Recent reviews by Snow Storm

This game is a delight.

It is a pretty game, resonates in a small beautiful way and the gameplay is very fun
and if you like games like satisfactory it will scratch an itch without requiring a PhD in Logistics.

The game has a cool narrative and is causal enough to play with friends
I enjoyed it immensely and you will probably too.

Two tiny pieces of criticism/advice.
1) The deconstruct button is wayyy to easy to engage by accident. spent a 10 minutes trying to place something? Haha *deleted*.
2) The game has very aggressive food and water meters for a game you are supposed to get lost in your head in and dying in the middle of a project feels super frustrating. On a positive note you can adjust the survival meters, but only when you start your save so I had to beat the game dying of hunger while trying to construct a distant mine.

It's rare a tie in game is good, let alone with such ambition and such a demanding fan base, but this game is not only good, it's pretty close to amazing.

I was NOT a Harry Potter fan before playing --nothing against it really, watched and enjoyed the first three or four movies and then sorta lost track of it. I started to find the series as a whole too big to break into around the time the 7th book came out and truth be told I had ZERO intentions of playing this game. But with a lot of encouragement from friends despite my protests that I as a non-fan I wouldn't really like it, I bought it.

I have a lot of games ...seriously, thousands of games, so many games in fact it would be impossible to play and beat all of them before I die. I say this not to be boastful, but to emphasize how easily i get bored and give up on a game or series because it just didn't click. A lot of the time games have bad beginnings, in order to keep the game long and make it feel like a journey there's a need to pace out the action and a need to create an experience that feels like it's building up to something. Hogwarts is unrelenting from start to finish in engaging and interesting things to do, places to explore and action to jump into. From the moment you make you character, to the moment the full world unlocks you feel a sense of excitement and fun.

The game takes serious effort to sprinkle things everywhere, quests, loot, enemies so there's never a feeling of being downright bored. Not only does it keep you engaged it offers dozens of different fun pursuits to keep you on the hook and constantly surprises you with an unexpected feature, time and time and time and time again. By the final act of the game I was still unlocking new stuff that made me go "oh wow that's really cool."
It is very clear the Devs put their hearts and souls into this game as there are enough features and activities to fill 5 other games. Not only are there a lot, almost everything is fun. There is some repition in the side quests and unlocks but the game never demands you do anything you don't like in order to have a fun time, and the completionist in me loves a sprawling world of side activities.

Lets talk features without talking spoilers.
Out of the game the combat is surprisingly fun and engaging, the visuals are astounding, the exploration is fluid and natural and storytelling is both narrative logical and serves a purpose of being a great framework for a game that's primary focus is exploration and discovery. Let talk about the main story; A lot of exploration games have this problem in which the plot loses a sense of urgency as the player spends hours looting every chest and picking every flower, Hogwart makes you feel like it's naturally unfolding both before your eyes and over a period of time that give allowances for you have fun and engage in other things, that time 'wasted' almost feels like a part of the main plot. The enemies you face are a barely step ahead while it feels like you spend a lot of the plot slowing them down, but never truly catching up. At no point did i forget the over reaching plot and because the game slowly and meticulously expands there's never a feeling like you can get too far off the beaten path where you cannot easily return.

I will also speak to the visual for one sec. This game has astonishing visuals that make it one of the best looking game I have played recently. if you can run it. I struggle to play on max on an RTX 4090 and playing on my steam deck, low both looks pretty bad and still runs poorly. It is a visual tour for those who have the power, but if you don't it could be worth checking the recommended settings before proceeding.

Overall this game is amazing. I will expound further on it but I will leave you with this:

Since I started playing this game I have BECOME a Harry Potter fan. I went back and watched all the movies and have begun reading the books because this game made me realize how truly amazing of a thing I was missing out on.

Let me start by saying I have a $7000 computer. This is an important piece of information as my experience of the game at 60-100 FPS is vastly different than others especially on last gen console. I’m playing on an RTX 3090 and running the game on 64GB of ram and a 980 Pro SSD. It still manages to feel sputtery at times and drops to mid 30s randomly but I’ll go over that in the bad.

The good:

Immersion:

Obviously I have played for over 50 hours which means the game is sucking me in quite hard. It is really immersive and the game has packed tons of things to do in night city into one game. Side questions, exploring, collecting and just generally running around and bullshitting is all fun.

Gameplay:

The gunplay is fun, it has a lot of options but the guns really feel powerful and responsive. The game gives me a lot of options for play. I like the upgrade paths and feel as though they aren’t so powerful that NOT upgrading makes a weapon useless to me, as that is sometimes the case with other RPGs like fallout.

Visuals:

Now that I’ve said that, I have to talk about how this game looks. It is a masterpiece. The work they put into designing the city, from the major urban design to the tiny alleys littered in garbage the game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ beautiful. You can feel the work they put into it’s design as you walk and look up and see a cascade of seedy ads, overlaying a both modern and decrepit city. I enjoy walking around and discovering new things, if you’re just starting out I highly recommend the double jump legs so you can parkour through the night city street. The city is amazing, but just as impressive is it’s outskirts. A massive wasteland that gives you a distant landscape of Night City, complete with holographic ads and glowing lights. And furthermore a constant feeling of getting lost in a very real 3D place. Yes I know the AI can ♥♥♥♥ itself sometimes, but I feel immersed in the city all the same and feel like it’s worth buying to explore the world by itself.

Collecting:

Collecting stuff is super enjoyable. The clothing and gun upgrade system and replacement system is fun in the Witcher/borderlands kinda way, except you can actually carry a bunch of guns in this game, which makes you’re ability to slot weapons in and out by need really sensible. But my favorite thing to collect are cars. There are lots of cool cars that you can explore the city it and driving around finding that one sweet ride has been my favorite thing to do.

Game design:

Overall CDPR put real work into the game and built it with a similar passion to that of the Witcher 3, however it might not seem it, but this game has a much wider scope and with it, you can feel they cut some serious corners. Not only that but the game was delayed so many times and has a lot of issues due to how rushed it feels. My hope is, much like the Witcher which had huge patches for months after the game launched this game will too get improvements to story, performance and other parts. That said I still recommend buying this game, but there’s a lot wrong with it.

Let’s talk about the bad.

The bad:

Story:

I haven’t finished the story yet but for me it’s a mixed bag. Some missions are great but there’s a looming feeling something is missing. The plot is, weird. Weird is not bad, but it’s unique in a way that doesn’t feel spirited. Your character wants to be a legend, but then acts like a whiny ♥♥♥♥♥ through most of the story. Spoiler alert if you are consider buying the game (skip ahead now, warning you!!!) A legendary, badass terrorist gets implanted in your head and begins to take over your brain. He shows up in random spots and gives cardboard flat banter despite how badass he is billed to be. He should be a cool, ♥♥♥♥ the man, anti-capitalist, anti hero that frustrates your character but pushes your character to be a better person, but falls short of that mark and comes off like an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Johnny silver hand and V are not opposites like they should be. In the way that Cortana is the brains to the master chief’s brawn and both seem to bring something to the table, the opposite is true here. Silverhand and V are both badass, sarcastic, no nonsense tough guys, with no corporate allegiances, and similar overall ambitions. If I was writing them as character archetypes they would be the exact same archetype. Since they are so similar they have to switch up the role of straight man and crazy one, in a way that feels borderline inconsistent, letting the character break personality to give the other one something to complain about. But I digress. Story is good but some parts are poorly written and the overall story arch does not seem to add up to the sim of its parts yet. (That being said I have a lot more story to go I think.)

UI:

I wanna touch on the confusing UI for a sec. it’s mostly good but I find it clunky. I ask basic UX questions like: why can’t I see anything but quests and travel points on the fast travel menu? Why do I need to open my phone, open my messages and sift through a series of out of order texts to generate a response to a text. And speaking of texts, why do mission photos only show up in the text chat and not on the quest log itself? Why is there not a sell all button for stacked items or sell junk button for crap guns? Why are the sort by options seemingly backwards, Why does the game give me driving directions when I’m walking? It took me quite a while to adjust to the UI, and I still find it clunky to switch gears easily.

Voice acting:

The voice acting is hardly the worst but it isn’t great either. Lots of story telling seems to be lost by characters constantly yelling or speaking in low exasperated tones. Also I can hear when a line was recorded on a different day because it sounds out of place or in a tone in relationship to the other dialog. This is very immersion breaking but not a cardinal sin, as overall it’s manageable. Not winning any awards but I’ll take it.

The quests:

Ok, so the side quests kinda suck. They are often confusing, repetitive or dull and the fixer who give them to you are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who give bad instructions. A great annoyance is getting several side questions in a single minute, while exploring and area where the enemies will straight up squish you, but now you cannot jump or crouch because the fixer is taking to you. It’s like niko Facetiming you 24/7 but instead of bowling he wants you to do an urgent killing of a gang of enemies 20 levels ahead of yours. Please stop giving me side quests way above my level game, it’s obnoxious and makes my quest log overwhelming. But most frustrating is trying to sus out what the quest givers actually want you to do. I was once given a quest when I needed to take a car that had somebody in the trunk to an enemy of the fixer. It was called olive branch and the gesture to the enemy seemed to be a peace offering. She told me to deliver the car but not the driver who had pissed off her enemy. She winked and said “if you know what I mean” which I imagined meant “kill the driver.” It didn’t. Also I let the guy get out of the trunk and she thanked me, THANKED ME, forgetting all about extending an olive branch to our enemies. The worst is getting yelled at for not stealthing through a quest that didn’t say I needed to be stealthy. In fact the quest in question said “handle this however you like.” Apparently they excluded murder.

That being said the worst thing about this game is how it runs.

The ugly:

Glitches, and bugs, and performance issues OH MY:

At this point everyone know the game is buggy and runs like a rotund man up a hill. Some of the bugs are annoying, like my car summoning 4KM away, some are immersion breaking, like enemies shooting in the wrong direction, or voice dialog not coming through, and some are game breaking, like me getting teleported anywhere between 5 to 100 feet in a random direction very very very often. This is really bad in a firefight or god forbid during a stealth section when I get

Trippy, out there, surreal and amazing.

It's here.
And it's worth buying.

One of the best stealth game I have ever played

the snake cute as ♥♥♥♥

My friends and I hate each other now. 10/10.

The game is not funny. Honestly that's the whole review really.

Yes humor is subjective, but it's trying hard to be funny and it's not. It's so force and written by people who are trying be funny, but do not understand how to be original or subvert expectations. The timing isn't funny, there's no escalation and the jokes are... sorry, Joke, singular, is tired by the time you're done with the first puzzle pack.

Also the voice acting is bad. Not only should the voice actor not be acting, he should probably not be talking.

Just save yourself some time and play the stanley parable.

Pure Joy. Worth the money.