➤ The Quiet Man, the review 🎮

Review The Quiet Man it is not complicated, but we confess that trying it we asked ourselves many questions. For example, it is legitimate to ask what motivated a publisher like Square Enix, which will surely evaluate hundreds of pitches every year, to produce and publish it. Describing it is extremely easy: it is a long three-hour film, which mixes sequences filmed from life with others made with the game engine, interspersed with dull sections from the fighting game to the Final Fight. Consider that there are no choices to make to carry the story forward, so you look, you look, you hit every now and then, and then you look back.

Its peculiarity is to have a hearing-impaired protagonist and combed by Pokémon, such Dane, of which we take control and hearing, so to speak. Basically for the whole game you hear the sounds the way he hears them, so you hardly hear anything. By nothing we also mean that Dane is unable to hear the voices of the other characters and when he talks he just reads their lips. If the player wants to understand what he is told, he must learn to do the same. It is a radical choice, even an interesting one, which, however, lacks an approximate implementation that creates several problems for the narration, as well as merely logical. For example, we accept that we can't hear what other characters say, but why don't we even understand what Dane thinks and says? Why are we cut off from the conversation when she lip-licks and talks to others? Couldn't we put subtitles in these situations, making us understand what he demonstrates to understand perfectly?

Moreover, if the goal was to essentially make us assume his point of view, why does the direction not follow this choice in any way and is instead based on the use of a dull and stereotyped language, made up above all of objective shots? Again, why don't we hear the sounds of scenes where Dane is not present? Why do characters who know Dane's condition speak to him normally, often turning their backs on him? These are no small issues, because the entire gameplay is based on this gimmick, which in fact is wasted badly and remains purely epidermal, that is, a simple mute to the whole game without making us understand what it really means not to hear. Moreover, that it is a poorly developed 'mechanics' it is also understood by the fact that the theme of deafness never really enters the narrative, remaining in the background. So the idea itself would also be intriguing, but it's implemented so poorly that it's annoying. Moreover, the whole story told is also annoying, which is not only very predictable, but also full of absurdities. Dane works as a thug for a local boss, his childhood friend, and is in love with his woman. Have you already understood the ending? Good, but you are missing a senseless twist and a particular sequence that reminded us of the final one of Quantic Dream's Fahrenheit for nonsense. Throw in a vaguely racist subtext too, mix it up and disaster is served.

Note on audio

In the original version of The Quiet Man the audio was practically turned off, then a patch added some sounds because shrewd buyers believed it was a bug and started complaining on the game's forums. Note that the complete lack of sounds was in the product description, so it would have been enough to read what you were buying to avoid making a fool of yourself.

Game mechanics

Unfortunately as we said The Quiet Man it's not just a movie, but it also has some hands-on sequences. The initial "unfortunately" is due to the fact that they are made really badly and, in some situations, they seem incomplete. Dane can punch, kick, grab enemies, and use a power that allows him to focus attacks, mixing everything together to create more or less effective combos. It can also dodge opponents' blows, especially useful if you choose the higher difficulty level (of two). At first glance the system does not seem to work badly and the fights are almost pleasant in their extreme physicality and brutality. The more you progress in the game, however, the more you realize that everything is extremely repetitive and not very refined, between a very small number of enemies, polygonal interpenetrations everywhere and missing animations, the short fighting scenes soon become a nuisance, moreover. often narratively incoherent and stuck to the game to lengthen the soup.

In particular the boss they lack animations, especially the final ones, making it difficult to understand why some hits fail while others do. Probably the developers have run out of budget and have cut some things, but in this way the result is terribly sloppy and ends up penalizing precisely those moments that theoretically should be more intense and those fights in which it is necessary to study the opponent a minimum to know when to attack. . To be saved are only the scenarios which, being few and reduced in size, are rich in details and well cared for. However it is not some graphic detail that can lead to recommend The Quiet Man, which turns out to be an overall disaster with no possibility of appeal.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Intel Core i7-4770 processor
16 GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 video card
Windows 10 operating system

Minimum requirements

Operating system: Windows 7 SP1 / Windows 8.1 / Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: Intel Core i5 (2.4GHz and above)
Memory: 8 GB of RAM
Video card: AMD Radeon R7 370 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
DirectX: 11 version
Memory: 40 GB of available space

Recommended Requirements

Processor: Intel Core i5 (2.7GHz and above)
Memory: 16 GB of RAM
Scheda video: Radeon RX 480 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB VRAM

Comment

Tested version PC Windows Digital Delivery Steam, PlayStation Store Price 14,99 € Resources4Gaming.com

3.0

Readers (18)

3.7

Your vote

The best version of The Quiet Man is the Xbox One, which doesn't exist. Really, the very thought of not taking the risk of hitting this game should make the owners of the Microsoft console happy. Obviously you joke ... but not too much. For the rest there is little to say about a product that would like to be experimental, but it is only badly made and that we find no reason to recommend to anyone. If you are intrigued by the lack of audio, start a random game and set the speakers on fire, the effect will be more or less the same.