Recent reviews by Rook-Alike

My contract-work transport-pilot's melee fighting skills are not smooth and agile and flowing enough. Honestly takes me out of the experience of trying to survive and fight for my life in this dark and horrifying prison environment. On a serious note, this was a fun and satisfying survival horror experience.

DEC 9TH 7:00 EST 1st IMPRESSION: I waited the entire ~8 years for this. With bated breath. I tempered my expectations. And, this game failed...

...to loose any of the charm and depth that I expect from CDPR. Already overwhelmed with the amount of choice and variety. Polish is surprisingly good, seeing as this is CDPR's weakpoint. There are some glitchy issues, but honestly not any more than Witcher 3 had on release. Amusing mainly, only one frustrating one so far. Example of amusing: You look like a weird angel ghost sometimes in the mirror in V's apartment. Lighting and model in the mirror aren't right atm. I'm a black player character and I am ghost white and literally glowing in the mirror. Example of frustrating: I softlocked the game by talking to a quest giver about a new quest as I was finishing a portion of a different quest, given by the same person. Re-load most recent save it is.

The core of the game is there, and it is hyper exciting and compelling; bugs can be fixed. All the NPC's look unique, adding depth to the world. I have never seen so much density and activity in a virtual city. There seem to be a plethora of playstyle-changing attributes to choose from when going through the game: cyberdeck mods, weapon upgrades, 5 large skill trees for the 5 main attributes, cyberware body upgrades, etc. This is the stuff I wanted the most. I wanted the depth and story, with a bunch of cool ways to change my gameplay through character. I have only played a few of the main story missions and a few of the side missions, and they are deep and interesting, just like CDPR is known for. I mean, I ended up pausing in an elevator, instead of getting off, because the random news segment that was playing on the elevator display was actually compelling and relating to the goings on.

Game takes a powerful rig to run. I have not messed with the settings but I'm getting 55-85 FPS with a Ryzen 9 3950x, GTX 2080 TI, 64 GB RAM, and a m.2 Samsung. This is customized all to ultra settings, with RTX totally off and DLSS off. The game actually looks more atmospheric and saturated with RTX off. Seeing as this is the biggest performance boost in the settings, I am happy to keep it off until I can get an RTX 3090 and test RTX while actually playing through some different areas of the game. I tested the settings at Lizzie's club, and when you first step out onto the main street.

Other than the sub-optimal FPS (on my system) for a first person shooter (haha, the FPS FPS)--I like to have 142 FPS for shooters--the gun-play is surprisingly smooth for a shooter done by a studio who has not done one before. I say this coming from Doom 2016 and Eternal (some of my fave games in the shooter genre). However, this is not Doom, obviously. The guns are fun, and have weight and impact when you shoot them. Aiming is good. Plenty of settings for tweaking sensitivity. Including a deadzone adjustment for controllers. Aim assist for both mouse + KB or controller, if you do not want to play this as a skill based shooter, and want primarily story and melee.

Get the game. Support this company. They did us right. I can tell they used every bit of time they had to pack this game full of good things for gaming's sake (if story-driven RPGs with combat are your thing).

Immersion, immersion, immersion. This game does it with its visuals, sounds, and general overall ambiance. Some will find the voice acting to be a little stiff and the story to be a little generic. I can agree with those statements. Not an A+ writing job. However, I feel like the game is partly trying to be corny or generic. You are PART of one of those classic good v. evil horror novels that bored housewives like to read.

The game mechanics can also seem a little clunky at first. Especially looking around. It is annoying at first, but I found this to be mainly because the mechanics are so different. You look over one of the main character's two shoulders (you can alternate with a button) and this adds to the claustrophobia and panic the game is serving you.

If you want to try something enjoyable and different, I definitely recommend playing this game.

!!!ATTENTION!!! This review comes with only an hour or so of playing the game. It will focus on the things that for me personally made the game unplayable or at the very least, not compelling enough to keep playing.

Without further ado, in no particular order here are my gripes:

• The movement is clunky and unresponsive in order to get a realistic feeling of moving around. This is not a feature I like in games, I prefer a more "HL Series/CS" approach than a "Call of Duty" approach to movement. Also, the normal movement--not walking mind you--is to me, unbearably slow.
  
• Something I noticed immediately, there is a huge discrepancy between menu mouse sensitivity and in game sensitivity. To get a comfortable in-game sens., the menu sens. is un-usably slow.
  
• Combat is very repetetive. Just hack and slash. If there is any more depth than that, the game failed to explain how combat works.
  
• Exploration is very repetetive, offering no enticing rewards for the effort of clunkily moving around, checking all bags and nooks and crannies for generic items that are used to craft generic upgrades for weapons or sell for money.
  
  If you love zombie games and repeatedly hacking/bashing enemies, then this game might interest you. For me, not so much. If you have to buy it, get it during a sale along with the DLC for a steal price. Any other price is too much for this game.