Julia O

To start, I am running this on a PS4. And never has a game made me want to upgrade to a Pro more. And I've played RDR2 and GoW4 on my regular PS4 with no complaints. This game is not at all optimized for these systems. From what I've read it has issues performing without glitches on every system. Hopefully this will be fixed with a patch, but it is a GLARING issue that a lot of reviews seem to leave out that shatters your gameplay experience and immersion. Anyway, just beat the game and have a very love/hate relationship with it. It really is a mix of Sekiro+Uncharted+Metroidvania. It's very satisfying to find hidden items (even if it is just another ugly poncho), as long as you don't mind inevitable "I should've made that jump what happened" moments that pop up at times. I enjoyed the story, I enjoyed reading every bit of data that BD-1 saw, and I enjoyed the characters. That said, BD-1 is a national treasure and became the only thing going at times. That is because combat, when it shines, feels good and fluid. Although most of the time you are fighting frame rate drops, glitching enemies, and Cal's clunky movement times and all of these issues would frequently clash at once to make the enemy difficulty more a fault of the engine than the actual enemies. Which is a huge problem in a Sekiro-like game where timing is everything And honestly, I don't know if it's just me but I spent the entire game trying to fully understand why counterattacks only worked some of the time when I successfully parry-blocked with the same type of enemy. Maybe it's the game, maybe it's a logic that is beyond me. On to the visuals, the Uncharted, cinematic scenes? Amazing. The worlds? The groundwork is there, they do look nice but the textures tend to make a lot of things look flat, and the lighting does it no favors, this is something I see very frequently in UE4 games, which is a shame...character models and assets, even during cutscenes, will take 2-5 seconds to load fully. This game tends to look more like a 2016 game than a 2019 one. Kasshyk was an asset-loading nightmare. So, did I beat the game? Yes. Was it enjoyable? For the most part. Would I recommend it? Not until they patch this so it is actually playable. Not even BD's adorable run when they found something to scan is enough to carry the game right now. (Also there's no post-credits scene to my knowledge, FYI)