This game often feels like it's mostly cutscene. With more bad dialogue than it needs at that. All to much of it unskippable, and much of the skippable stuff regularly leaving you crouching. That might be for the best because much of the remaining content is grinding a GTA map for minor collectable missions, underwhelming cybernetic implants and a poorly concieved janky RPG advancement system that gives out largely uninteresting incremental numeric bonuses in a really round about way. It's a passable GTA "future" substitute where the focus oddly shifts away from cars and towards a slightly better (but still remarkably shallow and janky) combat system. But only because when it comes to it Rockstar is going to sabotage the next big GTA title in an attempt to make everyone pay endlessly into an online multiplayer "experience" like they did with GTA 5.
This game is shallow containing nothing but the shallow and transparent illusion of strategy and choice. Still it's almost good enough. But almost good enough is THE defining description of almost every aspect of it's gameplay and design. It's like every time an aspect of design was considered the solution was ALWAYS "the barest possibly minimum". The sum of the barest possible minum turns out to be slightly less than it's parts. Then the laughably bad story comes in and kicks the slightly less than minimum standard of the game play in the nads repeatedly. OH MY GOD I do not have the available word count to describe how bad the story is in so very many ways. So lets just try just this little piece of the what the god damn hell... The super robots changed everything by changing nothing about the economy or class structure. They were only available to the super rich. There was definitely still a human underclass that still did all the hard work and had no access to super robots the story stops at one point just to point this out. Then the super robots went away for reasons that really really don't ever end up mattering. Most humans died immediately from poorly defined chaos. But then the rest slowly starved for 20 years because all the humans on thousands of thousands of worlds including the massive working class that did all the hard work FORGOT HOW TO MAKE FOOD. Also it's taken 20 years to not completely starve despite there being no food. But in between 10 to 100 years depending on which part of the story you ask everyone WILL finally finish dieing from forgetting how to food. But at one point you are told if you decided to be bad hated emperor for ONE THOUSAND years then and ONLY then at the end of that humans will be alive AND just MAYBE might have learned how to food again! That is like just one 48th of the crazy bad in the story and lore of this game.
Everything anyone has said about performance issues, over long loading times and fatal crashes is true and then some. I've spent all day failing to get through the opening missions. Litte scripted events randomly cause the game to have a total anurism. Sometimes. Sometimes the same scripted events are fine not even a hint of trouble, other times the game shudders to a frame by frame halt until ultimately freezing unrecoverably. And why? Just because the map scrolled a bit to look at nothing much happening. Then it's back to an extended load to load an opening made of what should be system resource cheap "animation" then too long to a menu, then too long to load your campaign/map then oops, straight back into a minor scripted event that scrolls the map slightly, cross your fingers, this is ambitious stuff! Yeah. I want to like this, I can't even say the game has even given me a chance to figure out if I do. Oh and the "tutorial"/opening missions teach you basically nothing whatsoever. Except for map scrolling. That's big deal stuff clearly. And character/campaign creation appears to have at least one step with only one option and another step where the choice is either meaningless or does completley secret things. I would discus more but again thats about all a day with this thing has managed to produce.
Everything anyone has said about performance issues, over long loading times and fatal crashes is true and then some. I've spent all day failing to get through the opening missions. Litte scripted events randomly cause the game to have a total anurism. Sometimes. Sometimes the same scripted events are fine not even a hint of trouble, other times the game shudders to a frame by frame halt until ultimately freezing unrecoverably. And why? Just because the map scrolled a bit to look at nothing much happening. Then it's back to an extended load to load an opening made of what should be system resource cheap "animation" then too long to a menu, then too long to load your campaign/map then oops, straight back into a minor scripted event that scrolls the map slightly, cross your fingers, this is ambitious stuff! Yeah. I want to like this, I can't even say the game has even given me a chance to figure out if I do. Oh and the "tutorial"/opening missions teach you basically nothing whatsoever. Except for map scrolling. That's big deal stuff clearly. And character/campaign creation appears to have at least one step with only one option and another step where the choice is either meaningless or does completley secret things. I would discus more but again thats about all a day with this thing has managed to produce.
