The Occupation Reviews
The Occupation is an investigation game that tries to make every second count but is ultimately a missed opportunity.
The Occupation is an investigation game that tries to make every second count but is ultimately a missed opportunity.
An occasionally brilliant immersive sim blighted by bugs and a restrictive save system.
A tense, imaginative thriller that buckles under the weight of its own ambition.
If you're willing to push past a large number of technical issues and poor stealth gameplay, there's a fantastic story buried deep in The Occupation's heart
The Occupation is a smart, story-driven stealth adventure, the sort of game that gets under your skin in ways you didn't even realize.
Playing The Occupation is like puzzling over a dense little knot of tangled priorities, information, and pressures. It’s tense to play through, and even more fun to go back and try the process again, armed with information from previous runs.
The best bit of The Occupation is creeping around and scrabbling through paperwork, and that bit is bloody brilliant.
The Occupation is an inventive political thriller that does something new, but is let down by poor AI and some frustrating bugs.
The Occupation is a game of intriguing ideas and sublime atmosphere; the tension of its real-time thrills gives way to a romance with journalistic sleuthing.
The Occupation has a politically charged story with a moral quandary you may not be able to answer due to the game's forced stealth.
A staggeringly ambitious, gun-free immersive reality detective game set in an alternate 1980s Britain, whose admirable intentions are undermined by technical problems.
The Occupation has a premise that is really intriguing in theory. Trying to spy on a powerful entity and taking them to task with your questioning is the kind of experience that can be great in the game, and taking inspiration from current affairs makes it feel much more authentic. It's a shame that various bugs, even when updated to the most recent build, can make the experience feel lacklustre, and at times a frustration to play.
Despite that, if you enjoy uncovering the truth of a mysterious story, and don't mind replaying a game to uncover the full story, you'll want to pick up a copy of The Occupation when it launches on March 5th for PlayStation 4, PC, and Xbox One.
The Occupation brilliantly blends elaborate levels, breadcrumb-chasing, gotcha journalism, and a politically-charged drama to become one of 2019's most interesting games.
The Occupation is uneven experiment to create a nonlinear political thriller with unpleasant restrictions and not always clear motives of the main characters. Bugs, terrible interface, problems with choices in the second half of the game and annoying stealth mechanics cause disappointment.
Review in Russian |
The Occupation is an intriguing video game with some cool gameplay mechanics, but it's flawed by many issues.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The Occupation is a serious and well crafted first-person thriller dripping with nuance and subtleties.
A superb, smart and taut detective thriller lay beneath the stack of technical and design issues that The Occupation has, it's just a shame that, in its current form at least, those shortcomings are at the forefront of the experience.
The Occupation is bold, ambitious, and a bit of a mess. Its bugs and occasionally obtuse storytelling severely detract from the overall experience, and yet it will live longer in the memory than the average game. There's something fascinating here: a real-time thriller that puts genuine political power in the palm of your hands. But it's strangled by its own ambition, and that's as inevitable as it is unfortunate.