BloodAndWine

For being such a story heavy game (half the playtime is cutscenes) it has severe pacing issues. For every hour of interesting story, there is another hour of padding of what feels like bad fetch quests that were rolled into the main quest. The combat can be fun at first, but by the end I was ready for the game to end as it became stale and repetitive. Diesn't help that the game is very easy. Since you only play as one character, there is no real variety. RPG mechanics feel entirely tacked on. Gear is boring. Loot dropped by fights is mostly irrelevant and exists solely to fill up your inventory. The game is very linear. It's level design goes from hallways to "open" fields, but the open areas have nothing in them. There is nothing interesting to find via exploration. Areas exist merely to be scenic. Too much time is spent going from one bland, muddy town to another. Most of the cast is quite bland and uniteresting with the exception of Cid. Overall character designs are lacking and visually boring. Interaction between the cast feels thin. The game seems heavily inspired by Game of Thrones except only superficially so. In trying to present itself as "mature" it ends up coming across incredibly forced and contrived (often corny but not in a fun way), and the attempt at being grounded plays against the strengths of the series. The music is very good. Overall, i didn't like it. Really disappointed. Game doesn't have much to it. It has some cool fantasy scenes, but it's bogged down by fetch quests, paint-by-numbers political intrigue and bigotry plotlines, too many mundane settings, repetitive combat, filler cutscenes, an empty world devoid of exploration and cool gear, a gloomy cast of characters with generic designs and dull personalities, and no real parties end up making the game a lonely and derivative experience. Also, the way sprinting works is dumb, motion blur is excessive, and the inability to turn off the auto-follow camera is annoying. Luckily the later two will be patched. And people giving the game a bad score doesn't mean you can write off their criticism as "review bombing". Sometimes people don't like things. No one ever fusses about the hordes of mindless 10/10 reviews.

Starts out promising but doesn't take long to squander any potential it seemed to have. The level design is an absolute mess, gameplay gets repetitive, bosses have boring movesets, and the writing is as bad, if not worse, than Forspoken. Like, the story and writing are really, really bad. Like intolerably. Overall, not a great experience. Especially not the 10/10 experience that Russians keep touting it as on forums across the internet. Edit* And here comes the Russians to drop hundreds of 10/10 scores

Major disappointment. This game is half-baked in almost every aspect. The writing is uninteresting and sophomoric. The AI is brain-dead even on hard difficulties. Every NPC stays glued to the same spot day and night thus making the environments lifeless and sterile. The loot is boring so exploring nooks and crannies isn't fulfilling. The rpg mechanics and perk system are unsatisfying and poorly realized. And the shooting is bad. Man, this game bummed me out. The only real plus i can give this game is that the skyboxes are fantastic and some of the flora and fauna are pretty neat. Everything else is just bleh. Also, almost all the characters are wack and i had a hard time caring about anyone because they all boiled down to one defining characteristic.

The technical presentation of this game is truly top-notch. One of the prettiest games I've ever played. The score is also very well done. It's also nice to see LGBT representation in such a big budget title like this. However, the writing and some major directorial decisions really ruined the experience for me. I probably wouldn't have played this had I know it would be misery porn with no real payoff in the end. A big disappointment but a pretty looking and sounding one!

The music is great. The atmosphere is interesting and the graphics are top notch. The gameplay however is tedious and filled with unintuitive menus and annoying mechanics. The writing is some of the worst I've seen in a game in the past 5 years and literally had me cringing frequently. The ending a mess plot twists on top of plot twist. I understand people like this game. Unfortunately, I think it is a pretentious and joyless grind.