If you are stuck in group-think you already made up your mind but if you can still think for yourself give it a try. The only gripe I have it is a combo heavy game which goes well with a controller and not with keyboard and mouse.
So sadly, if you are stricktly a keyboard and mouse player like me you might think twice.
I'll be honest the choice to have a narrator speaking for every single npc and being omnipresent is really annoying, thankfully you can get rid of it thanks to the game offering this option.
That being said i'm really happy to have bought this game, it's nice, fun and really chill to play.
I admit that i didn’t have great expectations on this one, but at the end i found a great game.
First of all, the world is really fantastic: it’s one of the best openworld i ve ever seen in 30 years of gaming. It’s huge, colourful, full of missions, secrets, different resources and biomes. You travel through forests, jungles, deserts, abandoned cities, contaminated areas, villages and it’s never boring. The quests are almost infinite, yet a little bit redundant, especially the conquest of the outposts. The plot is nothing special, you are the generic hero who must save the world but if you want you can play for 30+ hours without touching the main quest, so it’s not a great problem. The battles are interesting, you have a lot of different weapons, armors, upgrades and combat styles. You can craft a whole world of different objects and the survival aspect is important if you play at the higher difficulty. From a technical point of view the game is beautiful and smooth: i had one single crash in 55 hours of gaming at 60 fps FullHD with an old GTX1650, so people who complain about 1000 crashes or stuttering problems either have a potato pc or are trolls. Probably the latter. The only reason i don’t give 5 stars is the fact that some boss fights are frustrating QTE sections, the rest of the game in my humble opinion is nearly perfect.
Think if Ninja Gaiden had a furry kid brother who was into manga from like the 50s. You would think it was easy from the laid back atmosphere, cheesey grandfatherly storybook narator, and the "BAM! THACK! POW!" annotations and assorted commentary but it can in fact get quite hard. You can get swarmed, face mobs nearly 10x or 20x your size and the move combos can get quite intricate. In short this is a furry action game with a comic book slice of life feel to it with heavy doses of Japanese themed lore and assorted goofiness. If you like hitting and shooting at stuff and don't take things too seriously you'll probably have fun playing this.
This game has some ups and downs. The art design and direction are the obvious strengths. The world and its characters look unique and cool and make you want to explore. The idea of playing as a radioactive psychic raccoon wielding a baseball bat katana is definitely alluring.
The world, though, is very empty and there is very little to actually do in the "safe" zones other than get from point A to B. If, say, you wanted to test out your new weapon mods, you will have to wander around for a while to find even basic enemies to fight. There's a few shops, shrines, villages, and points of interest, but they are almost all identical to each other. The danger zones by contrast are pretty fun to explore but you have to invest a lot into resistances before you can even go into them.
The plot is almost nonsensical based on how it is presented to me in the game. I will just be wandering around in the grass and then suddenly be given a quest to, like, "Attack the fort", with zero context or explanation of what that is or why I would want to do it. There are a lot of interjecting cutscenes like flashback sequences or shots of enemy tribe leaders swearing revenge on me or whatever. Once, these cutscenes glitched out and I had two of them playing at the same time. Everyone in the world has known me since childhood and is watching my every move, apparently. Dudes in a house are levitating with no explanation. Nothing makes sense.
Combat is kind of OK but the movements can feel really janky - mostly the slow motion effect is overused to the point that it becomes disorienting. There is very little weight to my attacks, or even nice audio feedback or anything, so stronger weapons feel like they do nothing but just wear down bullet sponges a little faster.
One more thing - menus get very complicated with upgrades, gear, stats, mods, etc. Very easy to get lost and it takes hours to understand it. Also, LIGHT BLUE TEXT ON BLUE BACKGROUND (resistance % stats) - who approved that?!?!