The controls are ass, and you can't rebind most of them because the options are very limited. Movement is awkward and you can feel quite heavy at times. You will often unvoluntarily double tap a movement key and roll in a corner. Combat is simplistic and demands little skill, it boils down to attack and parry strength from you and your enemy, to determine who can flinch the other more into a 100 to 0 combo.
Every time you unsheathe, you lock on the closest enemy, forcing your character to suddenly tiptoe, breaking your charge. While locked, your character will move more slowly and have a worse backwards dodge, which doesn't apply to enemies. Most enemy attack patterns are random, the only viable strategy is to have enough attack strength to make them flinch.
There is no respawn after you die BotW style, you're taken back to your last autosave. That can undo a LOT of progress, and trigger many alt f4s.
Model variety is low, and abysmal for women. There is ONE woman copy pasted everywhere, including the named and story important ones.
The MC voice acting is atrocious. It would be logical for a character who is supposed to be cut off from his emotions, but there's a difference between acting neutral emotions and flat reading your voice lines. And it's not a design choice anyway, all MCs from piranha bytes games have the same dead-inside voice actor.
There's a bunch of text notes scattered around the world. They grant varying amounts of xp on first read, which i thought at first depended on how important they were to the plot and what they added into world building. But they're all incredibly generic and entirely failed to achieve any sense of world building. Those tidbits of reading are usually hated by the gaming community as being a cheap and boring way to add some story, but i rather like them. Not here. They are cheap, boring, and DON'T add anything to the story.
And while the story itself is interesting, the story telling is so bad. characters very much act like they are video game NPCs and not human beings. The flow of conversation feels forced and unnatural. All too often it feels like info dumping and giving away much too specific details in order to convey vital information, even though the person you're talking to should not be telling you any of it, all in order to advance the plot.
It does not help that the music is badly mixed and cues at the wrong time. Most of the game, the music is chill in the background. But on seemingly random dialogues, a much different one triggers, entirely off key with the bad voice acting, which you struggle to hear because it is suddenly much louder.
Among unlikely enemies, you will find bedrolls, chairs and couches. Because picking up loot and interacting with those is the same left click. And anytime you accidently click them, you must endure the lying down and getting up animation. Which is unsufferably long.
The inside of caves and buildings are ridiculously dark. The game has a magnesium torch item that you can find here and there throughout the world. But it doesn't light up the room at all.
You have 10 shortcut keys to work with. You need to have a melee and ranged weapon, food to recuperate between battle, potions for emergencies during battles, your torch, and consumables you CANNOT even use from the inventory. There are a dozen different spells and you can use none of them because you just don't have available space in your hotbar unless you're willing to sacrifice some of the things you can't use outside of combat.
With all of this, why is this a positive review ?
Well, you can pick up so many stuff off the ground and sell it. AND unlike many other games, money can be directly funneled back into power through elex potions for additional skill and attribute points. AND your inventory has no limit to it whatsoever. As a looting rat, i love picking up whatever isn't nailed down. AND there's a pair of sunglasses that allow for you to x-ray vision all the items you can pick up in the world.
And this is rare enough in video games that it carried the whole game for me.
