PunchingWood

Maybe they just thought they found an abandoned Asian kid at the airport lol 😂

His review is certainly most accurate.

I only played like an hour and I encountered so many of the issues he mentioned in his review, on top of crashing to desktop when I first fired a gun in the open world. It also runs absolutely abysmal on high-end hardware, reminds me a lot of Starfield's debacle.

I had hoped the gargantuan day one patch would've fixed some things. But I have no idea what it did.

It's quite baffling how this game got 81% rating on Steam right now. If it were EA or Ubisoft this would've been an Overwhelmingly Negative game for sure. There also were like thousands of positive reviews barely minutes after launch.

Game needs at least several months more in the oven, and then I doubt it would be all fixed still. I wouldn't rate this beyond a 5/10 in its current state.

Same could be said for lots of other party controllers that are essentially the same.

Like I have a 8Bitdo Ultimate BT controller, it's essentially an Xbox controller, but it comes with a charging dock and is also compatible with the Switch. It also has hall effect sticks and motion control (for Switch). I preferred the Steam controller's grip over the Xbox controller, on top of the Steam controller having back pedal buttons as well. Plus it comes with a dongle, which has to be bought seperately for the Xbox controller unless you use Bluetooth.

So there are plenty of things that could be done different, ranging from different features to better build quality.

I never understood why Steam didn't just make a variant of the original Steam controller that just had the classical button layout without touchpads. I liked the touchpad version for some games but it's really clunky to use for stuff I'm otherwise used to have sticks for. I really like the Steam controller's grip.

I would've loved the same controller with an Xbox layout or something or even interchangeable parts/layouts. Although that would probably drive up the price a ton.

I can't do it, I would just wake up in the middle of the night instead 😔

Some races seem in such a weird order, having to travel from Saudi Arabia to the US to Italy, and Spain to Canada to Austria.

Would've been better to give crew more rest, could've probably dropped like 3 or 4 races. Like I wouldn't mind if they dropped Qatar, Bahrain and Monaco or something.

Yeah the PSN thing wasn't something they had control over, so they got really fucked over by Sony on that one.

But later on they made constant changes and nerfs to fun weapons, which didn't help getting the game back on track. But with the recent updates they finally listened and made a great comeback. As for bugs, it's just annoying that every update we eiher get introduced to new ones, or old issuescome back that were previously fixed. Especially the game crashes were so frustrating that at some point I just stopped playing for a couple of months, they always seemed to happen at the most inconvenient times during a mission, often near the end after a long mission and gathering lots of samples.

Maybe they felt it would have pushed the Keanu introduction too deep into the game?

I was thinking that too. I think during development it might've shifted, since I think Keanu originally wasn't in the game, and they wanted to make him part of the game quite early on.

I would've liked if they had extended the Jackie chapter and moved the Silverhand arc to a later act. It would've meant that people would just be dropped in the game and let them explore the world carelessly before the story kicks up to next gear. But they probably realised that the game wasn't good enough to pull off the open-world part, so they decided to get on with the main story right off the start.

Lots of people were using SM2 as a "look how it should be done" excuse back when HD2 wasn't in a good place. Even though I didn't feel like the games were all that comparable, they're similar types of games, but very different in everything else.

But Arrowhead really went and redeem themselves in the best way possible. Plus honestly I didn't find SM2's action as remotely as enjoyable as HD2's personally. To me SM2 has been a very forgettable game.

Aside from the PSN debacle and the ongoing bugs with every update I'd say they deserve all of them.

No other game comes close to any of those categories this year.

I always felt like the game was originally never meant to be an open-world game, it's as if they were going for a mission-to-mission corridor kind of game and wrapped up a world around it to walk around in at a later phase. And many things in the game actually reinforce that idea.

I played the game at launch and the game was absolutely infested with stupid and annoying bugs, so eventually I just skipped all side stuff and just wrapped up the main story, I think that was about half-way through. Back then the open-world most definitely felt like an afterthought.

No events were happening in the world, there were entire parts of the city that were dead and empty. There were even areas blocked off by doors that were "locked" and implied there was something behind it, but some of those places I could just clip through and fall through the world because there was literally nothing behind the door.

There were few things that made it seem like an actual living world, NPCs were just wandering aimlessly, doing nothing. Just making a cool looking area and then dropping a load of copy/paste NPC clones in there doesn't make a good open-world. If you comitted a crime the police would just spawn behind you, wherever you were. While in contrast some of the story areas seemed more detailed and have more "scripted" things happening, which is part of why I think the game wasn't originally open-world.

Gameplay wise it was not that special either, gunplay was okay, melee felt quite unsatisfying, and outside of combat there was practically nothing to do other than just driving around. The choices you make at the beginning of the game don't ever felt like they mattered, like they make it appear it's a huge backstory thing that would play a role throughout the game. Nope, after the first 15 minutes it's never mentioned again. The whole cutscene thing with Jackie after the intro feels like it was supposed to be actual gameplay, but was just cut out and changed to a cutscene to skip time.

Also the skill tree barely mattered, there were even skills like being able to breathe underwater longer, even though there wasn't any underwater content, aside from one Judy mission I believe (which I didn't get because she wasn't accessible as a romance option to my character).

The only saving grace of this game was that parts of the story and characters were somewhat interesting, I liked the concept and style of the game. But it felt like a bad game when it came to actual gameplay. And some characters barely got any time to actually become interesting enough to care about.

I've been trying to get back in the game a couple of times, but it often just feels so lifeless and lacks any depth.