9/10 and a badass seal of approval. Top-notch writing, characters, character development, insane dialogues, fantastic motion capture and very good game play. So many times 3A games have a disposable story. Here you are literally playing a really really good star wars movie. Buy it. The only thing that slightly bothered me was that it could've been 2 hours shorter as the game play overstayed it's welcome by a tiny bit, but someone else wouldn't have been bothered I assume. Definitely the best star wars game I have played.
What a waste of backer's money this game is. Personally I'm a huge fan of both pen&paper Planescape and Numenera. Therefore I was very enthusiastic throughout the whole development process of this game. After finally playing it I realized that developer's promise about walls of text written for the game rang hollow. Turned out it was not quality writing. It's almost sad how uninteresting it is. Plus the game is badly optimized for both pc and ps4 - huge framerate drops . Better go play Disco Elysium.
It's hard as nails and aggressively repetitive. Because your upgrades carry over to your reincarnations, it seems you are supposed to die and have a go at it again. You will find yourself repeating the first couple of levels on and on and on and on. That's cruelly boring. People **** all over it, I'm just disappointed.
So after reading so many reviews trashing this excellent game I thought of adding a few pennies. Am I a Kojima fanboy? Not at all. I actually find MGV boring and drab, although it's much more of a shooter than this one. A lot of people will say it's a glorified walking simulator and there's certainly parts of the game that feel like it - one of the biggest challenges is terrain traversal. But instead of thinking of it in terms of walking simulator think of it as something of an evolution of a 3d platformer - it's a beautifully crafted, naturalistic world in which your objective is to get from point A to B. As the game progresses you find yourself in possesion **** number of tools to do that, so in the middle part of the game you actuall mostly drive around in trucks and motorbikes, while in the latter you mostly fly around on zipline. Now terrain traversal is fun and does make for quite a challenge. Another thing that makes for a lot of fun is new tools that are being introduced almost literally every half an hour. Some of them you might never use, some of them you will find yourself using constantly, so there are many ways to approach an objective. Another strong aspect is story - this game hours upon hours of beautifully realized cutscenes. How good is the story? It's good, although some dialogue lines are just badly written, mostly it's well versed. In an industry where most products have a throwaway story just for the sake of presenting cool graphics and mechanics, this one definitely stands out. Coupled with it's insane soundtrack and action heavy intervals, you get a one of a kind masterpiece. Most critics, even if they praise it suggest it could've been shorter, but I don't agree with them. I was actually surprised when the story started to wrap up, I wasn't ready yet - haven't delivered enough packages, haven't finished building all the highways (very satisfying activity btw), haven't encompassed mountains with my network of ziplines, haven't unlocked all the extra equipment... In the end story left me crying... this game certainly is a tearsqueezer. Does everything in the story make sense? Kinda, you just have to accept that it follows dream logic more often than waking logic. Buy it, it's worth it.
Pillars of Eternity stands out. I didn't have so much fun with RPG since Dragon Age Origins (and I did play most pc rpg's inbetween those titles). It's also sort of a disappointment and here's why... Although being a beautifully realized BG clone, or how they like to say it "a spiritual successor" it doesn't necessarily carries all the beauty inherent to the original. Way too often I felt torn apart by two ambivalent tendencies of the game, that is storytelling and hack'n'slash. I bow before Obsidian for filling all those immense dungeons with fair amount of content, creatures and treasure. It's the good type of hack'n'slashing - sandboxed, handcrafted and polished. The thing is that for "a spiritual successor to BG" I expected more story-driven content, something interesting and meaningful to get me through all those stale, repeatable combats. The main story-line is pretty good, which is extraordinary, taking into account how badly written some critically acclaimed rpg's are (remember Dragon Age 2?). Dialogues between your teammates are also poised and funny. After playing more than 24 h I started realizing that the game somehow lacks a consistent direction. The lore and immersion in it seems a bit half-baked. The script, how good wouldn't it be, is still incomplete. For me, this game is constantly on the verge of delivering the experience it so loudly aspired to deliver. I'd even say : They almost did it. I hope they will make the sequel better.
