3/5 ★ – xdarkthunderx's review of NieR: Automata.

NieR: Auto-Monotony Guess the hyped killed the game for me. I’m a huge fan of Nier Replicant so I figured I’d love this game but it was disappointing. The CONSTANT backtracking is one thing, but when the areas are a chore to transverse and the enemies are WAY too abundant, it just becomes annoying. They’re great the first couple of times, maybe, but when I went to the abandoned factory for the 500th time, I started to really hate it. Story was solid though, but the gameplay’s affect on the storytelling made it less than perfect. Did I really need to play the entirety of the first part from 9S’s perspective? No, could’ve just had those scenes. Did A2 need to go to the same areas as 2B/9S for fetch quests? Probably not. Just gets repetitive with how after ending A, there’s barely any new areas introduced. You go to the same areas and do the same things and then MAYBE get to go and do new cool things. And those new cool things are great. They’re just infrequent considering the rest of the gameplay. Yes, there’s bonding conversations in-between the cool story parts but they don’t save the dull gameplay for me. Not a terrible game but didn’t meet my expectations.