41 Hours Review: Shooting Blanks

The FPS genre has been in a bit of a weird flux lately. I’ve been seeing plenty of AAA shooters out there, and the occasional boomer shooter from time to time, but I haven’t seen many single A or indie shooters on the horizon like I used to. So when I saw 41 Hours in the eastasiasoft catalog, I was hoping to get back with some of those promising young indie shooters. But after spending more than a few hours steeped in the sci-fi shooter, I started to wonder if I might’ve gotten a bit hasty with my assumptions.

41 Minutes Into The Future

You start off being introduced to Ethan, a workaholic scientist and trained soldier that is attempting to bring his wife back to life. When you first boot up the campaign, you’re hot-dropped into this comic-book style storytelling session that reads like you picked up the 49th issue of a long-running series. The amount of technobabble and exposition left me legitimately curious if there was a game or webcomic I was supposed to play before this, but nope! This is just the fast-paced starting position you’re thrown into, and it does not do anything for the story. None of the plot points seem to sync up, character motivations are heavy-handed and cliched, and I still don’t really know who I’m killing or why during this whole campaign. The characters aren’t in much better shape either, as the game goes too fast trying to set up meaningful relationships. I know very little of the lady teleporting around me constantly during battle or the main character, yet the game expects me to find a fulfilling relationship here? Some more backstory would’ve helped more, but as it stands, there’s little reason to be interested in any of the characters presented.

Next, we can take a look at the gameplay, and boy, is this a tough pill to swallow. 41 Hours plays like a very watered-down version of Crysis. Standard FPS fare like varied guns, hot-swappable attachments for the guns, and special abilities you can get such as cloaking, shields, and having your strange teleporting friend turn into a bomb. Where this normally would seem pretty stock and standard, it’s the fact that little of this matters or works together that makes the experience ring hollow. The abilities are nice when you have them. But if you accidentally expend all your energy, you’ll be waiting a very long time for the recharge to finish. Sure, you can find power-ups around that instantly restore all of your energy, but they were rarely in a convenient place.

The abilities range from confusing to middling at best. The bomb ability was really awkward to use and wasn’t really worth it, the shields kind of helped but cost too much energy, and the cloaking doesn’t help for anything besides strictly stealth. You can’t attack anything silently while cloaked without getting decloaked, and there were no takedowns or any way to stealthily get rid of enemies besides repeatedly sliding into them. Adding to the list of issues, I didn’t really understand how the teleportation ability worked. I guess in the grand scheme of things, I feel like a lot of the combat would drastically increase in quality if the use of abilities weren’t so hindered, and there was more to the combat in general. What I’d like to be able to do is quickly swap between cloaking to plant a bomb, then dip out, or shield myself long enough to make a teleport point in the middle of the camp so I can duck out and ambush them again later. But as it stands, the energy restores way too slowly to matter in any real fight, even after upgrades, and the clunkiness of some of the abilities make it difficult even when I do have energy.

41 Guns

Probably one of the biggest issues here is the enemy AI. I don’t mind skilled enemy AI to create a convincing threat. What I don’t like is when I’m getting pelted with shots from an assault rifle that never misses from almost miles away. The AI will spot you from far away, deal a lot of damage, and relentlessly chase you. It got to the point that even on the default difficulty, if I couldn’t finish off the threat in the first minute or two of the battle, I was essentially dead at that point. The AI needs to be drastically toned down, and so does their damage. They would waste me almost instantly in some scenarios, and no amount of upgrading ever fixed this egregious massacre. This is extra problematic in the several occasions where you’re essentially dropped off in a location and have to fend off waves of enemies, and with there not being much else to do in 41 Hours, you’ll be in for a very rough time if you aren’t enjoying the combat.

There’s a level-up system, but I have no idea why it’s there. You get XP for killing enemies, and it can let you purchase things like health and energy increases, suppressors, and the ability to hold an extra gun. While all of this sounds fantastic on paper, it doesn’t do enough to overcome the problems 41 Hours has with balancing. It contributes very little that picking up normal upgrades on the field doesn’t do. Hide some body armor around or have some side-upgrades around for the lady’s psychic abilities somewhere. Anything would be more engaging than the level-up system that feels tacked on.

One thing I can give to this is the arsenal of weapons, which feature some of my personal favorites like the XM8 and MP7. They’re fairly well-modeled, so it comes out as a plus to me that they’re well-implemented. However, while the visuals are pretty spot-on, the audio leaves much to be desired. The gunfire comes across as tinny and lacking in bass or echo. It’s a very basic sound that I would’ve liked to see refined a bit more. Something else I noticed with the guns that was strange is some of the larger sights (like the ACOG sights) felt like they were foggy or hard to see properly out of, leaving me using mostly reflex sights. The suppressor didn’t help much once I unlocked it, as most stealth in this game will still usually garner the god-like gaze of the gunners and guard robots. Hell, some of the guns are even rendered useless on their own because the muzzle flash is so strong you can’t see anything you’re shooting at. The more tools they gave me, the more I realized that none of it really mattered in the long run. The best you can really do is dodge bullets where you can, hope enough enemies drop med-packs, and abuse your cloaking until you’re out of energy, then wait for ten minutes before repeating the whole thing over again.

Something else that really got to me was how little there was in the way of intrigue on the battlefield. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t often play FPS games for super-fantastical worlds, but I do appreciate something that catches my eye. Here, despite a few of the maps being as sprawling as an ocean, the content feels about as deep as a puddle. Not much to see in the larger maps, and while I occasionally spotted something that was a change of pace, I never felt like I saw anything I hadn’t seen (and seen done better) in other FPS games.

41 Reasons To Steer Clear

While I went into 41 Hours fully expecting a single A experience, I struggled to find 41 minutes of enjoyment out of my review playthrough. I honestly don’t see any quick, feasible ways to fix 41 Hours either, as there isn’t much here that isn’t a mess. Between the game’s unnaturally accurate and overpowered enemies, graphics that would barely be noteworthy on an Xbox 360, and a plot does little to spurn interest, I can’t help but feel this one came out of the oven 41 months too early.

Final Verdict: 1.5/5

Available on: PC (Reviewed), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X; Publisher: eastasiasoft; Developer: Texelworks; Number of players: 1; Released: October 19th, 2022; MSRP: $14.99

Full Disclosure: A copy of 41 Hours was provided to Hey Poor Player by the Publisher