I played on: PS4
I paid: £12.99 (DLC included in Boxset)
Available on: PS3, PS4, PS Vita, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC
Notes: Spoiler warning for Revelations 2 main story.
The Struggle explores how Moira survived on the island for 6 months between Claire and Barry’s campaigns. Seeing as Moira was a really interesting character I was looking forward to this DLC. Sadly I only found myself disappointed.
The basic idea for the Struggle is to spend a stage sneaking around previously used locations to hunt wildlife and scavenge health items and ammunition. Then after this stealth stage, you have to take on multiple waves of monsters and try to survive. You do this a few times and then the adventure is finished. It’s short and never really managed to grab my attention.
This is a shame because seeing Moira learning to hunt and survive over 6 months sounds amazing. Sadly, that’s not what we get. Moira is as strong at the start as she is at the end. We don’t get to see her slowly learning how to use a gun and overcoming her phobia in order to survive. Instead, from the beginning, she’s as confident and skilled with pistols and shotguns as both Claire and Barry. She doesn’t grow as a character because the wave-based gameplay doesn’t suit telling this type of story. The narrative feels so broken and far removed from the gameplay that it shatters all immersion and spoils the whole experience.
The writing itself isn’t all too bad but the way it’s presented is terrible. Instead of the beautiful cutscenes from the main game most, the plot is relayed via voice over. Moira will explain the situation and then you will find yourself dumped into a random location. The catch of the DLC is that if you run out of the food you will not be able to restart from a checkpoint. This means you are forced to start the entire campaign again. I see what the developers were going for here. Horror through survival but it just doesn’t work. One of the biggest problems is the disconnect between the hunting stages and the survival stages. If you get spotted by a monster while hunting you have to escape from the area give up the hunt or restart and use a ration. But during the survival stages, you can easily take on hoards of these same monsters without needing to run. Why can’t you just fight during the hunting stages? Then you have the lazy way the game teleports you around the area between waves. Very often you will be able to see the area it teleports you to so why not just let the player walk there? It breaks all immersion when the screen fades to black and then just pops you 5ft away on the other side of a fence. When a wave finishes why not just add an animation or cutscene of us climbing the fence? I think what they were going for was a Last of Us style adventure but instead, it just feels rushed and lazy.
Then you have the annoyance of having to replay large parts of the campaign if you fail. I played on casual and luckily never needed to start from the beginning. I really don’t wanna replay it though and there is no way I wanna tackle this on the harder difficulties. It’s far too mundane and generic as a hoard mode to make replaying it over and over any fun.
Ultimately I’d not say this is worth much at all. The story is nothing but wasted potential and while the gameplay is not bad per-say it’s far from engaging. Sadly as it is The Struggle is not really worth playing.
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