Not much to say. A few framerate issues, lack of mission timers is actually a negative, everything else is ace combat style insanity and it works just as great here as it does there.
Think they can just stealth-bring-back the nazi cofounder after 6 months and try to bury the negative reaction under announcements and collaberations do that? Fuck that and fuck them.
There's actually a fair amount that's good about this game, despite it being popular to hate. (It's not much of an RPG though. Less Fallout NV and more Mass Effect 3 in terms of narrative descisions and their depth.) The main story and the major companion questlines are quite good. The game looks *incredible,* especially at middle to long distances...if you have a quite powerful PC. The combat is ok to good depending on what you're doing, and some of the weapons and abilites feel incredibly good to use. The soundtrack is good. The level design is good. But, the game is like, half a game. The gameplay loop outside of those main story and main companion quests is MMO tier kill loot repeat loop. No narrative interactivity at all, and all the missions (with rare exceptions) basically boil down to 'kill everyone' or 'kill everyone and get the thing.' The clothes are much more limited than you might hope and unless you level heavy into crafting you're basically stuck in a clownsuit. So much for 'choose your style.' The generic NPCs don't react properly to anything. The bugs. Cops spawn litterally 3 inches from you if you accidentally shoot a civillian and then 2 shot you before you're even fully aware that they're there. No visual customization. TL:DR If you can't shoot it, and it isn't a quest objective, you can't interact with it at all. In most games that's not really a big deal, but for a game that presents itself as an immersive sim, to the point of doing all the cutscenes in 1st person so you feel more immersed, it is kinda a problem that 95% of the vending machines are fake, especially in an era where RDR2 exists.) Obviously the promised character customization didn't make an appearance. There's a good game in here somewhere. It's just buried under generic open world design and broken promises. I have hopes that it can live up to it's potential at some point. But I'm rating the game as it is, not as it might be. It's no Sonic Boom...but it's no VTM:B either.
The art is good, the characters are likable (even when they're objectively terrible people, which is usually,) and it's consistently funny. I usually avoid comedy stuff because most of it is stupid and/or offensive, but at least once in most games I spend 2+ minutes in a fit of laughter. Not every joke lands (obviously) but many of them do, and none of them miss hard enough to be simple shock humor or edgy nonsense. Also no punching down. The characters do outragous, often immoral things that justify the trigger warnings the game provides, but the jokes are never at the expense of the victims of such things or of maginalized communities. That's pretty much it. It's a comedy dating sim with funny jokes, good art and likable characters, litterally the 3 things that such a game has to have.
Even without branching narratives and an exceptionally linear story, the sheer number of ways you have to solve most quests and the impressivly varied dialoge options, the experience of being able to express your character as they're thrust into this world and being forced to think and act with your characters skillset is second to none. With the community patch that fixes most of the bugs coming pre-installed, there's really only 2 caveats. The combat is terrible. (Even if you pick a combat heavy route there's actually not very much of it so this isn't as big an issue as it sounds like it is.) Kinda...low key racist. Every protagonist option is white, in Los Angeles of all places one of the least white places in the country. (you can fix this with mods.) Perhaps more glaringly, several of the asian characters in the final area are *extremely* blatant stereotypes, and unfortunately not always on a meta 'make fun of the people who actually believe this' way. If you can look past those issues (and I can't say I blame you if you can't) it's a must-have for any RPG fan.
Not because it's bad. It's *amazing.* It's the best game Ubisoft has ever and likely will ever release. Sorta 'Zelda but you'e a photo journalist and you aren't looking for items in the dungeons, but evidence' kinda thing. Why not buy it then? Because Ubisoft management are a bunch of rapists and rapist enablers who bury abuse allegations and repeatedly promote the offenders to higher positions.
This is the best 3rd person action-RPG combat gets, still. There are caveats though. 1: The story is barely there, and kinda bad honestly (if totally insane) until the Bitter Black Isle, where the story is much better and delivered much better. 2: The leveling system is convoluted, in a bad way. It's a good idea on paper, but in practice the optimal way to play a Magic Archer is essentially 3 full playthroughs (or a fair amount of dedicated grinding) as a Sorcerer. Less than ideal. 3: Pawns (your NPC companions) are really quite stupid unless their player has specifically gone out of the way to teach them not to be stupid, which is quite rare (and somewhat involved) 4: Items are *broken.* You can pause and use them at any time with no use delays or rate limit or anything, so it's quite easy to become outright impervious to anything that doesn't kill you in a single hit. However, having said all of that? None of it matters. All of those problems except for the story are problems with workarounds in game (and mods make getting around the leveling problem even easier,) and the story being bad is mostly irrelivant because it mostly doesn't get in the way. The combat and class systems are just *so good* as to completely override all those complaints.
It's basically a precision platformer with all the precision stripped out and replaced with jokes. A huge improvement on the standard precision platformer genre if you ask me. My only complaint is it can get a *bit* fanservicy. It only happens like, twice, you'll know it when you see it. Even by my (rather strict) standards on that sort of thing, it's both mild and short lived. The music is great, it's pretty, and overall just a light fun adventure. Even if you aren't normally into platformers like me, give this one a shot.
Homophibic jackwagons make visually pretty but otherwise mediocre retro shooter. Just skip it and play Doom. or DOOM.
