Recent reviews by Carnage

This game is full of game breaking bugs that require a restart, as well as minor bugs that are super annoying, and just bad game design decisions. I spent my first 2 hours trying to fix graphics settings so this thing wouldn't chug on my 1080TI only to hit a brick wall trying to fix the hard-coded TAA that looks like I rubbed vaseline in my eyes and causes artifacting and ghosting everywhere, as well as forced mouse acceleration.

The following I encountered in my next TWO hours

Game Breaking (requires restart):
-Constantly stuck in scan mode, can't fire or interact
-Broken essential NPC pathing into areas that are inaccessible
-Caught on terrain / stuck in jumping animation
-equipment failing to do... something? sometimes the model for whatever you're equipping breaks, sometimes the UI breaks, sometimes all of it breaks and I'm fairly certain you're not receiving any stats

Annoying bugs:
-There's like 12 different models for NPC's, often they spawn in packs of 5-6 all mirroring animations
-NPC spawns (and some enemies) are entirely determined on where you're looking. If you look at two guys on a bench, and do a 360 and look again it will be two different NPC's, this goes for respawning them as well if they are killed or run away.
-Items in the world have a roughly 5% chance for you to not be able to pick it up despite a giant UI icon saying it's there
-clipping clipping clipping
-AI completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ itself in different cases, like talking to someone in combat, or being in an unpathable space
-Items fall out of NPC's hands and spawn copies of their models all over the place

Just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game design:
-Gun play is straight ass and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Firearms are incredibly weak, you can walk up to someone and dome them with a giant hand cannon and it will not do as much as a normal punch with no points in strength
-Game is all around an uninspired looter shooter, really only care about finding the thing with the highest DPS or armor numbers
-Driving is slow and stiff
-Police are scripted to teleport roughly 10 feet behind your back. This is not a joke, you can force 10 high level police to spawn in a massive gaggle-♥♥♥♥ by placing yourself in the right position, this is reliable, repeatable, and occurs in about 8 seconds, also they two shot you with insane accuracy
-every enemy is a damage sponge stat check

Additionally, and this is a very big point.
Origin stories are meaningless are shorter than 20 minute introductions to the movement controls. No matter what origin you choose, you will be a street thug in less than an hour


soooo that was a fun two hours...

Let me be perfectly clear, this game is awful.

Something is clearly wrong here for this game to have such positive reviews. It's not even a matter of something not being my taste, because this game proposes an idea that I am very much down for, and in fact I suspect that is probably the source of the cognitive dissonance between how this game is perceived by it's die-hard defenders and the reality that is the objective quality of this game.

I really tried to enjoy this game, I gave it a fair shot, and this game commits so many cardinal sins of game design that sapped the enjoyment from the entire experience. You may look at the time I invested and think "well at least he got his money's worth, maybe it's worth a shot" but please understand, my overall experience was worse for having played this game. It is actively infuriating, and I finally called it quits while running through the expansion area and found myself actually saying out loud "I am not having fun" it was a completely frustrating experience if anything because what the game pitches as it's idea is so appealing, and under served in the gaming market. With that said though, I'll keep this somewhat brief and just run down a list of things that were solved in game design over a decade ago that pop up in this title.

-Unreactive input buffer that will commit you to actions you wanted to perform seconds ago but would like to cancel now, often leading to death
-Input reading enemies that can even potentially dodge roll on button press infinitely, often leading to death from a second enemy or just because you finally run out of resources trying to actually land a hit
-MASSIVE resource dependency on basic actions, as someone here said well, "I was still going to win, now you just forced me to kite for an extra 90 seconds so I could swing again" this kind of stuff does not equal difficulty or realism.
-Game balanced around player resource management, yet enemies do not adhere to these same resource rules. Which is actually a huge issue when this game wants you to feel like a common adventurer, yet a common bandit that is allowed to run on infinite stamina and mana and has telepathic dodges. This actually just leads to you not feeling like a common adventurer, rather a severely lethargic person in a world full of hero player characters.
-Robotic timed quests across the board. This one is done well in very few instances, such as "if you didn't do this quest within X days of starting it, the corruption has grown too strong to purge" Ok cool, makes sense, waits for me to start the quest, doesn't counteract the games strengths. The vast majority of other quests are literally "I will attack this town/destroy this city in X days unless you stop me" Ok, as comedic and jarring as that is, it takes away from the games one thing that it almost does well which is exploration and freedom of choice. Because now by issuing the player an ultimatum, you are enforcing a play style that is completely contrary to those things.
-General enemy cheese. You're forced to cheese as hard as you can in this game, because the enemies will cheese you. There is no invincibility frames on roll/knockdown or anything and knockdown is incredibly common. You WILL have to patiently crawl through an area, pulling one weak enemy at a time, get a strong one stuck on terrain, snipe it with your bow. poison the strongest and run in circles for 15 minutes for it to die, simply because those are all actually optimal choices compared to participating in what this game calls combat.

Look there is a lot more wrong with this game than I put here, that's not the point. A lot of this games ambassadors will respond with something like "Mad cause it's hard" "It's supposed to be like that" etc, but that's simply not true. There are so many ways to make a game with the ideas that this game is proposing while still adhering to general good practices in game design.

Killing and hindering your players is not hard. You're the game master, at any point you can just kill off your players for any reason. That probably won't be fun for any of the players though, the skill in being a GM is in understanding what your players want to do and giving them the opportunity to meet those challenges. -First thing to learn about game design from some tabletop book a read a long time ago

Extremely clunky, buggy, and at times non-sensible.

Requires Uplay

There's currently a bug at the beginning of the game that prevents progress, wait until patchnotes reference the spiked wall speed (As of 1.0.3)

Abandoned by the dev without finishing, doesn't export .vox, removed 3D view, never updated and buttons don't work. Crashes and has many issues

A prime example of why you shouldn't strive for """realism""" at the cost of gameplay

ded gaem

The developers had to use some insaaane depth of field settings to get this thing running on consoles, however they didn't remove it when it came to PC. I can't recommend this game until there's a fix for the blurriness on anything that's not the back of your character. It's incredibly disorienting.

This game is actually incredible, so incredible it made me put aside my hate for EGS and CSS dumb community manager.