Recent reviews by Doppie

I only played one match in TF2 and could tell it was way better.

TL;DR - Needs mouse support, better optimization and less clunky controls. Don't buy for full price unless you're a masochist or you really love SAO.

To start things off - I haven't played much of the game but from my first hour, I can already tell - this will be a wild experience.

I was welcomed by a ton of loading screens. And I mean, a ton. The first loading, sure, fine, understandable, it can be long, even if my game is installed on a SATA SSD. I then went into the SAO Shop (since I got the SAO Coins, I wanted to see if I can spend them for something) only to see a "Coming Soon" and decide to leave. But guess what? The menu uses assets from the world - so it has to load EVERY SINGLE TIME. And it takes like 20-30 seconds, for it to load. I even checked my task manager and it only ever used like 10MB/s. But hey, Fatal Bullet was pretty decent - no way this one will be as bad, right?

First try on my boss fight was weird to say the least, as I accidentally skipped through the (by the way, rather hilarious tutorial. Seriously, you spawn and immediately get almost 10 pop ups that tell you what to do. There are better ways to do that.) and couldn't figure out how to move my camera. Somehow I finished that fight (mostly because I couldn't die) and... waited. And waited. 5 minutes of loading later, the game crashed. Ain't that lovely?

I launched the game again and visited the "Key Settings", which should probably be named "Controls", but sure only to find out you can't use your mouse to control the camera. So I pulled out my PS4 controller and played with that. This time around, the game didn't crash after the fight but it still was weird.

The fighting system isn't necessarily bad but it's... different. There's no dodging per se, you just have to run. Blocking takes an awful amount of time to get to and if you don't block - you more often than not get screwed. I'd say it's not a bad fighting system, it just feels different from the ones many people may be used to. At first I didn't really like it but to be fair... that's more similar to how swords behave in real life. Now, I know, it's just a game. But it's a game about a hyper realistic simulation so I suppose a less forgiving fighting system isn't all that bad, for the sake of the story.

Story, which isn't the best, as some of you may know. Since this appears to be a whole adaption of the Alicization arc, one I liked the most of the whole SAO novels published this far, I'm more willing to play it than any other part. I still don't think it's a good story, but for SAO - it ain't half bad, even if it sometimes it ridiculous in its own ways.

One thing that really caught my eyes are the animated, cinematic cutscenes which look dope. Please note that I'm talking about the animation system used in the very first fight. Later, the animations are just engine based (or at least were for the next ~40 minutes or so) and once there's a VN-like "talking to himself" Kirito moment which honestly threw me off guard. It's just two or three lines with a PNG of Kirito (closer in drawing style to anime than the game itself) appearing in the middle of the screen out of nowhere.

I'd also like to note that I haven't seen the same problems as other people reporting to have the game running like hot garbage on an RTX 2070 or something even better. My current GPU sucks - it's just a small GTX 750 Ti and yet the game runs at ~30fps at the lowest settings, and that's without trying to optimize it by playing with the community based solutions. It's not the best experience ever but it's better than I expected it to be.

To conclude - I don't recommend buying this game right now. Unless some patches come out regarding the optimalization, loading times or anything, you should probably wait for a discount. I won't lie, I've been let down after trusting the game, having experienced the Fatal Bullet which was a much more enjoyable experience for me. If you wanna play SAO - you should have bought FB on the Summer Sale and played it with some friends. I'm pretty sure it would have been more fun to do that while you wait for the (community) patches that fix this... thing.