A gem ruined by bad game design
I can forgive the stuff that will be fixed by patches over the next few weeks, but my complaints are more fundamental. The game is too grindy. It wastes your time on stuff that isn't fun, and that ruins the whole experience.
Firstly, I've never seen an FPS with so many junk items. For every minute of combat, you'll spend two minutes looting the environment. If you don't collect the junk items, you can't craft or upgrade your equipment, so psychologically it's hard ignore all these prompts to pick up ashtrays and soda cans. It's really dull shoving your face in bookcases and briefcases to pick mundane crap up after every battle. The game would be much better without collectable items all over the environment, but unfortunately they balanced crafting/upgrading around having so much junk around, so I doubt they're going to fix it.
Secondly, so many of the upgrades are incremental: 10% extra damage, 2% chance of electric discharge, etc. Once you find your preferred weapon type, most character/equipment advances won't affect the gameplay, but you'll be forced to make 1000s of decisions on whether you want to sacrifice 0.1 shots per second for 1.7 more DPS, or whether you want to wear an uglier t-shirt because it gives you 0.6 more defense. These decisions cost time and effort, but rarely give you the satisfaction of having actually improved your experience.
The story, exploration and FPS parts are genuinely fun, but it's hard to enjoy them when they pad the game so much with unnecessary loot management.
9 gamers found this review helpful