Recent reviews by metafish

Edit: I had left a positive review, but after basically no updates in nearly a full month for a AAA studio that improved anything I can't recommend it anymore. Just wait & see if they ever actually improve the performance.

Definitely playable, but optimization could be much better. Really enjoying it despite the issues, & it runs smooth "enough" with in-game frame-gen to get immersed a bit. Gameplay is engaging; love exploring 1800s Japan; the grounded setting feels great. The world feels rich & populated, & decisions feel like they have some impact (even if that feeling is an illusion, they did a great job in execution).

Overall, really engrossing, satisfying gameplay; combat system rocks; loot is interesting; slow-pace is combined with high-intensity extremelly well.

Having a lot of fun; definitely recommend!

No love for single-player campaign whatsoever; couldn't even be bothered to bring any of the variety of single-player focused online content to offline modes.

Thanks Rockstar, real rich update!

Incredibly optimized on launch & a fantastic extension of the formula set down in the first title. Highly recommend

Have to recommend, but extremely disappointed. Just finishing my second playthrough since launch, & I'm remembering why I left the experience the first time with a weird feeling.

The visuals, the story, the physics & feeling, lighting, sound - impeccable. Puzzles are fun & satisfying, never too hard, but not always immediately obvious. Exploration is satisfying & the game starts off incredible. This stays true, up until midtown.

The midtown section feels like one of the most wasted potentials in the history of video gaming. Where is all the vertical exploration? Why does it feel shorter than even the slums? Everything else is paced so well, but the length of midtown brings the experience down. The area's presentation is fantastic. When you first enter it seems like this is where the bulk of the game is going to be, but this isn't so. Midtown is roughly the same length as every other zone, it only *looks* gigantic. The slums never gives a feeling of linearity, but midtown is riddled with invisible walls, roads that you *could* walk up, but the game doesn't let you. Midtown gives the idea of the sense of freedom, but it's the most on-rails section of the game, especially the factory section. 60-70% of the game should've taken place in midtown, but it's over before you can really dig into the vastness of the setting. Such wasted potential, super disappointing.

7/10 because of the flat endgame.

Would be nice if games that support dualsense on PS5 could be communicated by the devs as to whether or not the feature will be on pc. Just let us know so we don't have to spend our money just to find out. Refunding this because it unfortunately doesn't support the feature, and will play it another way.

Literally the last EA game I ever support until they stop forcing the Origin launcher.

Patch the game or remove it from the storefront, it is completely broken on modern rigs. I don't know much about game dev but I'm sure THQ has enough money to have a small handful of people spend a couple of months fixing bugs in some old games for preservation's sake. Don't waste your money on this.

Cried for about an hour straight. Fantastic pacing, great animation, some really cool twists and turns. It's not what it appears on the surface.

Basically, it's like a Studio Ghibli film turned into a video game.

Highly recommend.

Not being able to manual save really sours the experience for me. There are autosaves after basically every action and dialogue choice. Other games like Mass Effect and The Witcher have these, Bioware games even have it on consoles. In a game that takes so long to play, not being able to sort of test the system and dialogue choices and being embedded immediately for every decision is not respectful of the players time.

I understand the argument that it tells multiple threads in an emergent way, but even Quantic Dream games give you more leeway than this. Having know way of knowing when a decision might be dramatically impactful is nice for storytelling, but if you're playing the game over again a second or a third time, or even the first time, aiming for a specific kind of run, well good luck on doing that without using a guide to know when everything is going to happen.

Like, this is not a bad game, and this design appeals to a bunch of people. But, this really ruins it for me as at 100 hours I've made a mostly pacifist run, then tried to vampire everybody to death in another run only for it to get mucked about because not sucking someone's blood soon enough caused a huge turn in events ruining my chances at two victims. Playing another six to eight hours to get back to this point sounds really unappealing.

On top of this, the game is generally disappointing because it's so close to being fantastic but stops short at being just a pretty decent game.

Definitely wait for a sale if you feel like trying it out.

GTA is not GTA anymore. It's an online game with a GTA skin. Online was always supposed to be an extra to the main game, but now, like a ton of other franchises, the actual game has become secondary, and the whole project is built to squeeze as much money out of us as possible.

Between content updates exclusively for online with zero attention to single-player and performance/graphic updates exclusively for console this game should be thrown in the trash.

The only thing this has really done good is create a huge foundation for the RP communities, but that doesn't mean they made a good game.

The game's trash.