Andrew Dahlbacka

Even on PS5/XBSX, this game is a buggy nightmare. Buildings, NPCs, weapons, vehicles, enemies, almost every object in this game often experiences incredibly delayed or broken rendering or some kind of irritating glitch. In not even 40 hours of playing, I’ve seen the following: Characters’ faces taking so long to render at times that you can watch them turn from a fuzzy mass of polygons to a somewhat recognizable human being over the course of a good 5 to 10 seconds. Sometimes buildings or parts of the ground don’t load in correctly, causing you to clip under the city and fall to your death over and over and over again because the game recognizes that you’ve gone out-of-bounds but has no idea what to do about it, soft-locking you out of the game until you close it out and reboot because it just keeps respawning you under the map. Annoying audio glitches where the sound will cut in and out at random intervals. Seriously, it really breaks the immersion when I fire a shotgun or a sniper rifle and it doesn’t make any noise whatsoever, or the sound is delayed, or when sounds get caught in a loop and don’t stop when they’re supposed to, or when the hustle and bustle of an entire city completely disappears. Sometimes enemies will still say dialogue even after you’ve killed them. Seriously, on more than one occasion I’ve seen dead bodies yell at me as if we were still in combat. Invisible weapons. I have clips saved to my PS5 of weapons not rendering at all. I’m killing bad guys with invisible guns. Sometimes NPC vehicles don’t spawn in until you’re getting run over by them, or hitting them with your own car. I’ve watched both NPC civilians and enemies alike clip through walls like they aren’t even there. My point being, this game is riddled with visual and audio bugs. Even on next-gen hardware. It’s poorly optimized. I can’t even begin to imagine how this game plays on PS4/Xbox One. It plays the best on high-end PCs, but even that can’t save the game from being a buggy mess. But, even after all of that, it’s a good game when everything works the way it’s supposed to. When everything clicks together and there aren’t any bugs, it’s a really good time. Fun story missions, engaging combat, lots of customization options for both appearance and character progression, etc etc. It has potential to be a really great game. It just wasn’t ready to be released yet. Easily could’ve used another 6 months to a year in development. But gamers are impatient as hell. If you want to experience this game the way the developers intended, don’t buy it for PS4 or Xbox One. Seriously, they never should’ve put this game on previous gen hardware. Get yourself a PS5/XBSX or a dedicated gaming PC and then play it after they patch the bugs and upgrade it from last gen to current gen. It’ll be much closer to the product everyone hoped it would be. It still won’t be a genre-defining title, but it’ll be worth the money you spent on it.