It's slow and methodical but in a good way. So far the story has been engaging. I've taken on 4 bosses already and I feel like I'm still early in the game.Decided to start the game tonight. Have only played the first quest but so far really enjoying it.
Some of it is bad. Some of it is good but I'm to the point where I skip most of the dialogue unless it's pertinent to what my mission is.I'm so frustrated with the story telling!
It's such a missed opportunity! The material itself is great, the environments and scenes are brilliant, but the delivery is painful.
For example, the opening scene is just a bunch of words vomited at you while some animated gifs play. No issue with that itself, but the voice over is missing the beat.
Then it cuts to in engine, with more words vomited at you agressively, and you're set free to play.
The game so far really could have benefited from calmer, intelligent voice work, or even presenting the story elements as if they were told from a point of hindsight.
And the voice actors themselves, are almost Silent Hill 2 quality...
The loading issue is another problem. Checking forums people said the initial part where it just sits there about half an inch into the loading bar, they check Task Manager and it said the game was unresponsive. For me I never saw that. It just sat there for a few seconds before finally loading. Shouldn't be happening on an SSD. For dialog issue it only happened once for me. The option I chose wasn't even close to what he actually said. Others on forums mentioned the same thing, but might have even been the same option I chose.I've finished the game on PC. It was ok. I thought the last 2 chapters really jumped the shark a bit narrative wise. The fights were tough without a doubt especially if you were doing a no casualty run like I was. The way around this was to make powerful weapons and do all the side quests. My scythe by the end of the game was one/two hitting grunt characters.
The game itself ran pretty good on my PC. I've got a gtx 1080 and was running at 3440x1440. I didn't notice any slowdowns or crashes. The only thing I ran into was long loading times at a specific part. After that it went back to normal.
I'll disagree with Viktor about the dialog option. I thought they were well thought out especially the dialog choices that end up shaping/breaking a neighborhood. The lack of manual saves while frustrating, makes it so you have to live with the choices you've made and not reload an old save to try another way.
Overall I'd lean at 7/10 easy. Not a masterpiece but there's enough here to improve and make a better sequel.
The loading issue is another problem. Checking forums people said the initial part where it just sits there about half an inch into the loading bar, they check Task Manager and it said the game was unresponsive. For me I never saw that. It just sat there for a few seconds before finally loading. Shouldn't be happening on an SSD. For dialog issue it only happened once for me. The option I chose wasn't even close to what he actually said. Others on forums mentioned the same thing, but might have even been the same option I chose.
For weapons, do you remember what you had against the chapter 3 boss fight (my spoiler above)? At that point I still only had blue weapons (axe and medical saw thing) because I couldn't find any of the pieces necessary to upgrade them again. Up until that point I had done all the side quests found in the first three areas and pretty much went inch by inch over every area. Didn't go into the west end district yet although not sure I even could at that point. I know you can respec characters as well, but my feelings on that are no thanks. I shouldn't have to be locked into a specific class just to proceed in the game. At that point I really only had one attacking power, a bit into one of the defensive ones, otherwise all points put into health, stamina, and blood areas.
By that point in the game though I really felt it was starting to drag on and felt like I spent more time just running around the streets getting stuck into battles that returned very little XP. Maybe a fast travel system would have been better. Couple that with a weak combat system and I decided it was time to move on. I'm playing Wolfenstein 2 now and my mood did a complete 180 moving to that instead.