Recent reviews by trenchilada

This game is a great case for steam to add the "Informational" review category to individual reviews. I'll split this into 3 sections: The good, the bad and the ugly

The map is engaging, there is sufficient activities to participate in as you explore and the landscape and points of interest look amazing. You can take a screenshot at any major landmark and make it a wallpaper if you wanted to, the world design is that good.
Melee combat feels rewarding with parries and dodges, good reaction and skill can supplement almost any power difference between you and your enemy, especially since aiming as melee also matters with hitting weakpoints, indicating every notable extremity has it's own locational damage, it's incredibly nice compared to Skyrim which lacks such mechanics.

Skill categories are also great, there's cooking, alchemy, handicraft, two and one handed weaponry, light, medium and heavy armor and more. All the skills give demonstrable advantages as you level them up and none of them feel insignificant since they give you noticeable state changes that are easily observable as you play.

The interpretation of the Matter of Britain is wonderful, just creative enough to stand on it's own but still ingrained enough to be recognizable.

There really is a lot to like about the game, if you're coming from Skyrim then just know that it would feel like a mix of Skyrim and Gothic, definitely worth a play if you wish to have something new in terms of open world RPG instead of having a n-teenth remake/remaster of a TES game. That being said, there is a few things that could've been executed better.

So when I said Melee combat is good, I meant it. It just also means the other forms of combat are lacking. Magic on one hand can feel really nice, but at the same time it can also feel lacking when you struggle to find magic that is actually helpful to the build you're trying to participate in. Speaking of, that can lead me into the next point; Build diversity takes a hit due to how the game plays out.

Let's say you decided to roll a stealthy assassin-like character, you will inevitably come across a fight you are forced into that will prevent you from getting your initial sneak attack to start the encounter, which puts you at a massive disadvantage and makes you wonder if you should've just rolled a standard melee build. Even if you were to invest into a dreaded stealth-archer, enemies slide up to you like they're on an ice-rink, forcing you to use a dodge as you try to pelt them with arrows or risk taking a lot of damage if your ability to sneak attack is out of the question.

That's another thing; enemy scaling is all over the place. When you go to Cuanacht from Horns, you'll notice that enemies are far, FAR tankier than they were, almost to the point that you might feel that your development so far might not be enough, even if you were to do everything possible to accumulate power in Horns.

Perk trees are another sore-spot for the game. You get your standard number tweak perks which are fine, but for some reason there are perks in the combat trees that try to help enforce a playstyle that just doesn't work at all for the tree. Consecutive hits with two-handers? Rubbish, you lose your stamina way too fast and you need to block attacks even in heavy armor or you run risk of dying. Don't heal yourself to increase your stats? Sounds nice until you realize the same branch of the tree giving you these stats also gives you self healing buffs. Hit stunned enemies? That's fine until you realize you need to keep your parries up, which invalidates any attempt at speccing out the block tree because parry is a separate tree as well. Can't forget the "deal more damage to bleeding enemies" perks that have no actual way to enforce bleeds in the same weapon group. It's very misguided on part of the developers, when it came to making more unique perks.

Stats are another part of what I believe takes away from the experience, namely the requirements and disconnection between stats and the supposed skills they're connected to. A lot of armor requires endurance, which makes sense until you realize that endurance becomes a tax-stat that even light armor builds need to invest in, especially when you also start seeing equipment that require 3 different stat thresholds, some of which you might not want to use on your build despite the fact the equipment seems to fit your intentions. As for the second part, the worst case is practicality and dexterity; stealth is a perception skill yet to improve your stealth ability you would invest in dexterity, as it provides more and more muffled movement (though this is a minor nitpick).

These are the weaker qualities of the game that I feel take away from the overall experience. I don't think they're dealbreakers, but they're definitely significant enough to cause a bit of frustration.

Optimization. The amount of times I have enter an area and just lag by looking at the wrong direction (regardless of my position in the dungeon) is starting to rise to about 30 or so areas. None of which are consistent between characters, might I add, so your mileage may vary.

Magic has the same issue as it does in Skyrim, namely that the scaling of such spells are usually tied more to equipment instead of skill level. I would say it's not unheard of to reach +300% magic scaling by equipment alone towards the end of Act I, yet you still lack meaningful damage. Summoning can also be lackluster depending on what you summon, necromancers especially feel bad with skeletons being made of paper and never actually getting to attack due to how fragile they are.

Crafting requires a lot of materials, and theres a good chance what you make just becomes junk without over-investing your materials, which would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that you only get a small paltry sum of materials per node. I think my knight set in the early game took around 90+ iron and 50+ leather to guarantee non-weak variants.

Overall the game can be fun, but it's held back by a few systems that just needed more thought or time put into them. If you want a break from TES then don't be shy to try Tainted Grail, but if you are just now trying to get into open world RPG's then look for other games instead, because I'd say this is very much a game that you'd only really like if you were already a fan of the genre in the first place.

This game is essentially Warframe with arguably the worst ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ grind I've ever seen in my entire life. I don't think any other game has had a grinding system as poor as this and that's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ saying something.

See, you need to go ahead and complete missions that have a minimum of 1 minute refresh times to have a 25% chance of getting an amp (Relics for those who are familiar with WF) and you can enhance an amp with certain materials to increase the odds of getting a rarer item. "1 Minute? You're ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about 1 minute?" Yes I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ am. At least in WF you can engage in a new mission as soon as you load back into your hub/ship/camp/whatever, but in TFD you have to clear the camp (usually in 6 seconds) and then wait a full minute to get another 1/4 chance of getting the amp that has the stuff you want. And that's not even counting stealth-mandatory amps that require one specific descendant to do which also have abysmal rates (some I think even go down to 1/5th chances instead, but I could be wrong on this?).
The only real saving grace about amps is that some of them are available from the 400% missions/invasions, which are infinitely more engaging and enjoyable with the amps having 100% drop rates and a guaranteed duplicate if you clear fast enough/cleanly enough, the only downside is that they are usually slower, though that's easily overlooked when you can just mindlessly kill entire armies (the only thing TFD does better than WF). Unfortunately, 400% missions and invasions change every day so you don't have a consistent way of getting things you want, you have to go farm garbage you either have no interest in or just not play those missions.

Let's also not forget reactors for your descendants are also abysmal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to farm. Every week reactors change their drop location across the various maps in the game. People were rightfully annoyed by this system so Nexon made a change that on the surface was nice but was quickly realized to be awful: permanent drop locations on top of randomized drop locations. This means if you want to effectively farm, say, a phase fire reactor you have to go to either the static or randomized location for it, grind there for hours on end and hope you get the rolls that you need, while also having the drops for the phase fire reactor compete for another type of reactor that you don't care about at all (or worse, the reactor is completely useless because it's dual type can't be abused by any characters currently in the game).

So you have a stockpile of the amp you want? Great, now we can crack them open.
There are two ways an amp get's cracked:
These are minibosses found on the maps, you approach the reactor and activate it to spawn a boss. Once the boss is spawned and activated, you kill the boss to summon a green sphere that you use to open amps, simple right?
Well no, you need to get void fragments from fragment missions around the map. You need a descendant with the same element to activate the fragment mission by attacking the fragment with one of their abilities that inflict damage. Once you activate the mission, you have to kill all enemies then a miniboss to acquire the void fragments. Usually the maps have the missions needed for the fragments in the same map as the void reactors, but it's usually only 1 run per shard mission (which is also affected by that full 1 minute cooldown after every run because ♥♥♥♥ you i guess).
Arguably more fun are the Void Intercepts that feature Colossi - giant bosses that are akin to a raid boss in standard MMO's. The only part of RNG here is how well your teammates can perform to make the boss smooth or make it work poorly. Generally you have to build your characters very specifically to burn these guys down in a reasonable manner, but that requires you to go through this hell in the first place. Most people opt to solo the Colossi because of how much HP they can get from scaling with a full squad.

Now we come to the end of the grind journey: actually opening the damn amp. You got the materials, you got the amps, you took down the bosses. You approach the green sphere and select your amp of choice, finally the journey is over.
...until you realize that the item you want isn't in the amp because your luck isn't agreeing with you. Well that's fine, you can just take a peek at your allies' amps right?
No, no you can-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-not, it is impossible to have shared drops in TFD so you have to endure the garbage RNG all over again by yourself. This is the worst part of the grind and it shows why TFD falters where WF can stride.
There is no trading with others, there is no sharing loot, there is no endurance run content for material, there is no other ways to get these items with better odds than 3 or 6 percent chances of dropping after the 3 layers of RNG. Nothing, zip, nada.

It's just abysmal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. There are mods, parts and characters locked behind horrible RNG grind, time-gated content and sometimes both at once. There is no trading or shared amp loot to alleviate it even a little bit for no real discernible reason. It's awful, time consuming and not nearly as satisfying as it is in WF. Again, the only good part is the mindless murder of armies that you can commit, but that is only a small stepping stone in the bigger picture.

The game is so terribly balanced, it makes League of Legends look like a paragon of quality. 3/4ths of the characters are complete and utter trash while remaining 1/4th of them are so unbelievably powerful to the point they can not only invalidate content, but also make new content be balanced around them. Freyna is arguably the best character when it comes to massive AoE and Bunny is arguably the best character when it comes to speedruns for farming, there's also Hailey with her unholy burst to melt Colossi or other bosses and there's Gley to be a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none while still remaining relevant thanks to how her skills are set up. Guns impose negative penalties upon use for not having them be fully built with 4 dupes, which further contributes to the terrible timesink of grinding for them, not to mention the weapons are also stratified by their power as well - arguably worse than the characters.

The game is fun for a bit after finishing the campaign, but it quickly becomes droll once you realize the scope of grind required to do what you actually want. The characters power being anywhere from absurd to abysmal further dampens the feel of the game when the characters that seem interesting are impossible to use due to how bad they can be. The only thing the game truly has going for it is how good looking the characters are, but that doesn't matter if no one wants to actually play this ♥♥♥♥.
Go play Warframe if you want a better game, because this has barely anything redeemable.

As much of a massive ♥♥♥♥♥♥ MW23's launch and subsequent maintenance was, it still wasn't as bad as whatever the hell modern Treyarch is smoking. Let me give you a quick rundown of the biggest points:

So the game became slow and awkward and it feels terrible. Sprinting is probably the slowest it's ever been, barely being above running speed (most loadouts will not feel the speed unless you tacsprint), dolphin diving probably has the largest penalty to accuracy in any of the games that's included it so far, sliding is a free headshot to most people and climbing feels like it was made slower. In contrast, we now have complete 360-degree sprinting, diving and sliding, isn't that awesome?

Well it's not; Gung-ho doesn't allow you to fire while sprinting anymore and sprinting adds an awkward delay before firing moreso than any other COD, which Treyarch obviously intended to incentivize you into canceling the awkward delay with sliding or diving. Except, the problem now rears it's ugly head with....

...the fact you get a MASSIVE accurate penalty for using these aforementioned methods in the first place. This means you now have to build around not only ADS time or Hipfire accuracy, but sprint to fire speed oops I mean Slide/Dive to fire speed because they're separate for some unknown reason. So now you have guns that feel awkward as ♥♥♥♥ without attachments, require attachments to perform in any meaningful way (outside of a few guns in particular) and will get your ♥♥♥♥ kicked in until you can get enough weapon xp for those attachments, hope you're ready to grind!

Let's also talk about the guns themselves. The current dominant guns (that I see anyways) are the XM4 and Tanto .22, both of which are deadly at almost any range and have a decent ttk among all other guns. Between the two, I would say the Tanto .22 is far deadlier because the TTK being similar to the XM4 isn't taking into account the slower firerate and lower shots required, meaning an overall decrease in aim required to get kills with it thanks to how easy it is to handle. Pair this with the fact that flinching is probably the worst it's been in a while and you have probably the best gun in the game (found so far).

The only other complaint I have is that the shotguns feel extremely inconsistent, which might go away when I eventually develop them enough to have better attachments to make them not total garbage. Which brings me to my next point!

As I have mentioned above, the attachments can really make or break half of the guns in the game. Flinch is massive so you need to grab the stock that reduces flinch. Hipfire is terrible so you have to force yourself to dedicate to a hipfire build or an ADS build, since the difference one attachment can make now is immense. Penalties have mostly gone away for almost all attachments outside of a set few, meaning attachments have been made much stronger and there are now far fewer than previous iterations. Because of this, guns without attachments feel much worse in what seems to be a compensation for the far larger benefits attachments bring them, making every gun an unpleasant grind until you can actually acquire what you want for the playstyle you wish to play.

In contrast, I ask people to look back to BO2 and it's challenges for Gold, where you had to get many kills in a life without any attachments to help you. This task would far harder than ever before in BO6 if it were to appear. Somehow neither Treyarch or InfinityWard can manage to recapture the spark that made MW19's gunsmithing system so wonderful in the first place; namely the fact that guns were being complemented and not completed.

The number of weapons in BO6 is incredibly low, to the point that it felt like they were going to tack it on to MW22/23 but realized how poorly that went last time. There are no special class weapons, the assault rifles outside of the XM4 all feel the same, the marksman rifles are a mix of burst and semi-auto hard hitters, the snipers are literally the same outside of the SVD which is just a slower but 1-shot possible marksman rifle, the 3 LMG's you have available are terrible, the 4 pistols are trash and there is absolutely no reason to use the bat over the knife for melee. Genuinely curious as to how this gun lineup was devised because it is by far one of the worst lineups I've seen, about as bad as MW23's.

Half of the maps are terrible as well. Redcard has so many angles on you at any given point that it's impossible to move if people start spawntrapping. Babylon and Subsonic are so small that spawns will literally give you a chance to get spawnkilled a la MW3. Vault is so weird in having 3 "lanes" where 1 is long range, 1 is medium range and 1 is a mix of short to medium range. Meanwhile Scud and Vorkuta are HUGE for 70% of their maps and the last 30% is no mans land. The few good maps in my opinion would be Derelict, Rewind, Protocol, Payback and Skyline, all of which I believe have a good mix of ranges and overall decent design such that you aren't constantly killed by a guy spawning right behind you. There's also Lowtown, but we don't talk about that one.

Zombies is nice, but I feel that the scaling is so fast with enemies that it's very easy to be overwhelmed. Not to mention that Boss enemies are still around, it feels like Treyarch want "faster" matches in zombies by just making people die easier.

The game is definitely not worth $70, wait for a sale if you care about zombies or you desperately want your fix of COD, otherwise stick with CW or MW19 since they are far better. Avoid MW22/23 as well.

The DLC is good if you like getting frustrated at games and/or like hitting your head against a brick wall until it collapses.
The DLC is bad if you like enjoying games with minimal frustration.

What do I mean by this? Well FromSoft decided that having players find scooby-doo clues as progression is good, despite the fact that there should be no reason to have a separate progression system in the first place since the stats of the enemies in the DLC are stupid as hell even with a full shadowlands blessing. The damage is insane, the resistance is insane, the health is insane and the movesets are insane. Elden Ring already showed that FromSoft were dipping their toe in complete stupidity, as evidenced by Malenia invalidating an entire playstyle while also falling back on awful attacks that are extremely hard to dodge, all the while hitting you like a damn semi-truck that reaches 60 mph in a single second. Seriously, that entire fight was fun but also definitely annoying.

Well SotE is FromSofts declaration that they have completely ran out of ideas on how to make the game hard but fair, the entire dlc is packed with enemies that rarely stop attacking, respond to your keypresses instantly, literally do nothing while waiting for such a keypress, throw out insane attacks and still have stupidly insane stats to back it all up. Seriously, all it would take to make bosses far harder yet fair were to add feints instead of this 32 hit combo crap that never ends just so you can tap the boss to deal 1% of it's health ONCE. I don't know about you, but my favorite style of games are ones where it's easy to die but also easy to kill and we all have the same good and bad parts of the system working with and against us. Instead what we see in SotE is infinite stamina on almost every enemy, all with poise higher than that of the havelgiants of DS1 or smelterhavels of DS2 while you're still the idiot that has to worry about that funny green bar.

Gael is still peak souls boss design, and none can convince me otherwise.

Before we start, I've played this game for hundreds of hours, maybe even 1k+, just not on steam.

If you're new then you should try the game out, there's 25 characters with a multitude of playstyles. I definitely recommend running through the game at least once.
If you've played the game for a while, then you know what I mean if I say that Vindictus is a game that I WANT to like but can't. The foundation of the game is incredibly solid with a simple but fun gameplay loop, great combat and decent character customization that was really good for it's time, monetization was about what you expected for a korean MMO with it mostly being cosmetic monetization with a bit of pay4power.

The problem really starts with the fact that it's a Nexon game that has existed for more than 4 years, meaning the monetization becomes unbearable for both cosmetic and power, supposedly done to keep the game "alive", if you can even call this shambling corpse alive. Basically, Nexon overmonetizes the game to extract money from a dying playerbase that is playing solely on the fumes of nostalgia and rainbows. Game has by far one of the greediest monetization strategies, where cosmetics require upwards of $200 for a guaranteed outfit while also requiring ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of paid upgrade material to have a chance at half of the content at the endgame. Not to mention that the servers have had issues since RELEASE, along with terrible framedrops and crashes, all of which have never been fixed nor will ever be fixed.

Essentially, you have a game with an amazing concept that will never reach its potential due to an extremely greedy publisher that has no desire to actually bring it back, paired with a dying playerbase that has those in the extremes accept the monetization for what it is and indulge Nexon's unbelievable quench for money. It really just leaves you with a bittersweet feeling whenever you reminisce on it.

Let's just just hope that Defying Fate isn't as screwed.

For some reason, right after the Sony fiasco with requiring a third party account to Totally Not Sell Your Data(tm). Arrowhead decided it would be a good idea to start nerfing absolutely everything that people found fun to use "to prevent any meta infetterence". Shockingly, people don't like it when everything fun gets nerfed to the ground, let alone in a pure PvE game where the personal preference of ones weapon of choice literally does not have any bearing on your experience outside of blatant team killing.

Well good thing Arrowhead said they learned from their mistakes! Let's see how that translated to the Escalation of Freedom update.
Yep, this is uh... oh... that's bad.
Arrowhead is yet another dev that fails to understand and interpret statistics, despite the job description of a game developer usually requiring a great amount of planning and mathematics. So Arrowhead nerfs a lot of ♥♥♥♥ again but primarily nerfs fire damage right before the warbond all about fire since they introduced a fire rework that has made fire worse off. Surely it can't get worse?
Actually it does; Arrowhead is saying this was planned months in advance and changing variable numbers is just too much work to tweak before the update. But don't worry, they also said it doesn't matter because "people were using fire weapons too much"

I really need to understand how stuff like this can happen. It takes all of maybe 10 minutes to compare two formulas to see which comes out on top and how fast. Desmos is literally free.

Can't wait for the next update to make chargers have indestructible armor and bile titans be nigh immortal, they're dying in less than 40 minutes!

Don't know why this keeps getting so many positive reviews, the game itself is terribly balanced around its completely arbitrary "Performance Index" system, managed by absolute greedy idiots and the competitive scene is rife with cheaters that never get punished.

The balance is atrocious, the Performance Index system is very poorly implemented to the point that there is little reason to use anything other than the top 3 of each performance score. I'm talking a difference of over 20 mph on straights and TONS of grip between two cars that are considered "equal". Not to mention that some cars are WAY overtuned compared to how they actually perform in the real world. (Authenticity issue at best) Supposedly the PI score is based on a simulation of how a car functions around a lap, but there's no way that's true when so many cars are way too overscored.

Performance between both Network and Client has been ass since release. FPS drops are common and Xbox Live constantly causes disconnects regardless of what you're doing. I don't think it's possible to maintain connection for more than an hour without being lucky.

So despite the game being set in mexico, it feels much more akin to Arizona. The music is so non-immersive save for like 3 tracks, it's just a bunch of american pop music with the occasional spanish track (of which multiple aren't even mexican, they're just songs from south american countries). It genuinely feels like whoever did the music choice for the game has the mindset of a white college girl talking about voter suppression in the U.S.A. (for the thick-headed: that means being racist while thinking you're actually very progressive (you aren't)).

Overall the core game is decent, but due to the incompetence of the buffoons at PGG it's been squandered. Read above for the already atrociously implemented PI system, but then pair that with the fact that physics for the game had been updated in the middle of the games life, causing everyone's muscle memory to be completely screwed and forcing a bunch of people to re-learn their cars' driving patterns. I don't know who the hell had that idea, but they need to be fired if they thought that was a good idea. Oh wait, they probably already are since the turnover at PGG is incredibly high.

You can buy the ultimate edition for $100, but you still don't get everything. As of the time of this review (May 30th 2024), there is still $55 of DLC cars and rising, not to mention that the rally expansion is an overpriced joke and that the hotwheels expansion just further exacerbated the problem of cars at certain PI brackets over or under-performing.

For some reason, Playground Games just can't help themselves from ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the bed when trying to police the community. PGG has been caught ignoring cheaters, banning people for ludicrous reasons and have been actively undermining their own competitive scene at almost every chance they get. People have been banned for innocent livery's while egregious ones roam free, while others have been banned for the mere idea of using a livery editor. People have been banned because PGG doesn't know how to play their own damn game , while actual cheaters stay at the top of the leaderboards regularly . Not to mention that a bunch of competitive players have direct ties to people inside PGG, cheat in their own hosted events (that PGG endorses) to keep the prize "in house" and attempt to get others banned despite it all.
Overall, a poorly moderated game policed by absolute ape-brained idiots that listen to F1 wannabes that are also has-beens of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ car racing game series, how pathetic can you get?

Overall the game itself is poorly designed and could otherwise be good but it would've required actual effort (a rarity in this era of the industry) and a team that's both consistent and competent at their jobs. The nepotism and cover-ups that go on between "competitive" players and PGG employees are disgusting as well.

Spin the wheel and hope you're lucky.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a wonderful game with a large amount of content to offer, from interactions and stories with Companions, to the faithfulness of 5e with a few minor homebrew rules that make an enjoyable cRPG. Yet despite all of this, there are a few issues I have with the game that I feel hurt the overall experience.
Keep in mind, despite this being a negative review, it should be more viewed as a "neutral" review.
Heavy spoilers ahead; turn back now.

The first issue the game has is with it's main story. If you've played Divinity: Original Sin II (Larian's previous game) then you should immediately recognize how ridiculously similar the main story is to that game. It goes a little something like this: You are a Godwoken (True Soul) that has piqued the interests of the gods (Dream Visitor/Balduran) to liberate them from their suffering and cross the realm of mortals into the realm of Divinity (Partial Ceremorphosis). But then as you fight against the voidwoken, you find out that the one attacking the gods isn't the God King (Chosen of the Dead Three) it was actually Lucian (The Absolute/Netherbrain) who was using the cover of the God King (Chosen) to take over all the Source (Souls/Free Will) and use it for his own ends (Full Ceremorphosis).
Is it a complete 1:1 copy? Absolutely not and I probably did a bit of a stretch at the end, but it's extremelly familiar and enough to be off-putting as I played a lot of D:OS 2 and couldn't exactly ignore the blatant reuse of the story.

Absolute delight to read and experience all of these. I did almost all of them and I am currently working on Blade of Avernus for Wyll. Each character has immense depth and the voice acting is extremely well done, the characters and their stories easily makes up for the distracting elements of the main story. However I still have my own gripes with a few of them:
First let's get the elephant in the room out of the way: Karlach. Karlach is an extremely pleasant companion; she's a doofus with a heart of pure gold and is an absolute joy to interact with. However, her issue stems from the fact that she has no actual good ending. Each of her endings involves her either dying or going back to Avernus, albeit with you and/or Wyll by her side. It's tragedy for a character that doesn't deserve it. Don't even get me started on the workarounds that don't actually work either, namely True Resurrection.
Next we have Lae'zel and the Orpheus dilemma, for some reason you cannot decide to have Orpheus and Balduran work together, so Orpheus MUST die if you wish to aid Balduran or Balduran will simply go help the Netherbrain should you free Orpheus - Why? Orpheus is already enraged at the fact you even have tadpoles in your party, and regardless if you use the illithid powers during your campaign he'll be angry no matter what and will still help you, why then would a single Mindflayer that has broken away from the Netherbrain be so offensive to him as just a temporary ally?

By far the best origin by miles if you play the redemption path. Genuinely shocking to me that this isn't the real story because it feels absolutely wonderful when you get this completed. Everything from getting Jergals respect to pissing off Bhaal and fighting Orin in a duel, the entire story of a good guy DU was perfect.

Overall the game is fun, it uses a 5e system with a bit of homebrew at the same time. If I could have a complaint it would be that Lone Wolf still isn't in the game after all this time, despite earlier dev entries in EA saying they'd be planning on it.
Using the 5e system is both nice and awful; combinations and neat tricks you can put together feels great, while missing a 95% roll because of d20 rules feels awful. Almost makes me wish that someone tried converting the game to a gurps ruleset with 3d6.
Magic feels extremely good, nothing is more satisfying than nuking an entire room with a fireball, or using metamagic to nuke entire areas with TWO fireballs at once.
Melee also feels nice, especially when playing a Paladin or Warmaster. My only real gripe comes from Ranged options as it feels like Fighter is just a better archer than Ranger at times.

Pacing.
The pacing in Act 3 is so slow it's not even funny. At some point you can get bored and just say "Screw it, I just want to finish the game and get it over with." This might be more of an issue with myself, but there does come a point where you feel like act 3 is overstaying it's welcome. Yes, the last act is meant to tie off a bunch of different stories. Yes it does a good job at that. No, it still feels like it takes too long to do anything, especially with the larger scale combat towards the end with tons of enemies taking forever to do their turn for whatever reason.

Optimization is really good until act 3, where it starts dropping frames occasionally and bugs start appearing that can cause serious issues.
One issue in particular, however, is not affected by the act you are in at all. Occasionally the AI in combat will simply sit still for a full 30 seconds, completely wasting time for no reason. This contributed to the feeling I had of just ending it all in Act 3.

Some may say BG3 is a wonderful game, but I take a more pessimistic view. BG3 is simply a good game and when you compare it to the sea of mediocrity that we have today, it looks like a diamond.
BG3 genuinely has had love and care put into it, but the reusing of the D:OS2 story I feel hurts the game heavily, which when paired with the bugs, lackluster endings to companion stories and overall massive slowdown in Act 3, makes it feel like the game could've been so much more.

As of re-writing this review, I have over 200 hours, most of which was done with stealth builds because they're honestly the most fun. I still encounter issues and I'll go over them here:

Yeah screw attempting to write something positive about the story; I've done all the endings, missions and gigs as of re-writing this review, the story has serious issues.
You never really know what Johnny is trying to teach you because he contradicts himself constantly. Can't even call him an "unreliable narrator" because other characters in the game confirm ♥♥♥♥ that he's telling you constantly.

Gameplay is overall okay, there are definitely some issues that are noticeable so I'll divide this into multiple subsections.

2077's guns have actual recoil, which is nice except for the fact that some guns genuinely feel like they do nothing. LMG's feel weak even after 2.0 and shotguns still deal unholy amounts of damage. Then again, nothing matters but melee and quickhacks in Very Hard.

In 2020, I said the melee system had the issue of what I called "skyrim melee". I still stand by this because melee is just spam M1 with an occasional held M1 and maybe press F for a finisher.
Also, melee is the one of the two real ways to play in Very Hard thanks to melee having the best damn perks in the game.

Here's the big change to netrunning in Phantom Liberty: it deals slightly less damage but you can upload multiple quickhacks in a queue, which gives you bonuses with your perks and makes your quickhacks deal even more damage than before.
Or in simpler terms: Netrunning deals even more damage overall but single hacks feel weaker. It's the other playstyle that works in Very Hard.

It feels satisfying when you go fast and just aggressively destroy everyone you come across.
Feels terrible if you attempt to take it semi-seriously and take it slowly - oneshot or die.
Yeah I got nothing more to say about it, either play aggressive stealth or it's just not fun.

All the enemies in 2077 feel the same, you only notice a difference if it's a biped mech, shotgunner or heavy unit. Netrunners don't matter because they're hilariously weak and Snipers are just longer range grunts.
AI will still run through walls and do stupid stuff.

Crafting is interesting in the fact that you require components of a higher tier to upgrade weapons, which would be fine if disassembly provided more components of higher tier. They do not and it hurts the other fact that iconic weapons require investment not just by components, but also in the crafting skill tree, to keep them relevant throughout the rest of the game.
Didn't bother with crafting after Iconic/Legendary rework. Don't have to craft anymore so it's nice.

This system needs to be improved, or at the very least rebalanced. Body is by far the strongest attribute with the most useful skill trees and meaningful perks. The overall system is terribly imbalanced, forcing choices to be limited for an optimized build. Attributes as a stat barely contribute unless the attribute is Body, which has unbelievably good bonuses for just ranking it up. Skills are capped at the parent attributes current level and require level 20 in that attribute to obtain the final perk in every tree. Perks end up giving mediocre bonuses or extremely powerful bonuses, with some perks just outright breaking themselves for reasons unknown (see: wolverine breaking in-combat regeneration).
The more I play the game the more I realize that I was wrong about a few things.
Yes, Body was one of the strongest attributes with the most useful trees at the time.
No, attributes did not barely contribute outside of Body at the time.
The REAL balance nightmare was Cold Blooded, there was simply not a single build in the game that would NOT involve Cold Blooded because it proc'd on every kill, no matter how that kill came around.
Now instead of Cool being a required attribute sink, we have Tech because of the cyberware rework paired with the bonuses to Tech weapons and bonuses that Tech offers.

Driving is decently authentic, trying to turn at high speeds requires you to know about countersteering and stopping requires more distance the faster you go. Main issue from driving comes from the AI, pop-in and minimap being zoomed in too much for the directions the game tries to give you.
I must've been smokin' some good ♥♥♥♥ when I wrote this, because the cars in this game slip and slide like they're on ice. Only the motorbikes feel good to drive and that's still not saying much. Even the patches that claimed to have made driving "better" completely failed in that regard.

Game has a notable amount of game-breaking bugs that prevent progression, optimization is really bad and forces an fps of 40 regardless of settings, neutral NPC AI needs to be improved because they end up crashing into eachother. Last and not least, pop-in can break and cause no NPC spawns.
Since release, CDPR has been hard at work ironing out the bugs of the game and have seen varying success at it. In my honest opinion, the game is still not well optimized as of Phantom Liberty, as I keep getting framedrops to around 30 at seemingly random and crashing is still common.

The game came out unfinished, buggy, under-delivered and it crashed all the time. But it's ok because we all collectively forget about this because Edgerunners aired on netflix.