I just finished the game on normal difficulty via game pass. If I had to give the game a rating it would be a 7/10. I was into the game during the first 8-10 hours then it slowly turned into a slog to play, and I found myself wanting to just power through it.
I'll begin with some positives then go into the things I did not like as much.
The game looks nice, I like the colour palette and the fact the game just isn't grey or brown. Some nice looking environments, sky boxes. Gameplay in terms of moving, shooting etc was solid. Combat was pretty basic but I didn't expect much there. There is alot of well written chracters, terminals and story sprinkled around the game. There is more to the surface than just finishing the main story if you want to find it (ala every RPG I guess).
Then some negative things, the game just turned into a boring slog after the first 8 or so hours for me. I started dreading speaking to people as I knew they would give me some annoying side quest that sends me all over the place and ultimately is unrewarding. Some side missions literally had you speak to one person then fly across the system to speak to someone else then back to do something else and that was it. I just couldn't be bothered the longer it went on.
The companions were fine, some interesting side missions there. The Parvati was stupid the further it went on, and boy did that go on and on. Go to this side of the system for this one item, then back for another, then go here to buy this, then back to the ship, and so on. The Max and Ellie ones were most interesting for me out of the bunch.
Another big problem for me was the lack of exploration. When I first landed on planets I was looking around like wow i'm going to be here exploring for hours, but actually it was really lacking in that department. It wasn't proper open world like Fallout, so I wish they did something similar to Mankind Divided with Prague - having this little hub world full of little places to explore and discover. Instead pretty much every planet just had a basic town area and was made up of the same general layout.
In terms of my character I ended at level 30, I played mostly passively and tried to solve most things the "good" way without conflict. By the end game I could literally lie, hack, science, persuade, engineer my way out or into any situation. It's incredibly overpowered, considering I picked a jack of all trades build at the start and didn't really focus on a single trait. Speaking character, I found the perks and skills pretty basic and a miss opportunity there, especially compared to something like Fallout 4. Nothing really stood out as unique or fun with the perks.
One thing that REALLY annoyed me was, why on earth did they map "X" at least on xbox / PC controller be the equip weapon button... as well as everything else: open doors, talking to people. It should be "Y" like every other single game. I look like a fool accidentally getting my gun out after speaking to every NPC or opening a door. I'm trying to have a conversation with someone and I have my sniper rifle stuffed right in their face.
I played on PC with a 1060, and the game ran basically 60FPS at high which was good. No bugs during, until the end where I had TWO hard crashes instantly to desktop every time I tried to just walk through a door, then up a lift. Looking online it seems to be a bug alot of people are experiencing so that pretty much sucks. I managed to get past it by changing my play style, but yeah not cool.
This was one of my top games of the year, so i'm a little disappointed in it overall. Fallout 4 was my first and only Fallout game, so seeing the hype around this and Obsidian I must say I expected more. I saw people earlier saying TOW2 will address and fix the short comings of this game, and I don't agree with that. You can't give Obsidian a free pass because this is the first game in the TOW series..It's not like their first game, considering they made the "best" Fallout game.
Overall I enjoyed playing it, I guess I got far enough before feeling fatigue to just power through the last hours to see the story through. I played via game pass so i'm glad about that. Theres a few locked planets left for I assume DLC, so I guess I will check those out at a future date to see what they are about.
