I'm doing a positive review now because I know that when I finish this, it'll still be positive.
But I will update this review a lot later, this is just to get the positive out the gate.
Let's start where the game starts. The character creator. My favourite bit in any game.
This one is decent, it's not lot's of sliders to shape everything and eventually wind up with a monstrosity because you slid something and sliding it back doesn't seem to do the job. You can play as male or female, you can change whether they have defined muscles or not. Choose skin colours and then get into the more defined details.
There's choices to choose for face shapes, rather than fine tuning. There's choices for tattoos, not just on the face but the body as well. It's a lot for a first person game. (There is a third person button. Z by default.)
If you want to be a bald man with a beard, a woman with a ponytail, or a pale grey man with bright pink hair and a bright blue beard. You can do that.
You cannot be a woman with a beard. I don't personally mind, but I know people who would've liked that.
Then you choose your name, which for me, takes anywhere between 5 and 20 mmmm....onths.
(There's a website, fantasy name generators, I usually use that and merge like 3 names together, cuts those months down to minutes.)
When I first started this game, waking up in a prison cell and someone commenting on how I was waking up. It felt eerily familiar. But that's where most of the familiarity stops.
The gameplay, while similar to skyrim. Feels more polished. There's still the occasional bug. But for the most part, the game plays well and wants you to play it.
I say this, as someone who loves Skyrim, I have over 3000 hours in Skyrim, I had better bloody like it, right?
This game is better than Skyrim in a lot of ways... but it's not Skyrim. Do not go into this game thinking "It's just Skyrim but." This is it's own game and it does a really good job of differentiating itself.
I like the combat, but the biggest issue I've found is that regardless of melee build, you're going to need stamina and lot's of it. You'll run outta that ♥♥♥♥ right quick.
Early game magic is very bad, but it can get good later.
Archery is great, but again, you're gonna need stamina.
You don't need stamina to sprint while out of combat, which quite frankly, I'm really upset more games don't do that.
I've only played roughly 8 hours. And most of that was trying different builds with different characters. I'm barely out of the starting area.
Enemies get real strong real quick. So definitely focus on combat skills and stats before you focus on improving your fishing. (That wasn't smart of me...)
Stealth is okay, not amazing. But if you can get up behind someone with a knife, you can take them down extremely fast. By default, walk is holding caps lock... I hate that, so I set it to toggle and on G. Out the way enough, AND IT DOESN'T MAKE ME SHOUT AT PEOPLE RANDOMLY.
Combat overall for me, I typically go for sneaky stabby builds first. Not sneaky shooty like most people. So I can avoid the bulk of a fight if I get a good stab in.
But the actual fight itself tends to be dodging to get behind someone. I typically dodge through them when they run at me, quickly spin round mid dodge and slash them in the back.
This works extremely well in this game. (Minus the stamina issue, I really should get more stamina, much more.)
I'm really bad at timing parries, my instinct tells me to dodge. I did try the parries and I was really bad at them... as usual. But I'm really bad at them myself, so I can't tell you if this is everyones experience.
You'll get a feel real quick out the gates for whether or not the combat suits you. Some of the first enemies are slow, zombie like things. So you can backpedal and shoot, or run around them, or whatever. Play with them a bit, practice with them. They're zombies, they're not going anywhere less you kill them.
The quests are phenomenal. I don't want to spoil things, but even small side quests feel important to do. If you pick up and read a letter, it'll give you a quest. Which can feel just like, Oh, I just have to deliver a letter... But that opens up so much more in time.
And seriously.... read the letters. Read everything. Read it out loud and put on voices like I do.
The people writing dialogue and text in this game really put their soul into it. You should too!
That's about it for now. I am just at the start of the game. But I really wanted to get some words out. I will update this, promise! <3
Thank you for reading, or skipping to the end.
Have a lovely day.< 3
