After playing A Plague Tale: Innocence a few years ago after claiming a free copy through Epic Games I was quite excited to see there was a new game coming. I was less than excited to find out that it had a price tag of $75. My excitement then returned when it ended up being one of the free games for the PlayStation+ subscription. Since I'm off work for the Easter holidays I decided now was the perfect time to start the game.
First Impressions
The very first thing I noticed was that the graphics looked really bland. Everything seemed to be quite smudged, blurry and soft. As far as I could remember even the first game looked a lot better than this so I wasn't sure if this was just a limitation of the PS5's graphical capabilities or not. Turning off motion blur and chromatic abberation made it slightly better and I didn't really notice and difference switching between performance and resolution mode. After googling the issue a bit it seems like this is just how the game is. It's probably an active style choice they've made but it's a shame that it ends up feeling like a downgrade.
On the gameplay side of things the game is very similar to the first one. I've played for about 3-4 hours and I haven't really encountered anything new when it comes to gameplay. This isn't an issue seeing as I'm mostly playing this game to get a wrap on the story and to experience the stunning visuals. Gameplay wasn't a strong suit in the first game either. It was simply what it had to be to tell a great story.
There's still a heavy focus on stealth which is usually something I hate. Luckily it seems like we're able to choose if we want to take a more aggressive path in this game which I'm quite happy about. There's three skill categories which we level up by using them. Stealth, combat and alchemy. If you rely a lot on stealth you'll level up your stealth and if you rely a lot on combat you'll level up combat and so on. I haven't really done enough to level up anything yet so I can't say much about the system at this time.
Thoughts
So far I'm having decent fun with this game. The story hasn't done much to grip me yet but at least the visuals are quite awesome. I find myself stopping to enter photo mode quite a bit even though the photo mode is quite weak compared to other games. I did notice that the game looks a lot better overall once I increased the contrast in the photo mode a bit. Sadly I can't use NVIDIA Freestyle with the PS5 to add filters to the game so I had to increase the contrast on my monitor. It helped a bit but the graphics still feel quite bland.
I hope the story picks up as I go on. If it doesn't it's unlikely that I'll go back through the game to pick up missing collectibles and trophies after my first blind playthrough. The first game was good enough for me to want to do that so I hope this one can live up to its predecessor eventually.
I don't mention anything of the story in this post and that's because I don't want to spoil anything for those that haven't played the first game. In short; there's a plague, there's rats and it's all somehow tied to your little brother. The first game pieces together a lot of the puzzle. This game sets out to finish the puzzle. I'll keep it at that for now. If you haven't played the first game then go do it.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.