I'll start by noting that none of my issues with this game are on account of the story, which is good and I imagine would hit quite a bit harder for some people than it did for me. Overall, I liked the story. But pretty muich everything else is either lacking or outright frustrating to deal with. Not to question the devs, but I wonder why this wasn't just a visual novel. I would have lliked it a great deal more if I weren't being constantly pulled away from the story by cumbersome navigation or a truly atrocious node-based flying mechanic(I don't recall what they referred to it as in-game.) Slight spolier, but the mid-point fake credits do a piss-poor job of directing you back to the game. I set it down for a day and started it back up on a whim, because I had seen a review mention a "choice" that mattered and I assumed I had failed to realize the importance of something I had done and was hoping I had a save that could help me figure out where this "choice" was, not even realizing there was any game left to play. If I hadn't been skimming reviews(thankfully nothing significant was spoiled) I thought I was done with this game at around the halfway point. Maybe I just missed something obviously "fake" abot the credits, but I definitelly thought the game was over with a fairly ambiguous ending that seemed out of place and made me wonder why such a big deal was made of this game by some. Overall, it was fine, it's good, it left an impression, but to me it fell well short of it's potential by trying to do too much mechanicaly when It could have just focused on keeping story-centered.
I already wrote a review for this game, but Galaxy keeps prompting me to rate and review it everytime I close.(I previously gave 2 stars, and I still think the 2.0 update flattened the balance of the game into uninteresting trash. Love the setting/most of the characters though)
After nearly three years of making incremental changes, largely for the better, they dumped a wholesale change of the game systems that largely get rid of any of the incremental improvements that had been made.I have spent over 2,000 hours in this game and now it just feels unpleasant to play. There is now way more visual distortion when engaging in a fight with enemies. Not just the needlessly beefed-up netrunners, but the general level of onscreen "visual noise" is ridiculous and unpleasant. Moving pistols to 'Cool' and making the 'Tech' tree so focused on cyberware means I now have save files of V's with no viable build for how I had played them. Having done playthroughs focused on crafting "tech" but light on cyberware is now not really feasible. I can't be the only one who has no interest in vehicular combat, so seeing that they pu a perk for it under every attribute makes me dread what may be about to come in Phantom Liberty. Tying grenades and healing to "charges" that deplete and refresh is nonsense, but I'm already getting angry on the internet and have spent enough time complaining about a video game.
I paid for this back in 2020 pretty much as soon as I could, played a couple hours and found several aspects unpleasant, but figure I'd just wait until the full release came. Now with more than 40 hours in the "finished" game, I am mostly disappointed. From graphical glitches to weird progression bugs, this game feels remarkably unfinished after nearly three years since it was launched publically. Even aside from that, Larian's weird fixation on massive combat encounters, where you end up waiting minutes at a time between actions while waiting for the NPCs to take their turns and then struggle to parse who's friendly and who's hostile in the clutter. Squad management is needlessly cumbersome, the inventory system is a trainwreck, there's not a "puzzle" I've come across yet that wasn't more infuriating than satisfying, and the maps feel incoherent and needlessly difficult to navigate. Visual design is fine, and story is okay so far, but this is well beneath what I was expecting from Larian.
