Short review after completing the game and the quests I had gathered in my journal (55 hrs in-game time on normal difficulty). ***Contains minor spoilers***
TL;DR: An unforgiving game which rewards patience and exploration. A great setting with a mix of old and new, in a beautiful, diverse and huge open world. Interesting factions and story decisions. The big drawdown will be the clunkyness of combat (and difficulty for some). Recommened to all RPG lovers that are in for a challenge and are prepared to live with its small flaws.
Pros:
- Gorgeous open world. Not too much to say about it, it is diverse and beautiful.
- Lots of possibilities for vertical exploration, incentivized by the jetpack. Exploration is rewarded: you will find the best weapons randomly searching through abandoned buildings.
- A magical blend of old and new history, environments and technology that comes together well.
- Enjoyable story, driven by your dialogue options affecting your emotional state and your “far-reaching” decisions.
- Interesting factions’ values and drivers. Many “in-between” sub factions and singular NPCs which will have you think for long time prior to making decisions. Sticking to one faction’s beliefs from the start of the game was my approach, but I still found several situations where I was tempted or persuaded to go against my faction.
- Great music and atmosphere.
- Satisfactory voice-overs.
- Some of the cutscenes had an effect on me that I can’t seem to have experienced before. I was genuinely scared of ever having to enter Xacor, the Alb city. Together with the eerie music, the cutscenes about Xacor sent chills down my spine.
General:
- Hard combat. I did not feel confident going into any fight alone (without companion) until 35 hrs played. Might be a result of my early decision to spec into experience boosting and ranged attacks. “Master of all trades”- approach might be the best solution, although my focus on Intelligence and Ranged made me godlike towards the end.
- You will not be guided by the game, rather you will start off running away from nearly all enemies. I felt lost at times not knowing how to increase my experience to get the skill points necessary to take on fights. The solution for me laid in finding new towns and quest givers and completing non-combat driven quests. You can progress and find new towns by running / jetpacking away from enemies, allowing you visit all the major towns early.
- Had to quicksave/quickload a lot.
- Specing into lategame skills early will make the game harder for you. Upgrading weapons for example is a late skill.
- Did not experience getting stuck in the environment as I have with previous Gothic games. My game never crashed.
- Use of pen and paper will help greatly for remembering characters and places.
List of problems that I found annoying, but learned to deal with:
- Clunky, robotic, square movement during combat. Hitboxes are difficult to predict. You will die many times blaming the game for its clunkyness.
- The HUD does a poor job at explaining what skills do. “Increased damage” does not tell me how much. Upon leveling up in factions and presented with reward choices, these are not explained either.
- Companions will wait for you to land an attack on an enemy to engage in fights. Companions will sometimes deflect shots targeted at enemies if they run into the path of the projectile.
- In team fights, accidently hitting a friendly NPC will make the NPC hostile towards you, nearly always forcing you to restart.
- Situations where you are attacked unjustly (in my opinion) because of your dialogue choices and friendly NPCs will not help you. On one occasion, I exposed a NPC as a murderer in front of a lot of people, only to have to fight him alone.
- Referring to the above, completing combat-focused quests in the beginning was not possible for me, forcing me to choose an different path from want I wanted. For example, letting a murderer go in exchange for money, instead of attacking and gaining faction reputation.
- Enemies with explosives (grenades, grenade launchers) can be cheesed by hiding behind cover or the level below them, making them shoot at the ground or into an obstacle injuring themselves and their allies repeatedly until death.
- The voice and tone of a NPC will change for the one line where they accept to trade with you, which hurts my immersion.
- I did not understand how lockpicking or hacking worked in this game. For lockpicking I was unfortunate enough to skip the 3-line explanation upon starting my first lockpicking. It didn’t take too long to be able to pick all locks, but I wasn’t really understanding what I was doing right. Hacking sometimes did not work for me and I had to restart, unsure as to why or if it was intended. Also, skills mention a “hacking timer” which I never saw. Could not find the required hacking skill for hacking terminals, thus making me unsure how much I had to spec into hacking to reap any rewards, which convinced me to stay away from hacking altogether. All in all, this wasn’t too much of problem for me, although does accentuate what was mentioned before with not being guided through the game.