A Plague Take: Requiem marks a return to plague-ravaged France in the 14th Century as we pick up where A Plague Tale: Innocence left us and developer Asobo gets to showcase what it learnt from making the first game, and how far the studio has come from a technical perspective.

Unfortunately, that hasn't carried over much to the actual gameplay. So while stunning in its presentation, A Plague Tale: Requiem is no evolving beast in its mechanics, leaving us with a game that hasn't really learnt from its first outlay of shortcomings.

Here's a snippet:

The problem with the above, which is the game’s most redeeming feature, is in how a balance is ‘struck’ between turning narrative moments into gameplay, and vice-versa, all of which are bogged down in the game’s biggest problem -- hard-fail.

Powerful lines of dialogue that centre around Amicia gathering her wits, strength and resolve to face the enemy head-on are quickly snuffed out in a hard-fail scenario. Often again and again and again. The entirety of the game experience is lessened because of it. Even with all its linearity and hand-holding, A Plague Tale is a driving force of an experience because of its excellent narrative and its brilliant characters, but when the writing is cut in half by an antiquated system of trial and error gameplay driven by hard-fail scenarios that are as thick and fast as the game’s swarms of rats, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hard-fail is the game’s plague, and it’s a blight on what would be an otherwise engrossing, enjoyable journey...

Click here for our full A Plague Tale: Requiem review.