Recent reviews by its actually joever

Another Ubisoft game that I for some reason thought wasn't gonna be like all the other Ubisoft games. Its bearable if you install mods + only play the story and nothing else. Basically treat it like a linear game that lets you drive to each story level in a fictional chicago. None of the side content has any creativity or inspiration whatsover, just copy paste busy work

It kicks ass, amongst other things. The demo is a good way to try out the game and decide if you like it, but lets be honest its 3D hotline miami with slightly worse music

Really fun. Microtransactions are non-existent, if they do exist they are purely cosmetic, everything that gives you an advantage/edge in the game is earned through play. Feels like playing Sea of Thieves but there is much more things you can do.

For almost two hours and $15 you get to hold up on your stick to walk forward while learning virtually nothing about the world you inhabit, discovering snake thingys in the sky that don't like you (why? you will never find out) to climb a mountain (why? you will never find out). When you reach the summit... energy? Something? will shoot out and the game will end. You will watch a credits scene roll and wonder how on earth so many people were involved in a game where basically nothing happens and so little assets are involved. I guess the soundtrack is alright?

I would be less salty if this game was made by a solo indie dev and released for free, but I can't believe a full sized team made this and charged actual money for it. Steer clear if you value actually doing things when you play video games. If affixing a rubber band on your controller so it holds joystick up for you to walk forwards and just watching the scenery sounds like fun for you, by all means give them $15 for this "gaming experience". But honestly if you like exploratory games I'd just recommend you play something like Abzu or Outer Wilds if you want more of a story line.

A fun, short experience and I'm glad I tried it! It's really fun to play with a close friend or significant other :)

I don't think I can recommend this game at this time. It is very limited in content. I believe I have played demos that have more content than the game currently does. There seem to be only four maps, and they are small. I thought that the kayak races would have you go through long routes in these worlds, but instead they have you doing little loops and turns in a small area. I think the arctic level for instance, was about the size of Halo 3's The Pit map. I assumed this game was early access and I'm shocked to find out its not. I was going to not write a review but when I saw it wasn't in early access I decided to write this. It just simply isn't enough content to justify being a released game @ $22 or whatever it was I paid at. I know they have a roadmap and it is listed that new levels would come in it, but it also contains a disclaimer that says basically "We can just simply not follow this roadmap at any time if we feel that is best to do"

edit: Tried the game again after a few months, it just crashes Unreal Engine now and I can't even play it. Yeah, hard pass

Buggy as all hell. I thought I was being smart by waiting over a year to play this game. I waited a tiny bit longer for patch 1.5 to drop, thinking the game would finally be fixed. It's still a buggy mess and only an hour in I could see how screwed up night city was. Cars clipping each other, copies of the same NPC walking everywhere (Wow NC has a lot of twins inhabiting it that like to dress exactly the same too), and the performance of the game is the worst part:

I destroy the Recommended specs, and on top that recently picked up an RTX 3070 Ti. In short here were my avg fps just standing still, not really doing anything (it also drastically varies depending on if you're inside or outside):

Raytracing Ultra @ 1440p: around 25fps
Lowest graphics @ 720p (lol): around 40fps

As one can see, turning down the graphics doesn't really solve the problem, in my case I was able to squeeze out 15 more fps but in the end the game could STILL dip into the 20s, even at lowest settings. WITH A 3070 TI. I found out that this is due to the game being horribly optimized for my CPU (AMD Ryzen). Apparently the CPU does not allow the GPU to be utilized (I had 6% utilization on my 3070 Ti). I found out that like with other game studios (*cough* bethesda *cough*), the modding community stepped up to fix the developers game for them. There is a fix for AMD CPUs, its called AMD SMT or something like that and its available within a mod framework called Cyber Engine Tweaks. Be warned though that its not a true fix but its an improvement. I am able to now at least hit at best 80fps, and my GPU reaches ~75% utilization now. This sounds great, except this is my fps when standing still. I've found unfortunately that even with the GPU being used a decent bit and this fps bump, if I start moving around and doing actions in game it crashes back down to 30-40 fps, which leads to choppy gameplay.

TL;DR spin the wheel and if you're lucky this game might run well on your PC, others are saying it did. Or get unlucky like me and its a dogsh*t experience. Hard pass

Edit: I managed to fix my issues finally by updating the chipset drivers for my CPU! The game still has fps drops to 10 fps, but its at very rare moments instead of basically happening the entire time, so the game is actually turning out to be fun. Its still buggy though with strange dialogue glitches and NPCs glitching out, but I can look past them since the game doesn't run like a slideshow anymore. I'd recommend it so far as long as you buy on a platform like steam that allows you to get a refund if it is broken beyond repair on your PC, like it appeared to be for months on mine.

They previously had a very sensible toggle to turn off scenes that may be inappropriate for some players. Now they have elected to remove those scenes entirely from the game. These scenes are actually quite important to the game and this decision doesn't really make any sense.

That is what inspired me to write this review (to voice my discontent), but also I should mention now that the playtime is really bad for the price ($25 USD). I beat the entire story mode in ~1.25 hrs. I think for the time spent on development and the experience, and the little bit of replay value, it's worth more like $10 USD. I think of this game as like buying a ticket to a movie. A short experience but its worth it. Well, it was at least.

Extremely buggy mess. Game crashed a couple of times, I think I've died twenty times to my character diving headfirst into the ground because I held down the sprint button while jumping a wide gap and he thought I wanted to pull out my wingsuit, other interactions in the game are a mess. Very long loading times even on a machine thats only using high speed SSDs for storage. It takes itself half serious, which is annoying because this game is way too buggy and nonsensical for it to have any amount of realism or seriousness applied to it. Animals constantly try to hunt you down aggressively as if you were just covered in squirrel blood constantly + whatever the f*ck honey badgers want to eat. Birds will attack you from the sky but it doesn't matter if you can hear them coming, if you turn to shoot in time, they will seize control of your character and prevent you from shooting your gun magically from 15 feet away as the game starts up a quick time sequence way too early. Stealth is buggy and enemies often can detect you because you killed someone 50+ feet away on the other side of a building, they'll just telepathically instantly communicate to each other that the other guy died or was hit.

(Slight spoilers in this paragraph)
I thought it'd be a bit worse compared to FC5 which is the first ever FC I played and enjoyed, but jeez this one was quite annoying. I have a bad habit of being a completionist gamer. When I have so many games to play and so much other stuff in my life to do besides gaming all day, being a completionist takes up way too much time. But one good thing I can say is this game was bad enough to force even me, a habitual completionist gamer, to stop caring about collecting all the little thing-a-ma-jigs or doing side quests and just finish the damn storyline, which was also a little anticlimatic to be honest. Ending was sour-sweet but mostly sour, and going through the alternative endings it seems clear that this is one of those games where no matter what ending you get its a "damned if you did this, damned if you did that, damned if you did nothing, damned if you did it all" type of game, which for me personally was annoying. I mean, I f*cking conquered all of kyrat and my reward in the final epilogue cutscene is showing both of the potential golden path leaders doing horrible ♥♥♥♥ and repeating the cycles of abuse that the final boss of the game perpetuated.

DLC was so bad I didn't even notice I completed it until I went online and realized the missions I did were the DLC. They were very cookie cutter and nothing was special about them that made them feel like an extended experience to the game.

Its like playing Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars in a language you don't understand