My review.....
Well.....literally just finished SGW3 a few minutes ago. 98% overall completion. Long story short, if you know what to expect, you'll probably enjoy this game but if you're expecting a lot, you probably won't enjoy this game.
Story and characters weren't bad but the execution and ending were. Seriously, unless you're near the end, you're not missing much. Wasted potential on a few characters, a decent swerve that was also wasted in the last few missions.
Haven't decided on a final rating but if I decide to give it a 7/10, it should be considered very lucky but to be honest, im probably going lower. So much wasted potential.
Missions were for the most part good as were the objectives but the game reuses the same areas for a lot of these missions, side ops and the wanted criminals which is a shame because there's a good amount of areas in the game that aren't really used in any of these areas which is disappointing to say the least.
Played on hard mode. 67 hours with 98% completion. Scout Mode Enemy highlight was set to NO. Aim assist was also set to NO. Extended enemy tagging options was set to YES. Bullet camera was set to NO for the entire game.
World is literally dead even in the small town areas. Limited to one car and the buggy if you have the season pass. Literally no life at all in the game. Probably saw more wolves and dears than actual NPC's. Three maps wasn't needed at all. One, maybe two would have been good enough. Mainly because like I said, you never go to several areas so it's like, what's the point in them existing?
Visually, the world itself looks good in 4K/HDR. I can't complain about that. Character models leave a little to be desired but the facial animations were still better than MEA at launch in my opinion based on what I have seen from that game. Music was okay at best mainly because there wasn't a lot of it. Here and there during missions and it was pretty much the same or similar throughout. The sound effects were good and the voice acting was passable at best but not horrible or anything.
Gameplay wise...sniping is excellent. Stealth is solid. General gunplay though not so much. Just too loose and not good compared to other FPS. Basically, it's serviceable.
Now the bugs/glitches/etc.
- Fell through the world twice while jumping off a ladder (amazingly, you can't step off the ladder as you literally have to jump off despite being on the bottom step...I avoided this for the most part by just falling from the top to the bottom as opposed to climbing up or down...most part, didn't even take any damage).
- Game froze on me three times.
- Had one system error while playing.
- Completed one mission by going out of the exfiltration area to watch me blowing something up but because I was outside the area, once I did that and completed the mission, it didn't register so I had to replay the mission.
- Played for an hour or so with no tires on the car you use to drive around. Literally no tires. Reloading solved the issue.
- Had a glitch with the assault rifle secondary weapon where at times, pressing the square button or any button for that matter while having this weapon as the main weapon in use didn't work. I had to change weapons. After a few minutes of doing various nonsense, this somehow reset and fixed itself but it happened at least twice from what I can remember.
- During one later mission that had buddies on your team, I was advancing, died and restarted from checkpoint. The buddies were literally a few feet in front of the enemies and weren't seen.
- Enemies appear/disappear based on how far away you are. While some will say 250m is the minimum, I literally walked around a base with no enemies despite it being a mission. I had to restart the game and the mission.
- Map has problems...outposts will appear and disappear depending on if you did them or not but if you go back to that area, they respawn which honestly, I hate. Once an outpost is cleared, it should be done.
- Also on the map, you can see the collectable locations but only when you're in one of the other maps. For example, if im in the Dam map, I can see the collectables for the Mining Town map but when I go to the Mining Town map, they disappear.
- Killed a few enemies with stealth kills yet I would be knifing air as the enemy would disappear behind me or whatnot dead. In fairness, I have seen this bug in other games including Far Cry.
- Initial map loading is long. On the Samsung EVO 850 SSD, this load took about 2 1/2 minutes. Once the map is loaded, dying and restarting from checkpoints and fast travel were super quick. On the base HDD, I have read reviews that said the initial map load takes about five minutes.
Can't remember anything else off the top of my head. Oh crap. Just came to me. HORRIBLE Escape of Lydia DLC. Mentioned this in an earlier post. It's only two missions which are basically linear cut off maps of the main game. Think Sniper Elite 4 but smaller.
Can definitely see why the game received low to bad ratings but in fairness, I did enjoy the game for the most part. Hell, if I didn't, I wouldn't have played and completed 98% of it in 67 hours. After typing all of that, I can't and won't give this game a 7/10. Overall, a 6 or maybe 6.5/10. Haven't decided yet. Will be in the 6 range though which on my scale is an "above average" (7/10 is "good" on my scale) game. I can say however that this game craps all over Homefront: The Revolution (I quit after ten or so hours) in pretty much every way and that unlike that game, SGW3 did in fact give me my Far Cry type game fix and I should be good until the eventual FAR CRY 5.
