Clunky beyond belief, and always good for a replay. The game is barely holding together, no matter how many fan patches, but it's such an awesome RPG with great writing and chock-full of colorful characters.

It is revered for good reason, shame it never got a sequel.

An amazing cult classic RPG, janky? yes especially the combat but the writing, quirky characters, and aesthetic made it enjoyable and really outweighs the cons similar to Fallout New Vegas. it's been 2 decades since release, hopefully there's a remaster coming.

Reminder to install the Unofficial_Patch in order to be able to play this on Steam.

I absolutely loved (most) of my time with this game, but I don't think I could recommend it to anyone. While personally the first half of this game felt just as fresh and fun as my first Disco Elysium playthrough, the quality drops off of a cliff around halfway through, and never manages to pull itself back up. I understand due to Activision the game was rushed and forced to release far earlier than it should have, but as I was playing I kept thinking about how easy, and quick it could have been to apply solutions to the incredibly combat heavy second half. (combat that only brought the game down, I truly think if the combat was entirely removed this game would only benefit)

But even with the heavy combat focus, so much could have been done to counteract this, even something as little as a message showing up saying "The game is about to focus on combat, so make sure to bolster your stats!" would have gone a long way to actually building a cohesive throughline, rather than throwing social focused characters into the deep end.

The second half of the game abandons a lot of the interesting dialogue options, the options available as solutions, and instead takes a heavy focus on the worst combat system I have ever encountered. If it wasn't for Console Commands and God Mode I would have never finished this game, as for me games are made to have fun, not to force yourself through a slog.

On top of this, not only did the second half feel mostly unfinished (obviously) it also felt unneccesary? Many of the combat situations could have been cut in half, or a quarter and would have felt much better for it, they didn't need to pad this game for length, when half of the fun is in replaying with alternate clans. The dialogue shines above all, and the world is amazing mostly due to the choice of using the Source Engine.

It's incredibly sad that we will never see a true sequel to this game (which should only actually happen when Source 2 becomes available for devs, Unreal Engine 5 was and is a mistake) and instead got a big old nothing burger of a "sequel". I hope someday some mods can make a source 2 spiritual successor to properly follow up on what could have happened next, and create something worthy of playing.

It's these reasons I don't recommend it, even though I personally loved it. I don't think most of the problems actually come from the rushed development, but from ideas that should have been cut long before, a perfect example of "kill your darlings" in media being incredibly important. This needed more time at the drawing board, not more time tinkering.

TLDR; if you have a high tolerance for downloading patches, ignoring glaring design issues towards the second half, and using console commands, you may love this game too, but for the average player this needed some more thought, or at least a play tester.