I have not had this much fun with a game for a while. I wrote this review after I wrote my CP2077 review, which I thought was a huge disappointment. This game by far is a better experience and better value. I ended up buying the deluxe upgrade to help support the devs as well as getting some nice goodies. Playing this game late 2020 I had a great experience, all the initial reviews mentioned performance issues and bugs, but my PC handled the game perfectly with 1080Ti, reaching 80 fps consistenly on 4k. I hit occational bugs but nothing deterred the fun of the game. There are some gameplay inconveniences such as inventory sorting is not present, setting up ambush is not very fun but necessary if you want full party to move first. Those issues aside, the story got me hooked ALL the way through, I have stayed up till 2, 3 am almost everyday playing to find out new story beats. The side content is great fun too. Three times I was laughing out loud for several minutes because of the choices I could pick. The way this game allows me to make gaming altering decision is just insane. I will be doing a full replay just to find out what would happen if I go down a different path. Can't praise the story enough. WISH IT WAS LONGER! The combat is above average. I didn't really find the AI all that challenging. I started with Ranger diff then upped to Supreme Jerk, and I only had a whole party wipe once fighting the ultimate scorpitron after 2 previous regular scorpitron fights. The high HP of the enemy doesn't present me more challenge necessarily. I wish there are more to the combat. Once all your rangers have settled into their designated role, you kind of just play the same combat each time, despite the fantastic enemy variety and faction diversity, eventually the combat became a bit boring to me. I wanted to review this based on my experience as this game brought me some geniune fun never experienced before. Definitely recommend.
This game is no witcher 3. It's not even on the level of witcher 2 at times. Even witcher 2 has more meaningful choices and more branching paths. The game is very linear, and no way to properly roleplay. The leveling system and enemy difficulty is very unbalanced at the end of the game. I can do 100000+ in 1 pistol shot that takes out endgame mechs and bosses. My hacking ability can do so much damage I stopped using them since they are too borning. There is no more advanced enemy type, no "monsters" like in Witcher 3. (The cyberpsychos are OK, but no on the same level as monsters) The questing system has 0 payoff. For instance, I thought I'd get something awesome after doing all 17 cyberpsycho quest, nope, just a meet with the fixer for a line of dialog. (at least I didn't bother to wait any longer for additional follow-ups, I stopped caring at that point). Also, the politician quest where you learn there is a secret society pulling strings, I was super intrigued by that but at the end it didn't do anything with it. I wanted to see what happens if you play as an outlaw and a squad of MaxTac show up and you have to face them. In a word, so much missed opportunities everywhere.
