I haven’t played GZ in about a year and a half because the end game became super boring and I had other things to do. Of course, when I saw that the devs were finally putting the game to bed with the final update I decided to hop on and at least play through the last missions and finish my own journey in the game. I was expecting something to the tune of the original story in terms of creativity and uniqueness, but good lord, it felt like avalanche really phoned this one in.
To start; it felt unbelievably rushed. The story lacked creativity, and was essentially the same thing twice: find objective > shut off power > destroy objective, with coms site at overby and rocket site on radar island respectively. And the “boss fight”? Pathetic. SO BUGGY, and just not very well thought out to be honest. “Figure out how to get past these shielded turrets and a bunch of hunters” like okay, it took me a couple tries to figure out blind spots, but on guerilla settings I was still able to just ran past all of them, and the tank in front of the control room door, and just hit a button. After that go back to a safe house, listen to a couple unenthusiastic voice lines and then call it a day. Watching paint dry would’ve been less anti-climatic.
Also, what’s with the new characters? The devs had a bunch of npc’s waiting around on himfjal that we already knew and loved, but instead decided to introduce a soviet commander and a human computer with about an hour left of gameplay, and then make them essential to the final mission. I couldn’t have gave a darn about the new people we found, I wanted to see himfjal people get involved in the main story.
I don’t even want to get started into how bare bones the new island is, I combed it and found zero collectible or Easter eggs save the gnome at the first safe house. What’s even worse is there was basically no visual story telling, something that this game had previously done incredibly well. A bunch of destroyed fnix’s and Swedish tanks seemingly strewn around the island at random makes me think the devs at least made an effort, but either didn’t have the time or passion left to do it well.
Finally, so much was left unanswered; the Iron church, the apple murderer, the 666 bunker, and then most of all, what happens to all the characters? We got an almost unbelievably half- assed cinematic at the very end of some of the characters at the overby base lookout, but they could’ve done so much more. The devs literally modeled an intact helo into the game near the apartment/police buildings on radar island, and then didn’t use that as a way for our characters to finally escape back to civilization. Which. They. Just. Saved.
It HURTS to say these things about a game that I once would’ve called my favorite without a doubt, but it just could’ve been so much more. I know nothing can be done about it, it’s just sad to see a game that once had so much love poured into it fall into its own former shadow. It’s been a dead man running for a while but I didn’t expect the ending to be this un-graceful.