Played Nier: Automata this weekend on PC.
A few performance issues. Hopefully will be sorted by a driver update.
Paas says it sorted out his issues.
Had terrible input lag till I adjusted some graphics settings.
Now on to the gameplay...
The TUTORIAL (emphasis intended) level is between 30 minutes and 1 hour
long depending on how you play (there are secrets, alternate routes etc).
There are no save points. You die at the boss? GGs go back to square
one. And it's not exactly easy. In fact, everyone suggests playing on
Hard mode, except for the TUTORIAL, which you should do on normal
difficulty (the boss can one-shot you with nearly every attack). The other
reason it's not that easy is because of how the camera works. eg. You
position yourself in front of a fence with the mid-boss ahead you so that
you clearly can see his attacks. As the fight starts, the entire screen
goes black. Why? Because the camera decided that it felt more comfortable
behind one of the thin horizontal rails on the fence, which means your
entire view is obscured. Congratulations! You just got hit by an
unseeable attack. Here's the fun part: Now this could be because of the
input lag, but it seems like there are no iFrames after getting hit. So if
you get hit by something like a grinder and then try to roll to recovery,
you can't if you happen to recover into said grinder. Ggs. Go back to
square 1. Well done Platinum on not making the most annoying cutscenes and
set-pieces skippable. Watch them again you ungrateful, filthy casual.
It's also interesting how some skippable scenes are skipped by pressing A,
while others are skipped by pressing B. Sensible UX design is overrated I
guess.
OK, now that I got the bad stuff out of the way, let's move on to some more
bad stuff. So you fight your way to the end again and you have to fight
more giant enemies. Simply dodging and counters. Very easy, no? No is
the correct answer. If you dodge while the camera is having a bad day,
you'll dodge in a way that you cannot see yourself because the boss is
obscuring the view. What to do now? Stand still? Dodge left, right?
Jump? It's an SFV mixup. You have to commit to a choice and if you guess
wrong, well, see the previous paragraph about no iFrames. But! What if
you are lucky enough that you only got hit once and therefore still have
enough health left so that you can apply a restorative item (never
explained in the tutorial BTW)? Well obviously you would just press start,
then find and select the item to use it, no? Again, no is indeed the
correct answer. The sub-menu appears to only be available during certain
frames of animation. If you press start on a "wrong" frame you simply get
a pause menu. The game seems to think that recovery is a cut-scene or set
piece. So what you'll need to do is get hit, then guess again about where
to dodge to, and then if the camera gods are feeling generous, maybe you
can find a spot and ideal time to access the sub menu so that you can heal
yourself.
Whew. Well now that the TUTORIAL is out of the way, how does the rest of
the game stack up. Well, the first thing they show you is how to adjust
brightness and audio volume.
GGs Platinum.
Other than that the game is great. I swear.
