41 Hours Review

41 Hours tells the story of Ethan a workaholic scientist and capable field combatant in search of his long-lost wife. Accompanied by a mysterious woman, named Lea, with super-human powers, Ethan will be able to get an edge on the battlefield thanks to special and unique abilities while using conventional armaments.

41 Hours is a cinematic first-person action game where players will be able to do typical FPS things; pick up weapons, ammo, and health packs, run, crouch and slide. Unlike most FPS, Ethan doesn’t have a normal CQC melee attack, instead, if you want to take out enemies “silently”, you need to run and slide into the enemy. It works fine against human enemies, but not so much against robotic threats.

As an added twist to differentiate itself from the typical shooters, thanks to the mysterious woman, our protagonist can also use special abilities like cloaking, creating wormholes to cross pre-determined unbreakable barriers, or having the woman create an explosive clone for example. It adds a layer of strategy to the game as opposed to running guns blazing. It feels refreshing.

Although don’t expect to abuse your special abilities and cloak your way through the game. There’s a cooldown period before you can re-use your special skills or Lea’s. Interestingly enough, as you complete objectives and kill enemies, you earn XP that can be used to upgrade in the pause menu; you’ll be able to upgrade your health, special abilities meter, number of weapons, etc… . If you’re not satisfied with your build, you can reset at any time.

While this all sounds interesting, there are a few annoying quirks. The lack of normal up-close melee attack is quite honestly baffling; sliding isn’t the cleanest way to take out enemies stealthily. While the game does help you by displaying a diamond-like icon to indicate an objective, for whatever reason, sometimes it will disappear temporarily from the map leaving you puzzled for some time before it returns and you can continue on. Also, the telekinesis power is the most frustrating and clunky skill to use. It’s baffling they couldn’t make it easier to use with so many buttons on controllers. It has caused multiple unexplained deaths when trying to move barrels.

The game’s story is told through colorful comic book-like storyboards where characters will interact and progress the story. It looks great, but it lacks the punch and immersive factor of viewing moving cutscenes. The levels are pretty generic so nothing special here. The voiceover work during comic book sequences feels robotic and phoned in. Otherwise, the rest of the audio is fine; typical enemy and mechanical noises with a generic score.

41 Hours is definitely a unique game that needs to be experienced. It’s a fun, challenging, action-packed story-driven first-person shooter with a unique gameplay mechanic. Sure, 41 Hours isn’t perfect, but the little quirks won’t drag the experience down. We need more innovation akin to 41 Hours in the FPS genre. I mean Call of Duty games are fun, but nothing changes from year to year, while 41 Hours manages to give the FPS genre a nudge in the arm in terms of gameplay variety. For fans of action games or FPS, 41 Hours is a must-play.