Yes, every horrible thing you heard about this game is TRUE. Launch was a MESS, and CDPR should be ASHAMED of themselves for releasing it in that condition. CDPR, however, has managed to patch and update it, and THIS IS NOW ONE OF THE GREATEST OPEN WORLD CRPGs ever made. NO SPOILERS FOR YOU! Just buy it.
I was having a blast playing this game on my WAY over-spec rig despite the frequent dips to 10 fps, the eternal loading screens, and the occasional freeze. But in the end, you just can't play a shooter that laggy, so I had to uninstall it. If it runs on your machine, great. Give this game some love. If it won't, return it immediately. Your rig isn't the problem. The game is just badly optimized.
This is a great take on turn of the century warfare. I very much enjoyed it, despite it not being so much a real-time strategy game, and much more a real-time TACTICAL game. It's all there. Infantry. Special forces. Armor. Support. The battlefields manage to feel complete without getting bogged down by an unreasonable learning curve. I would normally give this game 4 stars, but... This game will not run on my Win 11 Acer Predator. The System Requirements say Windows 10, NOT Win 10 or better. It might be best to take this at face value. It may or may not run on your Win 11 machine, but it absolutely will NOT run on mine. Anyway, Win 10 is going bye-bye, so... ONE Star. Don't buy unless you are willing to spend hours trying to get it working, and be prepared to fail.
I love martial arts movies. I can't name all Bruce Lee's Movies. I can't even name all the Bruce Lee movies I've seen. I'm not posing as an expert, but I have spent many hours cheering gormlessly at old videotapes. I understand that this makes me a terrible person, but I loved old Grasshopper and Kung Fu back in the day. My son and I still watch Karate Kid pretty regularly, and I intend to introduce him to Forbidden Kingdom as soon as he's old enough to see booze as a punchline. I love martial arts movies. This game is a martial arts movie. I LOVE this game. So... I shout 5 stars at the clouds! The combat system is a hoot, and the fighting styles are unique. The characters are epic and ridiculous. The twist is... well... not that big a twist, but who cares because it's martial arts movie, and the fight is epic! And... Yes. That IS John Kleese's voice you hear in the garden. So... Not an open world, but the maps were huge, for their day. They are packed with interesting NPC's, side quests and treasures so it does have a lot of fun exploration. There's not a lot of player agency, here, but there is a story. It is the equal of all but the very best kung fu movies, which means it's actually not really all that great. But people don't watch kung fu movies for the story. These movies are EXPECTED to be formulaic and predictable, and Jade Empire skillfully obliges. If you love RPG's, this is a Bioware classic. But, if you love Martial Arts movies, this is a Bioware masterpiece. Either way, buy it.
Title kinda says it all. I played it all the way through, so it didn't suck, but I was pretty consistently disappointed the entire time. I think it was my love of the franchise and hope that the game would improve, or that the story would have some unique twist or reveal, that carried me all the way to the end... But no. The end was just kinda, meh. Not the worst game I've ever played, and I did make it all the way to the last cutscene. But having made it this far, I wouldn't mind getting my time refunded.
This game was a bit of a heartbreaker. I came in wanting to love it, but I just don't. After two nights of play, I really don't care what happens next. The gameplay has been a bit of a slog. This game leans heavily into the cover-based shooter side of the game, but it's not doing anything special. They made a few tweaks to the control screen, but none I would consider improvements. You have all your old augs, but don't count on the designers throwing out many new ones. It's an action packed, bang-bang, shoot-'em-up right from the start, so if you like that kind of thing, pony up. Personally, I found the whole thing a dreadful bore. As far as I'm concerned, you have ONE night to reel me in. Especially if you are going to throw in a bunch of annoying live service features. For love of the franchise, I gave this game two. Don't get me wrong. It's not a bad game. It's just not a GOOD game, and I don't have enough years left to waste my nights on mediocrity. 3 hours, or so, and I uninstalled. If you're into cover shooters, give it a buy. That was never why I liked Deus Ex.
I really loved this game. Super basic. Linear, sure, but with an open world feel. The level design rings of Fallout 3/4, where the level designers make brilliant use of very limited space. I recommend this game VERY highly. I'm told it's not as good as the original version, but most folks who say that seem to be focused on graphics quality, which is something I don't really care at all about. The difficulty curve can be intimidating, but it can be changed mid-game. If you feel a rage-quit coming on, take a break... Or just turn down the difficulty for 5 minutes. It's worth swallowing your pride to get to the end. I am on an old Acer Nitro, and I had very few technical problems. The game ran smoothly, and the two freezes I experienced on my ratty old rig self-resolved in a few seconds. This game heralds back to a day when storytelling was actually a respected element of game design. It is thoughtful, full of well written characters, and crammed with the kind of moral ambiguity that modern audiences despise. This is one of a tiny handful of games that I've played since I started gaming that actually deserves five stars, and my gaming career started when I put a Pyramid 2000 cassette tape into a TRS-80 almost half a century ago. I've been at this for a long time. Get this game. Period. Especially if you're fed up with the way modern games keep reskinning the same-old, half dozen, boring, politically correct, hackneyed games over and over and calling them "new titles."
This is an unfinished game. They had to patch in an ability to move your army's commanding officer on the battlefield without his entire corps redeploying to new positions. They STILL haven't patched a "back" button into the tutorial. Ahhh... The tutorial. Long, badly written, badly organized, unclear, and INCOMPLETE with a UI designed by a disgruntled mail room clerk. Did I mention... NO BACK BUTTON? Don't make mistakes or leave a tutorial unfinished. Memorize every word on each page or will need to restart the ENTIRE 132-page campaign tutorial each time. There are also bugs that can also force you to restart. It is UNFORGIVABLE for a game with this kind of strategic and tactical depth to have such an incompetently executed tutorial. I see real potential in this game, but it's almost entirely unrealized. The ultimate civil war sim will look something like this, but this just isn't it. It could have been, but they pushed it out the door too soon. This is not a "diamond in the rough." This is a rough draft. For example, one of the things this game does really well is add command and control delays between orders and execution, but Naval units magically receive and execute orders instantly. It's not a game breaker, but it is a broken game. If you'd rather not have to spend your first 10 hours of gameplay deciphering the tutorials and studying a field guide, or you're unwilling to ignore some bizarre inconsistencies like the Palantir-equipped navies, you might want to find another title.
DO NOT get hooked into the crafting system. It's still totally borked. You'll wind up with dupes and undroppable items clogging up your inventory. There are still other bugs, too. Graphical glitches. Occasional crashes. The writing is amateurish. They try to explore morally ambiguous subject matter, but you can't really do that with a simple conversation tree so the choices come across as kinda dumb. You have to ride the author's moral compass instead of applying your own, and the author's moral compass is kinda stuck. And... I'll just leave this here... No character in a story can be smarter than the writer. Make of that what you will. As for game design... Meh. The way the game handles armor and weapon values is kinda dumb. T-Shirts and leather jackets can have a better armor value than ballistic vests. An endgame pistol can do many times more damage than a starter sniper rifle. It's all part of a ridiculous system for keeping the game confined to a level-based advancement system that doesn't really suit the genre. But it IS fun, and it does (mostly) run. The setting is pretty immersive. The characters are likable and even, occasionally, border on interesting. Come into it knowing what you're getting. An OK Cyberpunk sim. Nothing more. Nothing less. Keep your expectations reasonable and you won't be disappointed.
This is SO much less than a modern Battletech game should be. First, the game may not run, or many be unplayable for the lag. Load screens might be stupidly long even if you more than meet the recommended system requirements. Let's set aside the terrible optimization, for now. If you have any of these problems, you should probably just return the game immediately. Spending hours tweaking the settings and adding mods will likely not solve your problem. Let's assume the game runs smoothly on your machine. There are still a lot of reasons to be lukewarm on this game. The gameplay is pretty fast, considering the complexity of the combat system. It's pretty true to the board game. It simulates the management of a single lance in mech v. mech combat pretty well. It lets you salvage after the battles. Buy and sell mechs. Travel in a small slice of the settled galaxy. You can expand your freighter and collect mech chassis. You can keep up to 18 battlemechs combat ready and hire as many pilots (if not more). Plus you can keep an unlimited number of mechs in reserve. Nice, right? Well... No. Not really. You see... no matter how many mechs you collect and how many pilots you hire, you can never field more than a single lance of mechs. That's FOUR mechs, for those of you unfamiliar with the lore. You will never be able to join the ranks of the Black Widows, or the Gray Death Legion, or Wolf's Dragoons (forgive the anachronism) who can land whole battalions of Mechs for a single job. You will ALWAYS be... well... small potatoes. Another downside of the game is that there is more to managing a merc company than just mech combat, and the game just ignores all of that. Aerial support? Nope. Not even if you're working for a government with aerial superiority. Battlefield repair vehicles? infantry scouts? Mines? Tanks? scout and assault copters? Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Annnd... Nope. Look... It's fun for what it is, it just isn't... much.
