Recent reviews by サイコ

Cannot recommend in its current state.

This thumbs down was a difficult decision for me because I have enjoyed playing all previous games of the series, and was waiting eagerly to play the new chapter of the STALKER franchise. But this game's release feels sort of like the Cyberpunk 2077's release - you see the great potential of the game but it is not enjoyable to play it in the current state. My recommendation is to wait for the first official patches and mods if you want to truly enjoy the game.

I still like how the game looks and sounds. The characters are great, the voiceover is great, the sounds are awesome. In that regard, I think the devs did a great job.

- Optimization: I do not have the most powerful rig at all (Ryzen 7 5700X3D + 3060, 1440p), but in some of the locations I'd get significant FPS drops. Like you would have ~50-60 FPS in a field with several houses, but 29-35 in the first village. And that's with balanced DLSS on Medium-High settings.
- Visual glitches: Texture flickering\clipping is a common thing you'd see in many different locations. LODs of trees and distant objects changing shapes and popping in when you get closer, etc.
- Game economy: Tiny quest rewards, Huge repair prices, Zero money found as loot, Sell prices too low, Ammo prices too high. This one though is easily fixed by mods.
- Loot: No monster loot, which makes things even worse considering how much you need to spend to kill them. Poor NPC loot. Like, you kill a pretty geared-looking dude, and all he has is a broken weapon, bread, and 3 bullets. Has he been surviving in the Zone just with that? Yeah, sure.
- Game difficulty: Many enemies are bullet sponges. Bloodsuckers will actually suck all your money and not blood because you will spend all your ammo and weapon durability by killing just a few of them. Balancing a game by reducing the damage you deal on higher difficulties is the worst and dumbest way of doing it. This one is also fixed by some of the mods out there.
- Nonexistent A-life: There is no A-life 2.0, 1.0 or 0.1. Things just spawn around you randomly, that's it. Sometimes these things spawn right behind you and start shooting you immediately. There is no logic behind spawn location, frequency or anything else. Locations are not populated by anyone before you get closer to them. Why even have scopes in the game if you can't shoot anything more than 100 meters away from you? I had been playing Clear Sky not long before the Heart of Chornobyl was released, and even in that 2008 game there was a system of faction movements and clashes that created a feeling of something always going on in the Zone while you're not watching.

The last four points break the immersion for me completely. I am waiting for mods and patches that would fix those completely or at least minimize the immersion breaking elements.

There are already mods that address some of the issues I mentioned, but I think I will wait for the first official patch.

Pretty fun time burner, got through everything in about 10 hours. Totally worth the money.

Pros: Story, Graphics, Open world
Cons: Gameplay, AI

I love the DA universe and I can't even count the number of times I rerun DAO, experimenting with different classes and choices. When DA2 came out, it wasn't as big of a disappointment for me as the reviews, which I'd read before the purchase, said. But DAI, oh boy, it's on another level of frustration (for me).

1) The AI. It's dumb. That's it. Tanks wait for 5 seconds before engaging a mage who teleported. Pathing is ducked up. Range characters won't kite if attacked with melee, they also like to stand really close to huge dragons. AI would use spells on foes with immunity to the element of those spells, dealing 1 dmg.

Result: Much more micromanagement and frustration, especially if you like playing games on Nightmare.

2) The game is not Friendly Fire... friendly. I played both previous games with FF and loved the additional challenge of positioning and skill-building. In DAI, the combat system is simply not designed for FF, as if they just added the option at the last moment without any testing and balance in mind. Many spells are not circle\area based but just zap on random, some front-directed skills would still hit an ally who is behind the character casting the skill. Basically, you will never use chain lightning as a mage, it's just plain suicide. "BuT iT MeAnS YoU nEeD tO ChOosE DiFeReNt SkILlS", I don't care, I wanna go Bzzz!

Result: Much more micromanagement and frustration, especially if you like playing games on Nightmare.

3) No tactics. They (for some unimaginable reason) removed the tactics customization, at least the way it was in the previous games. The behavior you can customize is a speck compared to what you could do in DAO or DA2. Combined with the AI stupidity, this drawback multiplies the frustration tenfolds.

Result: Much, much more micromanagement and frustration, especially if you like playing games on Nightmare.

4) Tactical camera. In DAI and DA2, you had to right-click on the enemy for any character to attack it. In DAI, they changed it so that you need to hold an attack button and stand in close proximity in order to attack an enemy OR toggle a tactical mode with horrid camera controls to simply point and right-click like before. This division feels really weird for the first couple of hours, but I guess you can get used to it eventually. Also, SPACE is "jump" now, I can't count the number of times I pressed it to pause the time.

You won't probably like it if you like playing games on the highest difficulties or at least looking for a challenge, as it's not fun to play on higher difficulties.

You will probably like it if you want to plow through the game on normal just to immerse yourself in the story.
You will probably like it if you like micromanaging every characters' actions in similar games.

If you haven't played DAO and\or DA2, I highly recommend starting with those two first.