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5 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 12.3 hrs on record
Posted: 7 Sep, 2019 @ 1:35pm

TL;DR: It's pretty good if you like futuristic dystopian storylines, but wait for a sale - I would regret it if I had paid over US$15/€15.

The good:
  • The environmental design is AMAZING. I probably spent at least 30 minutes wandering around environments admiring the art installations and architecture.
  • It's one of Daedalic's most story-driven, least puzzle-driven games to date. You won't get stuck with pixel hunting or item combination puzzles. If you, like me, don't like getting stuck, then this is great.
  • The story reasonably novel, which is pretty rare in sci-fi these days. I was somewhat invested in the characters and wasn't rolling my eyes at all the tropes, so that's better than average.

The bad:
  • You often get the feeling that you've made a choice that matters, but actually your choices matter very little.
  • Some cutscenes are unskippable
  • Tedious achievements, which will require you to sit through many of those unskippable cutscenes several times to figure them out. I'm not even going to bother trying for 100% - it would just be hours of time down the drain.
  • Sometimes awkward movement controls
  • There's probably about an hour of padding through somewhat dull puzzle/minigame segments. They're not frustrating, but they just don't add anything to the experience.

The ugly:
  • The ending. It's like Mass Effect 3 all over again - your choices during the last cutscene determine your ending, but no matter what you choose, you just get a slight variation on the same thing. There are 4 endings, and the only things that differ between them are a few lines of dialog and a few characters being present/absent in the ending montage
  • The ending (again). It doesn't even wrap up some of the storylines - what happened with Simon, Jeff Kosowski, Kurtz Labs? Why, and how, was Stanley's MoveScan copied? How did the memory module get erased? I don't feel like my character actually came away the victor - he barely survived the crap thrown at him, and he still has a lot more crap ahead of him.
  • The lack of merch. For some reason Daedalic didn't make any for this game. Seriously, I really want Richard's jacket.
  • The price. I waited a year for them to bring it down to a reasonable price on sale. It really isn't worth €30.
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