Recent reviews by zumaris

As a preface, I've played through the previous SAO games on PC, from Hollow Realization to Fatal Bullet. I enjoyed Hollow Realization the most even with it's janky buff spam combat system, but at least the minute to minute gameplay was fairly fun. I didn't like Fatal Bullet so much because it couldn't run at over 30 FPS without causing the AI to break badly, and playing a shooter with less than 60 fps is just painful...

Unfortunately at this time, I can't recommend the game. Not sure how they managed to make a game that looks like it's from 2010 have such crazy load times of over 1 minute plus. I have a 2080Ti, 9900k, and the game is installed on an NVME M.2 drive and it still takes over 1 minute to load saves and get into new zones.

Then comes the fact that it comes pre-installed with easy anti-cheat, and somehow the game still can't hit a smooth 60 fps in areas devoid of any enemies, plus the world feels super dead, even the mob density is super low. There's nothing to do in 90% of the world, and quests are you standard fare of kill x or collect x. As others have stated as well, the control scheme is absolute ass. You can't open chests or climb vines, or jump with your sword out, but somehow the default controller options don't have room for the sheath button. So after combat you have to wait around 5-10 seconds to auto-sheath your weapons before continuing to explore. Somehow the camera is also a lazy camera. It doesn't follow the player, instead there's a huge lag. When you lock on the camera gets even lazier. The game lets you swap characters but when you swap the camera does not move so you have no indication that you've swapped. Dear god the game is just a chore to play. Hitting enemies has almost no impact, non-crits from regular sword slashes show no damage so you can't even really tell if you're doing damage sometimes. The tutorial is terrible as usual, and the UI is so bad at showing you how much SP you have.

I didn't even get to the terrible animations in cut-scenes, and horrendous dialogue and pacing. I mean i didn't expect much here, but they definitely took the anime cliches to 500%, and then made them even worse. It might compete with KH3 on how bad the dialogue and pacing is.

I'm not sure how they managed to do it, but this is the worst one in the series in respect to performance and general feel of the game. It's just bad from the start.