resent the series for it causing developers to decide that climbing is an essential gameplay element that can carry entire games. It worked in Assassins Creed, but in Remember Me, climbing is just a way of getting from A to B without ever having to travel through the beautiful city. You wont see much of the inside of most building for a long time, as most of your time is in the slums, or on walls of very white buildings.
This wouldn’t be so bad if you were doing it to avoid detection, using it for stealth. But that option is not yours, it’s all pre-written, and whilst on a few occasions your sneaking around on walls leads to a storyline moment (pre-scripted) that makes it feel like it was need, the rest of the time you’ll find yourself fighting the enemies you were supposed to be avoiding by climbing, and then wondering what the point was in the climbing segment. I could have stormed my way into a building and used the lift, instead I climbed a building and it’s nearby neighbours for 10 minutes, only to get to a ledge and be attacked by the same people who were at the main entrance and caused me to take this alternate route.
At least the fighting is fun. Occasionally. For weeks before it’s release, Remember Me was pimped as having an amazing combo system that you can customise, but you can’t do nearly as much as they would have you believe. Yes, you can change an attack from a power attack to a healing attack. But that is pretty much it. You can change the type. You can’t change the button sequence. You starting 5 button combo of X Y X Y X will always be those 5 buttons, you just basically change the effect of it, and to begin with you can’t really do that either you have to unlock extra buttons to use in combos. You may have a 5hit combo that ends in X, and you can have 4 Y attacks unlocked, but you can’t put the Y at the end, you have to wait til you unlock a new X. At times, this can be annoying. The combat also suffers from a lack of a parry system. You can dodge, and carry on a combo immediately, but there’s no block and parry. The game feels like it tried to take it’s leaf from the Batman games.
The combat is free flowing and at times it can be satisfying, but at others it’s just a question of hitting X 3 times, then dodging, and doing it again until everyone is dead. The game tries to change it up with new enemies who only appear when a light is on them, and super enemies who draw strength from others close by who you must take out first, but by that time you have your super power attacks and even a gun of sorts.
With the triple-X combo changed over to a combo that helps regenerate your super attacks, you can spam the combo and dodge repeatedly and use the super moves to finish everyone off. It makes for a dull fight, but it’s an easy choice when the alternate is trying carefully to pick off wall crawlers to weaken the super power leaper, whilst he batters you to death because you couldn’t aim your gun quickly enough.
You may remember that earlier I mention you were a memory hunter. This is a big part of the story, it lets you take memories from people. At some parts you use it to see how to get through security areas, and in other parts, you use it to change peoples memories so as to benefit you. These Memory Remix sections are a fun part of the game, that really make you feel like you have the powers Nilin is supposed to have. But they’re massively underused, not just in how often they appear (4 times in the whole game) but also in what you can do.
In each of them, you essentially make someone think they killed someone so they feel bad. Be this a husband, or a wife and child. You’ll then see how it affects them, a guy who now believes he killed his wife, commits suicide. Was that worth it? That what I asked myself, there’s now a widow and a fatherless child. Sure, he may be a bad guy cause he stops me getting where I needed to do, but surely this should be more of a moral dilemma for the player.
I’d have loved there to have been multiple ways to remix the scene, in a way there is as each scene has a half dozen or so items that can be manipulated as you change what they see in their memory, but you can’t really change the end. We’ll use the Husband with his wife and child as an example, because it’s part of one of the trailers and not too much of a spoiler. In his memory, he argued with his wife and she walked out. Maybe for good, who knows? But she slams the door and leaves the room as he looks at a gun. You can remix that, and take the safety off the gun, make a few things get smashed to heighten tension and now he’s shooting his wife, and in present day committing suicide.
Why can’t we have a third option? Why can’t we knock over a photo of their child, or make their child come in the room so as that they see their offspring and realise that there are more important things in life than the little things they’re arguing about? Make it so that in present day, the guy phones his wife and goes to meet up with her immediately to fix things. No pointless death, clear conscience for Nilin. It wouldn’t even need to change the main story that much, just a tiny bit, but it would make it feel like you had so much more control of this very linear title.
There’s not much more that can be said about Remember Me, it may seem like I dislike the game as I have taken issue with more than a few of the key parts of the game, but I did actually find enjoyment in it. It just never settles down to be a truly great game, it mixes simple platforming and simple fighting and doesn’t do either that well, and then adds the usage of memories which never feel like they reach their full potential for options. Through it all though, it does it looking good, and whilst I may not remember a lot of the story and actions, some scenes in the game are truly memorable. Nilin scaling a building and finally getting to the top to see the entrance to Neo Paris covered in smoke and fire due to your actions, it’s an image that I’ll remember for a while.
Over all, Remember Me will find a target audience out there. It deserves to, and I really hope we get a sequel than can further develop the world, and the interactions of the Sensen implants. But for most, I think a weekend rental is a better option.
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