Remember Me

In the year 2084, in the dystopian Paris known as Neo-Paris, the Memorize corporation has a huge influence on it's populace. A brain implant called Sensen allows sharing and addition/removal of memories. Seemingly linked to this memory modification are Leapers, which are mutated humans who exhibit aggressive behaviours and are residing in sewers beneath the city. A rebellion group known as "Errorists" aims to take down Memorize.

You play as Nilin, a memory hunter with a gifted ability to remix memories. She begins the game waking up in the process of having her memory wiped by Memorize. However, when she is in the queue to the final stage, a radio transmission comes through. A guy named Edge quickly introduces himself as the leader the Errorists and instructs Nilin on how to escape. Once Nilin returns to the Errorist hideout, she begins her journey to recover her memory and take down Memorize.

Navigating through Neo-Paris is quite the visual spectacle. The presentation of the game is brilliant - with a high level of detail in the environments with plenty of variety in the buildings and street vendors. The use of scripted events, accompanied by a brilliant musical score really brings out the atmosphere. There were plenty of moments where I was slowly walking and panning the camera around to take it all in. It evoked similar feelings when I played Mass Effect, and comparisons can be made in its cinematic approach.

However, the game is extremely linear. You are constantly pushed along a set path with no scope to explore which is probably the only downside to the game – although this can be a major downside to a lot of players who are used to the open-world style games.

Nilin is very agile both in and out of combat. You will be traversing the environment by climbing ledges and drain pipes, jumping from wall to wall, and leaping across gaps. The way forward is signposted so you cannot get lost and you can only climb on a limited amount of pre-scripted surfaces.

There are two types of secrets. One type of collectible boosts your health/focus gauge. You get a picture hint to show you where these are. Some of these I felt it would have been better being a proper secret, whereas others felt like puzzles as you may recognise part of the scene, but have to orientate yourself or work out the path to get to that area. The other type of collectible unlock concept art and lore, and are found in similar places but no hints are provided for these.

In combat, you will be taking down various types of guards and Leapers. Nilin can punch, kick, dodge and use special moves. You cannot block or counter-attack, but the dodge manoeuvre evades damage and allows you to continue your combo.

There are five special moves known as S-Pressens that are introduced over the course of the game. These use your Focus gauge which increases when you deal or take damage. The first one you acquire is called Sensen Fury which allows you to attack rapidly; useful against a large number of enemies and break through guarding enemies. Sensen DOS stuns the majority of enemies and is mostly used for type of Leapers that are invisible in the shadows. Logic Bomb has an area of effect and is useful for the armoured Enforcers. Sensen RIP can turn robots into friendly units; then explode. Sensen Camo is useful for taking down the Elite Enforcers by allowing you to assassinate them from behind.

At certain points, you will encounter boss fights. These are varied, so sometimes it's a one-on-one fight, whereas others have waves of minions to take down. When the boss' health is reduced, you need to perform a quick-time-event to finish them off. The strange thing is the button prompts sometimes give you exact buttons, other times it gives you icons. Not sure if that is a bug or intentional, but it is confusing.

The hand-to-hand combat is focused around a feature called Combo Lab which gives customisation to Nilin's 4 set combos. The first combo you are given is a simple three-punch manoeuvre. With each blow, you can customise the effect with what are known as Pressens. These come in four forms: Power (damage bonus), Regen (heals a small portion of health), Cooldown (reduces cool down of special moves), or Chain (increases the effect of damage).

You can never change the button combinations themselves, so throughout the game, you are stuck with the four combinations. It sounds limited, but the fact that the combos rely on timing and the game constantly throws various types and number of enemies at you; you have to constantly consider your strategy. Simply mashing buttons won't be effective here. There are many enemies that are resistant or weak against certain types of attacks, so you need to use the Cooldown Pressens to be able to use your S-Pressens again (in a reasonable time). You may switch your combo to use Power and Cooldown, but when you start running low on health, then you can switch them out temporarily for health restoration. Later on in the game, when you have more Pressens available, I liked assigning Regen to the three-punch combo, and assigning the others to the longer combos to give a simple way of quickly restoring health, but giving me the option of a stronger attack.

Another interesting idea featured in the game is Memory Remix which is only utilised four times within the game but provides a nice break from the action. Nilin watches a scene play out from a character's memory. You then rewind the scene and must spot objects which exhibit a 'glitch' animation. These can be interacted with which then can change the course of events. Achievement hunters or completionists may want to try every combination to see all the different endings to these events, but there is one particular scenario you are looking for. There is some trial and error involved but you should be able to logically work out what you need to do by observing the change in character behaviour. It's great playing detective, although what Nilin is doing is highly unethical; the change drastically changes the person's outlook on life.

There are times in the game where Nilin acquires a gun like device. In combat, this can be quickly fired like a pistol, or unleashed fully charged like a shotgun. Outside combat, this can be used for opening certain doors, either by blasting them, or simple puzzles involving transferring energy from one source to another. There are some light stealth elements too where you must avoid patrol drones. These situations are usually as simple as observing the route, then timing your run to the next safe area. There are a couple of times where you must open and shut doors to trap the drones inside.

When I think about the elements to the gameplay, there's definite improvement to be made. Having a bit more freedom to navigate and discover more of the city would have been amazing and would have made the platform elements more fun. The combat could be improved by allowing the player to create a couple of their own combos (in terms of actual button presses).

However, I feel that the game did a lot right with its game design. It keeps things fresh by constantly rotating the elements. Combat will be broken up with platforming sections, but before that becomes overused, you are given more story development, new game-play concepts, or even a puzzle.

These days, I find it hard to play games for long periods of time, but Remember Me kept me engrossed for hours at a time and I ended up finding it hard to put the game down. Despite being really linear, if you ignore that and just go with it, you will be too captivated to actually care.

People often joke about this game not being very memorable, but i had a good time with it actually. Its definitly one of those games you head into with low expectations, and you might just get an enjoyable experience on the other end. It has its flaws, but it does some cool stuff has well.

Visually its also really impressive, and it might just be the main reason people will keep playing the game. It uses the Unreal Engine to its full potential, and just nails the atmosphere of a derelict but lived town.

It has an innovative idea of allowing the player to choose their own combos, and i kinda wish this idea was developed further. Its more the actual execution that is lacking. The fighting handles like one of the Batman Arkham games, but is much less responsive. The combat does get repetitive since you are spamming the same combos over and over, and some of the enemies are literally health sponges. Apart from the solid but flawed combat, there are also some fillerish and very basic stealth and platforming sequences which pose no sort of challenge whatsoever.

The actual story could have been developed so much more, as the characters feel bland, and the memory remix puzzles more often than not tend to be trial and error instead of some though being placed into them.

Still, its a short game, and more than worth playing just for the eye candy. Just had the potential to be much much more.

With its sterling and startling representation of a dystopian future Paris, and a plot centered around the nature of memories and the way they can be manipulated, Remember Me pretty much has me on side from the trailers alone - it's a concept that marries a novel idea to one that allows it to slot neatly alongside other games I love, most obviously Deus Ex. When I reviewed Mirror's Edge I mentioned that I wished it was two separate games, one to deal with the world it's set in and one to deal with the parkour elements, and Remember Me takes care of the first of those wishes pretty well. And that's before we even think about it being a game where you play as a black (GASP!) woman (GASP!), which is tragically still a pretty brave move for a game to make at a time when it should barely even be worth mentioning.

Still, it's a Capcom game. Now I won't claim to be a person that pays a huge amount of attention to publishers, certainly not the same way I would producers or record labels in music, but Capcom have always stood out for me as a company that seem to let me down a little too regularly. I enjoy the early Resident Evil [バイオハザード] games, but they're also responsible for Street Fighter, Devil May Cry [デビル メイ クライ], Dino Crisis [ディノクライシス], any game with Capcom in the name, a hilarious number of lazy sequels, the worst game in the Tomb Raider series, and the recent Resident Evil games. Sure, nothing in there is atrocious, but when I play a game and think 'this isn't as enjoyable as it should be', I find that more often than not, Capcom's logo is on the back. The game doesn't exactly do an awful lot in its opening few minutes to dispel any notion that this would be the same either, with some faintly hilarious facial animation (the way the voices and lips sync up looks like a parody of a kung fu dub), some pretty heavy-handed dialogue, and a camera that's odd and fiddly.

But largely, it works. The fighting sequences are effectively a simplified version of Street Fighter, with two attack buttons and one dodge button allowing for freeform combos if combined right (though this, too, is fiddly) and simple spamming of one of the buttons if you can't get the timing right. They can get frustrating on the highest difficulty level, but everything is overcome by strategy and patience, as most well-worked fighting sequences in games are. The platforming elements are Tomb Raider-esque, but everywhere you need to go is signposted by small orange arrows, meaning you never land in a situation where you can't work out which way to go and why you can grab on to one ledge but not another, and the exploration carries a little hint of Shenmue [シェンムー] about it, with people going about their daily lives all over the place. It's an immersive world and it glides by smoothly, both in terms of the gameplay and plot, and 95% of each episode rattles along at an enjoyable pace that introduces new concepts neatly enough to avoid confusion, but also moves quickly enough to avoid boredom.

But then there's the other 5%. Unfortunately, it seems like somebody involved in designing this game hasn't realized that it's not 1993 any more, because each episode ends with a boss fight, and they are uniformly awful. Like, brutally bad at times. If I wanted to run around in a circle for 15 minutes I'd join an athletics club, not play a computer game. For example, take the Madame fight at the end of chapter 4 - firstly, you have to shoot her out of the sky with your gun, then beat her up a little bit while she's on the ground, then do that whole thing again while imaginary mooks are trying to fight you as well, then run around for a bit to avoid giants shards of ice falling from the sky, then knock her out of the sky with a power that take 180 seconds to recharge, beat her up a bit, dodge the projectiles some more, wait for the power to recharge, then repeat this about 6 or 7 more times. Then the fight ends....except it doesn't, because it turns out that was just the first half and the second half is about to start. Does this sound like fun to literally anybody? Oh, but it gets better - if you get hit by a single one of those icicles, you lose half your health, and because it takes so long for your character to get back to her feet when she's knocked down, you'll get hit by another one as soon as you're on your feet. So you're dead. And you have to start the whole fight again. What an absolute joy. Just dodge them you say? Sure, but your character has roughly the same turning circle as Scott Parker, so good luck with that.

By the way, if you Google search 'Remember Me madame boss fight', the top hit is a forum thread titled 'ok this madame boss fight is just annoying'. A post in there simply states 'every boss fight in this game is terrible'. I may whinge about boss fights more than most, but this really isn't just me this time.

It's a real shame that the game devotes so much time and effort to a part of the game that should never have been there in the first place and that lets the whole product down so badly, because for the most part Remember Me is great. The combo and S-Pressen systems that dictate combat are threaded into the gameplay really well, explained thoroughly once introduced, and some of the fights against large, diverse groups really do leave you stroking your chin wondering which weapon in your arsenal will be best to use. It's subtle, and subtle isn't something fighting games traditionally do all that well - so why destroy all that subtlety at the end of every episode? This is a game that, thanks to its story and its world, I wanted to blaze through in three days of intense gaming and really savor. Instead, every hour and a half I had to walk away and shake my head, or play another game that didn't actively seem to hate me.