0
0
I love me a good survival horror game. It doesn’t matter if it’s AAA, AA or even indie. If it’s survival horror, I’ll try it. The Sinking City 2 is pretty firmly in that genre, so does it surprise anybody that I’d be reviewing it?
While I don’t really care for the Great Old Ones-branded cosmic horror (I’m more partial to the Dead Space and Event Horizon stylings when it comes to horror from the stars), I was keen to give the game a shot because it looked cool. Not like your run-of-the-mill Cthulhu-esque game with cultists and the like.
So, is the game worth your time?
What is The Sinking City 2?
The Sinking City 2 is a 3D survival horror title developed and published by Frogwares for the PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. It is available right now.
Our review copy was kindly provided by the super folks over at Frogwares! Thanks so much!
The Sinking City 2 (despite being the second installment of the series) doesn’t require you to know anything about the original. That’s good, because I sure as hell didn’t play it. I do have it wishlisted on Steam, but haven’t gotten around to buying it during a sale.
Set during an alternate roaring 1920s United States, the game’s world is one besieged by horror.
Cosmic anomalies, supernatural flooding and unexplained phenomena plague the world, upending the natural order and routinely unleashing eldritch horrors into our world. If you love the art deco stylings of Bioshock (and Bioshock 2), you’ll love the art style of The Sinking City 2. It’s full of similar-looking buildings, tech and even clothes as Irrational Games’ baby.
You’re not going underwater this time, though, just splashing about on the surface of a city that’s going under the waves.
Enter Calvin Rafferty.
An amalgam of swashbuckling pulp heroes and noir gumshoes, Rafferty looks like what Indiana Jones would be if he was from a schlocky supernatural thriller. Rafferty doesn’t look the part of a dashing, capable hero, but he’s unfortunately the only playable character in the game, so you’re stuck with him.
Thankfully, his reason for braving the supernatural is rather relatable, so it’s not hard to empathize with his plight, weird-ass goofy looks aside. He’s just out to restore his comatose girlfriend back to normal by trying to complete an arcane ritual. Who wouldn’t do that for their loved one?
If you ask me to tell what The Sinking City 2 is most like, it’d be Resident Evil: Cthulhu.
The game’s love for Capcom’s seminal series is plain to see, and it liberally copies gameplay elements from most of the modern Resident Evil games. While the recipe for success is sound, the execution here is telling in the difference between Capcom’s team and those behind The Sinking City 2.
Resident Evil 4 is perhaps the main inspiration behind the game. Take the third-person over-the-shoulder camera, the gunplay and the boat section on the lake (and massively expand it), and you have a pretty fair estimation of what the game’s like. Rafferty putters around on his ride from one location to the next, just like Leon did on the lake.
Even The Slither are like a cosmic horror version of Las Plagas. Basically, they’re worm-things that burrow into a dead body and reanimate it.
That’s cool.
I like the wormy aesthetic, to be honest (reminds me of the movie Slither and Night of the Creeps). Horror always needs more tentacles and wormy things burrowing into fleshy bits. All good. Though I wish there were more body horror aspects to it. There’s gore, and there’s gore. You know? Can’t have too much of the latter.
That’s what made Dead Space’s necromorphs so fun to fight.
That’s just a minor gripe, though.
It’s in gameplay execution that the game feels sub-par in The Sinking City 2, not the art direction.
First off, the game loves to throw multiple enemies at you at once. Like in Resident Evil 4, you can shoot the knees to temporarily halt the Slithers’ advances…but then you’re forced to rely on weak-ass melee attacks (a stomp or a womanly pistol whip) to finish them off. The issue here is that The Slither can be damage sponges.
Shooting them in the head or body doesn’t really faze them, at least not in the way The Ganados are. They don’t flinch (unless you shoot their knees), and they keep on coming like an undead Terminator. Even environmental objects (like exploding gas canisters) don’t take them out. Not at point-blank range, not at any range. They’re just stunned.
So you can pretty much guess how they react to melee hits. Or rather…how they don’t react.
Going melee guarantees you’re going to get hit in return unless The Slither are stunned and alone. Worse still, you need to kill The Slither that emerge from a defeated corpse, or else they’ll rush back in and reanimate it (or a nearby body). That means wasting more ammo when you’re already hard up in the first place.
The issue here is that you’ll be in the midst of a fight with other Slither most times. Focusing on one enemy is usually a very bad idea, as the others have no qualms about hitting you from offscreen.
By itself, this isn’t an issue if the game is an action title. But The Sinking City 2 isn’t one.
Unlike Resident Evil 4 (which didn’t bill itself as pure survival horror), The Sinking City 2 does.
It forces you to melee or flee because resources (such as ammo) are scarce.
The problem here is that you’re forced to backtrack through infested (if you ran away) territory repeatedly throughout the game. The Slither aren’t slow-moving zombies or even decently fast like The Ganados. Nope, they’re the 28 Days Later zombie variety, and they can usually catch up to you even if you’re sprinting in-game. The dodge does come in handy, but the issue is there’s no invincibility frames on recovery.
That means even if you dodged one Slither, you’re probably going to get tagged by another that’s close by.
With the cramped quarters in the game, dodging becomes an issue of luck rather than skill. Luck hoping that your dodge gives you enough time to recover. Luck hoping the other Slithers don’t manage to catch up in the meantime. Luck hoping that your positioning now gives you a clear path to escape without being body blocked.
It’s just a frustrating system, made even more frustrating by The Slither’s ability to regenerate dead bodies after you kill them.
I consider myself a great survival horror player (it’s my favourite genre after all), having finished most of the RE games on their hardest difficulty, so believe me when I say, The Sinking City 2 is a fiendishly unfair affair on its normal (Restless Slumber) setting.
How unfair? Apart from the above examples? How about the shotgun being crap? The shotgun is supposed to be the workhorse of any survival horror title. It’s your go-to when something needs to be dropped fast with a somewhat devastating amount of firepower.
Not in The Sinking City 2.
Forget about dropping bosses. The regular Slither zombies don’t even acknowledge it. Shots to the head do nothing. They take one, they fall down. They get right back up immediately. No decapitation like in the RE games. Shots to the arms and legs are similarly useless. You can’t blow appendages off, so The Slither are just blown backwards or stumble and then recover.
I’m being deadly serious when I say that the game has the worst shotgun in the whole genre. Even the dinky pistol is better.
The weird thing is that Resident Evil 4 (and the other modern RE titles) solved this issue. They made combat tough, but fair.
They gave us crowd control measures – grenades and flashbangs to stun and blow up groups, and button takedowns on stunned enemies. You get flashbangs early and often, and takedowns are available right from the get-go.
These are the things that The Sinking City 2 desperately needs but lacks. Grenades only enter the picture much later, and you don’t get takedowns at all. Dodges are thankfully in, but like most of everything else in the game, half-baked in implementation.
That’s sad because the game really has some neat ideas going for it.
The Investigation aspect is especially noteworthy.
This is the first game in the genre I’ve played where finding memos and letters and notes left behind actually serves a gameplay purpose other than being lore or clue dumps. Once you have notes, you can link those that are related to each other to get points for your perks. It’s a cool method to incentivize picking up notes for everybody and making sure to read them.
I know it’s a long shot, but I hope this system gets adapted by Capcom in some shape or form for upcoming Resident Evil games. With The Sinking City 2 ripping off so many of Capcom’s ideas, it’s fair game to rip this one off, methinks.
There’s also a randomizer at work here, too. Items won’t be the same on repeated playthroughs. RE4 did it to some extent, The Sinking City 2 does it too. It doesn’t affect key items, so routes aren’t affected, but your playthrough can get easier or harder depending on your luck.
If nothing else, the item drops aren’t predictable.
Too bad the scares are.
In perhaps the saddest state of affairs, the game is totally predictable in how it structures encounters. Get to a new area and it’ll probably be empty with bodies lying around. Pick up a specific item (usually a key item) or trigger a cutscene, and those bodies will get animated by The Slither. Backtrack to a previously empty location and watch as you get ambushed.
Rinse and repeat.
Yes, I know these are tropes for the genre, but The Sinking City 2 makes it super obvious. Instead of fear and trepidation at exploring new areas, I get PTSD at needing to survive yet another harrowing multi-enemy encounter while optimizing ammo and health. That’s because if I don’t pull off a decent performance, it’s back to reloading the nearest save or autosave and retrying, hoping to be better or luckier.
I’ve restarted sections of The Sinking City 2 more than the number of times Leon’s starred in a Resident Evil game!
The game does a great job with its sounds, though.
Monster moans, slithering sounds…it’s always creepy when you’re wandering around and you’re hearing weird noises. They don’t always lead to encounters, but sometimes are just there to fake you out and unnerve you. I don’t get surprised by most of the game’s jump scares (too predictable, as I mentioned), but when they do get me, it’s because the mood was set by the excellent sound design.
The art design, on the other hand, is a mixed bag.
I don’t really care for the setting or its art deco look, but I don’t really hate it. The nautical feel to it does set it apart somewhat from most horror titles, so it’s got that going for it. Still, the initial locales do feel samey-samey because they’re visually the same – flooded and chaotic. It’s only when the game gets to the Akeley Memorial Hospital and later, the Fish Market, that the art design gets better.
The game really hits its stride when it leans into its nautical horror aspect.
Barnacles, coral and marine-life-inspired monsters are certainly something different from your run-of-the-mill monsters. The Slither look cool too, but they’re much too underutilized and shoehorned into being the game’s version of Las Plagas. They really should’ve been allowed to be more outlandish and delved more into the body horror aspects.
That’s a criticism I feel best describes the art design. It’s good, but doesn’t dare to go all the way to be really great. It tends to be safe, instead of innovative, with its monsters. It opts for generic horror, instead of experimenting with grotesque body horror to really complement The Slither’s design. It doesn’t take chances.
The Bottom Line.
The Sinking City 2 is a frustrating game.
Not because it’s bad. In fact, that’s what makes it so frustrating. There are some genuinely cool ideas here, from the Investigation system to the randomized item placement and the nautical horror aesthetic. When the game gets things right, it shows that Frogwares knows how to make a creepy survival horror game.
The problem is that the actual survival part of the survival horror isn’t particularly fun.
The Slither are aggressive, fast and come at you in groups, but the game doesn’t give you enough satisfying ways to deal with them. Melee is weak, the shotgun is practically useless and the dodge system feels half-baked. Throw in cramped environments, forced backtracking and predictable ambushes, and you have a combat system that’s more frustrating than frightening.
And that’s a damn shame because the bones of a great Resident Evil-style horror game are here. The Sinking City 2 clearly knows what it wants to be. It just doesn’t quite understand why the games it’s borrowing from work so well.
There’s a good game buried somewhere underneath all that frustration. Unfortunately, you’ll have to fight your way through a lot of bullshit to find it.
TLDR:
Lovecraftian horror meets Resident Evil 4. Sadly, the combat doesn’t quite survive the encounter.
The Technoverdict: Wait for a sale
The Good:
- Cool art design.
- Audio is atmospheric.
- Investigation system and linking memos is fun.
- Later locations are cool.
The Bad:
- Combat is frustrating.
- Melee is useless.
- Enemies can reanimate repeatedly.
- Predictable scares.
Salehuddin Husin, EIC
Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.
