CONDITIONALLY RECOMMENDED. If a) you are a RGG fanatic or b) do not care about plots or characters and want something to waste time on. Tl;dr - the plot is worthless, never develops from the premise and nothing new or exciting happens. It is about someone trying to take down Tojo and Omi and fake-killing people. No changes to it ever. The main antagonist turns out to be an old guy's cancer and the final boss is a side character. Old characters acting like pansies (Majima) and new ones deleted from the canon after this game. The script is almost as bad as the rubber-bulleting in Y4. The best content is SIDE STORIES. Everything else: lacking or deja vu. In fact every single side story plot beats the main story plot. Shinada's baseball content lasts about 2 hours. The game runs well. It has the adaptive detail adjusting feature based on available resources. Only the concert battles optimization issues. There are random crash bugs involving the scenes with Mack (a brief character). This game has a lot of similarities with Yakuza 0 and Kiwami 1. Short notes: 1. Everyone talking about dreams gets repetitive and meaningless fast. 2. The victory road qualifier thing for coliseum is tedius. 3. The gameplay templates Y4. 4. The idol thing is non-interesting besides the street dance battles. They have decent sound tracks, especially the hip hop one. 5. The best karaoke set, incl. the 1st appearances of Baka Mitai and Rouge of Love. 6. There is almost no yakuza content in the game. This game is about "Fulfiller of Dreams" (the JP subtitle) and yakuza have no dreams. If you want a yakuza game, play 0, 1 or 2 instead. 7. The game feels rushed. For example, Akiyama has no side story. 8. The five cities: different layouts, the exact same content. POINTLESS. 9. Shinada's story is clearly a J-Drama parody. Haruka is an idol, Saejima hunts and Kiryu taxi-drives. The theme is TV series. 10. The game'd been better with more play-testing and better plots and developed characters.
NEVER RECOMMENDED. DO NOT BUY THIS. Even the cutscenes are bad. Majima-chan and Daigo are complete OoC wusses in this one and do nothing. So many things wrong. Plot is mishmash trash with a long list of major plot holes. Possibly the worst game in the series. It is easier to say what is good in this game: they MOSTLY fixed the terrible perma-blocking AI of Y3 and the karaoke is has better stuff such as Machine Gun Kiss. In short, small fixes and breaking previously not broken things. Zero plot pay-off plot. It sucks. Activity segments that fall flat: Fighter Maker (watch CPU fail and waste your time), Hostess Maker (long and dull), Hostess Club (so tedious), Allies (useless). Tanimura's Police Scanner is fun. A lot like Majima Everywhere System except you do the chasing. Bad main story segments: boat chase - it is glitched and does not work. Again RGG put a minimum effort to porting the chase sequences. This is the worst sequence so far and alone bad enough to take 2 points from the game rating. It is so bad the garbage jail break sequence is much easier. Akiyama is a terrible, detached char. Saejima under-used. If you play the game, you will notice how false the things the characters say feel and how hastily-cobbled-together everything is plot-wise. Plot hole list: 1) Dojima-supplied guns containing police's top-secret tech i.e. rubber bullets, 2) the police supposedly having set up a hit even though the police got introduced to the conspirators AFTER it was already done, 3) Yasuko's unexplained hitman skills, 4) Hamazaki's bullet wounds suddenly re-opening for no reason, 5) the whole crime-as-police-controlled thing and the big stacks of money needed for it for not explained reasons, 6) people trusting Arai even though he's a serial side-changer, 7) various plot points involving Katsuragi and Munakata that go nowhere, 8) the Kamuro Hills site that was cleared out in Y3 is back to its Y2 half-constructed state and 9) stacked banknotes do not stop bullets.
NOT RECOMMENDED. Get Yakuza 0 or 2 instead. This one has a great opening, though then nothing ever. The playfulness of the side content is lacking. Only get this one if you are hardcore Ryuu ga Gotoku fan. Y3 is where the writing started to go downhill and it has not enough humor and amusement to keep it interesting. It is largely ruined by a crappy political plot (and mandatory playing with kids) and not enough decent supporting character screen time i.e. Daigo or Majima. Kiryu is particularly wooden in this one. Chugs a bit. The plot has no pay off, features non-sequitur land claim politics (YAWN!) and has the exact same ending events as the two earlier titles except somehow it is even lamer than the Y1 one. The enemies block a way too much in higher difficulties and have a lot of health in higher difficulties, making it boring and encouraging the player to avoid fighting as you get only junk and pocket change out of it. The side content is on the boring side, the best being the somewhat amusing Hostess Maker. Every other side activity feels like boring grinding. The fighting sucks. Luckily you can lower the difficulty to make at least the basic enemies to not perma-block and stun-lock you to death. Unlike in the recent games, the enemies will keep hitting you to the point of not letting you to recover and are super aggressive on Hard. Because of how side-step sensitively alternates as a step-away and a counter, it is mostly a crappy placeholder move until you get the real counter move i.e. Tiger Drop. The timing of an offensive side-step and the TD is almost identical. Oh and defensive running away and side-stepping do not always work because the enemies moves, even the straight punches, often track, meaning they will turn in place and hit you anyway despite you sidestepping it. This trackin hit garbage and the fortress-tier blocking makes the fighting unbearably tedious. The bosses add extra layers of cheapness to that. Y3 fighting is not fun.
RECOMMENDED. If you play Yakuza / Ryuu ga Gotoku / Like a Dragon games for the plot, this is 5/5. The plot is practically perfect, maybe besides the usual ham-fisted romance scenes and the Ryuji Goda having the exact same scenes and outcomes as Nishkiyama in the previous game. If you like real twists, this will be your favorite game ever. The sub par aspects of the game involve the stiff and not creatively reasoned combat and the sub-content design, especially the tying of substory completion and the unlockable skills to annoying and grindy minigame challenges. The new Dragon Engine (the previous ones used the Yakuza 5 one) means fights are no longer limited to any place. You can even run out of fights now. This means you can always go fetch a bicycle to demolish the attacking goons with even if there is none around. You want to do this as it makes the fights super fast. Kiryu does not have good or reliable group damage moves, so using weapons and objects is what you will be doing. Especially with the gang sizes starting with 5 and sometimes the game featuring scenes with dozens of them at once. Luckily, the game now has charged light attacks to break blocks for the continuing combo, ending the Fortress Disease of the previous games. Also, the enemies are less aggressive and block-happy as in Kiwami 1. No load times when entering shops and stuff - it is all conveniently on the same map now. F the minigame unlockable skills. To use the heat action of bats and golf clubs - some of the most common weapons in the game - you have to grind golf and baseball challenges A LOT. Like hours on end. Those weapons are super risky to use without those abilities. This is a problem because Kiwami 2 emphasizes weapon combat. For example, bullets commonly go through objects and some of the walls. The batting minigame sucks. You basically have to take notes where the curve balls are going to go now and hit it next time when the pattern repeats. Nerdy af. Darts aim not stable sucks
NOT RECOMMENDED. When the game trailer manages to spoil the plot, you have a story premise with zero pay-off. The final fights against Jingu and Nishikiyama are lame. The game feels like a re-skin of Yakuza 0, which clashes with the Y1 story a lot of Kiryu's contacts dying and the original darker colour schemes. Get Yakuza 0 instead. The side activities are re-purposed from previous games and nothing seems to have been made for this game, except for the eight 90-second "date videos" made for the re-designed hostess club segments. Despite being rewritten to be a sequel to Yakuza 0, it feels empty, forgettable and skippable. The overall feel of the game after having beaten it is bored and let down. Technically it runs lighter and with less loading times as Y0, probably because of it using asset caching. This means e.g. zero loading screens when starting Climax Battles. While these Kiwami releases are at parts better than the originals, a lot of detail and content has been lost in the process, including removed sound tracks. The story is so lazy it features Haruka the little girl needing to get saved 3+ times. That makes the story feel padded, even though it does not have much content to begin with. None of the side activities tie with the plot at all. The worst part of the game is that in comparison to Y0, even basic enemies block a lot more and the guard break moves are nowhere to be seen. Where in Y0 you could enjoy pulling of crowd moves with relative ease, here you are pretty much screwed against multiple opponents because they all mercilessly gang up on you and chase you. Add in the the fact that Kiryu gets stuck in a 2-second immobile daze every time anyone even love-taps him and you have one painful experience whenever multiple enemies are involved. Oh and the AI behavior gets even more violent and chasing if you turn your back on it. Enjoy being caught in a 10+-second paralysis as enemies practice their Art of Kiryu Punching on you. Majima stuff +1 star
NOT RECOMMENDED. It looks good, though is a drag to play. The fighting system makes you feel like you are on rails (read: more like on fails) with control directions that change with the wildly spinning camera, the main storyline is super short (multiple speedruns under 4 hours) and the side activities are painfully difficult for wrong reasons ON PURPOSE. The only good part about this game is Goro Majima's character, mostly outside the main plot where he is boringly serious. Do not get this game. It has the same problems as the old Shenmue games - lots of activities that are not fun. Boring, difficult, usually BOTH. Fighting gets old fast. There is really nothing to do in the static city than to fight thugs and Mr. Shakedown the primary source of money. No replay value. Flat content. I get the feeling the unofficial subtitle of the game is "A Game about Yakuza Crime Is Not Supposed to Be Fun." Maybe they do not want soft Western gamers to sign up for Yakuza. The game has two types of content: super easy main story content, somewhat easy substory content and mortally difficult minigame content at parts. The minigames look visual, though are actually purely about timing and extremely punitively so. There are ideal timing indication outside the super easy bowling one. Minigames are the reason do not want to 100 % this game, because it will make you its 100 % female dog in the process. I did do the 100 % activities thing - holy cheese it was painful. I spent a MONTH on it, a game you can rush through in a couple of hours. Learn from the mast... Baka Mitai. If you want the best part, the music. Look up the soundtrack. Koi wa Disco Queen and Heartbreak Mermaid are nice ones and the Goro Majima ones 24-Hour Cinderella and Baka Mitai are no less than memes. A PC Port without Mouse Aim: Chapter 13 has a light gun shooter style sequence with zero mouse support 3 Second Defenseless Penalty From Missing a Grab or Hitting Anything with a Bat = Kiryu Becomes Kill You
DO NOT BUY IT - this game is out-right UNFINISHED (no updates since 2021). It has bugs that you can replicate in five (5) seconds, left non-fixed. For example, an opened inventory window causing you to buy 2 items for the price of one. The only quality part of the game is the music that is top-of-the-line. If you have any even basic understanding of programming, you know what kind of programming mistakes were used to create various glitches. The game tries to recreate Star Control 2 with not-so-good outcomes and everything comes across BASIC. It is a Unity game. But focus on the glitches. Oh and I'm leaving out the non-terminal cosmetic bugs that you can just ignore and mention the ones that can kill your game or at least a character or two. Losing a character is a big deal in this game - it is a time and one-of-a-kind augment item loss. 2-for-1 Open Inventory Buy Slowing to a Crawl when the Path-Finding Fails Randomly Misplaced Inside Terrain (Effectively Dead Character) Augmentations Running out until Loading a Save (a Game State Failure) Failing to Shoot at Enemies Auto Harvest Mode Randomly Failing Generating Asteroids with Non-Retracable Drops Generating Asteroids that Make You Unable to Re-Enter Your Ship Moving Items Randomly Hangs Your Game Shops May Sell You Stack One Over the Boundary But Do Not Give the Item (a boundary check error) Unable to Buy Item Stacks into Your Fleet Cargo (though buying 1... I mean 2 per click somehow works) Enemy Encounters Scale with Fleet Size (making having just one ship optimal - ships' drops are terrible) Item Descriptions Randomly Not Appearing (happens in many places - the star map locations, the inventory screen and the fleet screen) Cursor Overlaying Something Interact-able Randomly Hanging the Game (mostly happens in shops, sometimes inventory) Guns Ignoring Energy Requirements (e.g. the Gatlings firing and reloading even at 0 weapons energy) Free Ship Event Ignoring Fleet Size Limit of 5 Get Ur-Quan Masters instead.
Look up game footage extensively before you buy and ignore the hype. Dying Light has the same pop-corn casual gameplay as Dead Island (with QoL improvements), so if you want a serious survival experience, consider sth like Project Zomboid instead. If you are money-wise, just get the cheaper edition of this game. Despite the carried name of the expansion The Following, it also contains the base game. Also grab those free promo DLCs, especially the L4D2 and Rust ones as they provide very useful weapon blueprints. In short, if you are looking for repetitive, consistent hack-and-slash game (you can craft SMGs early) maybe with some co-op potential, you might like this. If you are looking for something inspiring or new, this is not it. It is a very basic sandbox game with no dynamic environmental destruction (a noticeable annoyance) or an inspiring storyline (read: typical fetch quests / extermination stuff). The much-touted parkour system is like in Tony Hawk PSU2 - you can only parkour ledges and objects the devs specifically marked as interactable, otherwise you fail to parkour / climb it at all. CAVEAT EMPTOR The storyline: "things get worse and never better." The expansion in particular felt padded (read: little more than a playground for the buggy car) and the endings were iffy. Both the base game and the exp irritatingly did not allow co-op during the final storyline missions. The missions with time limits were often nigh-impossible and not fun. The major annoyance is that your stuff breaks after a couple hits in beginning and barely at all in the end. The buggy car breaks super easily even after all the shield upgrades. Breaking leads to needing to loot, which is a long and boring process of little variety. Most people bypass it with numerous item duplication glitches. It all leaves a grindy and a padded feel. Side quests are the most amusing part. Game drops inputs when lagging and context-sensitive button prompts often fail to appear on time.
RECOMMENDED if you do not mind the content length of 4 to 6 hours. Otherwise it is recommended to watch a playthrough video instead of buying the game. The lack of replay value content (besides the unlocked, harder Badass difficulty) makes the game a tough sell to a person looking for a more lasting experience. The polish, the style and the variety are the strong points of the game. There are plenty of humor and the 1980s references with the same feel as the 2015 Kung Fury short film. The humor tends to have a Death Wish tone because of the overall contract killing mission. The voice work is very good. For example, one of the bosses is a Macho Man imitation. The soundtrack has a track that imitates Beverly Hills Cop main theme. Also there are the rare one-liners such as Anna Conda's "you look good in lead" when she kills someone. It is all nice, though nothing you would replay the game again for. The default controls are a problem. On keyboard: ZXCVB. You cannot operate five buttons with one hand comfortably. It is recommended to change sub-weapon fire = F, primary fire = V, jump = C, dash = X and weapon switch = Z. That way you can use both fire buttons with the same index finger AND you have the most common used functions positioned for the fingers that can take most use. Only the bonus weapons support hold-down autofire, so you will be tapping that main fire button constantly during the gameplay. Note that there is a small delay before button presses become actions. This is most likely for balance reasons. Your bounty hunter characters generally are quite powerful even with their default weapons and the game is more about timing than accurate shooting. Pattern memorization and manipulation are required especially with the later bosses. (The last two use homing teleport moves, which are very annoying.) It is a good game IP, though at this rate it will not get any more sequels or content. Caveat emptor. The small sandwich warning.
NOT RECOMMENDED. Your gameplay would be mostly about wrestling with the controls trying to target the right enemies (your magic attacks will miss if the enemy moves even a little) and waiting for attack cool downs & spellcasting movement lock-ups to pass. You reduce enemes HP to zero, rinse and repeat. The dragon handles like crap, often gets stuck MID-f-ing-AIR. The GOG version seems to have trouble playing the voice line audio. Once you have killed one enemy, you have seen the whole depth of the game. No, there aren't any enemy dragons to fight. Does not at any point become fun to play. The spells would be fun if they did not take forever to recharge, living you with either fireballing (misses if the enemies move even a micrometer) or firebreathing (makes you an immobile punching bag whenever you use it) things to death. Even the mediocre and buggy Dragon Commander mobs the floor with this one. Oh and it randomly crashes. In summary, the game lacks the fun gameplay mechanics and content that enjoyable games have.
