Excellent writing, really good atmosphere and really good skill system. Mind you the game has no combat. It is pure roleplaying. But what great roleplaying it is. A true journey and a game that will stick with you. Only one advice: Embrace the failure in dice. The game is made with failure in mind. Do not re-load a failure. It actually bring out and enriched the story and some of the greatest moment in it is when you accepted that you failed and just move on.
Space faring and combat is generally enjoyable in this game but the mission designs are just incredibly badly made. The balancing is very often off and the mission indicators and descriptions are outright confusing. I get the idea that the game tries to not spell the quest objectives outright, but the quest descriptions are too abstract to know what you are looking for at least and often the actual missions indicator give bad information instead of helping. The amount of wondering around until the time you stumble upon the objective feels like 1/2 of the play time in main missions that do not involved killing. The worse example of this was a missions that you need to escape from an underground settlement. The are 3 possible tunnels that you need to check and navigate. When you check the tunnel most end up in a dead end. The problem is that they are confusing to navigate, missions indicators do not update to indicated that you already need in a tunnel and even worse enemies re-spawn almost immediately, removing the last thing that you could have used to know which places you have already checked. It becomes tedious and grading. It is a shame this game could have been really good with simple simple common sense in mission design.
My actual rating would be closer to 4.5 so the closest to that was 5 and not 4 stars. I will keep things short: The hate CDPR got from the technical issues were absolutely justified. But now on PC the major issues seem pretty much fixed. I had only a few glitches in my whole playthrough and at no point did those glitches interfered with my enjoyment. Performance is vety meh but adequate with no issues. And the game itself. It is great. It is a master peice? No but it is great. The world, the quests, the characters and story are stellar. Just excellent. Just make sure you do all the sidequests. Some are as important or even more than the main missions. Do not do the mistake of doing the main missions only. You will be missing whole character arcs. When you have finished all, the story ends up somthing really memorable (i even liked V and Silverhand that many people had issues with). The main issues with the game is the gameplay systems. They are fully functional, they never get into the way of enjoyment. But many things like the skill trees and crafting are superficial and uninspiring. There is little depth in character builds and gearing. But again at worse they are uninteresting. Very rarely are the gameplay systems "bad". Do not fall into the badwagoning saying that the game is not trash or other exagerations. The game itself is very very good. If you think you will like it go for it. You will enjoy your time. And if you are still on the fence? I suggest the Skill up review that is increadibly detailed. I found it matches my own experience almost to the letter. The good and the bad. Too bad CDPR botched the launch that much. This gave a reputation to a game that in its heart, it is really worth it.
This was the most disappointing game i have played in awhile. Mostly because it could be a masterpiece. Visuals, lore, atmosphere, story and gun/ability gameplay are excellent. But suffers from the worse enemy design i have seen in a 3rd person game. The FoV is immensely cnarrow thus pretty much all the difficulty of the game come from attacks that come from your back. Adding to this is the extreme effect of the game, which although impressive, make being able to see what is going on incredibly difficult making it even more of a challenge to see attack coming from behind. The worse offender are the bosses. Every single boss i fought was incredibly easy and very exploitable. All the difficulty of the bosses comes ONLY from the add spam during the boss fight exactly because of the backstabbing. To that you have to add the constant add spam at places you have already been and the very bad unnecessary backtracking when you die from the bad checkpoint placement. I guess they went for the Souls games formula but it is not well implemented. In Souls games you, almost, always die feeling its your fault. Here you get the feeling that you are just unlucky. What made me quite the game eventually (17 hours in), was a boss fight that actually had so many rendering effect that crashed the game every time the boss attacked. lowering details made things better but it still crashed randomly about 2/3 of the boss fight. It is a real shame. This was the first Remedy game i ever played. It had potential. But with the bad enemy design and the technical issues....it will probably be the last.
