When comparing Hollow Knight vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends Hollow Knight for most people. In the question“What are the best singleplayer games on Steam?” Hollow Knight is ranked 13th while NieR: Automata is ranked 43rd. The most important reason people chose Hollow Knight is:
The visuals, music and sound effects are both quirky and charming. You may stay for the gameplay, but you come in for the lovable world.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Has character
The visuals, music and sound effects are both quirky and charming. You may stay for the gameplay, but you come in for the lovable world.
Pro Rewarding exploration
The game world is enormous, with a massive amount of secret areas that really reward you for sniffing them out.
Pro Amazing art and soundtrack
Has a very dedicated aesthetic that works beautifully.
Pro Fun, challenging boss fights
With a couple exceptions, the boss fights are challenging in a way that does not feel cheap. If you die, it is because you screwed up and not because the game didn't feel like keeping you alive anymore.
Pro Amazing story and lore
Pro Large amount of content
Over 30 hours of gameplay.
Pro Tight and fluid movement
Every movement in the game makes you feel like you are in control.
Pro Has free DLC
Three DLCs have been released, adding additional quests for free.
Pro Mysterious story/lore
Makes you wanna explore more to find out whats going on and you may find secrets with NPCs that will tell you more or add to the mystery. This keeps things interesting.
Pro Forces you to learn attack patterns
You won't get far just going in swinging. Learning enemy behavior is much more important than in any other Metroidvania and that feels very rewarding.
Pro Interesting puzzles
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Slow first 2 hours
Game feels slow until you acquire an important upgrade.
Con Choppy on certain hardware
A small percentage of users have issues with choppiness.
Con Too hard
Con Controller lag is an annoying issue
Deactivating VSync and lowering screen resolution did not resolve the problem. This issue has been widely reported by many players.
Con Map system
To get a map, you must find an NPC first for each area you visit. Map updates whenever you find a bench. You also get sent to your last-visited bench when you die. It does not update in real-time, but the map will update with wherever you have been when you find a bench. This is all assuming you have bought the base map from the NPC in that particular area.
Con Some glitches inside
Some speed runners use glitches to finish the game very fast, including glitches that cause you to go to some other area or glitches that make you fly, but you might find some by accident.
Con Hidden lore/story
The story and lore are revealed in a similar manner as Dark Souls. There is a lot of lore, but you have to piece it together on your own because they don't tell you much straight-up.
Con Unresolved crashing issues
A few users have reported that they get random crashes in between room loads and at startup.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.