antrad88: Oh, c'mon. It is barely even a horror game. At best it is a shooter with horror elements. You have plenty of ammo, medkits and you are never really in danger. The scariest enemy is the camera and poor controls. The mine and underground temple were pretty bad, just long corridors that looked the same. And then the Chicago mission was very frustrating, the mobsters on the car would kill you and you wouldn't even see them because of the bad camera.
The first act was great, the zombie town was pretty good too, and the part in Hamilton Killain's mansion was fantastic, there are many things there is to like about this game, the characters, story, atmosphere, humor, the game engine itself... but the fact is it also has many flaws, you can't ignore those.
Nocturne is probably my favorite game ever and I've played it tons of times.
Barely a horror game? Absurd! It oozes with a perfect horror atmosphere better than any other game does. You even praised the atmosphere in the comment I'm replying to. So then how is it not a horror game if it has an amazing atmosphere?
The controls are fine, other than:
a) the hit detection when landing from a jump is a bit awkward & wonky. But thankfully, the times when you have to jump are few and far between, so it's not a big deal.
b) the major bosses rush you too much and force you to stay on a single screen only. As a result, you have almost no room to maneuver. This arbitrarily forces you into having to facetank the bosses' hits (something the hero is not at all designed to do) while spamming the "fire button." I'll concede that the controls are bad in these particular instances and this is a design flaw. But there are only a few bosses in the game, so that problem is not relevant 99% of the time.
As for the other stuff you brought up: the ammo is scarce and so are medkits. And enemies hit real hard. Specialized bullets are super rare, and if you waste them vs. the wrong enemy types, then you'll be in dire straits. If you get hit too much, you'll run out of medkits and also be in dire straits for that reason. There is plenty of danger. Not sure what that complaint is about.
The mine level and underground temple are both pitch perfect. I definitely had tons of freaky moments down in those places, like me believing there are no enemies nearby, then a zombie miner sneaks up behind me and appears instantly all of a sudden, makes its strange noises as it is breathing right down my neck, and starts munching on me from behind before I even knew it was there (all the stuff I just described happened in less than a second), which was very shocking! That scared me silly! For that moment, I forgot I was playing a game (one can't ask for out of a game than that). Likewise, the terrifying giant spider Elder God, stuck to the ceiling of its humongous lair, staring at you with its beady eyes, making you wonder if/when it's going to strike, as you have to run directly under it to explore the level, is one of the best moments ever in videogaming. IIRC that's also one of the reasons why GameSpy gave this game a very well-deserved 93% score in its review.
The camera is also fine
most of the time, except for the very first room you start out in in your HQ, and also, as you said, some of the streets of Chicago, and in a few other places. In regards to some of those Chicago streets, definitely the devs were being overly-ambitious by trying to add moving cars that the undead gangsters hop off of to attack you. The game's engine isn't able to handle that. I agree that the player can't see what's going on properly in those particular sections. But all of the stuff I mentioned in this paragraph are, again, only a small minority of the game. The entire Act 3 takes place in Chicago, but the parts that feature the moving cars where you can't see the enemies make up how much, maybe 5% of the level, at most? So that problem is minor in the grand scheme of things.
So my point in this post is, yes the game has a few flaws, but they are tiny molehills, next to the mountain of greatness that is the game
as a whole. Nocturne is certainly way better than its modern contemporaries of overly-pre-scripted, glorified-walking-simulator, absolute trainwrecks, like Outlast, Agony, Resident Evil, 7 etc.
