By skyforbes Granted, I haven't played more than a few hours, because I can't force myself to play it any further. So many people have said, however, that the game hooks you immediately and that the introduction alone is nothing short of incredible.
Another thing to bear in mind is that I'm not very experienced with modern turn based combat. But does that even matter when so many who say they normally don't care about turn based combat RPG games already claim it to be game of the year?
Here are some of my thoughts, based on just a few hours of the game (no spoilers):
- The game, while dressed in pretty graphics, feels pretty unpolished. Among the first things happening in the game is that one of your companions talks to you while speeding ahead like The Flash. They're talking casually while a couple hundred metres away from each other. There are invisible walls placed awkwardly which reminds me of several generations older games. The jumping animations look stiff. There's basically no animation for switching characters. And so on.
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That emotional moment everyone's praising is not nearly as impactful to me. I don't know, I don't think there was enough build up for me to care, not enough to the characters. It also doesn't help that some in game reactions to the event immediately after felt weird to me.
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What also made me not care about the emotional moment is the lacking facial animations and voice acting. Sure, there are lots of games in the 2D or 2,5D genre that manages to give feelings despite the lack of both, but a game that sets out to be this high fidelity, 3rd person game needs to do better in that department. Many faces while talking remind me of those in Horizon Zero Dawn before the remaster (which everyone complained about). The voice acting mostly ranges from wooden to annoyingly exaggerated (some sound like Oscar Isaacs' attempt at British in the Moon Knight show) and reminds me in some ways to old movie license games.
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The timing of the dodge/parry mechanic in combat is way too unforgiving and the enemy animations remind me of those in the Soulslike games (a genre which also often is overhyped imo). If I wanted to play a game with such emphasis in timing during combat I'd rather play a character action game or a fighting game with much better flow. I go to turn based combat for strategic depth more than anything else. These mechanics, or rather the way they're implemented, don't add anything of value to me but rather frustration.
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The game simply looks odd to me. I think my problem is the lighting and bloom being so upscaled.
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It's weird to me how the main character is such a blatant clone of Robert Pattinson (who's very popular now and seen everywhere already), without them going the Kojima route and actually hiring him. Since they hired Charlie Cox, why not model the character after him instead?
To me, it feels like being the target of a flash mob where everyone just decided to overhype this game to prank me, lol. And I'm not one of those contrarian guys normally. Most of my favourite games are universally praised. I just can't get this one. I know I'll be massively downvoted for having this opinion, but at least it feels good to get this off my chest haha! Thank you if you read this far!