Was playing Kingdom Come Deliverance II when this thing swept the entirety of the game awards, and I knew I had to try it out after that. KCD2 was one of the best games I had played in recent memory, so if this thing beat it out in every category I knew it had to be good. Once I saw my brother play it for a bit I knew I had to as well. Last time I felt that way about a game was Persona 5 and well that's a banger too.
Story is phenomenal. I somehow managed to never expose myself to spoilers playing this game. If you're reading this and have somehow avoided spoilers then cool stop scrolling through reviews and just go play the game before you inevitably spoil yourself. Trust me, it's worth going in blind.
Combat is satisfying, especially the bosses which I think are the most well-designed parts of the game. It's super gratifying when you manage to dodge or parry an entire move set. I think the least fun combat I had was getting one-shot by random mobs. Granted I was playing on the hardest difficulty, but even bosses weren't one-shotting me, which allowed me to at least survive to learn the pattern. Some mobs are just able to wipe your party without you even getting a chance to learn the pattern which feels bad, but for the most part the fighting is balanced with options for counterplay.
OST is a banger nuff said
Biggest criticism I have is performance. This game look a lot of tweaking computer and in-game settings to get working properly. And I know first thing most people will just say is "pc diff" or "nice potato" but specs should be attached to this review you can judge for yourself. Once I got it working it ran fine, although this is still an Unreal Engine game and textures/rendering were sometimes off, and then there would be the occasional massive performance drop from certain effects. The most egregious performance issue was that cutscenes were broken and would only show a red screen at times which, funnily enough, I thought was a feature not a bug. This did force me to eventually look up cutscenes online to see what was happening in game. This might be a game where it just works better on console than pc if that's an option for you.
Overall game is well worth it, it earned its Game of the Year and other titles for a reason.
