Finished Act 1,It is obvious CDPR never made a FPS game on their lives, what is puzzling is: did anyone play this game before the release? Very hard is almost unplayable if you want decent combat gameplay, you will need to go with blades or stealth, assault rifles, smgs, shotguns, pistols, are all terrible to use because of the hp spongyness that get to ridiculous levels. Didnt anyone play this game before release to see that any difficulty above normal is busted? I mean, on very hard, if you dont go for stealth or blades, the combat is so clunky that is unbearable. Generic mooks can take three shotgun blasts to the chest, can take multiple grenade explosions and two to three clips of SMG and assault rifle fire to the head.
I mean, everyone on their team never played a fps game? I mean, people shit on Borderlands but no Borderlands game has awful combat as this one. I mean, I did the heist mission, I have my stealth build based on headshoting with revolvers (one of the few ways to keep sane and withstand the combat as you can pretty much one shot dudes from stealth), so CDPR had the brillant idea of not allowing you to use your own guns and just give you some shitty peashooter SMG for the whole level. It took 3 entire clips of headshots to drop a regular enemy. The only reason I kept my sanity was by avoiding combat and taking down everyone stealthly. The incompetence here is astounding, if the game was just a technical mess, but there are whole gameplay designs that just dont work. Also, your character movement feels like you are steering a sack of potatoes that get stuck everywhere, WTF.
I mean, pretty much ALL other popamole shooters on the market came to the conclusion that unrestricted HP sponginess is a bad idea because it fucks a shooter so bad. What is worse is that the HP sponginess dont make the enemies harder as they are mostly passive keeping distance and with exception of the melee ones (that, by the way, have a very rudimentary Ai, on many other shooters, melee enemies tend to dodge alot and dont just charge on a straight line directly on your gun), they just stand there with some potshots at you.
It would be so easy to make this combat much better, it isnt a question of technical issues but retarded decisions after retarded decisions, most enemies should die to a single headshot but keeping moving all the time to make that hard, the generic mooks should be agressive, moving all the time and advancing at your position to surround you (like it is on pretty much 99% of popamole FPS). You should restrict those levels of sponginess to special augmented enemies that should be like mini bosses, each one with its own abilities. If they want this to be a looter shooter (and by the way, this game sucks as a looter shooter too). Imagine you are facing a corp hit team, two are dangerous augmented minibosses while the rest of the mooks applied pressure on youwith grenades and by flanking so you expose yourself to the minibosses (this is what pretty much most AAA popamole games do). It would be cool, you hacking the minibosses to keep them away from the fight while at same time having to deal with the mooks but instead CDPR took the most retarded rout ever, more HP for everyone. Not even Fallout 4 reaches this amount of bad. How this game fails at being even a fucking AAA popamole shooter which formula is well known since ever?
Not everything is bad, the story and the world are well done, and night city is really nice to explore and I like that the game tries some rudimentary attribute and skill gating with some powerful combat implants requiring high body and you actually needing to make some rudimentary build to at least overcome the bullet sponginess but all this is lost on the middle of shit gameplay.
The game is basically a really long movie where the gameplay bits between are shiet, or on another words, it is the same kind of shit of Witcher 3. This idea of CDPR of releasing awful games then covering it up with with tons of cutscenes are biting them on the ass, the gameplay systems of Witcher 3 were also complete garbage but they escaped there because it was an action adventure game like Ass Creed and those games arent know for having interesting gameplay but here, shooting is awful and you do alot of it. When I'm saying awful gameplay, I'm comparing it to other popamole games that have much better gameplay. Man, even Watch Dogs 2 have more complex level design with you controlling drones and shiet.
My advice is to play on normal and play as a stealth game (not that stealth is really well done here, it is pretty basic too) with lots of hacking (the best part of the gameplay for me) or go for blades to fuck enemies up quickly instead of trading pot shots with them forever. The only reason I didnt give up is because the characters, the stories are interesting and the game has a nice atmosphere, it is like a 80's cyberpunk story with cyber samurais and creepy old japanese corp villains included. The only major annoyance I have with the characters is the V male voice, the guy is an annoying whining fag, they should have gone with a silent protag, he is getting on my nerves. Many people are hyping the different choices and endings depending of side quests, we will see.
