I wrote this so it would stop prompting me
Game is a little rough around the edges in some areas but I ran into nothing gamebreaking. If you have bought an Owlcat game at release before you should know what to expect by now. There are a lot of people reviewing on this website who are frankly hypercritical and embellishing. The quality of the combat and storytelling is great. The combat has more in common with XCOM than either of their previous Pathfinder games. Lots of focus in synergies and a robust perk system that is a little overwhelming at first but they offer a fairly cheap respec option early in the game. The world is very well realized and faithful to the source material. Anyone familiar with 40k is in for a treat. Interested to see how they're going to flesh this out if they put out any dlc.
Basically this. The controls are tight but it's not really in service of anything. Gameplay is uninspired, takes 16 bit era stuff but doesn't really throw anything interesting into it. Enemies feel spongey and typical, leveling up is bland and grindy, and the combat is repetative. Plot is reminicent of .hack, cute twist on the silent protagonist but honestly didn't really give me anything to grip on to. Characters are cutesy with no real depth beyond their upfront charactures. Draws a lot from online/anime culture if that's your bag. Visually it looks like it drew a lot of inspiration from the SNES era top down games without really launching off into anything unique, honestly I got bored of the visuals pretty quickly. Overall, it's not a bad game, but doesn't really do anything to set it apart from the pack.
TLDR: This is a game worth getting if you like quick jolts of hyper violence with twitchy tactial(ish) gameplay in a nice cyberpunky coating. In depth below: The game itself is primarily a twitchy "dual stick" game though quite playable with a mouse/keyboard (which is what I used when playing). You'll need to have a good set of reflexes and a decent enough tactical mind to get through this game. The plot is minimalist without being devoid of flavour, you get enough to understand the overall setting and where your character fits for the most part without getting bogged down. The meat of the game is the combat of which is deceptively simple but begins to open up as you aquire more skills as you progress through the game which give you more tactical options. It operates on a point system, (higher level = more points = more skills) and allows you to redistribute your skills whenever for no cost to you so you can experiment with no reprecussions as you get more skill points. Weapons operate on a pickup/drop system; grab a gun/melee weapon, use up charges, discard, grab new one. You can have a melee and ranged weapon and while you do have basic weapons with unlimited uses you're usually better off grabbing something off a corpse. The actual fighting is varied enough that you'll have to change up your tactics here and there to be effective, circle kiting (as another reviewer put it) is not the "name of the game" here. It rewards an aggressive playstyle though the proper use of abilities (energy shield+dash is a good early starter) or even a more defensive static one if you're skilled properly. The game is super linear from what I've experienced thus far, it has a few "side missions" where you have to find a thing or get a certain number of other things or whatever in a level, but doesn't really have any actual exploration to the game. You're going to jump from room to room to fight dudes. All in all, not the greatest, but I'd say it's worth the pricetag.
