This game is just the worst of AAA gaming - unskippable cutscenes, every 5 minutes; handholding; constantly taking the controls away from you. It takes hours to wade through the unskippable tutorial. And the graphics may have been awe inspiring when it first came out, I dunno, but today it just feels like Midjourney, overdone, scifi meets fantasy tryhard. I stuck with it for 10 hours, and never felt like I was playing the game - its one of the few games that gives me visceral negative feelings when I think of ever playing it again. It seems most other reviews are raving about the story, voice acting etc - well, they should have just made a movie - because this was not a fun game to play.
After playing this a few times, knowing how it ends, how your decisions matter - and what the game world exists for, I find myself constantly coming back to ponder this game. Not just the deep philosophical questions it raises, but because it was just so darned fun to play.
3.5 stars. Shadow Tactics was a bit clunky and simple, but had good characters and decent story. Desperados 3 was fantastic. Shadow Gambit has even better mechanics, but feels generic. In the previous games, you felt like you were solving carefully crafted puzzles. In this game, it feels a bit more like a top down FPS. The story is a confusing mess and the characters ... have no character. The writing is just poor and the voice acting is ... annoying. The story doesn't draw you in from the beginning like in their previous games. It has the feel of a generic heist movie. Most missions can be 95% completed with a single character, whatever their skills may be. Still a good game, just disappointing compared to Desperados3.
At first I couldn't stand this game. It seemed cold, boring and unsatisfyingly difficult. Then I realized, in the old days, you would have got a helpful manual with the game (it was very difficult to play games in the 90's if you didn't first read the manual). So I used the gamepressure guide. It didn't feel like cheating, and I finally started enjoying it. Then I was hooked and couldn't stop playing.
This takes me back to playing Robin Hood and the first Desperados, just an enjoyable GAME. Everything is top notch, graphics, music, voice acting, simple cinematics that are skippable, saving and loading is fast, I can't think of anything wrong.
Play with a walkthrough. Save (very) often. The puzzles are mostly logical and serve the story, but you will still die a lot. I just finished playing. My strategy was to go to a new room, save, play it until I thought I was done, check the walkthrough then save, move on to the next location in the walkthrough. The entire game is timed and if you take too long, you fail right at the end. So follow the walkthrough. The story seemed far fetched when I played this 30 years ago. It was actually scarily prophetic.
on RTX2080ti, RTX looks amazing (DLSS performance at 4K), 30 fps is enough for me. I LOVE real reflections! Storywise, I feel dropped in the deep end, just going through the motions hoping it will make more sense on a replay one day. Acting is good. Story feels genuine even though I don't really understand it yet. Gameplay, its a weird mix of shooter / RPG. Already too much stuff, too many guns, too many upgrades and they don't really seem to matter - I just shoot and win. A lot of looong sections that are essentially cinema, worries me that replay will be tedious. This game suffers from the same problem I hate in other games - it has no relation to real life. You have to learn a new language full of slang, full of nerdy techy terms (I still don't know after playing for 5 hours what 90% of the nouns mean - what IS a netrunner?? What is a corpo really? Still don't really understand what a quickhack is, RAM makes no sense compared to real life) Glitchy. Otherwise, a good game, 4 out of 5 if you don't compare to Witcher and forget about all the hype and delays.
