Four years into the brutal military occupation, America is on its knees.Philadelphia - once the birthplace of Independence - has become a ghetto, where surveillance drones and armoured patrols keep the population at heel, crushing any dissent with savage force. Her once-proud citizens live in a police state, forced to collaborate just to survive, their dreams of freedom long since extinguished. But in the badlands of the Red Zone, in the bombed out streets and abandoned subways, a Resistance is forming. A guerrilla force, determined to fight for their freedoms despite overwhelming odds and ignite the second American Revolution. But Freedom always has a price…
This next recent update did some major positive changes graphically. I enabled HDR in the settings menu on the PS4 as well and was blown away even more so. I played through the trial and the environments are huge! The gameplay improves as the player progresses and unlocks more gear and weapon attachments. Its a shame the game didn't release with these enhancements visually. Already its been highly criticized as one of the worst looking games, but the update makes it one of the best visually. Before the update, there was not enough color. The game just seemed rushed and incomplete; not only graphically, but gameplay wise as well. Now with the update, it looks like they added improved lighting and shaders. his new update really displays the power of CryEngine visually.
Now on to the gameplay. There are a few moments for me where the AI glitched pretty badly. A feature I liked the game had that I thought seemed to be overlooked was the ability to recruit resistance characters to fight with you. This comes in handy if the AI enemies try to swarm you. However, I still had moments where they AI glitched so bad, they got stuck to models or ran backwards.. haha weird stuff. The AI still needs some improvements but when they fight in bigger numbers as a unit, it makes the game more challenging. The characters on the resistance; the side that players fight on, says some pretty racist stuff so its hard for me to recommend this game to friends at this point. I do recommend the trial before anyone decides to buy. However, my play-through experience of the trial after capturing each outpost was fun and driving the motorcycle in this vast open environment was a ton of fun as well. It would be cool if players could shoot while driving the motorcycle. What if players could use their side-arm like the pistol and shoot while driving the motorcycles? There are still some slight drops in frame-rate but not to the point where it makes the game unplayable. Considering the amount of detail and number of models in the first level, I wasn't too surprised. The art team did a fantastic job. Just to be clear folks, this is the kind of game that improves as you progress so you are limited at the start. Don't expect to run in guns blazing haha. There are times you have to be patient and stealthy.
As I played through the game, there are moments were I ran out of ammo pretty fast. Ammo was easily replenished by looting defeated enemies on the ground. To go along with the weapon customization, what if players could craft their own melee weapons when they run out of ammo for their guns? There are so many models and props in the environment, what if players could find scattered junk and build their own melee weapon? More enemy types would be interesting but I have not beaten the game yet so don't take my word on that. At release, this game was highly rushed, poorly optimized and unfinished. It still feels unfinished and I had a lot of high hopes for this game. It has so much potential: weapon upgrades, open-world, looting.. I wish the character you play as had a voice but.. he doesn't. Characters in the game makes decisions for you. What really hurt people's gameplay experiece before the update was the poor optimization which resulted in low frame-rates and for many it hindered their gameplay experience. The game is not terrible and I felt some reviews were too harsh but improvements can still definitely be made.