The Sound of Violence

My character in Secret World Legends lets her guns do the talking, and they are eloquent.

I love how this game embraces the fact that the player character never speaks.  It should come across as awkward during the lengthy voiced acted cutscenes that SWL does so well, as it does in some older Bioware games where everyone except the protagonist is voiced, but it works in this game and there's never any suggestion that we're just not hearing the other side of the conversation.  The writing is so confident that it even draws attention to it, and if it were confirmed at some point that the character is actually intended to be mute I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Aside from the best in the genre voice acting the sound works hard in other ways as well.  The way that in combat the music intensifies as the character takes damage, combined with the reddening, blurring screen effect, picks up a lot of the slack caused by the action sometimes lacking a sense of impact.  I also love the pistol sound effects, which have a satisfying sense of power to them.

I've been hearing them a lot in Blue Mountain.  It's perhaps the most action-y zone I've explored so far, and at times the environments are tight enough that there's no way through that doesn't involve taking on a lot of enemies.  The game's combat still isn't great - it's essentially a less fluid Neverwinter - but it's good enough, and moves quite quickly.

One aspect of the game I have come to appreciate a lot more is the crafting system, which is perhaps better referred to as a powering up system since the emphasis is on improving items you already have rather than making new ones.  I never got deep enough into this game back in its prior incarnation to be able to do a comparison now on how it's changed, but I like the steady sense of progression, and the fact that my inventory doesn't end up filled with useless clutter since everything* can be put to use.

*Almost everything.  I do seen to be accruing a lot of lockboxes, but they don't take up much room since they stack and I'm not feeling the need to open them.