Rhys T.'s reviews

100% Completed · PlayStation

100%'d this on PS4 and then again on PC, which tells you something about me and nothing good. The completion list is where the game shows its age. Under the Bridges. Knife Flights. Fifty stunt jumps scattered across a map that does not want to be traversed carefully. None of it is hard, all of it is long, and none of it changes anything. Compare it to what Rockstar did with the challenges in Red Dead, where at least the hunting teaches you a system. The story missions are a different matter. Mission design here is the tightest in the series — every one has a distinct idea, most have a set piece that doesn't repeat, and the flight school is the only genuinely bad stretch. An A, not an S, purely because a third of the completion content is busywork and I resent having done it twice.

100% Completed · PC

Three full runs. Wizard, then an Open Hand monk, then a Dark Urge durge run that I was not emotionally prepared for. The thing that makes this worth replaying isn't the branching, although the branching is real. It's that the game keeps track of small things and pays them back much later. A character I was rude to in act one turned up in act three and remembered. Not in a big flagged way — one line, easy to miss. I've played a lot of RPGs that claim to do this. This is the first one where I kept catching it. Monk is absurdly strong and I don't think it's close. If you want the combat to feel like a puzzle, play a caster. If you want it to feel like you're cheating, play monk. Performance in act three is the one real blemish. It got better. It was never good.

Completed · PC

I refunded this in 2020. I came back for 2.0 and Phantom Liberty and finished everything, and it is now one of my favourite games, which is an uncomfortable thing to have to write. The 2.0 rework is not a patch, it's a different game underneath. The old skill trees were a spreadsheet where most nodes were percentages; the new ones change how you play. Police actually function. Vehicle combat exists. Cyberware has a cost you have to build around instead of a shopping list you fill. Three years late, but it's the game the marketing described. Night City remains the best-realised city in the medium — not the biggest, the best. Verticality that means something, a skyline you can navigate by, and districts that feel economically distinct rather than aesthetically themed. Performance still gets a 7. Ray tracing costs more here than anywhere and the CPU load in crowds is unreasonable.

100% Completed · PlayStation

Every challenge, every legendary animal, every stranger mission. About 190 hours. The complaint about this game is that it's slow, and the complaint is accurate and also completely misses what it's for. Yes, skinning an animal takes eight seconds. Yes, you walk in camp. The friction is doing something — it's making the world feel physical and it's making time pass at the speed the story needs. A version of this game with snappy controls would be a worse game about worse people. What I did not expect was how much of the best writing is optional. The stranger missions contain the two best endings in the game and most players never see either. Gameplay gets an 8 from me rather than higher because the mission design really is rigid. "Follow this person at this speed" is a shape the game returns to too often for something this open.

100% Completed · PlayStation

Platinumed it in about 60 hours and enjoyed nearly all of them, which is unusual for me with an open world this size. The reason is that the collectibles are mostly good. Haiku spots make you stop and look at a composed frame. Hot springs give you a quiet monologue. Bamboo strikes are a tiny input test. Almost none of it is 'walk here, press square', which is what collectibles usually are. Someone thought about what a player should be doing while they clear a map and the answer wasn't 'nothing'. The Mongol camps are the exception and there are a great many of them. By the third act I could predict the layout from the approach, and liberating the fortieth outpost is the same as the fourth. An A. Gorgeous, thoughtful about the small stuff, and structurally about fifteen hours longer than its ideas.