Own it on Steam, gonna buy it here as well to support these guys, what a spectacular game. I'd give it five out of five but for some of the little irksome things that don't make sense or feel like where they just cut corners, you 'll know em when you encounter them. While that doesn't warrant an entire star of frustrations, the other 'half-star' is taken off just for inconsistency in tone. It's like the writers didn't really spend much time working together, especially not with the dialogue writers, and that combined with no real direction coming down the pipeline to the voice actors, it's just kinda a mess. What should be some of the best, most terrifying deeply unsettling or just really epic stuff, gets lost when it can't decide on themes and you're taken from a deeply upsetting scene and horrible conditions of the middle ages, and everyone is just whacky and zaney. A heavy and more serious toned game needs some levity of course, just not all of the colors used in the painting thrown together at the same time, ya know? Just makes it muddy... And the enemy AI is still just terrible, as are the dialogue choices, or complete lack thereof most times. But...I absolutely cannot wait to see more from these devs, this is an outsatanding and well done AA, looks great, plays great, balanced and difficult and you really feel those hard won points each level. All around very well done, not without its flaws, highly recommen, cannot stop playing it, just like when Skyrium dropped 13 years ago.
Couple failures to launch in both a technical standpoint (while it was still early access, so, issues were rectified) and a couple of times failed to grab me after a good amount of gameplay. I did however return to it after 1.0 and some patches and such, and I modded a few cosmetic things to make armor and clothse look the way I liked, but otherwise I couldn't sing morepraise for this game. Some seriously unfinished writing areas-House of Hope End/Choices/battle was a cheesefest in only one good way, and a few others that don't stand out but felt like there was something intended to continue, or follow through or a way to proceed or solve that fizzled into burnt ends. All in all, I am going to immediately replay through this and do a wildl different character. Let's get some VO work for our protag and I'd barely murmer a complaint. Romancing a Gith is everything you need it to be...
Let me start by saying that this should have been pushed back again until complete and polished bright and shiny, and CDPR screwed themselves by buying millions of dollars of adds and Keanu Reeves and just demanding it come out in 2020. So, in six months or so we might see the completed version of this game. As a fan of and player of the original tabletop RPG and a scifi junkie to the furthest extent and beyond, being immersed in this title is what I have been looking for in a game since time immemorial. That immersion is frequently broken, unfortunately, every few minutes by technical issues that, by comparison to console issues seem like nothing at all to be irritated with. But I still paid $60 for this and hoped it would be as smooth as Witcher 3 but knew in my heart it was still going to feel rushed. So that immersion breaking bug slapping me just as I begin to *get* immersed again becomes a glaring and nagging voice in my mind that I should NOT have pre-ordered this or at least waited for half a year or more until they've resolves many of these problems and by then it will have already gone on sale. Now I mean to say I am happy to have purchased this on GoG and that 100% of my money went to CDPR and that will hopefully reflect their continued diligence in finishing a job they started 8 years ago. PROs: It looks great for the most part apart from some messy DLSS moments and some horrible framerate drops and stutters if DLSS is off (and I run a powerful rig that handles Control on maxed out settings and RT on). The art direction and whole feel of Night City is just how I pictured a dystopian corporate crime ridden $#!7hole The music... oh man the score and licensed songs on the radio (particularly Vexelstrom's dark synth industrial foot stomping anthems) put me there one huyndred percent. Bombing around Kabuki on a rainy night blasting darkwave fist pumping jams is where my heart SWOONS... MORE in a second post as this has a character limit
As a neurotic obsessive of Andrei Tarkovsky's films, particularly the one this trilogy of FPS games was built in homage to, I have spent reticent years combing through endless reviews and 'tubing' the mod sites to only meet my own skepticism from it's immediate dissonance from the film. When I finally allowed myself to just shut up and enjoy something without too much expectation, I was completely enraptured. Taken as it's own piece of interactive art, 'S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl' goes to great lengths to note some of the most subtle aesthetic and subtextual emotional moments Tarkovsky conjured in us almost fourty years ago. It departs entirely from his cinematic masterpiece by becoming an action-oriented story equally drowned in atmosphere. It belies even that by forcing you into a miasmatic and baffling gauntlet of increasing urgency, so briefly relieved by respite. The scripting for the enemy AI is some of the very best I have ever, EVER experienced in my 37 years of gaming to this very day. The graphics and sound for their time and place are equally immersive, pushing the perceivable into the inconceivable. Despite countless bugs and fan-made attempts to bandage those issues, they become entirely forgivable by a haunting and strange ambience rivaled only by the early groundbreaking best like 'Half Life', 'Thief' or other Eastern titles like the 'Witcher' series. Truly loud and terrifying gun play raises the pulse and becomes some of the most rewarding gameplay after it's harrowing, resource exhausting decison making and real-feeling ballistic physics that become reminiscent of other shining celluloid diamonds such as 'Heat', or 'Black Hawk Down'. I broke a nervous sweat more than a few times. While much of the voice acting (English in my playthrough) falls short of the benchmark most of the game sets, it is more than adequate to propel a virtually story-free plot that yet remains engaging. Another echo of the primarily philosphical film. The perfectly reproduced sections of Pripyat itself are breathtaking and yet too frantic to be truly absorbed. Upon Googling images of the ghost city I found near exact replicas of the Eastern block tenemants that were built almost as quickly as they were abandoned. The rust-frozen ferris wheel that was to open the very week of the worst nuclear disaster in history, never once enjoyed by anyone; an iconic symbol of the socio-political decay that has beleaguered Ukranian and Russian people since utilitarian time immemorial. A truly suffering civilization haunted by corrupt and irresponsible leadership and hasty, cavalier decisions. All this while binding you to resource management and conservation of expensive and rarely afforded supplies like food, medical aid, radiation meds, a sleeping bag... Burdensome but welcoming desperate survival on the brink of human disintegration. The psuedo open-world requires points of travel with brief loading times that don't become noticable as you are distracted with increasingly intelligent and difficult enemies. They almost all carry different weapon types, so scavenging their ammo and swapping your hard won weapons with less functional ones will leave you angry but determined, another veritable description of Eastern European culture. I cannot truly praise this game enough. The countless flaws aside, it soars as one of the most satisfying and memorable gaming experiences of my life. Four stars only due to the issues that were never dealt with despite a long time 'baking'. A little polish could very well have made this a perfect game.
The first Black Mirror game appeared to be a stretch in the right direction for a genre (investigation/horror/adventure/p&c) that was suffering from a polarizing series of either relentless shoot em up/rez evil horror, to things like the Alone in the Dark series which had it's ultimate but very frustrating end five years after the OG Black Mirror debuted. It felt like the early AitD series in it's long periods of running around clueless and trying to piece together your next step with some really horrendous controls, but overall satisfying because the storytelling is well paced and, albeit derivative, pretty compelling. This 'Black Mirror' re-imagine's the original story, adds some volumetric lighting, some superb voice acting, and all of the nightmare that comes along with trying to control your character or the camera. Being unable to click on something whilst standing in front of it, instead having to step away and adjust your camera for at least half of a minute before the game recognizes you're trying to play it, pulls you IMMEDIATELY out of the potential set and story arch. The story arch, from the start, is incomprehensible. Not in the way you want a proper mystery thriller to engage you, but in a way that literally makes absolutely no sense and is kind of a dumpster fire. Running from _nothing_ with no time frame to get anywhere. Randomly encountering ghosts who have nothing to offer but abrupt and very brief cinematic moments, the staff of the house doing little things that absolutely no one earth despite the time period would allow to happen to them without interfering or demanding something else... All of these and plenty more are factors that take you out of the attempted immersion into the old school horror/adventure we used to know and love. The inability to maneuver your character where you want him to go, and in my experience becoming 'caught' on things like stairs or even walking across the floor and being completely stuck seems like lazy post production. The aiming at objects to interact, collision detection, abysmal camera and the fact that you can't walk through clearly open doors or spaces merely because the railroad plot won't allow you to go there yet, becomes another infuriating factor. Give me a castle, and a mystery, let me walk about and check it out and properly die a bunch making bad decisions. But this is not Amnesia, or even the original Black Mirror series. I experienced some fairly long loading times as well on a pretty heavy rig. Graphic issues I can get past, always, if the story plays. As a Telltale production, which this almost emulated, this game would have been perfect. A consistent style and visual formula meets well paced storytelling and deeply engaging people. Instead, you have a game trailer with over the top rendering, an actual intro that barely connects to that incoherent thing which has virtually nothing to do with the reason you're at the castle to begin with. I don't mean to rag on the people who created this because it obviously took an enormous amount of effort and talent, and while I am there, I want to say it has some of the finest moody atmospheric music, and very excellent voice acting. Sound design leaves something to be desired as much of the cinematic or cut scene moments have little to no sound effects and there are regular moments where they simply aren't. Ones footsteps, or a door opening, or even a candelabra being knocked over, should be important but nothing is heard. All in all, this get's two stars from me because it is a noble effort, but it is by no means a finished game. Recommend waiting to see if THQ decides to actually polish up the game and bug test and ACTUALLY finish it before releasing it for $27.00. Don't buy this yet, try the original game first if you like an old school point n click with solid, elusive writing. Or, just don't expect $27 worth of game if you do. As so many companies are wan't to do, they released a game far before it was ready to be released and frankly we'd all rather wait. Garbage, dressed up as a nice meal.
This game right out of the gate is absolute garbage. From the fairly fates graphics to the terrible voice acting and idiotic dialogue. Then beyond that combat is like trying to drive a real tank in real life with only one person operating. NIGHTMARE. Beyond that the combat is so difficult that 25-30 hits on a regular animal sometimes doesn't kill it but it hits you 2-3 times and its over, this is on EASY difficulty. There's no clear mission to take that will be achievable in the beginning because you can't fight anyone or anything on the way which is clearly the only way to level your character to be able to fight these insanely monstrously stupid impossible to kill animals. This game is a COMPLETE waste of money DO NOT BUY IT!!!!!! GARBAGE
