I've played about 4 hours I'd say (steam says 7 but I swear a full 3 hours was spent tweaking the damn thing
) and I have to admit I was worried at first BUT the last three hours or so have been an absolute blast. I've not even gone on the first proper mission after the intro yet, just been ****ing around doing side missions and bounties... but even those FEEL like actual missions. I also did one of the "psycho" missions where the enemy is heavily tech augmented and it was awesome, they were zipping around the place so fast and I couldn't hit them with a gun, so it ended up being a katana fight. I strongly feel that it's going to be excellent. At this point my only gripes are;
- Bugs. Most are funny/not a problem (see below for example) but I did have one game breaking bug. Not hugely so - just a stuck quest and thankfully all you have to do to fix it is quicksave and reload the save - but still.
Car spawn bug:
- It feels poorly optimised. The graphics are amazing, yes, and for their full potential I can see why it needs hefty hardware HOWEVER it's not so far beyond recent titles that it explains the performance issues. That said, after a couple of hours I completely stopped noticing that I'm playing at 1080p (it's not that long ago that all games were, after all) and it was definitely worth the trade off for 60fps. But yeah - I feel like it should have better framerates for the visuals I'm seeing, I don't get why it's struggling so much, or why it totally flatlines on OG consoles. This gripe is nothing to do with the quality of the game of course and it's a "temporary" problem - in a couple of years people will have forgotten that it was ever hard to run.
- 3rd is a minor PC gripe... cars are bordering on impossible to drive with keyboard & mouse
. Luckily controls hotswitch to whichever you press... so I have a controller sat next to the keyboard that's purely for driving
I'd struggle with this if I was a reviewer I think. On the one hand the game itself, taken in isolation, e.g. if you were playing it on a bleeding-edge PC with ray tracing, is genuinely brilliant, both gameplay and how it looks. On the other hand the technical problems are beyond anything we've seen in recent years and a lot of people (baseline console owners and PC players with anything less than a GTX1080) are going to have found themselves very dissapointed yesterday morning.
They should have been honest and just said that despite their best efforts, the game simply doesn't work on the baseline consoles.