Overrated. Wears its influences on its sleeve while not being quite as good as any of them. With the praise it's gotten I expected something on the level of Nier: Automata, but while I was depressed when finishing Nier because there was no more to experience, I felt very satisfied with putting the game down at the end of my first playthrough with Stellar Blade.

That said, the combat is definitely a highlight. A very well done system that stands on its own with enough of a skill ceiling to make you feel like an anime god but also cheese it if you're not into mastering mechanics.

This game is a solid 8/10 and I look forward to whatever the studio does next.

I don't mind less content but the game is lacking a ton of basic options and there's a clumsiness to playing the game. There was clearly a "minimum viable product" approach to getting this into release.

This makes the game feel worse to play and more amateurish than many smaller budget 4X games.

Some issues that make the game unplayable for me right now:

- Animation speed cannot be adjusted. You'll have to wait for units to move and fight very slowly.
- Animation speed for menus opening/closing is slow. When you're constantly going in and out of menus, this constant source of friction adds up.
- Very few map customization options.
- Lack of tooltips explaining what the existing options do.

Play this if you want:

- The retro-futuristic art style of Bioshock
- The grim darkness of a Warhammer 40k hive city
- The existential themes of Altered Carbon
- The cyberpunk neo-noir of Neuromancer
- The crime investigation gameplay loop of Phoenix Wright

All rolled up into one compelling, story-focused package. Excellent game dripping with mood and atmosphere.

Out of all games I've played titled Ghost of Tshushima DIRECTOR'S CUT

Pros:

I know way too much about Warhammer 40k lore and the game nails every detail. The mechanics and systems are also much easier to grasp than Pathfinder.

The companions are a bit cookie cutter if you've read an unreasonable amount of Warhammer books like I have but people less familiar with 40k stories will find a very interesting and unique group of characters, each representing their slice of 40k very well.

Cons:

The game's pacing has a lot of fights, then a short break of conversation, then onto another string of fights. Much heavier on the combat side than the roleplay side. Not necessarily a bad thing but I like to have a bit more of a breather between combat-heavy sections in CRPGs.

9 hours of "just one more round" as of this review

Game is fun but crashes constantly within 20 minutes of playing every time. Can't recommend it at this time.

The game right now will default to your integrated GPU if you're playing on a laptop. Make sure to switch to your dedicated graphics.

Getting worse than a black screen. Alt-tabbed out of the game, it crashed and now it refuses to start up. Game crashes as soon as it opens.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ worthless.

This game is pretty fun, but the only reason why the reviews went to "Mostly Positive" is because someone on reddit went to the subreddit and asked people to post positive reviews.

I only have 12.1 hours at the time of posting because I recently added my E:D account to Steam (didn't know that was possible until recently). I bought the game when it was originally first released to the public for purchase through their website.

This game is really fun, but takes a certain mindset to find it that fun. You have to be into the fantasy of being a pilot zipping through space trading/fighting/exploring. When it comes to the objective amount and design of features, this game should not be a "Mostly Positive" imo.

You have to create your own goals and story in this game. This becomes less true as features trickle out to pad the game with real goals, but it's still largely true. This isn't bad in and of itself, but it becomes pretty bad when the metaphorical vehicle you use to do this are shallow gameplay features.

There's no real depth to E:D. This isn't entirely true in ship weapon customization (only if you have the Horizons Season Pass though) but E:D is like a really impressively wide puddle. Sure it's bigger than anything you've seen before, but it's going to be just as deep and interesting on the other side as it is here.

I think E:D will become a game worth buying in the future. But now? I couldn't ever recommend it to anyone. I still think half of the Horizon features should have been added into the base game for free.

And I despise how this game was pushed into "mostly positive" not by the natural opinions of the gamers who bought it, but artificially influenced by a sudden influx of opinions from a demographic that's going to be skewed towards positive because they're hardcore fans and not necessarily representative of the average experience. The average person doesn't spend hours a day commenting about the game on a forum somewhere.