Well, I'm certainly getting what I asked for when I went back on my word and bought this game because of the bad word of mouth for the PS4 version. This game looks incredible in motion with all the filters turned on, it's an absolute digital mess. At times it feels like I'm experiencing a weird sort of watercolor world and I've created this sort of headcanon where this is all actually taking place in a Matrix of some kind.
Unfortunately, having just finished The Pickup, I'm finding the gameplay pretty subpar. The menus are confusing as hell and clearly not designed for a controller at all. I decided to pick Hard difficulty for...no clear reason other than it sounded like Rob Zacny was recommending it, but for me all that means is dumping dozens of rounds into each enemy while overdosing on med huffs. I've always found stealth in first person inscrutable and that hasn't changed here so the couple combat encounters I've had where stealth seemed viable I just ignored it as quickly as I could.
I also don't really understand the Watch Dogs bits of the game, I'm just opting for the blinding effect as often as I can for now.
The first boss fight was pretty lame and seemed like it would have gone on forever...if I hadn't had about a dozen frag grenades, which I just chucked all of at his feet and ended him in about a minute. But then Jackie warped through the door to exit the area and I wasn't able to open it on my own...so I restarted and did that all over again...
Afterward I ran into a pedestrian while on the phone with Dex and the game hard crashed. I reloaded and had to do that fight a third time, attempted to go do a side gig involving Pachinko machines and on my first shot fired...the game hard crashed, and after reloading I had to do that boss fight again...
So I decided to skip the side gig and go straight to The Afterlife, only I ran into a pedestrian and the game hard-locked for a few seconds to load the tooltip about police. I was so close to Jackie I assumed the game might work like a GTA where if I activated the quest before the police arrived I could just ignore the consequences but while we were talking on the streets the police arrived and started shooting. Jackie continued to ignore them while delivering his dialogue about his mom, so I tried to rush into the club for safety but couldn't open the door...and couldn't take out any weapons because the game thought I was indoors or something, so died and turned off the game.
All that was a real bummer because last night I didn't encounter anything like that, it was just a blurry mess that I was pretty into. Well, I did wander into an undercover cop's hotel room and loot everything in the room, even walking right up behind her without her reacting...but when I doubled back to check for anything I might have missed, I noticed her laptop and attempted to log on but she immediately swiveled around, yelled at me and pulled her gun. I'd have gladly handled her passively like the fixer had asked me to but the game made that encounter so difficult to read we wound up in an awkward shootout.
Otherwise, the sound design is awesome, the voice work is good (Jackie isn't great but he isn't as lame as the preview made him out to be) and I love how dense the game feels even if it occasionally makes it confusing to navigate, I'll trade map legibility for what I've seen so far. I'm very interested to meet more characters and see more locations, and what little I've seen of the weapons so far makes me optimistic I'll find some overpowered weapons that trivialize a lot of the combat in fun ways.
But so far I'm a little taken aback by how unbalanced this game is between excellent and awful with almost no room for any mediocrity. I guess the lore stuff is mostly mediocre, but I expected that as I often find games set in the future - but not the far, outer space future - have a much tougher time creating fiction that isn't cheesy or hamfisted.
Anyway, add my voice to the legion crying out that the PS4 version as it stands is a total waste of money unless you're just morbidly curious as I was.
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