tl;dr: it's great if you have a good CPU.

The good: The game itself is very good. I'd say it's in the same vein as Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom with the exploration and feeling of freedom it gives you. The combat is very fun and responsive, and the pawn system is cool. It's got a bit of that "early 2000s game isn't telling me exactly what to do" feeling to it, but that's not necessarily a bad thing if you pay attention. The best part of the game is the lack of scripted fights. You go out on a simple quest to pick flowers for someone, and then you end up on a 2-hour-long adventure because you got attacked by a griffin and hopped on its back, and it flew away with you, and now you have to find your way back to the village you started the quest at, or because you needed to cross a bridge over a canyon, but the bridge was broken, so you had to detour around it, and end up fighting a cyclops. The gameplay is very emergent, and no two trips from point A to point B will be the same because of it, which I suppose could be seen as a bad thing if you're just trying to quickly do something, but that's half the fun of Dragon's Dogma.

The bad: I get why it's being review-bombed because of the microtransactions, but I personally don't care about it. They don't shove it in your face, and you can get every item for free just by playing the game. It's no different than Devil May Cry 5. Just ignore the DLC page on Steam, and you're good to go.

The ugly: Performance is... not great. I don't have the newest and most powerful PC, but it's certainly not weak either. I'm playing on a 27-inch 1440p monitor with an RTX 3080, Ryzen 7 5800x, and 32GB of memory, and I get dips down to ~25 FPS in Vernworth on high settings (med shadows). That's just not acceptable with this computer. I'm playing with no supersampling because I find both DLSS and FSR make my performance and visuals worse. I set my shader cache to unlimited in my Nvidia Control Panel global settings, and I also set the CPU priority of the game to high in the task manager. I find doing those two things cuts down on a lot of stuttering I get. Supposedly Capcom is aware of these performance issues in highly populated areas and is working on making the game less CPU-bound, but I wouldn't hold my breath for some magical fix to happen, but we'll see. I personally would recommend Dragon's Dogma 2 if you have a beefy enough computer; otherwise, I'd avoid the PC release and get it for PS5 or XSX, but they also suffer from the same performance problems as the PC version. I wouldn't even think about trying this on a Steam Deck unless you're willing to put up with a 10 FPS slideshow.

8/10 (9/10 if performance is fixed and 9.25/10 if performance is fixed + Denuvo is removed)

tl;dr: it's great if you have a good CPU. The good: The game itself is very good. I'd say it's in the same vein as Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom with the exploration and feeling of freedom it gives you. The combat is very fun and responsive, and the pawn system is cool. It's got a bit of that "early 2000s game isn't telling me exactly what to do" feeling to it, but that's not necessarily a bad thing if you pay attention. The best part of the game is the lack of scripted fights. You go out on a simple quest to pick flowers for someone, and then you end up on a 2-hour-long adventure because you got attacked by a griffin and hopped on its back, and it flew away with you, and now you have to find your way back to the village you started the quest at, or because you needed to cross a bridge over a canyon, but the bridge was broken, so you had to detour around it, and end up fighting a cyclops. The gameplay is very emergent, and no two trips from point A to point B will be the same because of it, which I suppose could be seen as a bad thing if you're just trying to quickly do something, but that's half the fun of Dragon's Dogma. The bad: I get why it's being review-bombed because of the microtransactions, but I personally don't care about it. They don't shove it in your face, and you can get every item for free just by playing the game. It's no different than Devil May Cry 5. Just ignore the DLC page on Steam, and you're good to go. The ugly: Performance is... not great. I don't have the newest and most powerful PC, but it's certainly not weak either. I'm playing on a 27-inch 1440p monitor with an RTX 3080, Ryzen 7 5800x, and 32GB of memory, and I get dips down to ~25 FPS in Vernworth on high settings (med shadows). That's just not acceptable with this computer. I'm playing with no supersampling because I find both DLSS and FSR make my performance and visuals worse. I set my shader cache to unlimited in my Nvidia Control Panel global settings, and I also set the CPU priority of the game to high in the task manager. I find doing those two things cuts down on a lot of stuttering I get. Supposedly Capcom is aware of these performance issues in highly populated areas and is working on making the game less CPU-bound, but I wouldn't hold my breath for some magical fix to happen, but we'll see. I personally would recommend Dragon's Dogma 2 if you have a beefy enough computer; otherwise, I'd avoid the PC release and get it for PS5 or XSX, but they also suffer from the same performance problems as the PC version. I wouldn't even think about trying this on a Steam Deck unless you're willing to put up with a 10 FPS slideshow. 8/10 (9/10 if performance is fixed and 9.25/10 if performance is fixed + Denuvo is removed)