Recent reviews by spaceboots

Guys, you simply cannot lose 2-3 hours of progress because you have to leave. Read the tutorial, it's made extremely clear that the game saves at every level transition. A level takes 15-25 minutes to complete, so that is the most you can *ever* lose if you have to instantly leave and must shut the game down. The highest possible estimate for how much time you would lose to an average interruption is something like 12 minutes, and if you're very unlucky and are at the very end of a level but HAVE to leave instantly you may lose 25 minutes in this worst-case scenario. That sucks, I get it. But it's not hours of progress. A momentary distraction comes near the end of a level? Just pause the game and finish the run when you get a second. This isn't actually an issue in my eyes especially compared to a lot of roguelikes (I simply can't play RoR2 for example because of its save system), I had to leave a lot while playing and never lost significant progress at any point.

If you're reading negative reviews about how the game is unplayable for people with a job or children, ignore them completely. I don't have the ability to sit and play for long sessions and have interruptions all the time, yet the most progress I ever lost was when my power went out and sent me back by about 10 minutes. I don't know if people just don't know how to read or can't see the save icon or whatever, but you don't lose a *run* when you quit the game. The save system is a non-issue unless you genuinely can't play for more than a few minutes at a time, and the ability to instantly return to the shop with everything intact nullifies any problems entirely.

Finally getting to the review, the game is very good. It's paced very well to keep feeding you new content and gameplay until about the 25 hour mark, and if you were to rush through the game you'd finish the story in 15ish hours. If you get a lot out of progression that's one of Pacific Drive's strongest points; upgrading your car feels fantastic and the progression tree will keep you occupied for as long as you want to keep playing. For me (not a completionist, but I am generally pretty thorough) my playthrough lasted around 31 hours; if I were more geared towards completion filling out the entire tech tree would take about 50 and I think the gameplay loop would run out of steam long before that point, so completionists beware.

The game runs pretty well for how good it looks, but cranking shadows up (which is the most important setting for making the game look good) takes my performance down by half going from Medium to Ultra. On my 1070ti and Ryzen 5 2600x I averaged 65fps and basically never saw a dip below 55fps at all Ultra settings with Medium shadows, which dropped to 35 avg/30 min on Ultra shadows. I imagine an up to date PC could easily crank out 80+fps on maxed settings, but being able to stay over 60 with almost maximum settings on my ancient rig is pretty solid considering how good the game looks as a whole. It's not fantastically optimized, and an improvement to performance on high shadow settings would be welcome, but it's far from an unoptimized game as well.

Visuals: 8/10
Atmosphere: 10/10
Performance: 6.5/10
Stability: 9/10, I have never had a crash but some reviewers say they have issues with crashing
Soundtrack: 10/10
Story: 7/10, the story is above average and the voice acting is excellent which bumps it up a notch
Gameplay Loop: 8/10, it's serviceable and is carried by really satisfying progression and fun driving mechanics, but harvesting resources can get slow and repetitive at times
Accessibility: 9/10, the only game I've played with a more robust suite of accessibility settings for gameplay is Celeste with its assist mode, which is saying a lot.

Overall: 8.4/10, This is one of the best games of the year so far in my opinion.

PROS:
Art Design
Music
Great Voice Acting
General aesthetic polish
Unique blend of XCOM + stealth that works surprisingly well and doesn't fall apart as quickly as it should on paper

CONS:
Lategame difficulty scaling is terrible and breaks the flow of the game
Performance is atrocious
An obvious dominant strategy emerges and is essentially forced onto you by mission design
The difference in power levels between characters is enormous
An entire character is behind a paywall

OVERALL: 6/10

This is very much a "mixed" review for a lot of reasons, I wish there was more nuance on the recommended scale. The major issues with the game are with the performance and how difficulty is scaled into the lategame, and both of these things hold back the game enormously and are very difficult to solve for different reasons.

First, performance is simply not good. This game is remarkably hard to run at playable framerates on anything but the finest graphics cards; with my 1070ti my frames peak at 50 and generally hover in the mid-30s on basically minimum settings. I don't know how much can be done on this front at this point. It's annoying, and if you have the "standard" setup with a 1060 and a decent processor this game will be basically unplayable on minimum settings, which is always a shame.

The difficulty scaling is an issue that kinda cuts down to the core of the game, on the other hand. In the lategame, missions are made harder by simultaneously clumping more enemies together and making a higher proportion of enemies immune to stealth takedowns. There was a mission I played recently where a group of 8 and another group of 4 enemies, all immune to stealth kills, were clumped up in one area. Fighting them in combat without taking at least one stress break (an instant reset condition due to an absurdly harsh post-mission punishment) would be near-impossible, yet none of the enemies can be taken down out of combat either.

This leads to the style of gameplay that will define the late stage of every campaign, and the biggest single problem with the game: luring enemies across the map until they're separated from their group, then ganging up on them. This is simultaneously extremely tedious due to a total lack of useful tools for luring enemies (meaning you run into their detection circle and stay around the edge of their vision to repeatedly cause them to chase you), extremely punishing since getting fully detected by this enemy will trigger combat with the entire area, and totally unrewarding once you do kill them. But if you've played the game you'll know this is the only viable way to clear many later missions, and this is a really serious problem. It shouldn't be possible to do, yet it's the also only way to approach a lot of late encounters. Until this issue is addressed entirely this game can never break the 6/10 mark for me.

This is a stealth game with combat as a failure condition, but it forces you to do more and more combat the further you get if you don't want to cheese everything using luring tactics. This loop just doesn't work for me, and I don't think it'll work for you either. Just to clarify, I love turn-based tactical combat; I'm a fire emblem and XCOM nerd and love Shadowrun as well, but this game doesn't have any of the things that make those games' combat systems so great, and long battles are an absolute slog due to the lack of depth.

To get deeper into the combat, there are two characters who can essentially infinitely gain action points if certain conditions are met, and these characters are extremely strong in comparison to the rest of the cast. One of them can also exploit this to near-infinitely chain their signature/ultimate ability, and successfully doing this is by far the best way to deal with combat against large groups, to the point where this character, Celestine, is essentially indispensable for every lategame mission.

Character progression is designed in such a way that greatly rewards simply sticking to 3 main agents and 1 supplementary (since some mission types allow 4 characters and most allow 3). The experience cost of powerful abilities ramps up pretty drastically and those lategame abilities are still a much better use than taking a bunch of low-level stuff on a peripheral character. There's critically no way to assess a mission and its goals beforehand to tell which agents you should ideally bring, since this more depends on the spread of enemy types and the nominal objective means very little on this front. So the strategy that makes the most sense is to pump up 3-4 characters to max as soon as possible and never deploying any characters outside your main team. The fact that the game basically screams that this is the intended way to play, however, doesn't prevent them from having one of the most bizarrely punishing mechanics with no workaround.

When an agent or enemy is missed by an attack and hit by certain abilities, they will gain Stress points. When this bar is filled, for the next 2 turns the character will be reduced to 1 Action Point instead of 2, and will be vulnerable to an execution, and instant kill. As far as I know the enemies are not capable of using execution moves, but even if they were and that was the only punishment for being stress broken, it would be many times less punishing than the current setup. A character being downed in combat can be stabilized, returning them to half health, and this can be done up to 3 times in a mission. The post-mission cost is that if the agent enters another mission the next week they can only be revived twice when downed, but this can be totally circumvented by spending an abundant medicine currency that has no other uses. Early on it can matter, but lategame there's never a reason to worry about agents going down. After being stress broken a single time, however, there is a 3-week crippling debuff applied to the character and these are so harsh that the character must sit out for that entire time. There is no mechanic for healing this or making the debuffs less severe, meaning a stress break is esentially infinitely worse than allowing that agent to be downed, and you should instantly reset to your last save if it happens.

A unique character is locked behind a paywall at launch, which is just silly and totally predatory in my opinion, but I'm a person who thinks that about any paid DLC so take that with a grain of salt. My playthrough did not include this character so they may significantly affect the balance of the cast as discussed previously.

There are some baffling design decisions that hold this game extremely far back from its potential, and I hope that these will be addressed because the core game here really is great. But until some massive balance changes come out, don't pick this game up unless there's a large sale, because the lategame is a total disaster currently. Some of the problems mentioned suddenly appear out of nowhere as the game progresses and some mechanics randomly disappear due to bizarre balancing, when these things would be on more of a sliding scale if they were implemented better.

This is a mediocre souls-like with decent but weightless combat, poor visual design, and poor boss design, but most notably exceptionally bad level design. Genuinely the cathedral is the worst area I've ever experienced; I'm not exaggerating when I say it would take nearly half an hour to run through if you already knew the route and there were no enemies and multiple hours on your first playthrough (the scale of it is beyond absurd), and combined with absolutely atrocious architecture and repetitive visuals it's a mind-numbing slog to get through. Well-constructed areas are one of the most important aspects of the souls games, and this one is so far off from that standard that its best areas couldn't even be compared to the worst levels in the Soulsborne line.

It's also extremely easy, with little challenge at any point except for unfair gank bosses that don't move at different speeds and are therefore impossible to separate unless you use a partner. Virtually every boss is either a total pushover or an annoying multi-enemy fight, and not a single one of them is memorable. Most enemies have extremely low poise and getting one hit with a heavy weapon ends 95% of 1v1 encounters with an infinite stunlock, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility to clear an area entirely your first time through without even taking a single hit. The difficulty also means you don't have to engage with any of the game's systems; you could never use a single gift, never transform a weapon, never exchange valuables, never use your blood veil, and you'd still cruise through the game. Some of these are actually good ideas that never become meaningful because the game is too easy.

Back to the visual design for a moment, the animations and background scenery are underwhelming at the best of times, and stretch all the way to downright awful. Combat animations for some weapons aren't terrible, but they completely lack weight and feel robotic. As a whole bosses are animated very poorly, with telegraphs being difficult to distinguish and with very unintuitive movesets on even the best bosses. Like I already mentioned, the Cathedral is a hideous level, but it doesn't get a ton better than that at any point. The scenery is boring and largely incoherent, none of these places feel like a real world. There are no pretty areas at all: the setting is as generic of a post-apocalypse as you've ever seen, and it's all a drab greyish-brown. I had to take multiple breaks per session to avoid eye strain.

I don't really have much else to say; if it goes on sale for $10 or less I could possibly recommend it with a caveat: just quit playing once you see "Cathedral of the Sacred Blood" appear on your screen and you'll get a good 7-8 hours of gameplay out of it if you're a souls veteran. This is a terrible way to spend $60 on steam; if you still really want to get it after reading this far into a scathing review, buy an activation code from a third party if you can't wait for a sale.

The game's ok, but it lacks replayability. The campaign is only a few hours long and there's not much to come back for after that. 7/10, but good value for the money.

One of the best games I've ever played. Every character feels like a real person, with flaws, years of life experience, scars, and a real perspective on the society they live in. The writing is unmatched by any other game I've experienced, and I mean that seriously. But it's not a game for everyone. The gameplay is slow, there's no time crunch to do anything (as far as I can tell you can wander around as much as you want without any time passing until you speak to someone or do something), there's very little action, and there are multiple novels' worth of dialogue in a single playthrough. It's somewhere on a spectrum between classic adventure games and old-school open world RPGs, although it shares a lot more with point-and-click games than it does with Fallout and Wasteland. It's video game storytelling at its finest, but there is a complete lack of tactical or mechanical challenges that may be offputting to a lot of players. However, if you're interested at all in something matching this description or are simply a fan of point-and-click adventure games or story-based RPGs, Disco Elysium is one of the best gaming experiences to be had.

Although I experienced some technical difficulties with co-op mode, the game is super fun so far. Definitely play with a friend and you'll have a blast. The art style is one-of-a-kind, the music ranges from decent to fantastic, and the story is surprisingly touching and relatable.

Overall, it's pretty fun. The character's movement is jerky, almost like the characters are locked to a pixel grid but the camera isn't? Not sure what's going on with that, but I could definitely see that causing headaches. Also, there are some aspects of boss design that I would go as far as to call objective design errors. The Clifford boss taking reduced damage in his later phases doesn't add anything other than making his health bar completely useless. Just make the boss have more health and show it in his health bar. Bullet hell sections are more annoying than fun as well, as the movement system clearly isn't designed for that type of challenge so it just feels awkward, and it seems that dodge rolling through an enemy or boss only works if the roll ends with the player hitbox entirely past the enemy, which makes it feel inconsistent (almost feels like one pixel was the difference between taking 2 full hearts of damage or taking none). It's definitely a long way off from a finished game, but it's a fun concept and I'm excited to see what it becomes.