Évaluations récentes de SotiCoto

I will be completely honest here: This is a well-made game. It does what it sets out to do exceedingly well, especially given the small amount of HD space it takes up and the low cost.

BUT due to the very nature of the game I'm finding it stressful, and the aching of my body from being constantly on edge while playing is difficult to tolerate. What I'm saying is that the game is causing me physical pain.

As such I would only recommend it to specifically those who enjoy survival horror and / or roguelike games. Anyone who gets invested in their characters or progress in games would probably do well to give this a miss... as well as anyone easily disheartened by failure. This is a game that can bring about enjoyment, pain and depression in equal measure.
It is also worth noting that while this has controller support, it is kinda bad... and playing Mouse & WASD causes me severe RSI, which just added to the overall physical discomfort.

Plus despite my opinion of this game generally being a pained positive, I will note that the EULA and general tone the game takes towards the player is a little too sarcastic and antagonistic. Just because you're bigging up the "everyone dies eventually" angle is no reason to be mocking about it.

Anyway... yeah, I've said my bit.

Typical DLC content for a bad game. Released long after the game itself ceased to be relevant. Completely screwed up my 100% for a game I was glad to be done with forever.

A tiny microcosm add-on to the game world where everything happens in its own little pocket area beyond any sense or reason. Even Fallout 4 did better.
The plot is mostly as tedious as that of the main game... though if anything it railroads even harder with more pointlessly immortal quest NPCs and huge swathes of gameplay / story segregation.
Plus of course the game itself is still a bug-riddled mess that crashes on a regular basis and has graphical glitches, broken quests and messes galore. I just got used to having to restart the game every half hour or so since something would render it impossible to continue (or just CTD).

It gets maybe +1 point for providing a different ending to the game, but it is arguably a worse ending than most of the vanilla options.

But the "Somewhat Damaged" quest in particular can eat a bag of d!cks. -1000 points for that. Trying to jump on the horror game trend and ruining the only things that were still redeemable about this awful game in the process. What do you think this is? Resident Evil? You think I want to stumble about blindly in the dark without a light source, with the quest markers turned off, trying to deal with an enemy that is magically immune to all damage and quickhacks for no greater reason than "plot says so"? And the absolute toxic cherry on this cosmic sh!t-cake is that it was impossible to get past the memory at the end of the chapter. The game consistently CTD'd every single time, rendering that path of the DLC impossible to finish.

CDPR can go fŭck themselves up their collective arses with a chainsaw. One chainsaw. They all have to share it, no matter how clogged up with blood and sh!t it gets.

It is a bit pretentious, and very simple, but still a fun game to play.
Good humour. Interesting and efficient art style. Mostly dark-mode.

Objectively a better game than Baldur's Gate 3.

A Very Silly, Very Cute, Very Fluffy Game full of Cats, Doggos, Bunnies and other adorable animals.
You can put them on your head.
You can rub your face on them.
You can make them big and ride on them.
You can make donuts by giving a cat scritches so it will knead the dough.

Yeah, a few parts of it are kinda rough, a bit janky and unpolished... but it is thoroughly saccharine and does not take itself seriously, which makes it a good game in my books.

Objectively better than Baldur's Gate 3.

TL;DR: This is a Bad Game, and vastly overhyped.

I regret buying it. I regret believing the hype. And since I am a completionist, it is now my prison until I'm done with it. I wouldn't normally write a review so early into a game, but it has already done more than can be simply overlooked or forgiven.
Let me try to break down what I know so far...
_____

{ Pros }
+ : Moderately accurate representation of 5e D&D.
+ : It has a story... Not a good story, but a story.
+ : Sometimes dialogue / scenes are funny. Sometimes.
+ : There is a lot of content, which is generally a good thing, but this game manages to bring out the downsides to it...
_____

{ ♥♥♥♥ } ... and I'll separate them out since I'm in rant mode...

- : The game takes up over 140 gigs of space. It eats through the hard drive like a fat kid at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and it took me 15 hours to download and install. I'm guessing most of this space is being hogged by tons upon tons of completely needless dialogue audio files (the game does not need to be fully voiced) at a higher bit-rate than my music collection.... but I've also been informed that there are mandatory 4k resolution textures for everything... even if the game is mostly zoomed out so far as to render even 1k textures excessive. It is huge and wasteful, and I've played a lot of more graphically stunning games that take up about 10% of the size of this one.

- : The Character Creation options are threadbare at best. You get a small handful of premade faces. 4 body options for most races, 2 for others. No face-part sliders. No body-part sliders. And a few preset colour options. Your face you will share with NPCs. You can't make a completely unique character at all.

- : The game has no pause option. Switching to turn-based mode is the best that can be done. So if you need to deal with something away from the computer, switching to turn-based mode or Quicksaving and quitting the game are the only options. Why? Insanity, probably.

- : The player character moves at the speed of cold treacle. All the things which look like they should increase movement speed only increase movement DISTANCE because the game is technically turn-based even in pseudo-realtime mode. That means it takes ages to get anywhere and it is a very tedious process.

- : The game area is rather large... and rather repetitive. Combine this with the cold treacle movement speed and it takes a prohibitively long time to get anywhere. And you can't get any good views because of restrictive camera angles (so you can't clearly see how janky the skybox looks). All of this combines to make exploration a chore rather than something enjoyable. It is tedious and horrible. There is a limited fast-travel system, but the nodes are far apart, so it only slightly takes the edge off the vast amounts of backtracking.

- : The game claims to have full Controller support... but the controls for the Controller are abysmal, unintuitive and poorly explained. While I've been using the Controller for going from A to B, primarily because I just need to hold a stick in a direction and kinda zone out, I've had to use M&K for combat because the Controller just isn't a viable option. Oh, and switching between the two takes a second or so for some reason, and you'll be booted out of all menus while you make the switch. I've made accidental switches a LOT, and it is just a waste of time.

- : D&D systems are all fine and well for tabletop gaming, but as far as gaming goes, the old Real-Time With Pause method employed by the previous Baldur's Gate games (and other Bioware projects) works much better than this. Waiting through everyone's turns is boring. Trying to deal with the action-type economy is an unintuitive mess. And all of it together makes for a clunky, immersion-destroying experience.

- : Lots of hidden items. Many of them are important. Most of them are difficult to find. Lots of trying to click each and every pixel on the screen to find the one that might be relevant. Holding down Alt does NOT highlight everything, nor even most things in the surroundings. In fact it highlights so few things that I question what the hell it even exists for. Funnily enough, the controller has a short-range search feature to make up for how nightmarish it is to target anything with the controller normally... but it often runs into pathing bugs that you need to switch back to M&K to click out of.

- : It is entirely too easy to accidentally click on things which cause fights. The things which are highlighted in red, but there are no safety measures to stop you accidentally clicking on them in various ways. For instance, some of the "red" things are highlighted in gold if you're holding down Alt (or the Right Stick), so you wouldn't immediately realise they're off-limits until it is too late. Other times you might be trying to talk to someone, and just like a Bethesda RPG, they'll move past your cursor JUST as you hit the button and you accidentally steal the item behind them... causing everyone in the vicinity to instantly aggro. Yeah. This has happened quite a few times for me so far. Oh, and if you do deliberately steal things, everyone will know about it even if they never saw you take them (so make sure to be in turn-based mode so you can quaff a potion of invisibility and leg it the hell out of the area before anyone catches up with you).

- : For all that Larian bragged about how many different playstyles they accounted for, you don't have to look very far to find nonsensical dialogue or quest entries due to NOT playing the game the intended way. For instance, I decided to play the game solo... without companions... but the game generally assumes you'll be playing in a party and makes contextually bizarre comments about a group or party when you're walking around alone (which I've found makes mobility far less of an issue since the "party" doesn't have to move at the pace of the worst jumper). Also Gale assumes he has been travelling with you even if you left him outside the first portal and happen to chat with him again later.

- : Speaking of Companions... I don't care for any of them. They're generally ugly, though not quite to the extent that Dragon Age: Inquisition characters were. But more importantly, I opted to play solo because I learnt what the characters were actually like from Youtube, and found it all very unappealing. Probably better to just make a bunch of custom characters and stick them together or somesuch.

- : The Main Quest. The whole parasitic thing crawling into your eye-socket dealie. Larian should probably have considered that would trigger some folks. Fortunately I'm not exactly triggered by eye-socket-invasion, but I find it utterly disgusting... to the point where I checked outside the game for details on how to get rid of the damned thing... to no avail. Because of "Spoiler" culture, it is a nightmare to find answers to my questions regarding getting rid of the revolting parasitic macguffin, but as far as I could work out... there is no way to get rid of it. Every single attempt anyone makes to remove it just fails. Waste of time after waste of time. Of course if the characters were to DIE and then have the parasite removed from their corpse, then get resurrected... that would almost certainly solve the problem. It never comes up though. Anyway, as far as I can tell (having not got past Act 1 yet), the entire plot is a shaggy dog story that goes nowhere.

_____

Anyway.... enough is enough...
By which I mean I could probably keep ripping the game apart in a continual tirade about how much I hate the game mechanics. To be fair I can tolerate the rather pointless-seeming plot. It is the game mechanics that are full of a thousand and one glaring flaws that collaborate to make the game an unpleasant experience.

Bad Game.

It is very similar to the Dynasty Warriors Gundam games... except chibified, has a smaller moveset, and covers far fewer of the Gundam series in detail. But despite that it is still rather fun.
The Multiplayer achievement is a bit of a pain though, since the game's multiplayer was dead on arrival. Plus the price for the game is rather more than it is worth.
Recommendation: Get it on Sale for at least 40% off.

The most sane David Cage game so far, which makes it rather more insane than most games, but Heavy Rain set the bar REALLY low.

< PROS >
+ : Graphically pretty.
+ : Rose's Butt is Glorious.
+ : Lots of Story.
+ : Lots of Choices.
+ : Rose's Derriere is Legendary
+ : So Bad Its Good charm.
+ : Getting 100% of Achievements does not require 100%ing every single chapter.
+ : The Extras Section let me zoom in on Rose's Sexy Backside.

< ♥♥♥♥ >
- : David Cage's metaphors are about as subtle as a brick to the face. Androids are ALL the minorities. Markus is Android Jesus. Humans are either idiots or nazis... or both.
- : If you don't follow David Cage's idea of maximum goodness, the game punishes you for it.
- : Entire game is a wafer-thin metaphor for David Cage trying to understand human behaviour and completely failing. It is clear that everything he learnt about those mysterious hoomons he got from Hollywood films.
- : Plenty of plot-holes. Slightly fewer than Heavy Rain and Beyond Two Souls, but still plenty. David Cage just abandons his train of thought sometimes and forgets about it.
- : Rose shows up far too late in the story, and I was sadly subjected to all sorts of inferior butts before her denim-clad wondercheeks showed up.
- : Had to put up with the title-screen Chloe making really awkward facial expressions on endless repeat until I finished the game once, which finally let me tell her to bugger off. The only good part about her was her look of disappointment when I told her she was NOT my friend. Title screen should have been Rose's sweet ar$e.


Overall a fun game... but ironically.
Don't take it too seriously or you'll be disappointed.

100% Completed this game in a single 12.6 hour session.
A rather fun game but with a few conspicuous flaws.

< Pros >
+ : Fun combat... at least for a while.
+ : Recognisable faces. Hello again, Littlefinger.
+ : Entertaining, if rather goofy, story.

< ♥♥♥♥ >
- : Buffering on the Episode segments. Seriously, the whole streaming model is the BIGGEST downside to this game.
- : Collectables. There aren't a huge number, and they're well tracked, BUT hunting down the collectibles seriously disrupts the narrative flow of the game.
- : The combat really needs more variety. Fun as it may be, you've experienced it all about halfway through the game.

So yeah...
I would recommend playing. Easy cheevos at least. Moderately. If you know where the collectables are.

The single-player campaign was great. Classic Homeworld style, albeit on the ground instead of in space.
A bit short though. Definitely not enough content for single-player. If you don't care about achievements, DEFINITELY pick this game up on the cheap.


On the other hand if you DO care about achievements... and particularly 100% completion as I do... avoid this game like the plague. Most of the achievements are Multiplayer... and getting them all requires at least 800 online multiplayer matches. Even the top of the leaderboards in-game seem to only have up to 50 matches under their belts... Yeah.

I will almost certainly have to SAM this eventually, as I doubt anyone has the patience to get 200 of each match type with each faction legitimately.

This fancy slide-show takes up over 60 gigabytes of space... which is pretty insane for a game that is less animated than a late 90s Flash animation.
It took me about 6 and a half hours to download it.
I completed 100% of the achievements in a single session lasting a little over 14 hours.
And then I uninstalled it.

Just for comparison, Monster Hunter Rise is about half the size and has entertained me for several hundred hours... and I'm pretty critical of that game, all considered. Also for Rise I at least had the option to turn off FoV, Bloom and Motion Blur, rather than merely lower the quality of them. Ironic that this even HAS motion blur when it lacks actual motion.

Oh... and for the bonus round, it feigned courtesy by showing trigger warnings and offering a chapter skip for a suicide scene it doesn't even bother showing.... then shoves the one thing that triggers me right in my face without ANY kind of warning nor preamble. Thanks for the double-standard, guys.


Well, I guess it was easy achievements, even if 1/3 of the entire game time was spent downloading the damned thing... and the story was nonsense.