I'm not sure what these guys were developing for 8 whole years, but this isn't the result we all expected. And I'm not talking about the current state of bugs, crashes and performance issues which I'm sure will get fixed over time, even if that is completeley unacceptable for a product that was supposed to launch "when it's ready". What I'm not sure about is whether any amount of DLCs can fix this being a bland game, with game mechanics being broken and features missing.
This is not an RPG, rather a glorified shooter which happens to have a rather nice story. Characters are bland, world is stale and stagnant.
There are aspects of a good game here. But no facet of the game seems as good as it could be. In other words, every aspect of this game is done better in other games.
-The open world is shallow, with NPCs seeming very robotic and not life-like, including the police and traffic AI.
-The perks are mostly small percentage increases in damage, health, etc.
-The loot system is cumbersome with the player's inventory filling up with trash items very quickly.
-Armor values tied are to clothing so fashion goes out the window.
-The driving mechanics are imprecise. The steering will cause you to over correct A LOT.
-The melee combat is floaty and imprecise. Enemies have a type of "movement assist" that makes it hard to predict if their attacks will hit or miss (they'll usually hit you even if you think you're out of range).
-The enemies are bullet sponges. Shooting a human enemy in the head 4 times still won't kill many of them.
-The "choices" you make as V aren't really choices as much as stopgaps in the dialogue for player input to keep the story going on a set path.
-For some reason, they hard coded the 'F', 'I', and 'J' keys, so rebinding keys is pointless unless you want to dig into the xml config files. Is this a PC game or not?
This is all on top of the horrendous bugs and bad performance.
-Floating items, NPCs, cars, floating everything.
-Falling through the world.
-Can't equip or unequip weapons at times.
-All types of graphical glitches.
-Quests freezing or not starting at all.
On the positive side:
-The city is pretty to look at...when there are no graphical glitches.
-The voice acting is pretty good.
-The story is somewhat intriguing.
This game is ultimately a waste of time and money. It seems the focus of this game was all about presentation and they neglected making a fundamentally sound and quality game with good game design. They'll most likely have the bugs fixed within a few months. These game design choices will probably never be corrected however.
DON'T buy it as of now.
As of this review:
It's an unfinished game that has some potential.
It can look amazing depending on what setup you have.
It sounds amazing if you can fix "the crackling sound bug" (I had it, you may not have it).
The default hair asset seems to be bald so as of now your character will sometimes be bald.
Entering/exiting your vehicle? Bald
Looking in a mirror? Suddenly Bald.
Random cutscene of sudden baldness. How?!
You can summon your vehicle, get run over by it but you can't capture it in "photo-mode".
Or I couldn't. I couldn't even capture my character getting run over by a random car.
But I could capture a floating unconcious body which drops when getting shot or hit.
I had 3 or 4 enemies walk into thin air when I shot at them from below and pass out in the air.
Invsisible ground?
And don't get me started on the crafting system.
I prefer Animal Crossing: New Horizons crafting system to this.
Trying to upgrade common material to rare material?
It's single item crafting. Which is okay if you craft items but not when you're trying to utilize the ability to upgrade rarity of materials. It's tedious. And takes too much time, well at least it doesn't seem to be buggy.
Buy it at your own risk.
I don't recommend buying it if you value game development.
Completely unrelated: the edge of my GoG Galaxy window (while in full screen) goes over onto my secondary/primary screen, depending on which screen it's fullscreen on.
Performance: The game ran more or less fine on my GTX 1080. Didn't run into that many bugs myself, and the ones I did run into I could live with.
Experience: There were times when I just wanted to explore the world (and the world is probably the games strongest point) but I kept getting hammered with phone calls. Sometimes said phone calls, or just passing by another quest npc would switch the quest I was tracking and I would have to go to the menu and reselect the one I was previously on, which is a bit annoying.
All that said, my biggest problem with the game is I kinda hate the protagonist, and none of the dialog options let me steer him in the direction I want.
I'll be back in a year or two, until then...
