Recent reviews by SpicyMustard#705

I haven't seen my wife in 3 days

Game is mucho better than at launch

Oof...needs another year at least

Hate this game. Bungie keeps messing with stuff and they keep making it the worst game in the universe!

...I'll be on tomorrow

Dear developers & publishers,

Please fix the steam version of the game.

Paying $40-$60 to play this title on the largest PC storefront / platform should be more than enough for the developers to provide performance fixes / QoL updates for this version of the game.

After playing a good bit through both the steam version ($40-$60, depending on when you bought the game) and the competing $5 a month service there are a number of glaring issues that are present in the steam edition. I am playing w/o the community mod as I believe a game should work w/o much community intervention. These are the most significant issues that I noticed in my brief playthrough:

- Cutscenes are still broken (very low fps / frame pacing issues that drastically reduce the impact of some of these incredible story moments)
- Game has performance issues in some of the more densely populated areas (these issues do not seem to exist on the other platform)
- UI is low resolution, even when playing in 4k. Actually the entire game looks significantly less sharp than the $5 a month version, even at 4k.

Please update this version of the game. Users paid a lot of money for a product that still remains to be unoptimized / broken. With such an impactful story it is a shame that gamers had to experience these moments via a subpar experience. As impactful as 24fps is in cinema 12fps (to me) is going in the wrong direction.

As of now I will hold off on ordering Nier: Replicant until I have confidence that SE will support the game throughout its lifecycle.

Please fix the steam version of the game.

Not gonna lie it is very hard to review a game like this, and I can't help but think that I would probably feel a little bit differently about it if we were living in different times. I like fast paced combat that is challenging and really don't care too too much about story. This one is....different.

For the two of you reading.....I'll start with this: This is the perfect game to play during a time like this. Photo-realistic landscapes really help to immerse the player even further into this bleak, unforgiving world. And with DLSS 2.0 my 2080 had zero problems playing this game at 4k 60 HDR with the settings cranked all the way up.

Violence / needless killing is heavily penalized in this game, which I thought would be a bummer since it's a game and I need to blow some steam (pun?) but with how the story i set up it makes perfect sense, and to be honest it was a breath of fresh air. Combat is spaced out and in lots of cases can be avoided altogether, but when it is inevitable it is so incredibly thrilling (especially that first time encountering BT's).

Story - 10/10 (still stuck with me after closing the game for the last time. Incredible story and, as importantly, incredible story-telling. This was a pleasant surprise.)
Combat - 9/10 (thrilling as HELL but you are very limited in what you can do / bring and the boss fights, while really cool to watch, are not exactly unique from one another)
Traversal - ehhhhhhh 9.0/10 (this one is hard because on the one hand the landscape is the best I've ever seen in a game. Hands down. However, the reluctancy to give it 10/10 is rooted in the traversal itself. While I understand and massively respect the attention to detail when it comes to portraying realistic traversal through difficult landscape....randomly tripping on a rock or mis-timing a jump and destroying my fragile cargo (thus resulting in a failed delivery) in the middle of a boss fight is incredibly frustrating. I found myself at times randomly yelling at my controller when Sam decides that it's time to go from slow walking while crouched in a BT area to popping a cartwheel to show the floaty folks that he is down to party)

Overall - 9/10. Thought-provoking title with limited but thrilling combat that takes place in such a beautiful, lonely setting. Too bad Sam went into delivering cargo instead of fulfilling his lifelong dream of becoming a gymnast.