I'm about 14 hours in, exploring Monarch, and I'm still enjoying myself but the lustre is definitely starting to wear off. Playing a shooting-based game on Hard isn't something I would ever do under normal circumstances, but here I feel like Normal is just so unbalanced that it's almost required. I haven't put any points into combat skills and I've just been waltzing through every encounter without any danger. The trade-off for dumping all your points into schmoozing is supposed to be that you have to talk your way out of combat because you'll be too brittle for actual open battle, but here they've made you Max Payne even with 0 combat investment. Like, to the point where I genuinely don't know what you'd even get out of 100 points in Long Guns or whatever. Shots already go exactly where I aim them, enemies already die quickly; what more would I need?
I'm also really feeling the absence of lockpicking and hacking minigames, and any kind of percentage-based speech checks. With all my points in schmoozing and sneaking/hacking, I just feel like I've completely broken the game. In any given conversation I have like three different guaranteed-pass speech checks available, and I can pick every lock and hack every e-mail with zero effort. I have basically infinite ammo for every weapon, and like 30,000 credits with nothing to spend them on (I think I accidentally bought a 4,000 credit weapon mod just by buttoning through a vendor menu, and I don't even care. I don't need mods to kill guys and the money loss is a drop in the ocean). The only 'danger' is getting caught stealing something, but honestly I could probably finish the game without picking up one more piece of loot, and if I do get caught I have four different ways of schmoozing myself out of it anyway.
It just feels like playing Fallout 3/NV, but with all my stats modded as high as they'll go and god mode turned on. I've never felt that giddy thrill of finding an awesome new weapon or armour piece, had no sense of accomplishment hacking or lockpicking my way to some secret because it's just a matter of holding a button for a second, never worried about passing a speech check because they're all just right there unlocked in the dialogue tree. I'm enjoying it enough to want to finish it, but I don't see myself coming back to the game once I'm done.
I came here to post exactly this, funny how that goes.
I beat the game last night and I uninstalled it immediately. I had a decently good time up until halfway through Monarch, then I soured on it quite a lot. Your thoughts on the game mimic my own eerily well. Once you start putting points into any stats, the game becomes way too easy. By the end of the game I had 80k in my pockets and I had never ever bought an item on purpose. Mods were useless and barely noticeable in combat for me (melee only), and once I learned I could tinker my weapons with bits, I did so on all my companions up to about 1500 bits each and I could just watch them win every fight without healing for the rest of the game. Perhaps not the game's fault when I made it easier on my own, but still, it felt unbalanced to the point where a large section of the gameplay got kinda nullified.
The final area was boring, and I just walked and ran my way through it because while the combat suddenly became quite intense, there was no point to anything anymore for me. The villains came out of nowhere, literally in one of them, so weird. And then I picked a poor choice at the end and it gave me an ending I didn't want lol, because the phrasing was a bit off from how I read it.
I heard early on that companion skills were boring and I ended up agreeing. In the end, every companion had pretty much the exact same unlocks because of min-maxing the most interesting skills for me. Having multiple 100% checks per dialog wasn't any fun either. Almost every gameplay system in the game is either under-baked or under-utilized. It never truly excels at anything, it's just slightly above competent.
I kept thinking things like "this game looks a lot like Bioshock, but worse and it's already been done", "this level feels like an underbaked Deus Ex or Dishonored, but worse", "this humor is trying too hard and fails", and so on. The companions themselves weren't fleshed out and felt like caricatures and honestly a bit tacked on (pretty much literally what happens with Felix, wtf). Sure they have their own sidequests, but they were either too long and boring, like Parvati's, and pretty much none of them made the characters more interesting, pretty much none of them were truly likeable for me.
Maybe it's because I did every single side quest I could fine in each area, but the main story felt really unbalanced, with most of the set pieces and actual story points happening in the end game. I can't really say what happens in the story until you are about to leave Monarch. It's not really noteworthy anyway.
The game's been praised for the cultural commentary and all that, but it didn't feel fresh at all, we've heard it all before imo. It reminded me of GTA5 and all the jokes about facebook and modern American politics. Sorry, but the jokes are like 5 years too late xD
For me this is barely a 6/10, and a weak one at that. I fell for the undeserved hype train, in my opinion.
