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by Rafiki 02/20/2024, 11:13pm PST |
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It was on sale for $40, so I tried it. Requested a refund after 100 minutes, 15-20 of which was sitting at the title screen waiting for "compiling shaders" to reach 100%. I could technically start the game, but it warned me of severe graphical issues and instability, and there's mountains of posts all over Steam and the internet about the game crashing all over the place with the advice being do not bother starting the game until the shaders are done compiling. I guess at the original launch this was massively unoptimized and people waited for HOURS for shaders to finish compiling, so this is an improvement. Fortunately, the majority of people had the correct reaction and absolutely savaged it in reviews. Unfortunately, the most recent reviews are all Very Positive on average.
If this is not just some shitty developer that did the port and is the future of AAA cutting edge gaming, then they can fuck right off and I'm more than happy to let technological progress stall until this gets sorted out. I give fuck all about the difficulty of supporting different hardware configurations and operating systems and so forth. I'm not turning into some goddamn neckbeard customizing and recompiling my Linux kernel just to play the latest AAA dad game. People were also warning that if you update your drivers you'll have to recompile shaders all over again. Other people were suggesting that devs add a message to the game explaining the purpose of compiling shaders so that we can all set our expectations and assume the appropriate bootlicking position.
I will give credit where credit is due and say that the graphics were pretty, though.
As far as the game is concerned, I walked around for 90 minutes looking for context button prompts to move a ladder or a bookcase, reading scattered lore in environments rendered with a ludicrous amount of detail for the value of said lore, and did some Uncharted cover-shooting. May seem wrong to judge it so harshly with so little time played, but in the first 90 minutes of Hi-Fi Rush I beat the shit out of 100 robots to a bitchin' rock beat and then bashed a giant death robot in the face with a guitar so hard it exploded while Nine Inch Nails blared in the background, so Last of Us could have done better.
Worm said the story would have been better if they wrote Joel as a wasteland psycho from the beginning, and it kind of looks like they did. The first thing you do is go with Tess to track down some guy who beat up Tess and who's supposed to have some guns for you. You murder a whole bunch of people who are guarding him, then when you confront him, Joel breaks his arm backwards across the joint because he was giving you the runaround on where the guns were, and then Tess shoots him in the head because he sold your guns to someone else. If he's not a wasteland psycho he's at least mafia, jesus christ.
They wisely rewrote that for the HBO series, by the way. Joel and Tess wanted a car battery, and the group is killed by an unrelated explosion. The Wikipedia page for the HBO series says that the writer was willing to allow any changes from the game as long as there was a strong reason, and "make your leads sympathetic and likable" is pretty strong. |
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