![]() Your playable characters have a few too many evasive options during the heat of battle, and most enemy attacks can easily be dodged, regardless of the size or strength of the foe. Defense is a little too forgiving as well. The game carries a veneer of genuine depth and strategy to the combat, but no matter which weapons you use or which skills you equip, combat always seems to boil down to equipping the strongest weapon at your disposal and mashing away on the attack button. There are weapons to collect and upgrade, skills and buffs that can be equipped, and dozens of sidequests to tackle, but the meat of the game lies in its hack n' slash combat.and boy howdy do I wish that aspect of the game were better. It's a 3rd person open world experience featuring simplistic button mashing combat and some twin-stick shooter sequences thrown in for flavor. In terms of gameplay, Nier: Automata plays a lot like GTA meets Dynasty Warriors meets Raiden. The stylish combat sequences look great, even if they are a little too easy. This game doesn't really have much in common with Furi, but it is an open world RPG/action/shooter hybrid with some interesting elements, so I stuck with it through the end. I never did play the original Nier (or its antecedents, the Drakengard series), but I was motivated to check this out after I heard it favorably compared to Furi, my game of the year in 2016. Any longer and the scenario, gameplay, and characters would have really started to wear thin. ![]() It took me just a bit over 10 hours to complete the game, which felt like just the right length for this style of game. The shorter length of the game overall does help to soften the blow of the lame enemy designs, but there it is. There's just very little variety in the enemy design as compared to the rest of the games in the series, and it's kind of a bummer. As creepy and powerful as the Baker family are, it's worth noting that the rest of the enemies in this game do leave something to be desired. In fact, it's all the better because he's not some 'roided out, wisecracking superhuman distracting you from the truly creepy Baker family as they stalk and taunt you on their home turf. ![]() ![]() Everyman protagonist Ethan Winters is nothing to write home about in the personality department, but he works as a stand-in for the player, and since you rarely see him (again, the game is in first-person), that's just fine. Speaking of the game's "vibe" and story, I can definitely say that I enjoyed those elements quite a bit. Put simply, the combat system succeeds at feeding into the overall vibe of the game and making you feel like an average terrified dude exploring a house of horrors, but it's nowhere near as fun as it has been in the last few numbered entries in the series. You've got a knife that you can use to slash away at weakened enemies in an effort to finish them off without wasting ammunition, but there's nothing in here that's reminiscent of the limb stuns and melee finishers that were such an integral part of the combat in last few games in the series. As a matter of fact, if the melee attacks of 4-6 were something you enjoyed you should know that they're nowhere to be found here. You've still got guns, and you're still using them to blast away at weird ass shit, but the aiming is slow, your ammo is weak, and there's no satisfaction of nailing a well placed headshot before moving in to deliver a coup-de-grace melee attack while the enemy is reeling. Sadly, the well-tuned gunplay of 4-6 doesn't really make the leap to the first-person perspective all that well. ![]()
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