Should you give this PC port a chance?
41 Hours is a first-person shooter dramatic game that follows the narrative of Ethan, a workaholic scientist in search of his long-lost wife. The story is intriguing and it takes several surprising turns as it develops over 11 Chapters and 20 hours of gameplay. In his journey, you get to: Use portals for teleportation through the space-time continuum. Experience extra-terrestrial environments. Fight overwhelming waves of robots and alien-manipulated zombies. Solve mind-challenging puzzles.
41 Hours launched on Steam a while back but besides a few negative reviews on Steam’s page, I didn’t find much about it so I was wondering what it might be like on PS5, if it deserved the negativity or if the console version would be such a vast improvement that it might actually be worth a go…
The story is told via comic-book style panels with some quite bad voice-acting, but I was still optimistic. The game gave me control and everything looked okay but then I took a few steps forward and my worst fears were confirmed. The game began screen-tearing, textures and enemies would just pop in and the framerate took a nosedive almost immediately. I still had hope that at least once I got a chance to fire a gun with the DualSense, things would improve somewhat but once again I was left disappointed by the fact that the guns don’t even give a rumble response when firing the trigger.
In fact, the only rumble you get is being hit by enemies. There are other elements to the game’s mechanics besides random enemies spawning and screen-tearing though…you have an AI companion of sorts that you can send over to areas to explode enemies, but timing that is tougher than you would hope, and you want to make sure you stand back, like way back by about a mile or the explosion will end up killing you despite it seeming like it never, ever would even inflict damage. The enemies also are given way too much time to get out of the blast radius, leaving her simply to explode all by herself for the most part.
The AI companion can also pull off wormholes and time manipulation, but its your main character who struggles to even aim at enemies, plus the weapons he uses are about as effective as a water pistol. In fact, his best attack is simply sprinting at the enemy and slide into them for a one-hit kill that seems even more out of place than anything else in the game to this point.
It doesn’t help matters that the game’s visuals aren’t as great as they should be for this generation, they are okay but with the performance issues you’d think you were playing a shooter from the PS2 or Dreamcast era. It’s easily the worst optimised FPS I have experienced on the PS5, but from what I was reading on the Steam page, it doesn’t sound like the PC version was much better either.
The Verdict
41 Hours is perhaps the worst performing FPS I have played in years with terrible screen-tearing, texture popping, random enemy spawning and overall dreadful mechanics. The shooting feels incredibly flat and your AI companion is about as much use as a glass eye. It may have some good ideas with wormholes and time manipulation, but the game is so frustrating to play in general that you’ll be lucky to get past the first area without instantly closing the game in anger and deleting it from your system.