Played it for a few hours, it's better than I thought because I came in with reeeeeally low expectations, but yeah you'd be wise and wait for a half price discount or something in the near future.
The story is very well written, the racism bits don't seem too shoehorned and obvious, but holy shit that initial statement from the dev team in the beginning of the game, is that really needed? They flat out state this game has a anti racism agenda, and I'd prefer if they kept that stuff more subtle, which would ironically have a bigger impact i think. That said, I'm just a few hours in and the story already surprised me, every time I try to expect where the story will go it flips on it self, if it keeps this until the end it'll be worth it just for the story alone!
The gameplay feels very unpolished and dated, moving your character around feels very clunky both with Keyboard / mouse and with a controller, specially having finished U4 recently the maneuverability doesn't even compare. Shooting also feels a bit stiff and getting in and out of cover feels sub-par to say the least, I'm getting really tired of cover shooters man, specially after having played Last of Us where the player automatically and smoothly snaps to and out of cover without having the need to press a freaking key, I thought that would become the standard in third person games since it works so organically, but the god damn "press key to get in cover, press key again to get out of cover" from the original Gears of War is still used nowadays.... just staph!
Graphics are weird in this game too, it's all over the place. Sometimes I find myself gazing at the great environments and render tech, but some areas of the game look really bland in contrast. Very rarely you'll find an in between, which is peculiar to say the least.
As for AI, it's like you're playing against 3 year olds. They keep shouting the same lines of dialog, they run towards you out of nowhere, and they're usually very predictable and flat out bad.
Shooting doesn't feel too bad, it feels very oldschool, sometimes you feel you're playing a 10 year old game, which can be a good callback to oldschool TPS games like the original Mafia so I wont complaint too much there, just know that you'll be killing dozens of enemies per mission.
Driving feels alright, I like the realistic driving mode, glad that made a return and they ditched the "Crazy taxi" driving that we saw on earlier footage, it's actually very akin to Mafia 2, only with muscle cars this time around.
As for the GOOD: I actually like the city, feels like a place I haven't been in before, yet familiar. Cutscenes look dope, characters are well written feels like I'm watching a TV series set in the 60's. The soundtrack is absolutely fucking amazing, like I'd say it's worth it to play it just for the soundtrack alone, they do a lot of things I've never seen in a game before with the music. I'm getting throwbacks from some of the Tarantino movies where a weird music starts playing but somehow it fits and you get a grin in your face, this is way better than the usual action orchestra music you usually get in action scenes. Oh and I guess I'll add the performance to one of the good points as well, I don't have a beast machine and I'm able to run this at 1080p 60fps which is nice. And that's about it, I hope that even with all it's flaws that I find the patience to finish this, I really wish they'd polish the game a little bit more though.
