This is a frustrating game. It's frustrating because it's on the damn steps of being a masterpiece. The good: - This game has a jaw-dropping open world game, Night City is wonderful and incredibly designed, I've never seen a game with such verticality, this feels like a real place in a sense I had never experienced before. - (Main) Characters are super interesting and behave like real people. Not only this has amazing voice acting, but character animations are a work of art. Each character is filled with small details that make them seem real; a character talking about something painful? they may be shaking their leg for a few seconds while showing a very realistic face expression. It's mesmerizing how GREAT these animations are. - Main storylines are absolutely a blast. They're super engaging and really, really well written. - Gunplay is very fun, guns feel great, melee combat is better than most games. - Interesting skills/perks/level up system. The bad: - Game is undercooked and absolutely PLAGUED with graphical glitches. Enemies may be swallowed by the floor, cars may flip in the air. - Texture streaming probably seems like a great idea but works awfully here, you will see characters being spawned in parts sometimes, or appearing as PS1 models for a few seconds until the high-res textures finally load. - Character pop in is the worst I've seen, NPCs spawn before your very eyes all the freaking time, it's very immersion breaking. - Vehicle pop in is even worse! And it doesn't work sometimes, the worst immersion breaking bug I have seen is riding in Night City and all the damn streets are absolutely empty unless I stop for like 20 seconds and let the game load some cars. - Very little variety in NPCs means you'll see crowds containing 4 or 5 instances of the same model, all one next to the other, terrible. - Terrible NPC AI, even worse pedestrian dialogs, breaks immersion. A lot of good, a sizeable amount of bad. Overall I still strongly recommend this game.
Does not work on my PC, it crashes always after like 30 seconds of running, I've been looking online and this is a years-old bug that affects many users. https://www.reddit.com/r/tropico/comments/evu3d1/tropico_5_crash_on_start/ https://www.gog.com/forum/tropico_series/warning_tropico_5_crash_on_startup Seems to be related to the game's audio. Sucks this game disabling bug still hasn't fixed, so avoid this game.
Up until now my favorite metroidvania was, unsurprisingly, Super Metroid. Hollow Knight has taken that place with incredible ease. It has superb, buttery smooth gameplay; dying is never the fault of a cheap game mechanic, control is always in your hands and the combat is very rewarding. The plot is amazing, but it's also completely (and I do mean completely) out of the way if you don't care about it, it's lying there for interested adventurers to uncover and delve into, it will never get in the way of your fun and will never be thrust on you. The animations and art style are memorable and masterful. Music is incredibly atmospheric. This game is nothing short of perfect.
This is a fantastic game. It starts slow, I had a hard time getting into it for the first 5 hours, which is a bummer, but it grew on me big time. The main issue I had at the begginning is the staggering amount of backstory that is thrown at you, it's just too much, but it's done in a truly masterful way, the characters don't flat out tell you everything, things that are implied your character knows (like past events in the world) are explained in tooltips during dialogs, which you're free to ignore if you want, but a great source of contextual lore for those willing to delve deeper into this world. I did not enjoy Pillars of Eternity, I thought I might have lost the taste for isometric RPGs like Baldur's Gate, but this game made me relive my love for the style. The combat is far simpler than Pillars, closer to Baldur's Gate, and so much fun, the magic system is very intriguing and very original (you get to, more or less, design your own spells). The characters are very interesting and have so much depth in their motivations, dialogs are really well done, lore is presented in an interesting fashion, world building is really nice. I'm some 25 hours into the game and I'm just in Act II, I don't understand what have people been playing when they claim this game is short, might not be Skyrim, but this so far is a very enjoyable experience.
The graphics are terrible, it's not even old school, the original Baldur's Gate is HD graphics by comparison; it's not just that they are bland, they make navigating unnecessarily uncomfortable. The UI is a mess, it's difficult to understand what buttons do, and good luck understanding the spells in an adequate manner, it's not about hand holding, it's about making the game easy and pleasant to use. The combat is, for some reason, ridiculously tough, the first enemies, which as usually foxes or some nonsense, can easily kill you, while in a party mind you. The premise is super interesting, but unfortunately the game is a chore to play; I don't get how a game made nowadays, with so many terrific RPG to learn from (such as Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Divinity, Planescape), has such abysmal design choices. In 3 hours I couldn't find another reason to continue playing, the game made little effort to provide even basic entertainment. And even if someone tells me "the game gets better later", which I doubt, games should not require me to force myself to play them to get to the actual fun.
This game is a masterpiece, even the trailers are f*cking art. The plot is incredibly respectful of the books' lore, and is easily one of the best I've played in any RPG. The graphics are awesome, the voice acting is superb, the story is extremely engaging, the combat is fluid and very fun. Finally a game with potion mechanics that make potions actually fun to use! The world is breathtaking and unbelievably detailed. This game puts other games with bigger budgets to shame. 15/10.
