The Council is definitely one of the most interesting adventure games in recent years so I sure recommend it to everyone. Fresh setting, plot, and characters. Also, it has options for different outcomes and endings. Sometimes it's even very surprising what happens when you do things differently or explore and pick up stuff that's seemingly irrelevant. The game has mild RPG elements that provide for some variety in dealing with the dialogues, puzzles, and investigation. It might be a bit weirdly optimized though and sometimes unclear how to approach some situations in the game. The edibles management might be a bit confusing too. The game autosaves all the time and you only get to select one savefile for each playthrough, so that might be annoying to some people, but the game doesn't game over you if you fail, you just might see something different or something that might put you in a tougher position in your story. But still a worthwhile game. The story and various outcomes of it make up for any shortcomings and annoyances the game might have.
Ok, what needs to be addressed first is that there is no progress preventing bug in the first chapter. The game is just very particular about what you need to do to progress in the main quest, so if the boulder is still there and the passage is still blocked, it's because you haven't talked to someone, haven't visited the passage below the village church, or haven't had the enemy letters translated. And so it is with every main quest in this game. If nothing's happening, you haven't done something or talked to someone. That said, this game is like a crossover between diablo and baldur's gate. If diablo was way harder and baldur's gate had no pause button so you could actually order your guys or target a guy that's sprinting at you. (yeah, don't expect to run away from enemies). The story is pretty standard (castle attacked by evil dudes whose only vocation in life is evil) but has interesting bits and at least one or two actually deeper or more clever story bits. Or at least more clever compared to the usual fantasy rpg stuff. And there's a ton of text in the game, it doesn't market itself as "interactive book" for no reason. The downside is that the game is confusing as heck and very cryptic. It's like they tell you "go talk to this guy" and you have to figure out where that guy is on your own on several large-ish maps of the castle area. The worst one was "there's a corpse somewhere between here and the stronghold and you need to find it" in an area of 16 maps. Pretty frustrating. Also, the combat is weird. Your companions are dumb and frail. You can't pause the game so don't bother giving them orders in the middle of the very hectic combat. But the plus side is that stealth can help you a lot and magic is strong too. The game is not exactly clear about its own stats though. So basically if you don't shy away from a walkthrough when you're stuck and if you read up on what stats do then you can have a reasonably enjoyable experience :D
Yes, as of January 31 the game still has minor bugs and glitches. Minor as in not affecting the gameplay or not preventing player's progress. An NPC doing something funny or a mesh/texture loading slowly is not a "gamebreaking bug". And the game's performance is not optimized to the best yet. That said the game is very true to the source material of Cyberpunk pen&paper and also very true to the general idea of cyberpunk as a specific genre. The main story and sidestories are often bleak and dealing with mature and serious themes, and IMHO dealing with them very good. It's cyberpunk, you're a nobody trying to save yourself, not a hero trying to save the world. Great writing and tons of detail both in the stories and the characters and the world itself (it's worth it to go looking around the city and surrounding areas for secrets). With it comes the audiovisual production value which absolutely stunning. On High settings the game looks very nice and Ultra settings it looks beautiful. I was running the game on 16GB of RAM, i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz, and Geforce 1060. High was recommended settings and ran smooth, switching to Ultra was a massive improvement in visual quality with only slower framerate in heated combat and high speed driving through the most crowded city center. The graphic design of the city and the characters in it is incredibly detailed and creative, it's fun to sometimes go through the city to look for funky looking NPCs of which the game has plenty. Similarly it's fun to explore the streets themselves for interesting views. + You can have a ton of fun with the game's photomode while exploring. The music in the game is often very fitting and gives the game the right kick, although it's true that the combat music can get pretty stale after some time. The licensed music though is filled with a ton of great music made specifically for this game. The game has music for everyone, from blackmetal to jazz. That is something worthwhile in itself. top game
First thing. When you appear in the game and don't know what to do, press enter and navigate the menu with pgup/down. It's not in the controls options and the manual apparently is not here. This game is only for die hard scifi flying/shooting fans. Why? Because it doesn't really offer much. There is some nearly non-existent story in the game of you being an undercover cop on prison planets or some such. That's the reason for you doing repetitive missions in a flying/shooting car. There is very little variety to the missions and the point of the missions is only to get you money to replenish shields (which you lose quickly in this game) and there are no repeatable ones so do yourself a favour and choose some easy difficulty if you don't want to end up dead ended by having no money, low shields, and only one tough mission to select. Same goes for ammo actually, and good luck depending only on the infinite ammo lasers. The reason why you lose shields quickly is how weird the combat in this game is. You can't really dodge anything other than slow rockets and you're usually fighting swarms of enemies that make these weird moves that make you spin around like a record baby right round round round everytime you try to target them. The music, while being sort of good sometimes, is unreasonably "intense" like all the time. But the main reason I'm mentioning it is that, at least for me, lowering the volume of the music didn't exactly do anything so it was constantly blasting this weird intense combat music that was driving me nuts :D. Overall, I was quite disappointed with the game, but I did manage to finish it. With money cheats because I did ran out of money on medium difficulty. I cheated the game and myself, as the saying goes, but the game also cheated me with a bizarre outro that was straight out of a different game lol :D
I played through the whole game (the story thing at least) and it was ok, I guess? The shooting bits are really annoying and I can't imagine playing this with a controller since the auto-lock aims sort of weird and it's overall frustrating. The story is ok, but it gets really funky by the end for some reason. I mean it's more or less reasonable throughout the game but then suddenly it goes michael bay way :D. Also, I don't know if the developers were making some sort of a statement with this, but the 70s soundtrack has classics in it, while the 2006 soundtrack has sucky mediocre music that wasn't a thing even in the 2000s. They could have picked something actually good for the soundtrack. Anyway, the game's not terrible but it's not exactly great either. Aside from the 70s soundtrack, that has some great bits in it :D That makes up for the only ok-ish driving model, sucky shooting bits, and the completely unnecessary "sidejobs" and no actual point in just driving around unless you're somehow a hardcore fan of this particular game or you're a driving junkie and this is the only driving game you have because the driving is not that much fun and there's nothing interesting around the town and the sidejob challenges are not needed for anything nor are they entertaining.
