Rong Yi Lim

10 hours in and honestly, not really worth the hype. Game is jaw dropping gorgeous on a 4K OLED display, with RT and DLSS it runs smoothly most of the time but that’s about it. Story is lackluster and it is quite evident that the game is quite shallow and empty once you get past the visuals. You go from 1 place to another in a linear fashion: kill creeps, kill the boss, next area, rinse and repeat. The biggest letdown is the broken combat mechanics. This game artificially stretches the game time by making your upgrades having little to no impact. You can barely take any hits no matter how much defence, DR or health you have. You can barely cast any more spells no matter how much mana you have. Progression is so slow and meaningless it’s laughable. Bosses have a ton of cheap, overpowered, AOE spells that they keep spamming without any cooldown so you barely even get close to do any meaningful damage. Standing far away to give yourself more reaction time? Forget about it. They can close the distance almost instantly, zip across half the arena and take a huge chunk of your life. Or scatter the whole arena with AOE damage leaving you helpless. The only meaningful defence is the dodge that does jacksh*t because I’ve faced enemies turning 180 mid air to slam unto you, or turn around to swing their weapon at you mid cast. It’s so broken and frustrating. All enemies can cause major knockbacks to you, cancel your animations, cancel your spells midcast with any hit. This broken mechanic + no cooldown spams is truly a double whammy. Comparing to the likes of God of War where a well timed block opens up a window to counter attack, this is just 90% dodging and hopefully you luck out not getting hit by any of the bosses’ broken moves. Thankfully I’m on PC and have the luxury of using trainers to even the odds. I’ll shamelessly say this: I have a full time job and other commitments thus I have limited time per day to play. Retrying over and over again at ridiculously broken bosses isn’t something I would want to spend my precious time on. Get this on sale perhaps.

TLDR; How i missed the old series, seems like Santa Monica has completely loss the plot with God Of War in this reboot. What happened Santa Monica? Seems like they took this IP and butchered it since 2018. I loved the 2018 GoW but this, just no. So much content being recycled and Atreus is back as being more annoying than ever. (Who thought it was a good idea to play as him? Remember TLOU2? There you go.) Pros: Christopher Judge is back. Stunning visuals, generally bug free (after a few patches) in sweet 60FPS Cons: Bad gameplay. The upgrade mechanics is shallow at best with not much thought put into it. You are locked behind progress walls and can only get the ingredients as you progress through the story. This is an extremely bad design as it makes exploration kind of pointless, as there is no purpose to the loot you have collected along the way. And, please stop it with the 'souls-like' model, it's frankly quite tiring. At the end of the day people just want to button mash and see Kratos do insane combos, not dodge & block with precision, and getting punished for not doing so. On 'Give me balance' difficulty, a normal enemy took 1/3 of my health with just 1 attack. It really makes upgrading and collecting ioun apples pointless, doesn't it? Awkward pacing. One moment you are Kratos, one moment you are Atreus. Nobody buys a God of War game to play as Atreus. Weird Script. Why does Odin & Heimdall speak like that? They don't sound like Aesir gods but rather just some random Americans.

After playing for 40+ hours, I would say that CP2077 would have been better off as an action adventure game than an open world RPG. The mechanics are just too shallow and I find mainstream reviewers too generous with their scores (9/10 for this?) What your character does has barely any effect on how the world plays out. Night city is extremely beautiful to look at but beyond that it’s just smoke and mirrors. The world is beautifully crafted with a lot of attention to detail but perhaps that was CDPR’s downfall as well, investing too much time on it and neglecting the rest of the components. NPCs don’t interact with you on a meaningful way and they just go about doing their scripted path whether or not you exist. The game isn’t hard to run; it’s just not optimised to utilise all available resources. I ran the game on a r9 5900x and RTX 3080. Framerate hovers around 55-65 & dips to the 40s at times on 1440p ultra. Lowering graphical settings just reduces my GPU usage and kept around the same frame rate. (I have unlocked the frame rate) Opening up the resource monitor and you could tell that the engine just isn’t utilising the full available power. Bugs aside, there is a fundamental flaw with the game that simply cannot be fixed with patches. None of what you do matters in the game. The game just goes down this linear path of predetermined lines and scripts.

Game is so historically inaccurate it almost felt like a slapped to the face of veterans and those who died for our freedom. If Activision wants to make money out of one of the bloodiest war in human history, the least they could do was to respect the source. I played on veteran difficulty and the whole campaign was more frustrating than challenging. Enemies don't die when shot to the head with an STG44, they just shake it off and get back up. I highly doubt helmets at that time could withstand 7.92x33 Kurz calibre. Multiple shots to the body using a PPSH or MP40 also resulted in the enemy just getting back up like it was nothing. And yes, the AI is absolutely atrocious. AI just seems to ignore everyone and go straight for you, once your head pops up, Bam you're dead. Jap soldiers do their bayonet charge passing your allies (who conveniently ignores the Japs) straight to you, ruining the whole immersion experience. Activison, Sledgehammer - No we do not need a yearly COD. Take your time and release something worth buying instead of regurgitating & reskinning the same garbage every year.

Game is what you'd expect from Ubisoft. The introductory area is pretty much what you will be doing for the rest of the game, just rinsing and repeat for the next 40 hours. It's always the same with Ubisoft titles, You start in a tutorial island, then you find yourself in a map that's bigger than it really needs to be, doing repetitive tasks until you get to face the "Boss" of that region, then moving on and repeating until the game is over. Far Cry 4 you have Pagan Min, FC5 the Seed Family, Ghost Recon: Wildlands, the Cartel, Breakpoint, the Wolves, AC Odyssey, the Cultists; and now, you have the Castillo family - you get the idea. There's really nothing much to do or see while travelling, I got so bored of it I had to download a trainer to teleport myself to a waypoint. But despite all that, the gunplay is solid, graphics is beautiful, and I had 0 crashes on my Rig (R9 5900x & RTX 3080). AI needs a whole lot more work though, I find it ridiculous that enemies investigate the sound coming from YOUR footsteps but not their allies. What, they can tell that I am an enemy just by listening to my footsteps? One time, I was crouching on the 2nd storey and I stood up. The enemy went "I heard that!" and began to climb up to investigate. Seriously? Giancarlo Esposito did a fantastic job as Anton Castillo and if it wasn't for him, this would have been a really generic "open-world" shooter.

I can’t comment on the lack lustre Performance that other PC users experience as I did not experience a single crash in my 20 hours play through. I ran on a R9 5900x and RTX 3080 and game was buttery smooth at a constant 120fps on 1440p. The game’s setting and location was beautiful, amazing voice actors and all the visionaries were so unique with their peculiar habits that made me want to investigate further into their backstory. The visuals were done typically in the Arkane fashion and what I appreciated the most was how every asset / item was original, nothing generic looking and it all fitted into the 60s era. Seriously, the art direction and attention to detail is amazing. This game is a fresh take on the stale FPS genre we have come love and to expect and Arkane did a really good job with Deathloop. However the AI needs a ton of work. Seriously it feels like an AI script from 2001 where they are so oblivious to their surroundings, it’s laughable. I did felt some fatigue towards the end, from 16th hour onwards, as the novelty of “a different setting / experience depending on your time of visit” began to wear off, feeling almost like a gimmick. I couldn’t even be bothered anymore to off the visionaries or collect residium as I just wanted to be done with the leads. But overall, amazing game. It felt both great and a sigh of relief completing the game. Pace was a little slow but it’s alright. Any longer and I would have been bored already. I hope this IP will continue on.