the game is beautiful and the UI is very impressive and intuitive, I must say, but that's pretty much it. if you're looking for a VN/dating sim or something of the sort, look elsewhere. interactions are scarce, quick and shallow. to be successful in getting attributes in the brain map, you depend on luck to find the reset node. and then learning skills is bland and feels unrewarding. and apparently your parents are not happy when their child is having fun, instead they are happy if you are a study or work machine. what a healthy way to grow up, right?
that is all
ULTIMATELY, what made me drop this is that the characters are B L A N D. It felt like romancing someone on Fable. The villagers are not unique, they share lines with everyone else, so no one felt worth romancing. I liked the date mechanic, but that doesn't save it. I did the final quest of like two characters, and it felt very very shallow. The game is really beautiful, but the characters are kinda ugly. The male MC looks like a horror movie villain, and there's nothing you can do about that. The game is kinda dark and I like that, but I don't wanna leave my family for x years to get new trinkets. I thought it would be another farming game, but farming here is very shallow, the focus is on the folkore of things (crops, for example). Owning a store sounded fun, but it actually felt cumbersome. Combat was fun, and I planned on doing only that, since other things didn't entice me, but it got repetitive really fast
I love this so much. Well, combat is a bit wonky, but I don't care, I have places to jump and Emily to see. The story is so. good. I haven't felt this emotional with a plot twist ever since the Doctor and Rose Tyler got separated into different universes! I just wanted to hug Emily all the time and s c r e a m. I really, really, really wanted Lea to be able to talk, but they did make very good use of this. I loved finding all the jumping secrets. This feels very much like playing an MMORPG with friends, except that it's not boring like all MMORPGs are (and the friends were not real, but o well).
You know when you really really want to play something, but you can't get past how clunky it is? So, yeah.
tl;dr: had tons of fun, but expected more freedom and silly nice things Starting with the good, it looks fucking amazing. Playing as a hacker is really fun, I also like throwing knifes at people's heads. The story is good, the world is full of things, buuut it could be better. First of all, what frustrates me the most is that they say that "in Night City looks are everything", but I haven't noticed that. I'm on my third playthrough and I never experienced my looks interfering with anything in this game. The only things that matter are your background and stats. And they only added the option to change appearance and have outfits 2 years after the release?? Oh, and the colors available for hair and stuff are just... sub-optimal. And why can't I have a hair that glows? Or tattoos that glow? (now I'm just being picky) What I don't like about the story is that it was said that I would have freedom to approach things my way, but actually the main story is very linear. I have to complete all three branches of it to get to the end. Bleh.
I wanted to play this because I liked the "you are not special" idea, but it's just not for me. Starting with the good. It's kinda silly, but I liked dropping my backpack to fight and then grabbing it back from the ground after the fight. I also like how you don't die, you just get captured/imprisoned or something and then have to make your way back to normality. Or maybe you're just miraculously saved, that's nice. Now the bad. The maps feel _very_ big and empty, and you have to walk _a lot_ (which is annoying when you gotta avoid all the enemies you see because you can't fight them). And the rewards for exploring are: (1) finding an enemy you can't defeat and (2) some nice items that you can't carry because your backpack is already full. Okay, yes, "you have to prepare for combat and chose your fights", but it's not fun when you basically have to chose not fighting every enemy you see (a chicken killed me). Simply fighting two minor bandits required me to layout traps and try to overcome how clunky combat feels. And even when I got better gear, some insects were dragging my face on the sands of the desert. Maybe I do want to be special. 🤡 Oh, final note, the characters felt _very_ bland, I didn't feel like caring about any of them. Oh, and female enemies grunted with a male voice.
