Review: A Plague Tale: Requiem is an uneven adventure plagued by performance woes

videogameschronicle.com:

A Plague Tale: Requiem is a game that does many things well, but doesn’t commit to any of them nearly enough.

The stealth action is engaging, but it’s broken up with clumsy combat, the game is visually stunning, but it runs poorly, and the story is compelling but is broken up too often by needless, frustrating action, and even then the narrative outstays its welcome long before the credits roll.

The game’s early areas marry long sections of walking through stunning environments with some stealth gameplay, accented with slight survival horror flourishes. There’s a great tension built up when avoiding guards, or using the array of weaponry at Amicia’s disposal to serve those guards as an afternoon snack, but as soon as the game asks you to take on enemies head-on, the combat really shows its limits.

There’s an early section when you’re tasked with evading a large group of enemies, wherein the game very heavily hints that you should just run forward, however doing so will lock you in an endless loop of dying.

The only solution we found was to break into some kind of ersatz Benny Hill sketch where four lumbering guards chased us around a rock until we finally disengaged their patrol cycle. We could then pick them off one by one using stealth, but it portrays a lack of polish in the gameplay that’s at odds with how good the game looks.

There’s another section not long after that when guards swarm into a barn and Amicia has to ward them off. Despite most of the proceeding game highlighting that as soon as you’re spotted, it’s very likely you’ll be killed, these guards slowly climb down from the higher section of the barn for you to endlessly smash their skulls in with your sling. In one absurd moment, you go from a vulnerable