I took my time with this one as i am in absolute awe of how beyond amazing this game looks. This is a technical marvel in human achievement, everyone and everything is hyper detailed to the point of overkill as it is impossible to see all of the fine details in everything in this game. The lighting, even with ray tracing off in incredibly cinematic and behaves like raytracing despite being baked. This game is so over engineered that it has its own HDR 10 that doesn't use the OS toggle to enable it, and it makes a huge difference in its color range and makes harsh blinding lights realistic to the point where my expensive PG27QUR doesn't display the full power of this game's lightning. I spent hours taking screenshots and getting lost in the various environments, especially that cyberpunk scene as some one who loves that aesthetic its the best artistic depiction I have ever seen. I could go on for pages and pages about this, just know this is probably the most detailed game we will probably ever see and despite the game's flaws and ill get to that, the eye candy is impossible to ignore. And this will go down in history of one of the most visually impressive pieces of media ever made
Now onto the gameplay the biggest issue with most people, I personally liked it! The weighted movement with devastating impacts as you are hacking off limbs with blunt objects. The combos and ending it with a heavy swing hits the enemy so hard they fly backward and fall onto the ground is very satisfying. Despite it repetitive combat its still fun to smack things with this amount of impact and gore effects. The dodge feature is a double edged sword, as in most situations in combat the flow and rhythm of hitting dodging, popping off a quick shot felt fun. However it also can eliminate any tension in the stealth sections, like in a level in the DLC the game wants you to sneak past a bunch of biobots, but you can just run through the entire level and dodge incoming attacks and make it to the other side easily. It's also hard to call this a horror game, yes the tension and wicked design of the enemies are horrifying, but you are always in close quarter combat with them that they aren't scary anymore. I wish they made dodging a timed mechanic to make it harder, so you cant just hold left or right and wait for an attack to dodge it every time. This makes most boss fights where is 1 on 1 pretty easy, while they are damage sponges its hard to get hit as long as you just hold down the directional keys to dodge. However the final boss in the DLC addressed this issue with more attacks and a ground pound aoe attack that you have to run away from, making the fight challenging. The 3rd person shooting is great, love the integration of it into the melee combat, decent upgrades to them and a random chance of a stagger is also a welcoming feature. I wish there was more money or valuable things to sell though, as I took my sweet time as i only max upgraded one weapon by the end. The levitation grabbing powers are also a double edged sword, its fun to grab a explosive and do some much needed aoe damage to a group of enemies, but in other instances you can easily grab them and throw them off a ledge killing them instantly making it too easy.
The story here is overall good, though it takes a while for the player to understand why certain things matter or make sense, and my god it really drags its feet mid game. Where you fight and fight and fight and run around for longer than it feels necessary to power up something, find fuses and get to the next cutscene. Eventually though things pick back up and the story continues and it does a great job of filling in the blanks of what the player doesn't know so the initial confusion is gone and everything makes sense. The voice acting was sublime, Josh Duhamel especially nailed his role here, the way he is animated in idle or the various states of injury. And those execution (and player death) animations are so gore-filled and brutal I'm surprised the esrb only rated it m. And holy ♥♥♥♥ the gore is so detailed and realistic from actual combat to the chopped up bodies all over the place, its a technical achievement and no doubt countless hours of effort went into making this look as good as it does.
However despite all of this its biggest negative is its lack of depth, even if you really like what there is here it will really test your patience as you continue same combat over and over again from start to finish and what upgrades and weapons you will unlock are nice but don't add nearly enough for the entire runtime. After a while it does lost its shine as you rinse and repeat over and over and over again sometimes for a couple hours before the next cutscene. It's also really hard to be immersed at times, because despite its excellent cinematic direction, you are so limited in what you can do that it loses its fun factor over time. Makes me wish the developers had more time to expand the game, even if it has to copy more from dead space's playbook. Its disappointing because as you play you see all the wasted potential, every corridor and hallway in this game is so well detailed and expertly placed with so much clutter and lighting so stylized it looks like something from a high budget movie set. Every corner of this game has so much unnecessary detail in places that that the player will run through in 5 seconds, I'm sure they reuse those kinds of things throughout out the game, but time could have been better spent expanding the game giving the player more things to do.
Overall I still really like it as it is a 10/10 in so many areas, but its severe lack of depth and player agency really weights it down. The deluxe edition is worth it as the Final Transmission DLC is the real ending and its done well. Get the deluxe edition for $20 or less
