Recent reviews by SafetyMoose

Not releasing this on Steam from the beginning was a huge mistake, and so many people I know who are big fans of Star Trek didn't even know this existed. Epic only releases are where gems like this go to die.

I wont spend a lot of time on some of the minor issues other people have mentioned, namely the fact that the animation can be, at times, not the most modern looking. However, the story and voice acting are superb and most of the set pieces are good or at the very least serviceable. My only major gripe is the responsiveness of the quick time events. Most of them are just tedious, especially when effort has been put into interactions with various computer systems or your tricorder. The PC controls for many of these QTEs are very sluggish.

This entire narrative adventure blows a lot of newer Star Trek TV content out of the water and really feels like what Star Trek is supposed to be. There are a couple decisions made for the sake of story and "player choices" that are odd, specifically how Starfleet Officers behave or react to a couple situations, but they provide you with hard choices to make and some depth to the characters so its easy to look past. If you are a fan of Star Trek and are craving for a game that feels right out of the TNG era, this is for you.

It just isn't long enough to justify the current price. It took about 4 hours for me to complete, and I didn't feel like I was rushing the experience. There is an achievement for completing this game in 2 hours so its obviously possible to do it much faster than I did.

I will say that the visuals and music are wonderful, however the game play wasn't overly challenging and I can't see myself going back and playing it again as a result. This is where recommending it becomes difficult. Its very obvious that a lot of time and effort went into making this game, but 4 hours for $40 CAD may not be the best value for some people compared to other games you can pick up at that price point which provide far more entertainment in terms of time played.

I really wanted to recommend it, but I sat here looking at my steam library and how many hours of entertainment other single player titles have given me and I just can't recommend it for $40 CAD. Pick it up if its ever half price.

Once you get past the honeymoon period and snap yourself out of gawking at the sheer beauty of Night City, the cheap shortcuts and paper thin facade used to try and create “immersion” and "detail" become more glaring and distracting than anything the tantalizing neon skyline can make up for. You will just as quickly abandon any expectation you might have had of investing yourself in a character that feels like your own, instead accepting an incredibly linear storyline with a pre-established character where most decisions seem to make little difference. That said, as I sat watching the credits roll after almost 60 hours of game time, most of the side missions completed, and a well levelled character, I did feel a sense of satisfaction which almost made up for the games glaring flaws and under delivered promises… almost.

If you are reading through reviews now and didn’t purchase this game on release, you may have more tempered expectations than what many, myself included, went into the game on launch day with. Even ignoring the bugs (which are VERY present in the game and forced me to reload saves to fix more times than I can count), the game does not live up to the expectations people have in 2020 for a big budget open world title. This goes beyond polish, a word that i’m sure is being thrown around a lot in reviews, because it's obvious that certain design choices were the result of simply taking shortcuts, rather than implementing but not completely tweaking them. The most blatant examples of this include the lack of vehicle variation, an ambient world where NPC behaviour seems very static and unimaginative (I would pass the same “recent” crime scene on the same corner every time I went by), and copy pasted objects and advertising, all of which were distractingly and excessively repetitive. To make matters worse, things like vehicle pathfinding and certain scene animations just felt downright bad and dated. I hope its just because they weren't finished, and will be added/fixed in the future, but i got bad vibes that these were the finished product in some of these situations.

The saving grace here is that the story and characters are great. Silverhand in particular is amazing and incredibly entertaining to watch and interact with whenever we are blessed with his presence on screen. As I said in the opening paragraph, where the story itself fails is not so much in its plot, but rather in the promises and expectations set regarding the game being player choice driven. It isn’t until the very final act of the game where most of your decisions feel like they hold any real weight on how things have progressed, however I don’t think this makes up for the feeling of being forced into most decisions by a dialogue system that simply loops you back to one particular option. What you get in most cases is either a variety of ways to get to the same point, or options that simply provide further details on a situation. To make matters worse, the Corpo life path I chose on character creation didn’t seem to really mean anything beyond some dialogue changes, and a cool first 15 minutes that very unfortunately ends abruptly and ultimately means very little.


By the 3rd act I was starting to get tired of the bugs, tired of the repetitiveness of the world, and tired of a story and character that didn’t feel like my own. I had to make a point of sitting back and re-framing my perspective of the game. I had to view it as an action game with a mostly predefined story that I was experiencing alongside a mostly predefined character I just happened to superficially design at the very beginning. With that as the expectation in my head I had a lot more appreciation for how the story played out, and feel I appreciated the conclusion I ended up with far more than I would have. I was rooting for the character as I would in a film, rather than living in the world and story as them.

I'm recommending this game from that perspective, with those expectations, and as that sort of game. If you go into it expecting it to be the way it was marketed and hyped for the last few years, as a super immersive open world RPG with countless ways to experience the story, you WILL be disappointed. I would even suggest that if you haven't felt pressured to play the game RIGHT NOW, that you wait for the first sale. By then it should hopefully have further bug fixes and optimization to make your experience far smoother than mine.

Normally I can look past games with simple designs or limited content when they are in VR due to the limitations of the medium at this point, but even this felt like it got old really fast. The inside of each ship looks awesome in VR, but beyond that I just didn't feel like the game had enough to keep me engaged. Gameplay was incredibly repetitive, and the lack of maps further killed my enthusiasm to keep playing.

Its not a bad game per say, its just not worth the asking price of $55 CDN, and certainly not if you don't have access to VR. I'm sure my review would have been harsher about the lack of content had I not played it in VR, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it for non-vr play. Atleast for VR players its worth experiencing for what it is, even if you end up refunding it after a few rounds like I did.

One of the best games I have ever had the enjoyment of owning. You can waste a ton of time on this game playing through the missions or just messing around in Sanbox mode. If you enjoy anything related to politics and city building this is a fun and simple combination of the two. Its simplicity doesnt distract from the fun however making it an enjoyable experience and contains many hours of pley time. Highly recommended.