NieR: Automata is a good game. I like how it tells its lore and existentialist story with different point of view characters and relevant side quests, how much there is to discover in the ruined world, the quirky inhabitants, the music and art direction. The controls are responsive and the animations fluid. The game kept me interested through almost its whole length. It embraces its medium as few modern games do. But I don?t find it amazing or even great, like most players seem to.
I didn?t have any issue with the flying sections. This isn?t one of the better scrolling shoot ?em ups I?ve played, but it?s fine. The hack and slash combat, while polished and totally serviceable, is simplistic and shallow. The balance is poor and the character you play as more than any other, 9S, has a mediocre hacking mechanic haphazardly replacing the Y attack.
The hacking that comprises so much of 9S?s combat is just more shoot ?em up gameplay, which the game already has in abundance. The only big difference is that the mini-games are set on a little square map instead of a long scrolling level. There are a select number of hacking mini-games that are replayed over and over, not including the small number present during unique bosses and areas. The hacking makes 9S too powerful. His wins are usually instant. I hacked in such rapid successions that the characters didn?t even have time to speak whole sentences. It would be nice if hacking were something you did after finding some kind of opening.
I also find it weird that 2B is supposed to be the one in charge and 9S the support, yet in Route B, which is largely a repeat of Route A but with you playing as 9S instead of 2B, he is always running ahead and doing everything.
By the time the story has ended and you get to play as 2B again, you?re overpowered. I think this game would have been better without leveling, with only the interchangeable, combinable chips serving as upgrades. It?s implied that the playable characters have been performing their combat and scanning roles for a while, so the leveling system serves little narrative purpose, and it unbalances the game later on. Alternatively, give me a Bloody Palace mode or a challenge mode or something in which I can continue to play as the different characters while being challenged.
It would be nice if you at least had to dodge in the correct direction and were not invincible while dodging, which would require reworking the enemy attacks. You can spam the dodge through every attack.
The hovering pods that accompany you have offensive and defensive programs, ranging from protective barriers to a giant hammer. You eventually get a wave attack that can instantly take out every lower tier enemy in your vicinity. It takes less than a minute for the pod to recharge, at which point you can do it again.
I usually don?t use the term spectacle fighter, but it describes the combat pretty well. It?s about looking cool and feeling powerful rather than having depth and being challenging. The harder modes don?t fix it either. I tried Very Hard because I wanted to replay some chapters and was overpowered at level 80-something. I died from one hit in the prologue, by one of the little trashcan enemies. Same thing happens if you start the game on Hard mode at level 0: Instant deaths in the prologue. Normal is far too easy and hard is far too punishing. I?m not fond of difficulty levels. I like how Demon?s Souls and Dark Souls have just one difficulty. It forces the developers to find a good balance with their game.
The lack of checkpoints makes the prologues sometimes feel like annoying wastes of time. I had to do all of the Route B prologue again because I died during the last part. Even though there were do-over checkpoints before that point! It?s not a difficult part, but I had practically no hit points left (and didn?t yet know that I could heal during the flying sections) when I started the sequence, and mistakes happen. Forcing me to sit through the same story sequences again is excessive and hurts the pacing. I failed the sequence again the second time because I wasn?t aware that I was supposed to prevent the machines from passing my pod. I?ve experienced some crashes. They don?t occur regularly, but I?ve had them often enough that they made long sequences without save points slightly more worrying.
It?s always disappointing when cutscenes that are created with a game?s engine in production are played as compressed videos. It wastes a lot of space and doesn?t look as good as a live render. NieR: Automata?s cutscenes take up 24.5 GB, half the size of the game. If Kojima Productions can render all their in-engine cutscenes in real time, Platinum Games should be able to.
I thought the relationship between 2B and 9S could have been handled better. We learn more about them late in the game, but for most of the story they seem distant. So it?s a little weird when 9S has an emotional breaking point because of 2B in Route C and goes on a self-destructive quest for her. I would have liked to see the two of them grow closer instead of just having the significance of their relationship justified by complicated exposition so late in the story.
The final ending is alright. It makes prior events feel a bit pointless, though. The director wasn?t lying when he told Siliconera.com that the ending would be happy.
It?s because of how absorbing the world and the story are and how proud NieR: Automata is of being a video game that I?d still recommend it. You can tell that it was created with passion.
The game runs generally okay on my GTX 780 and i5-4670k, after lowering the resolution to 1920?1080 and turning off anti-aliasing, blur and ambient occlusion. I find AA overrated anyway, because of how it softens details in many games, and motion blur always looks bad, in my opinion. It makes sense in 30 fps console games, like Shadow of the Colossus, but at 60 fps it becomes distracting. I have Effects set on high, Shadows on low and Texture Filter at 8x. The framerate does drop into the forties and sometimes thirties, but not often enough that it significantly detracted from my experience. Installing the FAR fix has also helped. Some of the cutscenes, however, are currently choppy, no matter what specifications you have, and the subtitles are delayed by about a second at times.
