PAX East 2013: Remember Me

actually had to ask Ser and George what the last non-fighting Capcom game was. Then they reminded me of Resident Evil 6, which I guess I just bleached out of my memory.

It's good to see Capcom trying new things, even if they don't always work out. They've kind of just become the fighting and Resident Evil guys. That isn't to say Remember Me is especially new, but it's a breath of fresh air from them.

I say it's not especially new because Remember Me plays like a hodgepodge of popular mechanics from other games. Take Batman's combat, Uncharted's exploration and mix it up inside a genetic albeit dystopian future-scifi setting.

The combo-and-dodge combat will be familiar to everyone. Just hammer on the punches and kicks and something cool eventually happens. There are a few power ups that can be activated with the left trigger. The only one available upped my strength and kind of sent the character into a Wolverine-esque berserker rage. It ran out pretty quick but became available again after a short cooldown. The demo ended with a genetic strong guy boss who had a few cronies. The minor baddies empowered him so I actually had to knock them out before I could touch him again, but he could still wail on me. It was an interesting twist on the boss-and-baddies fight.

Remember Me has fluid, jumpy combat, and in games like this I trend to ignore the smaller enemies by dodging and focus on the big guy. Though, the enemies in this suffer from Batman-levels of "Too Many Hits syndrome," and the combat gets old just from fighting one guy. I'm sure it'll open up once new combos and power ups unlock, but the demo didn't have much to show.

The exploration feels extra familiar right now when everyone's comparing Tomb Raider to Uncharted. Now we'll have a third game to water it down. It's even simpler in here with glowing yellow arrows marking where to jump next. This eliminates most missed jumps and accidental plummets to your doom, but it can still happen once in a while if those arrows make you too cocky.

The actual environments you're traversing don't make anything more interesting. They're pretty, but feel just like any other dirty dystopian city. I didn't glean much of the plot from the demo, but it could save the boring setting if it's extra engaging. Here's hoping.

For right now Remember Me feels like a bunch of other genres on the market.