Gamplay Preview 1 & 2 Complete Breakdown
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Graphics & Music
The devs showed us a bit of how the gameplay will look like and after watching thru it, I have some mixed feelings.
First off, the game might be 50gb or possibly even 60gb in size. With the insane amount of environments, there is no way you can fit it in a lower size without making it into a blurry compressed mess. But to be fair, no device under 128gb would be able to run the game anyway, the graphics are insanely good and some things (like reflections on the road when it's raining) are just a must have that can't be disabled for lower end devices without ruining the feel of the game. Now depending on the optimization of the game, it's either some 128gb devices are strong enough to run it or its 256gb devices at the very least. With the current generation of "AAA" mobile games, 8gb of ram is also probably required.
Now that that's over, lets talk about the gameplay itself. The map looks huge, the game features cars with a ton of customizability which means they're a big enough focus of the game to feature such customizability, so it's a possibility we might not have features like fast travel which honestly if there are not a lot of fetch quests (aka go from point A to point B over and over again), I think it'll be fine.
Also, the game features really nice interactions eith the environment, going from simple interactions like breaking lamps ending up creating sparks, to wild encounters or sudden interdimensional missions. Now that does bring up some issues, like sometimes I just want to explore and take pretty screenshots or look at eyecandy because why not, and well if the game keeps throwing random encounters etc at the player, that will be really annoying to do. Now there could be something I'm missing here due to the gameplay video being in chinese, but as far as I can see, it's just purely random encounters. UPDATE: They tried to answer this in a recent Q&A, more on this at the bottom of this review.
Something I really would love from the game is instead of localizing the voiceovers for multiple launguages, I would prefer the chinese one as long as a lot more things are voiced for better immersion, then as long as you add live subtitles in the middle of your screen, it would be perfect, kinda similar to how it doesn't really bother people to read subtitles when watching anime etc. The reason I'm bringing this up is because in the gameplay video, the player runs thru a market of some sorts where you can hear the people talking, but the subtitles only appear above their head which I don't really like but honestly I think it should be a setting to either have subtitles all in the middle of the screen or above their heads.
Should have started from talking about this but the character designs are amazing, now I don't know if there will be gacha elements where you can get more characters, but honestly I'd be okay if there weren't, would probably make the player attach themselves to them more when it's used in both gameplay and story.
The combat is just fine, I don't think it'll be something you'll give much thought about when playing the game, more on this in the update section at the bottom of the review.
Lastly the thing I'm most worried about is the biggest dealbreaker of all mobile games which is obviously monetization. With a game this advanced, the budget must be really high and they will probably want to make that back. Now it's a question of how popular this game is in China, because it doesn't seem insanely popular in the global market and so if it's also not all that popular in China, odds are they're gonna want to squeeze more money out of the players, or worse case scenario they squeeze money out of the players regardless. They might make the game extremely grindy and p2w, and obviously they're not gonna that in the gameplay video so that's gonna be a question answered only on the eventual release of the game.
Now speaking of the release of the game, they hinted at september 2024 to be a big date for the game (read the update, turns out it was just a new gameplay trailer) so with that disappointing reveal, by a very crude guess I expect the game to fully release between late 2025 to mid 2026.
That's it. Now if you have watched the short gameplay video yourself, share what you thought of it in the comments as I'm myself curious about what do other people think about this game, especially since the other reviews usually aren't as detailed/long as this one.
UPDATE: They released a brand new gameplay video, much shorter though and it's more like a cinematic look, not fully actual gameplay but we do see some of that. In those parts with actual gameplay I can point out that:
1. Since we get a bit longer glimpse at the combat, we can point out how it's relatively fast paced now once you start doing combos. It relies similarly to other games on a bunch of character switching for even better combos. The enemies also seem relatively varied but they might be just picking the best gameplay shots they have so it's possible in game the enemies might not be as varied most times. Something tiny we can spot right at the end is that a character parries a huge monster attack, so we might see parrying in the game, but it is in a cinematic bit of the video so don't have your hopes up.
2. Just an overall graphics upgrade and what feels like more interactions with the environment.
Other than that, yet again, no glimpse of any new playable characters so that's reinforcing the idea of this not being a gacha game.
Additionally, apparently according to a called "Harith", the devs hosted a Q&A and there is one question that sorta tries to answer one of my worries I pointed out earlier in the review, the one being that random encounters might be annoying when a player just wants to chill in the game world. The response boils down to that both of the events in the gameplay trailer can occur if certain conditions are met, like actions or time etc. Now the problem with that response is that it's extremely vague, like what does "actions" mean exactly? That could go from all the way from accepting a quest on purpose to simply driving a car thru a specific zone. Now there are other things they answered, but for that go check out Harith's post, as they were the ones that informed me of this.
Posted on 09/16/2024735 Views
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LolexIsALazyPotato09/26/2024Author
With the release of the new gameplay trailer, I updated the review a little with the new information we recieved.
Darth Hunter09/17/2024Liked by Author
wow, it's been ages since i last read something so well written and well thought on the internet (with the exception of the independent raxxla hunters discord server). amazing review. i'm very hyped for this game but also a bit worried about the potential problems you pointed out in your review. i'm gonna watch the gameplay video now, see ya
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