Unfortunately, I dropped the game half-way through. I got hooked by Vampyr vibes, good voice cast and an interesting premise, but I just can't for the life of me find the strength to deal with even one more fight with 3 drunks who think it's a good idea to fight a dude who can control literal demons.
Granted, I hate JRPGs explicitly because of repetitive drawn out fights, so I'm biased here. But Jesus Christ, there's SO. MANY. BORING. FIGHTS. It's just padding, wherever your quest leads you - be sure you WILL get interrupted with "hey! what are you doing here!!! this is our place, we don't take kindly to yer kind 'round 'ere!!!!!" followed by a fight with 3 drunk dudes.
I guess I'll never know how the story ends.
I'm 9 hours in and the combat got old ~4 hours ago. And there's just so much of it! You'd think after the 150th jackass who I beat the snot out of within 2 days of arriving in the city, word would get around, but no! Everyone wants to pick a fight with me. Every single mission, no matter how small has 2+ occasions where a group of presumed locals who can't pick an accent decide to force me into this pokemon-like battle and despite my character being advertised as capable of influencing people, there doesn't seem to be a single opportunity to talk your way out of violence.
Its main gimmick outside combat, the clue and conclusion system, got old even quicker. You just walk around spamming RT until something lights up in red, press A, optionally read some fluff text and repeat a bunch of times until a conclusion pops up.
And I'm not using controller inputs by accident here, the game was clearly made for console and it feels very clunky and uncomfortable with kb/m. The camera also sucks, player isn't given control of it for no discernable reason and half the time you're ose to a wall you can't see anything.
It's a shame, because the aesthetic, particularly during salutor fights, is very cool and the world and story seem interesting, but I just can't bring myself to trudge through the more of its gameplay to explore more of its strong points
Fresh setting with interesting battle mechanics, nice graphics at least for general environment. Character models of NPC could be higher res and more detailed textures.
Summerized: Nice game, good overall visuals and authentic feeling environment, overall good and funny game play mechanics (No looting!!!). If you like single player story games it is worth its price.
You can notice this down grade in overall graphics especially in dialouge scenes, wherein W.S. is quite detailed but background and NPCs lack a kind of "deepness". But overall, when walking through city you can notice the UE5 graphics effects especially in lightning eg. light reflexes in puddels, rain effects. This causing the game be quite hard ware hungry.
Could not get over the feelining that the game was also kind of show case of UE5 experience for the developers, cause much of this effects would be more effective used in a game with other camera view.
Gameplay feels fresh and unused. The pride system in characterdev in combinaiton with your prescribed character background is for this kind of narrative rpg deep enough. The battle system is quite unique, too. Especially in highest diff, you need to think through your moves or go for luck with ability perks. Mid to endgame you feel quite overpowered, just to get corrected in last fight. The fights in midgame are to many and have often no use for story/ side quests but you can often avoid them (not interacting with the NPCs).
Story is ok, not fully linear, your choices during main quest have some effects on the ending, but don't expect BG3 like story trees. I would wish for more usage of thaumaturges mind affecting powers. In some dialouges the lack of influencing story NPCs via this mechanics was astounding.
I enjoyed this game. It has some real historical characters and events, intermingled with fiction. As a result, I picked up some interest in learning more about the time and place.
Pros:
-immersive environments
-interesting characters
-interesting stories
-unusual mechanic with salutors
Cons:
-game is crash-happy. This reduced with patching, but still happens usually about once per play session
-it would be nice if you had an toggle-able aura for perception. Instead, you have to right click repeatedly
-often going to a location or person is just done by right clicking as there are not in-game clues to find it on your own
Late game choices are affected by some decisions made elsewhere. Some people that I figured were irrelevant to later game may turn out relevant, so choices made had an impact I was not expecting.
The setting is very uncommon, both the historical era as well as geographically. And developers did a very good job recreating the vibe of the time and place (at least that's what it looks like to a laymen eye). This alone should interest some players as there are not that many games set in similar environment. On top of that backdrop there is a similarly fresh-feeling fantasy world. Both take center stage in the plot of the game.
The setting is populated with many great characters, on both on "the good" and "the bad" side. And it's very unclear at times which side is which, great stuff. Also the protagonist can be very different based on how we want to play and which choices we make. The story has several endings, some distinguished in only details but others being completely different. There is a great replay value here, and even if played once, the game will still take a good amount of time.
Music and sound design is very fitting, if not especially memorable. I have some small complaint to the Polish dubbing: at times it sounds too clean, as if the proper context was lost on performers. It's fine most of the time though. Graphically the game is nice, but it's not a looker in compared to other new titles.
And here we start getting into some (small!) annoyances. I think the optimization could be better: even on a strong PC there are small stutters here and there. It's not a big problem in a title like this, and locking the frame rate made it less visible.
Slightly bigger issue is the combat: while fun all the way to the end in my opinion, if you do most of the side quests you can end up quite overpowered and the combat can become repetitive (though I still had a good time and never shied away from it). But then, depending on your choices, you can end up in a boss battle so much more difficult that after several attempts I caved and lowered the difficulty.
All in all this is a very good game, easy to recommend to any RPG player.
