Steele Johnson wrote on Sep 27, 2022, 13:28:
I waited mainly due to youtubers that I’ve watched play it, pointing out some crazy defects and performance issues. And because I didn’t have a current gen gfx card at the time of the game’s release, there was no way in hell I was going to pay full price. Waiting a year or 2 for fixes and a sale is sometimes the way to go, especially these days
So I just picked it up on the 50% off sale and I had similar to you on the release. I didn't have a card capable of running it, but did some upgrades this past year. Visuals are very nice, but it definitely is a "console first" title. I'm not crazy far into the game, but the opening quest line was pretty dang good I thought, even if it was very "on rails" where it didn't really feel much like your choices made much difference.
It definitely feels like GTA. Constant phone calls and messages with offers of side quests as I drive around, but not much guidance on how to turn that off so you can just enjoy the game and concentrate on your mission. In one particular part I was listening to the dialog from an AI taxi-cab and my phone rang and just took it over, so I missed half of the dialog. Driving with KB and mouse is a challenge for me, but that could just be my lack of skill. Driving with the controller seems to be the way to go. I have a wireless controller that turns itself off, and it will pause the game EVERY TIME to tell me to turn it back on. If I unplug my keyboard it doesn't pause....one of the reasons I say it's very console focused.
Dialog options on the quests are very limiting, you don't really get to play your character how you want (so far for me) or ask any real questions that a normal sane person would ask in lots of the situations. The "net" doesn't seem to have much ability to search for or look up information, but again maybe that's just me not knowing how to use it. Vendors all over the place, but you can't talk to most of them, for example the food stall vendors. You'll get spam e-mail, but can't talk to the food vendors so I know it's not like they're trying to eliminate useless stuff. A lot of the dialog choices you pick aren't ACTUALLY what you say, sometimes it's not even what the choice was. I think they're going for "A/B, True/False, "Good Guy/Bad Guy".
From where I am in the story, it sounds like there's a time limit, but so far I haven't see one actually exist.
The gangs don't seem to actually do anything except spawn scripted quests or random "attack on civilian" pop-up quests. I had a couple interactions in scripted scenes with gang leaders where they're all nicey-nicey with me, but then I walk out a door and their random gang members decide to attack me. Again, I've tried not to read much on the game in advance so maybe gangs will play into it more later? They're your bog standard "Guy dressed like this, uses this weapon, and is a caricature of this type of person" gang members, like GTA-V.
You can't just respec your character without download a save editor or mod program, which I always find silly in a single player game. I guess you can respec your talents, but not your attributes. Unless you go read a bunch of guides in advance, you may put attribute points where you don't want them down the line. I already had a "what?" moment when it came to my attribute points and just downloaded the mod program to move around my attribute points so I could change my playstyle.
I know that all sounds like I don't like the game, but overall I'm happy with it and I'll get some good playtime out of it...although I doubt I'll finish it unless I just power through the main story and skip most of the side quests. For $30 I'm happy with it and would recommend it if you have a system that can run it well since I really fell like the graphics, voice acting, and just "Feel" of the city are the biggest draws. You do have to put up with a game built around consoles and some very cheesy shoe-horned in parts of the story, but those can be overlooked. If you can deal with "Harry Potter" level of "magic works when it's convenient" style of story telling, it won't be an issue. I can, so I do enjoy it to an extent.