Scarlet Nexus has some neat ideas but it feels cumbersome and poorly paced resulting in a kind of boring experience.
On the positive side of things though I initially liked the visuals with a kind of Blade Runner Neo Tokyo vibe to the environments with holograms on buildings and a nice sense of scale. The soundtrack is really pretty good too with a mixture of digital and rock tracks that are fast paced to match the combat. It all runs very smooth on PS5 at 60fps as well.
On the more negative side of things after 10 hours I felt the story just didn't really go anywhere and is broken up by these "bond" quests that just feel like an absolute time waste as I don't feel they actually develop the cast. You get a choice of two characters at the start, I chose Kasane and her whole stick is that she has a sister complex pretty much in that time. The story scenes are kind of cringey but not entertaining as I just didn't care about anyone or what was happening. The cutscenes themselves also seem to have been made with about a £10 budget. They are nearly all just one static screen with talking over it like a poorly made visual novel and there is a lot of dialogue and text. I feel like this game needed both pruning massively and yet more depth to the characters and plot all at the same time. It's pretty impressive how the writers managed that.
The combat has promise. You can use these telekinetic powers to launch items at monsters as well as do physical attacks, jump, dodge, and link with team mates to gain additional abilities like elemental buffs etc. When it works it can look pretty awesome, picking up a bus and crushing monsters with it is satisfying. The issue is it's kind of clunky to use and I just never felt comfortable with it control wise. Your character takes almost no impact damage half the time as well so I would get hit by an off screen launched projectile without even knowing it had happened. There doesn't seen to be an attack cancel for dodging either which I found most unpleasant in a fast paced action game like this. Lastly the fights just feel really repetitive. Enemies aren't that interesting and can be beaten pretty easily but all in all I found it a little awkward but it's close to being fun, just not quite there.
Speaking of awkward the menus are just an absolute mess with side quests and challenges (also bland and boring) buried in sub menus with various other things like character exposition, equip menus etc. The dungeons are also just uninteresting to explore with a few corridors and large rooms with randomly generated items, it's just repetitive.
Eventually I got to a particularly bad story section and simply realized I wasn't having fun. It dawned that I'd been actively avoiding playing it compared with most games when I had free time so made the decision to simply drop it and move on.
It's not terrible. It's just clunky, haphazard and kind of boring.
+ Smooth framerate on PS5.
+ Nice OST.
+ some nice art design.
- Slightly clunky and repetitive combat.
- Boring dungeons.
- Uninteresting story and characters.
- Badly paced.
On the positive side of things though I initially liked the visuals with a kind of Blade Runner Neo Tokyo vibe to the environments with holograms on buildings and a nice sense of scale. The soundtrack is really pretty good too with a mixture of digital and rock tracks that are fast paced to match the combat. It all runs very smooth on PS5 at 60fps as well.
On the more negative side of things after 10 hours I felt the story just didn't really go anywhere and is broken up by these "bond" quests that just feel like an absolute time waste as I don't feel they actually develop the cast. You get a choice of two characters at the start, I chose Kasane and her whole stick is that she has a sister complex pretty much in that time. The story scenes are kind of cringey but not entertaining as I just didn't care about anyone or what was happening. The cutscenes themselves also seem to have been made with about a £10 budget. They are nearly all just one static screen with talking over it like a poorly made visual novel and there is a lot of dialogue and text. I feel like this game needed both pruning massively and yet more depth to the characters and plot all at the same time. It's pretty impressive how the writers managed that.
The combat has promise. You can use these telekinetic powers to launch items at monsters as well as do physical attacks, jump, dodge, and link with team mates to gain additional abilities like elemental buffs etc. When it works it can look pretty awesome, picking up a bus and crushing monsters with it is satisfying. The issue is it's kind of clunky to use and I just never felt comfortable with it control wise. Your character takes almost no impact damage half the time as well so I would get hit by an off screen launched projectile without even knowing it had happened. There doesn't seen to be an attack cancel for dodging either which I found most unpleasant in a fast paced action game like this. Lastly the fights just feel really repetitive. Enemies aren't that interesting and can be beaten pretty easily but all in all I found it a little awkward but it's close to being fun, just not quite there.
Speaking of awkward the menus are just an absolute mess with side quests and challenges (also bland and boring) buried in sub menus with various other things like character exposition, equip menus etc. The dungeons are also just uninteresting to explore with a few corridors and large rooms with randomly generated items, it's just repetitive.
Eventually I got to a particularly bad story section and simply realized I wasn't having fun. It dawned that I'd been actively avoiding playing it compared with most games when I had free time so made the decision to simply drop it and move on.
It's not terrible. It's just clunky, haphazard and kind of boring.
+ Smooth framerate on PS5.
+ Nice OST.
+ some nice art design.
- Slightly clunky and repetitive combat.
- Boring dungeons.
- Uninteresting story and characters.
- Badly paced.