Recent reviews by archon fey

Coming from someone whose favourite games are like Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout: New Vegas...... this game is great. It's worth playing. It ain't perfect but if you actually like RPGs, you'd be doing yourself a disservice to skip this one. I run it on a decent-but-not-amazing gaming PC and I had some very minor visual glitches (floating cigarettes mostly) and maybe 2 crashes throughout nearly 200 hours of gameplay. I'm not gonna defend the console launch, though, because there's no excuse for that.

The Good:
1- V's voice acting. Both male and female V are amazing and believable. Some RPGs with a voiced protagonist fail to feel like a coherent character. The minor downside to this is that V has a personality and you are confined within it to some extent, just like Mass Effect's protagonist or Geralt in the Witcher. You definitely have some influence on the character, but V is not a blank slate and it's actually a good thing because you end up with Dragon Age's Inquisitor when you try to add voice acting to a blank character and we don't want a repeat of that ♥♥♥♥.

2- Storytelling/Plot. The game has some majour themes that are present from the start and some great foreshadowing about the game's endings. The main characters you interact with are well-written, especially Johnny Silverhand, Judy, and Panam. The endings range from outright sad to barely bittersweet, which is appropriate for the setting. Night City is a terrible place and yet people are drawn to it... even the player. The only other game to give me the same feeling after finishing the main story was Enderal. It's a difficult experience to capture, and it has left me thinking about the game's ending for days after finishing it.

3- Majour NPC Design and Animations. The people you talk to look amazing and have some really great character quirks in their animations. You definitely should not be skipping through dialogue on a first play through.

The Bad:
1- NPC AI. Yeah it's not good. Enemies are sluggish sometimes. I can sometimes run up to people with a katana out and kill two of their friends in front of them before they start actually reacting to my presence. Random NPCs throughout the city are goofy as ♥♥♥♥, too, but that can be ignored easily at least.

2- The Police and Crime System. Cops just teleport in when you commit a crime for some reason. You're safe if you drive off because the cops have no driving AI apparently. Dumb AF, but doesn't have an impact on the game's main story.

3- Difficulty, or Lack thereof. Played on 'Very Hard' which is the highest difficulty setting. The first hour you feel like you don't do ♥♥♥♥, but after that there was pretty much no challenge in the game. I actually screwed up my build really badly too and didn't have the points to do crafting to get the actual good gear, and I still breezed through the game after getting even a small amount of skill points. I did have to change my playstyle to defeat the 'secret ending' which involves a solo battle against a bunch of enemies that are always max level--but I blame that on my poor build choices. And once I changed the weapon I was using, it went back to being a joke. I'm not really too mad about the difficulty being weak because I'd prefer that over bullet spongey enemies, but it was boring to finish up side quests at max level.

Overall, I'd give it 8/10 (on PC) and I will definitely be playing DLC when we get it. Also we better get a damn barbershop added because I restarted after 7 hours on my first character because I couldn't stand the awful hair choice I had made. ._.