Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion

Stop making everything open world. It's empty, bland and pointless.

From my general impressions, I'll say right off the bat that the game was developed with a significant deviation from my initial expectations and was significantly changed from the first DAEMON X MACHINA, which I really liked. Since I'm not in the mood for big talk today, I'll just summarize. Pros: ➕There are still mechs, but they function as ults and only appear in the frame for 2% of the time. ➕The mech and exosuit designs are still very cool. ➕There are a number of well-done, beautifully staged scenes and character designs in the story. ➕There are a number of well-done, beautiful locations in the game. ➕The boss fights, despite the increased difficulty, are well-staged. ➕The feel of movement is sometimes reminiscent of Xenoblade Chronicles. ➕The weapon recoil is sometimes decent. ➕For the most part, the phenomenally cool heavy soundtrack, intertwined with electronics, is both blissful and has you bopping your head to the beat, which GREATLY improves the overall experience of combat and battles. In the open world, it's also dynamic, escalating if there's more than one enemy in a row. ➕The game is quite undemanding: at maximum settings of 1440p, it delivers 70 to 120 frames per second on a 2070 Super with DLSS Quality. ➕The game has co-op, which seems to have been the focus of all open-world gameplay mechanics. Potentially, it should be the thing that makes any game 30-40% better, allowing you to regularly invite friends into battle to clear out the next section of the map, quests, and endgame world bosses. I played single-player, 'cos THE GAME'S REGIONAL PRICE IS WAY TOO HIGH. Cons: ➖Now that this is another open-world game, events and activities are spread thinly across all maps. Fast travel points and supply nodes are a must, which becomes tiresome by the 5-7 hour mark of the 20-30-hour playthrough. ➖You have to travel between points of interest and tasks for a very long time, which becomes tiresome by the 5-10 hour mark because it's sooo booooooooooring... ➖The same goes for ammo in the open world: it constantly needs to be replenished. And not from enemies or supply crates 99% of the time, as is the case in normal open-world games. Instead, you either go to your own designated, but terribly limited, resupply points or head back to your base. It's a very annoying and completely unnecessary fast-travel masturbation, making you moving back and forth every 10-20 minutes of gameplay or 5 minutes of intense combat. ➖Since we now have large, open maps, all the resources needed for crafting, leveling up, creating, and upgrading everything are scattered across them in respawning bits, and you have to run around collecting all this crap from all the open locations. Which also gets annoying around 8-10 hours. ➖Since we now have an open world, you need to take on world bosses multiple times, just like in an MMO, to have a certain chance of dropping the necessary items—from mutation factors to blueprints and resources for those blueprints. ➖Quests require you to change your exosuit into different setups before arriving at their destination, from light to heavy, with various items or upgrades installed. It's fun at first, but then it gets tiresome and boring. ➖Some quests require exosuit races, but the femto-particle reserves for the currently available parts aren't correctly calculated for them, and they deplete much faster than you can find refills along the way. No one tells you to upgrade and assemble an ultra-light and special set of exosuit parts. ➖Even in Story Mode, the game's open world and oddly tuned difficulty curve horribly unbalance the difficulty of its challenges, requiring you to replay battles 15-20 times after 5-8 hours of gameplay, tinkering with parts and tactics just to get through the boss. This isn't Story Mode, this is f0cking Hard Mode! ➖The balance of battles and weapons makes enemies feel like bullet sponges, even though you really want to swoop in and blow them all away with precision strikes. ➖I absolutely hate that the small jet engines, which drain stamina, drain it too quickly, making it impossible to gracefully maneuver around enemies on the ground, like in the first game. It's annoying. ➖The impact of hitting an enemy isn't always successful. ➖The absolutely disgusting wall turrets in the underground story complexes, which fire VERY frequently and push you VERY FAR away when hit by a beam. They force you to literally count the timing between shots down to the millisecond, ducking behind obstacles and trudging forward without getting pushed back. A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Sisyphean task, for God's sake. I'd forcibly send whoever came up with this idea to a resort in the Antarctic Sea in their underwear. ➖The transition point to one of the pre-final stages and battles is completely illogical, confusing you by throwing you into the quick-transition menu without clearly pointing you to the name of the next location. ➖Since it's an open world, there are plenty of places with randomly changing conditions—from dust storms to anomalies—but the game has seriously lost its visual style in terms of color combinations due to its shift toward pseudo-realism. Almost the entire world now looks very gray, formulaic, copied (procedurally generated), rather bland and bald, flat, and a couple of generations behind the current one in terms of visual quality. But the same can't be said for the exosuits—it's as if all the production money went into them. The environments are severely lacking in layering and density—bare rocks with low-resolution textures and a rough polygonal mesh, crudely placed objects, and other joys of life with sparse grass and undergrowth. ➖All this is further marred by the fact that the game runs on the Unreal Engine. As a result, we experience incredible lag when compiling shaders on the fly whenever something new appears on the screen — from an effect to an environmental element. Besides these, there are random bugs with flickering and underloading of objects, with flickering texture meshes on the floor, and with clipping through unloaded meshes. And if you update your drivers, change your video card, or reinstall the OS, the first time you load up, you have to patiently load to the level, wait 5-10 minutes for the game to compile the shaders in parallel with rendering, fly around a bit, exit the game, and then log back in as a normal person. ➖The female version of the main character uses the same rig as the male, making her look like a terriblly treated, hormone-deficient transsexual. So, to avoid the hassle of animating the two sexes differently, the developers simply gave them shared animations, and, as a result, shared shoulder and hip sizes. NPCs, including the antagonists, don't have this problem—they have feminine lower bodies, unlike the main character, and corresponding animations. ➖The English voice acting is very strange, with Ash constantly yelling into the microphone like his ass is being burned with turpentine, and Angel spends half the game struggling and crying. ➖The plot is pretty weak, in general terms. It's okay, but I wanted to see more character development and a much greater variety in the layering of events. In short, I'm mostly disappointed. A good action game has been turned into a tedious grinder with an implicit emphasis on multiplayer. It's certainly playable in a pinch among cool games, but compared to what's been coming out this fall, it's too weak. Rating: 6 out of 10. Everything could have been made significantly better if they hadn't broken what made the original so beloved to suit popular trends. And as a minor factor, the game's price is, to put it mildly, too high on all platforms for my friends to buy copies just to play with me.