I got this and Astral Chain using the "vouchers" that I bought a while ago.
Have to say that I am quite enjoying it.
Controls handle well.
The style is very nice looking and enjoyable.
The world building is decent.
I like the ability to customize and pick up new gear.
Missions are fun to complete and replay.
The problem with reviewers, I would say, is that they give WAAAAY to much weight to story.
So they end up saying the game is great but the story is a mess so the score is heavily skewed towards story.
Does this even make sense for videogames?
If you look at a game like the Shadow of the Colossus remake on PS4. It has a 91 on Metacritic. If you look at the trophies for this game though you will see that while 99% of people who play the game will defeat the 1st colossus this drops to 70% when you get to the 5th colossus, 56% for the 10th and then 49% for complete the game on any difficulty.
A lot of players seem to not really be sticking around for the story in so many games.
Assassin's Creed Origins has 98% completing the prologue but only 68% completing the final story quest.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has 95% completing chapter 1 but that drops to 75% completing chapter 2 and only 55% completing chapter 5.
Yet reviews of these games seem to be far more focused on the story, that a lot of gamers seem to not finish, and less focused on the gameplay.
I'd question how much having a "bad" story should impact the reviews of any given game and if games like Daemon X Machina would be better off not pushing a story at all.
It just seems weird to me that the IGN review seems mostly positive but then they basically say "the story sucks, 6.5" and the game has the same score as Anthem.
I especially like this:
Missions almost never deviate from “destroy X things” or “stop thing from being destroyed” structures.
So it's a videogame then?
I mean, what the fuck?
Sometimes it feels like they overthink things. Instead of looking at the game as a game first and foremost they are looking for a story and then trying to build a review around the "story". For example, giving Gone Home a 9.5 based solely on how it fares as a work of fiction. How is it as a videogame though?
Just seems so silly to take a medium such as videogames and then review it in the context of other mediums like movies and/or books.
The weight given to storytelling is too much, in my opinion.
Not that this is a 10 out of 10 game for me. It's more in that 7 or 8 region for sure but I just can't agree with a 6.5 based on the story not being that great.