Definitely much better than I expected. After surviving countless AAA games with enormous maps, 7,000 question marks, 45 types of crafting materials, and side quests asking me to collect somebody’s missing socks, this game felt like actual medicine for the gaming industry.
Not every game needs to be an open world. Sometimes I do not want to climb seventeen towers just to reveal another fifty icons on the map. Open-world games are not automatically bad, of course, but only a small number of them actually justify being open world. Most of the time, they just feel like unpaid part-time jobs.
This game, on the other hand, gives you a mostly linear experience while still allowing you to approach situations in different ways, which has apparently become a rare and forbidden technology these days. You explore because you are genuinely curious, not because the game threatens to leave your map at 98% completion forever. The combat, atmosphere, and graphics were fantastic. Almost everything felt polished and satisfying. Optimization is decent and fps is stable as well.
My only real complaint is the gunplay. The guns technically exist, but sometimes it feels like nobody told them how guns are supposed to work. For instance the sniper rifle has a scope, but there is no proper first-person aiming mode. Why give me a scope if I cannot dramatically stare through it like a professional assassin? Most guns also feel nearly identical, which destroys the immersion whenever you stop punching enemies and decide to shoot someone instead. Still, this is somewhat understandable because the game clearly wants you to use its spectacular melee combat and it's built this way. You can barely carry more than a magazine, ammunition disappears faster than my motivation in a 200 hour RPG, and enemies are almost always standing close enough to play come and get me.
In the end, I got around 20 hours of genuinely enjoyable gameplay. It never felt exhausting, overwhelming, or like I needed to quit my job to finish it. It had a good story, an incredible atmosphere, beautiful graphics, and excellent combat.
Honestly, that is all I need. I do not need a 200 hour, slow-paced journey across an empty continent filled with meaningless discoveries, repetitive activities, and twelve different kinds of flowers to collect. Give me 20 great hours instead of 200 hours of digital chores.
