If you're a Soulsborne fan, you will love this solo. For those who get frustrated learning things, you can always group up.
It's a good shooter, with a good difficulty treshold. You need to learn the bosses, and yes, some may require a bit of luck in your first attempts. After a while when you have a good build going, you start to learn how to deal with bossfights. They will still be hard, but you'll have a plan (using certain weapons, mods and gear, and having certain traits), and luck will be less of an issue.
The scenery is diverse and so are the enemies on each "plane".
In a way this game is like better version of Destiny, with more depth, builds, diversity, except it's not a looter shooter. Gear is more like a Soulsgame, sparse and every piece unique.
I don't agree with the minus points in the review:
The story is actually not given, but you yourself need to read, listen to peoples dialogues and such to know anything of the story. There are not a whole lot of cutscenes and no story arc to follow, besides the quest you are on since the start. It's a bit like a Souls game, you just take in whatever you want.
"Steep upgrade requirements make it too easy to stick to the same loadout for a long stretch" The same can be said for any Souls game. You choose your weapons beforehand and the build you're going for. The first playthrough is getting to know the game.
"Random order of bosses is an odd decision that makes it difficult to progress thoughtfully at times" Again, same thing with Souls games. You are not bound in a linear way to bossfights. You can even reroll you playthrough, which may yield different bosses, or join coop with the same effect.
And to top it all off it costs 40 EUR on the PS4 store. It's a top notch bargain.
Personally I preferred the previous version with it's "naval" combat, in 3rd person, using broadsides to fire at ships. I found it to be more novel, than this throwback to original space combat.
I started playing with keyboard and mouse, which was clunky. Then looked for software to connect my PS4 controller to PC, and now playing feels very natural and smooth.
One of the things that they added is that you can skip every single cut-scene where you land, take-off, auto-pilot to your destination. What it does it that you in fact no longer travel through space. You just point at a destination, skip to it, skip landing, you're there. While by no means you are forced to skip anything (you can sub-light to destinations too), it's an option that imo clearly shows one of the shortcomings of this genre: Flying through space is in itself boring.
Imagine if in Star Trek you had to watch the helmsman push the boost button for 2 full minutes without anything else happening to reach the destination. It would be the most boring show ever.
In series, writers come up with other things that happen during that time, namely human drama. In games, there needs to be something else to fill up that "space".
Developers need to come up with ways in which the journey through space itself becomes interesting. It could be that they need you to do repairs (through mini-games, or elaborate gaming constructs), or make it so you can review information while in flight (get a spreadsheet going for which resources can be gathered/bought/sold where, build a database of info on something,...), or you can be a researcher and you perform experiments on your ship on alien fauna and flora yielding usable results. Something. The radio stations offer some good tunes, but I doubt any trucker would forego the ability to skip the road in favor of listening to a tune. Being able to skip the road is an ambiguous thing, while it saves you time, it undermines the very essence of what it is to journey through space.
There are not that many ships to choose from and after 20 hours I'm a smidge away from buying the best ship the shops offer. I heard there are a couple of ships that you can acquire outside the shops, but I haven't figured those out yet (might have to do with reaching max standing with pirates of law?).
The game will get repetitive after a while, since its systems aren't very deep. Other than that it's a polished, good looking game. If you loved Freelancer, it's cheap enough not to wonder if you should get it.
Developer: "We did this and that...blablabla" Every single host on every E3, turns to the audience "Aren't you guys excited!!!?" Billboard blinking off screen: **PLEASE WOOO ON THIS QUEUE!!!** Armed guards in the galery: "Tch-click" /cocks gun Visitor 1:"Why did you bring me here? I thought you said this was going to be fun!?" Visitor 2:"Go with it man. That one guard has been eyeballing us for the last minute! There's the sign...WOoOOooOOO..." Visitor 1:"WOOOoooOOOooO...That's the last time you bring me anywhere!..WoooOOOoooOO!"
@esqueejy: I wasn't talking about Dany. I'm actually fine with the way she took revenge, that wasn't really out of character.
The series was always character driven. People's choices, rooted deeply in their character, made the show go in directions we never expected, or have unforseen consequences.
Unfortunately, this is no longer the case in this season. No longer is it character driven, but it's now action driven. Events unfold as waves of the impact of certain other events. Winter is coming! And it came and went like a drizzle on a spring day. The undead invasion alone should've been half or even a whole season. Not just combat, but fleshing out who this undead king is, what he wanted, delve deeper into the magic that summoned him. This would've been an opportunity to flesh out more characters in the face of 'certain death'. Yet, the season needed to end, so the plot needed to be pushed forward, and so the nightking just gets stabbed by Aria. Well, pretty frigging badass undead that was. He was nothing, an artificial barrier, a major story arc ending in a whimper. The looooong night ending in an hour and a half.
The same happened now with several other characters, just unceremoniously being killed off because the plot demands it. Sersei is out of character. She just waits? After all the plotting and scheming, she just stands there for doom to come? She, of all characters SHE HAS NO PLAN B??? She would've tried cutting down Dany's forces within seconds of them living through the long night. She would've sacrificed her own people herself just to win the battle of the red keep.
The hound just throws himself off the tower to kill his brother, really? That's what he really wanted? Euron tries to kill Jamie just to be able to say he killed him, really?
There is no depth to these events, because none of it is enough character driven. GoT used to be deeply character driven, not just surface layer but several layers deep. That's what made its characters great. That's what made the story great. The action was only there to reinforce the characters. Now the action is driving them...poorly.
@esqueejy: No, don't agree there. It's not because story arcs wind down that they had to let go of everyone's dramatic needs or change their characters to the point of being unrecognisable. Things can end on a crescendo.
By far the worst season so far. There is a lack of depth to the story and characters that used to be GoT's trademark. It's painfully obvious there are no books backing this last season (which means nothing has been worked out in depth). While previous season got a pass from me, this one is heartbreakingly atrocious. It feels like a kid is running through a work of art going "Boom, Pow, Prrrrrt, Shwoosh, Arrgghgh!" playfully toppling a masterful construction, making the blood run from your face in horror at the sight of this unceremonious massacre. My heart bleeds ;(
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