Recent reviews by The Blue Falcon

Glory to mankind.
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The campaign is fantastic! However, as soon as you finish it the game becomes extremely repetitive and boring extremely quickly. Grind for loot because... reasons? I'm not sure. The campaign was so much fun and if the game had focused on that aspect and made a longer more complete single player story it would have been fantastic. However as soon as the campaign finishes you basically are playing a fairly basic looter shooter game without any of the charm of similar games such as Borderlands or Warframe.

The combat is pretty good, but not as good as other games in the genre. Outside of mindlessly bashing robots there is no real reason to play this game and the combat alone doesn't save it from the litany of bugs, performance issues, and the fact that you still need to waste 5+ minutes every day to simply collect your daily objectives from an NPC instead of just having them pop up in your menu somewhere. The companion AI is absolute garbage, so if you aren't playing with other real people you're gonna have a bad time and multiple people can't play the same character so if both you and your friend happen to love playing as Thor you're outta luck.

It's unfortunate because I really badly wanted to love this game. I have thousands of comics, and enjoy super heroes as a genre in general. The Marvel movies are overall very good, and other games such as Sony's Spider-Man (PS4) were amazing! This game somehow missed the mark very badly in terms of execution. The one saving grace is the initial Avengers Assemble campaign which is reminiscent of a classic comic book story although it is extremely short. Once the story is completed and all you are left with is the base gameplay it becomes very apparent that this entire thing was a quick cash grab to sell over priced micro transactions.

TLDR: This is in the running for the greatest game I've ever played. Almost everything about it is perfect. The combat feels smooth and polished, the soundtrack is absolutely stunning, the graphics with the help of some community upgraded mods are great, and the story is probably the greatest of any game EVER made - I truly mean this with no exaggeration.

I'll explain in a bit, but first a couple tips:

If you purchase this game, be aware that there are 4 play throughs to complete the entire story, and you must finish the final boss battle twice to collect what most people consider to be the "true" ending. I would also highly recommend a few mods available on the Nexus community to help improve the overall stability and graphics of the game.

As for why I enjoyed this game: I'm a simple guy. I generally like "dumb" video games that don't make me think too hard to unwind with after a day at work.
This game is not that.
And it's so much better because of it. This game truly made me think about how I view the concept of life, what death is, and what it means to be human. The characters are incredibly well thought out, and most of the side quests aren't trivial like in many games - they truly enhance the story by either providing perspective or foreshadowing to the main arc.

The music is probably one of the best scores I've ever listened to. It's incredibly beautiful and really enhances the atmosphere and mood of the game. In fact, the music is so good that when I play the game my girlfriend will come into the room and ask, "Oh are you playing NieR again?" and sit next to me while playing games on her phone so she can listen to it.

The combat is incredibly fluid, and switches between several styles seamlessly throughout the game. Is it an action game? A bullet hell? A shooter? The answer is yes. It also allows you to switch difficulties at any time and the difficulties are perfectly executed. On the easiest setting, it's literally like watching a cutscene as you can simply press a button to auto battle. On the most difficult setting, it's as punishing as a hardcore gamer would want. The different weapon types feel different enough to provide variety while at the same time being similar enough that it isn't like learning an entire new system.

The characters truly have distinctive personalities and really are a big part of the game. Unlike similar action style games such as Devil May Cry 5 where the characters are mostly just cheesy and border on downright cringey, the characters in NieR are relatable and have excellent dialogue and provoked genuine emotion from me.

This, for me, will be the standard that other games will be compared to for a LONG time. "How does it compare to NieR: Automata?" Will be how I critique other games.

What Rockband or Guitar Hero wish they could be