Dark R Reaper

Played on the 2nd hardest difficulty mode, but my experience and review has nothing to do with the difficulty (despite almost all difficulties being available at the beginning of the game, which is an interesting choice). (This is coming from a man who has played Nier:Automata on hard difficulty. The main character feels and moves incredibly slowly even though it feels as though her character is meant to capitalize on speed. New weapons feel useless as the whip is all you really need 90% of the time. It's near impossible to tell if enemies are in hit-stun or not leading to unforeseen damage. Her whip sometimes misses enemies and environmentals on the ground but far less than some of her other weapons. This hit-box issue is only increased in aerial combat. Is it so much to ask that my giant 20 ft whip hit the creature standing an inch in front of me? The writing of the story seems lazy. Item descriptions are incredibly hard to read without slowing down your entire gameplay experience. Doesn't do a good job recapping the series in any way shape or form. The actions of characters don't make a whole lot of sense at all. Fury feels POed for no reason or has every reason to be but isn't. NPCs run through the same 2 lines of dialogue over and over when you speak to them, particularly the shopkeeper. It's like either talk to me like a real man or just stop talking. Voice acting is good and voice actors seem motivated as they probably never saw the design of the game before release. Speaking of sound, the sound will cut in and out of the game as the game lags. When combined with the slow-mo that characters (boss, fury, random bug-like enemy) are nearly always in, the non-existent hit-stun animations, and the controls (I'll get to them in a second), the game feels incredibly unresponsive. Fury also runs incredibly slowly in comparison to that massive world that she is in. She can't even outrun basic enemies and it takes a whole 60 frames to turn, which is incredibly slow as the game runs at a whopping 30 frames per second on PS4 (and appears to be locked there). The controls are not grand. In the default game mode, the game forces you to hold down L2/Left trigger/(whatever mouse key they decided to use on PC, I can only imagine) to lock on to enemies. It's not that hard to create a lock on system guys, on or off is all you need. Dodging is non-multi-directional, you can choose to dodge in one of 4 directions, but often if the game is unsure of your choice it chooses the forward direction. The graphics aren't too bad. Hair moves fine, armor is somewhat stagnant but there, nothing phases in and out of existence (this is a positive for this game).Water animations are kind of weird like every step seems to create a tidal wave around her leg. I know fury is a big woman but I don't think that water is supposed to move like that. I have never deleted a free game via PS Plus faster from my system. I didn't play the original release of this game and now I'm glad that I didn't. This is essentially the first negative game review that I've ever done on my blog, but I feel that it needs to be said.