So the game is finally free on game pass despite it being at least one year old and having literally no one play it at launch and having to discount the game at least three times(?).
I've managed to get past the prologue which was a fucking spectacle in the 9th degree with a color pallet and graphical art style that gave me deja vu from the netflix tv show Arcane. This is not me complimenting the game, it's just everything during the prologue has to be cranked to an extremely high degree in terms of drama I have to wonder if the writers and directors have low attention spans and just happened to be massive fans of Arcane and wanted to make their own because they thought it'd be cool. It also features the same writing conventions as a cheap Marvel movie in which dramatic action will be going on and characters, for whatever fucked up reason, will have ice cold composure and still be able to carry out conversations as if nothing is happening despite demons rounding up civilians and murdering them or buildings disintigrating into rubble.
Gameplay wise it's just mash the light attack button as fast as you can with a hard to see indicator flashing when to dodge and when to block. Because the game is a visual nightmare of colors and spell effects, it's hard to see indicators at all meaning a lot of the time I'm hit from enemies I can't see with the camera or they perform a hard to react to combo that has vague or hard to read inputs. This is because the chucklefuck who designed it decided to put it on your character's head and make it a small glowing orb instead of having enemies glow different colors as they're attacking and lighting up as the input is about to be made. It's weird how I can come up with a better system on the fly in three seconds and yet several people were paid to design this shitty system and came up with this unintuitive nightmare.
In terms of writing and dialogue, this game wears filler and artificial bloat on its sleeve. Corrine Busche and her cotorie of designers seem to be working under a word count requirement (Our game has over 300,000 lines of voice acted dialogue!) for investor purposes or advertising because it feels like the dialogue was written with this requirement in mind. In an incredibly lazy manner mind you. Characters will repeat themselves several times, will say redundant exposition even if the player can already surmise it, will say as many words as humanely possible in a sentence despite something shorter sounding much better, but because they have that word count minimum they have to work with, they have to fill it as much as humanely possible with as much dialogue as they can say. It also doesn't help that there's no consistent voices with any of the characters. Neve will switch dialects within seconds, Harding is just flat and lifeless using generic American turn of phrase, Belara has no voice at all, you get the idea.
Even if the dialogue was refined, the story, so far, from first impressions bothers me. Varrick is clearly dead in the beginning because Harding pays no mind that Varrick is awake and makes no mention of him at all during the dialogue. Yet despite this, nobody in the party informs Rook what happened or where Varrick is and our character doesn't, for whatever fucked up reason, mention it at all when Harding says "Varrick paid the price". He doesn't say something like "He'll recover in time" and the characters would react in baffled manners completely spoiling the upcoming twist that he was dead this whole time!
Yeah first impressions are loaded. Loaded with shit mind you, but that's par for the course as far as I can tell. It's bad and it's meeting my low expectations, but I'll keep playing just to see how much worse it'll get.
