Recent reviews by Dr. Chris

The post 2.0 updates and Phantom Liberty have breathed life back into this game and it's extremely enjoyable to play, but there are some things to take into consideration if you're picking it up now and planning a full playthrough.

- If you don't do any side content and just follow the main story you will miss out on 90% of the interesting cyberware, weapons and vehicles.
- Phantom Liberty doesn't really have a defined spot where you jump off from the main story into the DLC so I recommend progressing the story until a point of no return and then before making your decision go and complete the content. Can do it earlier, but it definitely benefits from having the context of Act 2 and a decent amount of upgrades/a defined build.
- You cannot change your character's gender or voice midway through a playthrough, and this locks you out of some endings/romance depending on your choices. Basic rundown is: Male V (Panam and the Aldecaldos, Kerry and Johnny's backstory), Female V (Lucy and the Mox, River Ward and the NCPD).
- Dialogue and mission choices are final even in places that don't say so. I recommend doing a first playthough blind, but it's worth going back knowing what decisions actually matter as some completely affect your story and some have no impact while most of the time it doesn't notify you. This includes side content that you have to seek out that can lock you out of endings/items/dialogue without you knowing.
- You cannot reset your attributes at will without modding the game, but you can reset perks. This will impact you later on as taking a heavy investment into an attribute and then wanting to swap builds is nearly impossible without heavy grinding since you can only max out 2 attributes, and you require 15 points to gain access to the best perks in a skill tree.
- If you want to have a powerful endgame build you can make do with weapons and gear you randomly come across fine, but if you want that feeling of massive damage numbers and a cohesive build I would recommend finding a guide someone else has theorycrafted since there are interaction between perks that the game doesn't outline in tooltips, and certain weapons/cyberware are difficult to come across without knowing where they are. Multiple super impactful weapons that can change your entire playstyle are hidden in places super out of the way or locked behind specific choices.

Keeping all of this in mind I think the main feature lacking from this game is a NG+. With there being so many individual choices (many of which you don't get prompted are important) that affect your experience being able to go back with hindsight without having to grind your way back up through side-content would give this game much better replayability.

100% worth the pickup on sale just for the characters and story. Good luck out there chooms.

(also do yourself a favour and install CTE.
PlayerDevelopmentSystem.GetInstance(Game.GetPlayer()):GetDevelopmentData(Game.GetPlayer()):ResetNewPerks(); PlayerDevelopmentSystem.GetInstance(Game.GetPlayer()):GetDevelopmentData(Game.GetPlayer()):ResetAttributes();
is the command to reset all attributes and perks so you can swap builds.)

This review is specifically for others who play in the OCE region.

Firstly: DO NOT PAY FULL PRICE
This game goes on sale for less than 5 bucks multiple times a year, and is only worth picking up at those prices. Key resellers are often untrustworthy, legally dubious, and morally wrong, but if you don't want to wait for a sale you can buy this game from one of them for this price year-round.

There is a small dedicated community that continues to play this game, but that community is mainly European/American so if you're from OCE and considering buying this game don't expect to find a match in any of the usual gamemodes. At peak times on the weekend I've queued for 40v40 and failed to matchmake even the minimum amount of players. To test this I left it matchmaking for a few hours and the lobby did not fill up at all.

If you're from OCE the main reason to buy this game is for the campaign and the 4-player COOP gamemode. From my experience completing the campaign twice, and playing COOP with, and without, friends this is worth the pick-up on sale. The campaign isn't particularly groundbreaking, but it is about 5 hours of fun and takes you to many different planets and ships.

COOP on the other hand is a lot of fun with friends, and I've found it to have a decent replay value due to the progression system with weapons, ability cards, and playing as different factions. Each COOP match is a squad made up of players, and a team of friendly and enemy AI, either attacking or defending objectives in a similar format to Squad's Invasion gamemode or Insurgency's COOP mode. The AI is hyper aggressive most of the time and there are lots of them so even though the maps are smaller than their 40v40 versions it still maintains the feeling of being a soldier in a larger battle. You have access to faction special classes, heroes, and vehicles which adds to the variety beyond the 4 standard classes.

The graphics in this game hold up extremely well as the colour palette is vibrant, and the character models are stylised rather than hyper-realistic, and even more impressively, the performance is incredible. I average over 200 fps even in the largest battles on the most cluttered maps whilst running max settings. Loading times are short, and I've encountered very few bugs whilst playing. My main critique of the game's aesthetics is that certain faction's appearance customisation options are fairly bland (primarily the CIS droids) and are essentially a slightly different shade.

If you see this game go on sale for a few dollars do yourself a favour and give it a quick try. I just pray that one day a studio that isn't EA gets given rights to use this amazing IP for Battlefront III or a new Clone Commando game.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME yet

and here's why
- Lack of content: the main campaign is around 8 hours long with side missions adding around 5 hours at maximum in a single playthrough. There is almost no reason to replay the campaign as you don't unlock any new missions, side objectives, loadouts or ng+. The side missions are comprised of 6 missions that show different perspectives of the campaign missions, and can be replayed in order to grind out 6 classes and their gear. These missions get repetitive quickly and at higher difficulties most of the classes are next to useless, anything melee is unplayable, and heavy is useful for about 5 seconds until they close the gap and chain stagger you. Without significantly more content added especially for coop you can expect about 12-15 hours of non-repetitive gameplay.

- Performance and stability: I am running a 4090 with a 13th gen i7 and 32 GB ram with the game on an m.2 drive and with DLSS performance and high settings at 1920 x 1440 I am averaging 75 frames with drops as low as 30 with large hordes.

- Floaty and annoying combat: the long and short of it is that melee combat is all but useless as a gameplay style once you advance past minimal difficulty. Dodges and parries do not consistently work, and when you are bogged down in melee combat ranged enemies can burn most of your health in a matter of seconds without any way to avoid their attacks. If you commit to dodging ranged projectiles while surrounded in a swarm Tyranid Warriors will tear you a new hole and chain stagger you. Certain enemy types seem like they exist to make the gameplay less fun and slow you down immensely with no reasonable way to counter them (neuroloids that are bullet sponges and spam fire psychic beams at you that will 2 shot you).

- Epic Games and Easy Anti-cheat: You cannot play this game without these services running on your computer full-stop. Not even offline single-player campaign without ever interacting with another player. Whilst this is annoying it might not be a deal breaker for modern gaming audiences that are used to being treated poorly by their corporate overlords, but what might be is that the performance issues are almost entirely fixable with 3rd party programs and editing the .ini files that set rules for the game engine. Lo and behold Easy Anti-cheat will prevent you from playing the game at all (even offline) preventing you from fixing the issues that the devs have failed to.

- Ultrawide support: I have a 4k monitor, and while with the performance issues I wouldn't recommend it, I intended to play it max setting 4k as I had seen ultrawide gameplay by content creators only to learn that there is no ultrawide support on release. I don't understand how review copies have this feature but the full release does not.

Basically don't buy the game yet. Wait until they roll out some major fixes and the game goes on sale preferably some more coop content too.