Credits rolled.
Combat is definitely its strongest point, especially after making it up the skill tree to improve each skill's weapon archetype function. Too bad it gets old rather fast as most of the time you fight 7 slightly different types of dudes with an umbrella and some headless children. The occasional or late-game bigger foes and bosses are where it's at, good stuff. Not sure why people have issues with aiming I hear, it works ok like COD with L2 lock on. Ripping out multiple cores at once with haptic feedback felt good 'till the very end.
Just makes me think how much better Ghostwire could be if all the budget went into expanding combat mechanics and enemy variety, rather than the truly piss poor open-world aspect of it. There is simply not enough meat on the bone here to keep things interesting at this scale, resulting in a huge city environment that looks great and definitely delivers the vibe but feels barren and pointless to explore. The side quests aren't even that bad at squeezing out a very limited pool of mechanics. NPC being ghost shades with zero personality doesn't help, perhaps the Japanese VO makes a difference but I hate reading subtitles so after switching to English it just barely does the job.
It's clear the game went through many re-works with remnants of systems that seem totally redundant in their current shape like the inventory.
Also, this is not a horror game. Switch to "Hard" for any sense of threat from the mobs, switch back to "Normal" on bosses for a smooth sail through the story.
I can't say I didn't enjoy it, just much less I thought I will. Much less than Evil Within 2 which IMO was very underrated. I respect Tango for going for something risky, different and unique but now I'm worried about them focusing on
smaller non horror games moving forward.