Garabbas bounced off Midnight Suns immediately, instantly; I'd be surprised if he hadn't already installed it, just five days from release. I think he would rather have nothing than the possibility of more that. As Penny Arcade's Chief self-flaggelator, I have been lashing my bare back with it for the last couple days. Results have varied!
The initial issues I had were related to crashes. Once it crashed two times in a row, I essentially reloaded the game directly into a crash, and when I updated my drivers it sorta helped but not completely. I read that people were turning DLSS off and having good results - DLSS, you'll recall, is something you generally turn on. That seems to have stopped the full crashes, but it still freezes for seconds at a time when you… well, when you do lots of different stuff. All the time. That sure was a long pause. Is it gonna crash? That's the primary source of drama propelling the narrative currently.
If a game looks incredible, I expect that it's gonna result in performance problems from time to time. But the game looks awful. People. I swear to God: there was texture pop-in on a pre-rendered cutscene. I am the kind of person who does not send food back if they bring me the wrong order, if it's cold, or even if it is up to fifty-percent human hair. I don't send back food you can crush and style. Okay? These characters look bad. The character creator is from the year 2000 - and I don't mean that in the euphemistic way, where two-thousand indicated a trackless future occupied by household appliances of mind bending sophistication. I mean it is from the Year of our Lord two thousand, disinterred from an elementary school's time capsule.
There's a lot of CW type shit in here. I don't even mind the CW, I just don't know what it's doing in this. And it would be one thing if it could just be skipped, but it can't really be, as they've commingled watching movies with witches and talking about my feelings with the combat systems. I don't want to walk around a big place just to do what I should be selecting from a menu. I don't want to go to some intermediary space before we fight just so you can display your impressive collection of Whedonisms. The tone is all over the fucking place.
The walk cycle for the main character looks like it's from an asset store. Load times are inexplicable. Battles culminate in an autogenerated comic cover that is an embarrassing hodepodge of posed 3D models, 2D backgrounds, and homeless, out of place fonts - they couldn't even be bothered to make the one hand-drawn part they slapped in the upper left corner match the character you made. Continue, inexplicably, doesn't load from the last time you saved but the last time it saved. I could go on. These luminous reviews are either inexplicable or unconscionable.
Nestled somewhere inside these bizarre decisions and console refugee portsmanship is one of the most interesting battle systems I've seen. Understand that skirmish wargaming is my chief interest currently, my knowledge isn't encyclopedic by any means but it does border on some combination of Ridiculous and Gourmet, and the way they've braided the action economy with the card systems is the .gif of a bearded, leather-clad man nodding in approval. The way the characters I have characters are modeled in those systems might actually be genius, and I had to spoil the others. Why are you hiding this game beneath the other one?
I'd have more to say, but it didn't want me to play it. And I have a very specific allergy to games that crash at the Victory screen.
(CW)TB out.
