Recent reviews by klbk

I miss my wife.

I don't really get what this game and its story is trying to tell. It fails miserably at the presentation.
Maybe I'm not american enough for this type of dry and repetitive humor, which indeed gets old after 20 minutes.

This thing defends itself only with the on point voice acting, but that's not really enough to justify wasting your time playing it, let alone buy it.

Enjoyable for casual gameplay with friends, ocassionally with randoms on ranked, as long as you'll not stumble upon bots, try hard smurfs or blatant laggers.

Manual region change should be added, since at certain days and hours it's impossible to find and enjoy ranked matches.

Jank.

It may be good for single player content, if you haven't experienced original game, but crashes often in freeburn (online). Sometimes just after connecting to a lobby, sometimes after more players join. You can clearly see others having similar problems by watching them join and disconnect instantly, or after some time, then try to join again. BRP Modder might have a solution for this, but their servers seemed to be down at the moment I tried to patch the game.

I haven't had so much crashes in the original release, this is sad.

The game is really underwhelming and significantly broken for me to enjoy it. Even at such low price where you could say it's a steal.

I tried playing original The Crew in the past, but did not enjoy it either. This one I apparently played for 20 minutes at some point, but did not remember doing it, so I checked it out.

Driving physics can be okayish when playing on a gamepad, but still not so much enjoyable anyway. This completely wastes potential of such big and pretty good looking environment, as cruising around is just bland and boring. This especially makes "driver needed" events a chore. KBM controls are terrible to use and should be avoided due to other issues this game has.

I cannot say much about progression system and the upgrade system, but it seemed to be okay, even though you upgrade your vehicles by gaining cards from lootboxes (which are dropped after completing events).

The dealbreaker, however, is the fact that every single attempt to minimize the game for a moment is likely gonna end up with unability to get back to it, so you'll need to reset this game. It actually takes a lot of time to get back to action, so this is a major issue when you play in exclusive fullscreen. Feels like gambling all over again in 2010's with Source engine games (but worse).
Moreover, game doesn't lock the mouse cursor inside the game window properly, so if you have multi-monitor setup and want to use keyboard + mouse to play it, you'll likely click outside the window when moving camera around your vehicle or wander around your garage with your avatar, causing your game to minimize.

Another thing is that the game locks to either 30 or 60 FPS, which might be a big deal for someone and even with the lock, frame pacing suffers and you can experience micro-stutters, while still having lots of computing power to spare. This is a minor issue, as it's not that often, but was worth mentioning.
Game also offers only FXAA for anti-aliasing method, which breaks the visuals a little by creating ghosting around your character and behind your vehicle + making graphics a little blurry (obviously). This happens even in static scenes and should be considered when using low pixel density displays if aliasing bothers you.

To sum it up: The game may be worth checking out at 1$ price point, especially if you plan to play with your friends, but don't expect much from it. If you can withstand the game physics and issues I mentioned, it might be enjoyable journey for you. Personally I would skip this one, as there are better titles out there. Refunded.

I played every other main Yakuza game that came before this and enjoyed them all, even if there were some weaker entries.
While I understand they're all story/cutscene heavy, this installment fails at balancing things out.
It feels like a drag with 90% of cutscenes and 10% of actual gameplay, and that's 7 hours in. The fighting system doesn't help at all, since it's basically 6% of the gameplay part and is slowing things out even further.

Story itself sure is fun, at least so far, but having to invest god knows how many hours to have some fun with the actual gameplay is crazy.

Hard pass for me, but maybe I'll try again some other day.

Really cool and refreshing classic that needs a proper, modern remake.
Easily one of the top FPP fantasy games when it comes to fighting mechanics.

Game worth checking out, that's for sure.

Very lovely game which I enjoyed, even if business thing was a bit grindy. Definitely worth a try as it's a little bit different from what's on the market.

Main story is really great and gameplay is simply fun with very minor exceptions.
I loved how it balances it's theme between being comical and serious through the gameplay.

What I loved for sure is how much development went into most (if not all) of the characters, even if they were minor and not related to the main plot. Face design is also superb, and thanks to that you won't forget our memorable antagonists, that's for sure.

You rarely see a game like this, where even its minigames are more polished than some full titles.

I enjoyed the game in general, but the grind it has becomes simply insane at some point.
Even Yakuza 0 with it's business thing is incomparable to that.

Like who the hell thought it'd be fun to grind Majima so much in order to restore Dragon style to at least usable state.
I gave up at rank S and skipped Komeki altogether after seeing that it still sucks and I'm barely halfway through, while other styles are maxed up already.

Another thing is this Kiwami mechanic, which is utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Your opponents regenerate like crazy while you have to change styles in order to stop that, and that costs time. It wasn't making combat any more challenging in fact, but it artificially stretched each encounter for no particular reason.

I recommend the game but I advise to not bother with clearing all the content it offers.

Rock and stone!