Son and Bone Thoughts and Rant

Son and Bone was a game I desparately wanted to like, and when I first booted up the game, I thought was getting just that. The opening cutscene was short and brief and the game had an old school pick up, play, story is secondary approach. For a few hours, I thought this was going to at the very least be better than Turok 2008.

Before I start criticizing the game, I will give the game credit for having a massive stockpile of guns, much like Turok 2, there is a wide array of guns for the player to choose from, many of them are a variation of the same gun like there will be 3 shotguns, 2 machine guns, 2 chainguns, two pistols, two snipers and so on, the attempt at having a large array of guns is appreciated even if it never reaches the heights of creativity like an Insomniac game or the Dead Space series.

The game's damage animations while unpolished and awkward does get the job at creating moderately satisfying combat and the new Doom glory kill system is welcome here.

With all that said, this is where my praise for Son and Bone ends. One big ugly problem with the game is that the levels are way too large and bloated. Play times for the various longplays I have seen on Youtube ranges from 2 hours to 8 hours. The reason why they tend to vary this much because the "shooting" part of this "first person shooter" is entirely optional, you don't even need to actively kill enemies in the game to progress since there are rarely ever any barriers that will block progress unless you kill all enemies. On top of this, the game occasionally uses keycard system from FPS games from the past while also combining it with the Serious Sam and Painkiller horde shooter level design and as a result the level design can feel confused.

One minute, you can follow the waypoint indicator telling you where to go, and skip past enemies, then another minute the game will block progress and you need to find keycards since the game never tells you even with the waypoint indicator where the keycards are.

If you fight the enemies, the game is going to be even longer for you and since the levels are super long, bloated and dragged out on top of combat being optional, you are only artifically extending the length of the game.

The level design isn't good and combat in this FPS game is entirely optional.

What really destroys Son and Bone is the first person platforming, on it's own, the platforming ranges tolerable and unpolished to completely infuriating. I say this with the latter statement because with the former, as long as there are no death pits, the platforming is doable if a mild annoyance, but when it's the latter when there are death pits, and when you fail a jump, the game does not respawn you from the last platform you were on before you failed the jump instead you either die a slow death by lava or fall through the level with no ability to restart from checkpoint in the pause menu.

In order to restart the game when failing a jump especially when the death pit is an endless void, you need need to quit the game and restart from the start menu to restart the platforming guanlet, by that point, I gave up and realized I had better things to do and better games to play.

Overall, Son and Bone barely has any coverage and I doubt many know about the game, but as a whole, I just say it's a game you stay far away from. Don't let the Turok meets New Doom gameplay in the trailers fool you, the game is very poorly made and is a must avoid. If you are curious, get at a VERY steep discount.