The Complex Reviews
The Complex is a failure of an FMV game, with meaningless choices and boring characters that would make you wish for your time back.
The Complex attempts to fuse Bandersnatch and Until Dawn and fails abysmally. Meaningless decision-making about characters that are impossible to care about makes what could have been a boring movie actively bad.
The Complex fails at being an engaging interactive experience, video game and story.
With a shadowy totalitarian state pulling the strings (thinly disguising North Korea) and a bio-terrorist threat in a major European city, The Complex could have much to say about politics, ethics, and other meaningful subjects. Instead, the game meanders in mediocrity to its meaningless climax, leaving with you little motivation to replay the game to explore alternative decisions.
The Complex is a decent story that feels bigger than it could be. While some choices feel very weighty, they are few and far between, leaving a lot of inconsequential decisions in between. Honestly, it may have worked if the experience was a bit shorter - sure, a common complaint has been it is too short, but maybe it would actually benefit from being trimmed a bit. As it stands, it feels like whatever ending you got the first time through, everything else is just "what if" scenarios that don't really matter.
A lot of visual polish is not enough to cover for a product where the minimum of effort has been placed in every other component. There are far better interactive movies more deserving of your time and money. Even Night Trap was more interesting.
There's a place for FMV games like The Complex, but this effort is both poorly written and performed. You'll tire of the cast long before you reach the release's credits, and while the title does include various branches in its story, it generally feels like you're on autopilot for the most part. If you're desperate for a live action experience, the PS4 already has much better alternatives to this.
It's your job to help two doctors – who are also ex-lovers – save an infected woman in this zeitgeist-y drama with eight possible endings
The Complex is an interesting experiment that sometimes yields the fruits of its labor. More often, though, it reveals precisely why developers stopped using live-action video as a means to tell an interactive story. With a minuscule budget and equally small ambitions for its narrative and characters, The Complex just doesn’t replace the gaping whole that TellTale left behind.
Lacks anything that really makes it glitter and at the same time isn’t awful enough to have a certain level of camp to it either.
Thanks to some poor performances and a serious lack of meaningful player choice, it's not a complex decision whether you should check this one out or not.
The Complex is desperately lacking the narrative meat necessary to support its promising presentation, so only the most ardent FMV game fans need apply.
The Complex is neither a game bor a movie. It's actually a movie that you can change its course by your actions. The gameplay is very simple and there isn't really much going on, and if you are a fan of the genre you'll probably enjoy it.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Performances are mostly solid aside from the main protagonist, but the lacklustre script with a severe lack of character development aside from large amounts of exposition make it difficult to really care about any of them. Some of the endings are quite abrupt, leaving an unsatisfying finish. I find it unlikely that The Complex will win fans over to the genre, but those who do have a dedication may find something to enjoy.
While you can't fault the visuals and the effort put in to try and mask the evident budget limitations, that cutting of corners vibe is sadly something that plays into The Complex one too few many times.
There is fun to be had here, especially in some of the more ridiculous endings, but even those are examples of tonal whiplash in a title that plays it straight for the most part. More film than game, The Complex doesn't gain enough from the premise of being interactive - instead, it ends up as a strangely paced movie with a lack of focus and not enough tension to draw players in.
An interactive movie that tries to tell a relevant tale of near-future Britain but is marred by characters that lack credibility and a story free from dramatic tension.
A polished but disappointingly by-the-numbers FMV adventure that won't linger in your mind for long.
The Complex is a run-of-the-mill live action adventure game, in a genre that can't really afford to phone it in. The decent price tag makes it at least a bit endearing for the curious, but fans will find The Complex to be an underwhelming movie and a forgettable game.
The Complex is an interactive movie with a fairly interesting plot, a rather good performance from its cast and a decent amount of player involvement that goes beyond simple plot choices. While the genre may not be the most engaging when it comes to gameplay experiences, The Complex could have used some additional help with a flowchart for the plot choices and improving on some cliché elements. Overall, fans of interactive movies with sci-fi plots will have something to look forward here.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review