Disco Elysium: The Final Cut review — a modern masterpiece mired by technical failings
Our Verdict
Disco Elysium: The Final Cutting is a masterwork in video-game storytelling that volition engross y'all from beginning to cease. Only persistent technical issues hold it dorsum.
For
- Engaging, deep story
- Memorable characters
- Tons of lore to dig into
- Cute fine art fashion and presentation
Against
- Frequent framerate drops
- Poor controller mapping
Tom's Guide Verdict
Disco Elysium: The Final Cutting is a masterwork in video-game storytelling that will engross yous from start to cease. Merely persistent technical bug hold information technology dorsum.
Pros
- +
Engaging, deep story
- +
Memorable characters
- +
Tons of lore to dig into
- +
Beautiful art style and presentation
Cons
- -
Frequent framerate drops
- -
Poor controller mapping
Upon its original release in 2019, Disco Elysium was met with nearly universal acclaim from critics and gamers alike. In the eighteen months since launch, it has become something of a cult classic, just Disco Elysium: The Terminal Cut aims to bring the game to an even wider audience.
Out now on PS5, PS4, and PC, with an Xbox Serial X and Nintendo Switch port due out this summertime, the RPG will soon be playable just about everywhere. This is certainly worth celebrating every bit Disco Elysium is a special game that manages to live upwards to the loftier expectations prepare past its glowing reputation.
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It's definitely not a title for everyone, even so, and some players will be put off past the slow pace, nihilistic worldview and lack of a proper combat organization, merely few games are more immersive once Disco Elysium gets its hooks into you.
Read on for our full Disco Elysium: The Final Cut review to detect out why this is a dark and brooding mystery-adventure you need to solve.
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut review: Story
You wake up in a shabby motel room. Yous tin can't think where yous are or fifty-fifty your own name. You walk outside to observe a mutilated torso hanging from a tree, and it'due south your task to notice who's responsible for this crime.
That'due south the initial setup of Disco Elysium, and it's a pretty intriguing one. The game is an RPG in the truest sense of the word; right from the start, you are given significant freedom to brand your character your own.
Afterward selecting 1 of iii pre-configured character archetypes or building your own grapheme from scratch, y'all are let loose in the game'south small only dense open world to interrogate townsfolk, find clues and get into mischief, if you seek it out.
Within my kickoff 20 minutes, I had been bullied by an impolite street kid named Cuno, vomited twice thanks to a wicked hangover from the dark before, and engaged in a philosophical contend with a motel possessor nearly the concept of money in an attempt to go out of paying for my room.
It'south not just other humans you'll exist interacting with. The game also features regular interjection and interplay betwixt your ain psyche as parts of your personality clash or try to convince you to perform sure deportment.
Early on, my brain attempted to convince me that I was a diehard communist and needed to spread the political ideology to the citizens of the town in a sequence that was equal parts bizarre and hilarious.
Yes, Disco Elysium can be very odd, only it's remarkably thoughtful. The dialogue tin can be snarky, bleak, comedic or depressing, ofttimes all the same time. The key story, likewise as numerous side plots, is among the best-written in all of gaming.
I don't desire to delve too deeply into the specifics, as the real joy of Disco Elysium is discovering things for yourself. Merely the core narrative unfolds at a pleasing pace and y'all're given a pretty substantial corporeality of control as to how things all play out in the end.
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut review: Gameplay
It's a adept chore that Disco Elysium'south story, characters, and world are and so remarkable, because that'southward really all in that location is to the game.
As an RPG played from an isometric perspective, Disco Elysium's closest comparing signal would probably be Divinity: Original Sin 2, minus the gainsay. Instead of a turn-based battle system, Disco Elysium is all virtually warring with words.
You roam the game'south hauntingly beautiful locales and interact with characters, engaging them in lengthy dialogue sequences in club to learn something new or gain a new item. That in turn lets y'all open up new areas to explore and meet even more characters. This gameplay loop may be off-putting to some players, every bit it tin feel closer to reading a choose-your-own-take a chance volume than actually playing a video game.
Along the way, you'll also face skill checks by style of a dice roll. For example, if you lot want to throw a dial at a bouncer who won't let you into a club, the success of your swing will exist measured past a stat-weighted ringlet. It can exist frustrating when you fail a skill check with the odds stacked in your favor, but similarly, the sense of jubilation when you roll a winner on a check with a single-digit take chances of success is immense.
Disco Elysium feels very inspired past classic pen-and-newspaper tabletop RPGs similar Dungeons and Dragons, in which building your character sheet is the most important gameplay component and digging into the lore is your main reward for thorough play.
That's not to say you aren't given the opportunity to upgrade your character along the way. You do so via the "thoughts cabinet" where y'all tin can unlock new skills. Internalizing these "thoughts" grants useful stat increases and volition let you to featherbed certain skill checks.
There are also more traditional ways of growing your grapheme using skill points to increment your level in four unique metrics: intellect, psyche, physique and motorics. Overall, the progression arrangement in Disco Elysium is largely just equally quirky as the rest of the game.
What actually lets Disco Elysium: The Final Cut down is the atrocious controller mapping. The game certainly seems designed with keyboard and mouse in heed, which isn't surprising as it was released first on PC, only titles similar Planet Coaster take proved that smoothly transferring a PC-axial control scheme to console controllers is possible.
Actually interacting with the world feels unbearably clunky on a controller. Just selecting an object or person to interact with requires you to substantially scroll through every interactable item in the vicinity, which is very cumbersome.
It doesn't help that the collaborate push button seems to only work about one-half the time. Prepare for a lot of double-pressing when your first input doesn't register. Information technology all leads to a pretty frustrating experience playing the game on console.
If you have the selection to play Disco Elysium: The Final Cut on PC (and it's not an peculiarly graphically demanding game) then we suggest you do.
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut review: Visuals and audio
From the gorgeous watercolor aesthetic to the heavily stylized menus, every aspect of Disco Elysium'south visual design feels meticulously crafted.
Modest flourishes actually impress, such as when the portrait of a graphic symbol with whom y'all're interacting appears adjacent to their dialogue box. This really helps immerse you lot in the game'south world, and these little visual touches can exist seen constantly.
I of the biggest additions to The Final Cut, as opposed to the original version of Disco Elysium, is the inclusion of full voice acting for every single graphic symbol. It's a pretty big deal considering that the game contains more than than ane 1000000 words of spoken text.
As you spend basically the unabridged game engaged in dialogue trees, having it all fully voiced is a pretty substantial improvement. I couldn't imagine playing the game without it now.
The unabridged voice cast is up to snuff, but item applause must go to Jullian Champenois who voices Kim Kitsuragi, a police lieutenant who accompanies you and is i of the game's best characters. You'll likely be completely enamored with him by the time your tale comes to an end.
Credit must too go to ring British Sea Power who provide much of the game's understated merely appropriate soundtrack.
Unfortunately, while the PS5 version of the game claims 60 fps (and 4K resolution), the frame rate is far from stable and regularly dips well below the promised benchmark. This is particularly odd because fifty-fifty though Disco Elysium is certainly a looker, information technology'southward hardly a graphically intensive title. More than graphically enervating games such as Demon'south Souls or Hitman iii both run at a stable threescore fps on Sony's machine.
Developer ZA/UM has promised that patches are beingness worked on in order to fix the framerate problem, along with several bugged quests that are preventing some players from progressing.
At the time of this writing, no patches were available. However, the first series of fixes accept since been released, and by all accounts the game is all the same in pretty rough shape on console with frame stuttering remaining a problem and plenty of bugs still halting player progression.
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut review: Verdict
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut adds a few tweaks that make quite a substantial divergence to the overall feel, but unfortunately, the transition from its PC platform origins to consoles hasn't been equally smoothen as we'd have hoped.
Even with these faults, Disco Elysium: The Final Cut is a near-essential journey that everyone should accept. The game's remarkable story, characters and world polish so brightly that the frequent technical issues are for the well-nigh role easy to overlook.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/disco-elysium-final-cut
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