I actually *really liked* 90% of the game.
The carousel level. Watching enemies being decapitated by the scythe. Perfection. The alarm and music lighting up the room was so cool. I loved sniping the gun-toting enemies from higher ground. The room with all the traps and the hook-guys? I made it through that fight with a sliver of health. It was so exhilarating.
The Keeper level. A fucking joy. I love that time pressure. Everything leading up to the fight, including the audio log mentioning the safe and the early encounter with the the Keeper as he introduces you to the big bulkhead doors and the gas made me so damn happy. Then when he broke the last valve? I must be a masochist, because I love that sort of thing.
The mansion level they showed in demos? Intense. I really enjoyed the minimal amount of backtracking it introduced. I wasn't really a fun of instant-death Ruvik, but he never showed up again and it *did* add a different type of tension. But in the end, I mostly died because of the camera in tight hallways as Ruvik followed me or teleported in front of me.
But that final descent into madness bit at the end of chapter nine with all the wires and the mannequins was excellent. I criticized the game earlier for shitty chase sequences, but I actually liked the chase through the mannequin heads. The maze that generated on the fly called for some on the spot thinking. I suppose if I died there it wouldn't have been as enjoyable.
The church and marketplace. Super fun. I really enjoyed all the action moments throughout these chapters. Learning how to deal with large groups of enemies without wasting huge amounts of ammo was a puzzle unto itself. Like, the first time, like, seven guys followed me down a narrow hallway only to electric bolted and lit on fire with one match was very rewarding.
A city ruins. The best implementation of action horror I've seen in a good while. The water stuff made me super anxious. It was unforgiving. The mannequin factory has room was a nice change of pace. The series of rooms starting with the RE4-esque opening and closing "and here's three more enemies!" gate was actually scary because by the last enemy, I'd literally used every bit of ammo I had other than a single magnum round. Having to then proceed through the following onslaught, which culminates in the cart-ride across the burnt out building was actually super stressful. Every resource I found counted and I didn't find many.
The bus chapter I could take or leave. I liked the running to the ambulance bit, but could have done without the "waste your ammo in this spider" and the defend your position onslaught as enemies attacked from above.
That said, the stealthy part of the city ruins in chapter 13ish was a real joy. Avoiding the hooded imposters and the Keeper while disarming traps was really effective, particularly because I was so happy to have more trap parts again.
And then there was that bit in the subway that had a few alarms that I failed at once only to have a bunch of enemies rise from the water. On repeat, I managed to disarm the alarm and take most of them out stealthily. I wish there were more rooms like that one.
The Laura fights were excellent. Realizing I had to burn all the bodies in the first encounter was a great "ah-ha" moment. Turning off all the fire traps was, again, totally the sort of boss-puzzle I enjoy.
The sewer bit with the organic mess leading up to the octopus boss-fight was super uninteresting from a gameplay perspective. The boss-fight itself was fairly standard. I liked playing with the power switch the open the two supply rooms, but that really was just a novelty.
When the nurse disappeared for the last time... aww. Also, they never showed who was in the last cell! The guy in the second cell showing up in the last chapter with a final warning was a nice touch. I like how he was, essentially, just a nobody in the end. That's a surprising bit of narrative restraint for a game that otherwise didn't have any.
Otherwise, I thought chapter fifteen was a real drag. The brain/blood rooms were the ugliest parts of the game. Not ugly as on disgusting, ugly as in low fidelity. The last section with the spot lights was boring. The last wire trap you needed to sneak by was unreasonably difficult thanks to the camera being unreasonable when up against a wall. The last boss itself was just point and shoot. No finesse or skill. The actual last boss, the twin Keepers, was fine, I guess, but I felt like I got my fill with that guy back in the meat-locker. Like, I was fine with the chapter thirteen encounters, but didn't need *more*. That enemy onslaught was fine, but again, it didn't feel very different from what I'd already dealt with in chapters three, six or eleven. It was just *more*. Stomping the brain should have been cathartic, but it didn't feel earnt.
I haven't spoken much about the early game, like pre-chapter six, but I feel like they've already been discussed to death in this thread. I essentially liked chapter one, but it was a terrible introduction to the game. Chapter two was a lot of fun, chapter three was a pretty ingenious transition from stealth to action, in hindsight. Chapter four was basically an introduction to all the concepts chapter five made good on, and yeah: chapter five was when I started to kind of dig this game.
I feel like this game is going to work really well on repeat playthroughs. I'm already looking forward to having another stab at some of what I described above. The question now is whether I have a fun run on NG+, or attempt nightmare. I'm leaning toward NG+.
Also, other than chapter fifteen, this game is fucking gorgeous. Like, I get that the IQ isn't great and the textures are weird at times, but taken as a whole it's such a nice looking game. Just, yeah, wow.