Cryostasis

Its uncanny resemblance with BioShock and the fact that its first gameplay teaser featured what looked vaguely like plasmids accompanied by vintage weaponry, tainted my first impression of Cryostasis, making it seem like a BioShock clone. When I played the game though, to my relief, I was proven wrong. Think of Cryostasis as a mix between the combat from Condemned, and the eerie atmosphere from BioShock.

Cryostasis takes place in 1981, when a nuclear icebreaker named the North Wind gets shipwrecked near the North Pole. You play the role of Alexander Nesterov, a Russian meteorologist who's hell bent on figuring out what went wrong aboard the North Wind. Throughout his investigative journey, he comes across the ship's dead crew who metamorphosed into weird creatures that don't seem to like company too much.

For most of the first quarter of the game your main focus is on melee combat, which boils down to pressing the left button to attack and the right button to block. You can hold down different directional buttons while attacking for different punches, and you can hold down two directional buttons to start up a multiple hit combo. The fist fights are really good in the game, but the melee combat gets boring once melee weapons such as the axe or the broken valve come in. The reason behind this is that the melee weapons have no cool combos, and no matter what direction you hold while attacking, they attack the same way.