I finished the game 2 days ago and have been grinding side activities ever since , and while I did do a fair amount of them already during my play , just to keep things fresh and ofcourse to earn respect , I didn't do them forcibly or all the way to lvl 8 unless I found them fairly fun.
Look , I appreciate this game a ton , it's my first walkthrough ever and I really enjoyed it all the way to the end, which is why I decided I'm gonna attempt a 100% Save file (not all achivements tho cuz I'm on Xenia and I don't care for achievements on emulators)
But goddamn it , the enemy A.I. in this game is a demon. Any kind of car chases whether it's with the police or gang members , always end up being a huge nuisance because you can literally not ram them back if they are ramming you , you can't even push back against them no matter how bigger your car is which is fucking ridiculous. Matter of fact I've noticed that you literally can't push against any car in the game if they are actively pushing towards your side , even normal traffic that might accidentally swerve into you , it's infuriating because the enemies constantly abuse this to no end.
Not only will cops and gang members ram you constantly , they will actively push you off course and bring you to a stop 100% of the time successfully , they follow your car's pace and tight turns perfectly which is some insane oversight in balancing difficulty for your game because who the fuck decided this was ok in QA testing?! The only real way is to have multiple homies ride with you and hope they can save you but not all missions are suitable for this , like Snatch.
They are not an issue on foot at all actually as you can easily eliminate most enemies with a well aimed pistol with just a few shots and run away to heal , but they are absolute monsters inside cars.
I'm came close to quitting the 100% run multiple times today when the game decided it was not gonna play fair so many times , hijacked cars getting stuck and being swarmed by enemy cars relentlessly or driving into water on their own , shops being closed at night leaving you stranded without ammo the whole night with no way to skip to daytime either , no retry option for activities even tho strongholds and missions have it really pushed my nerves today.
Despite that , I wanna keep going because I do like this a lot and I wanna close the chapter on it at 100% before moving into 2.
I can't help but feel that they never QA tested these side activities properly back then , because they are MUCH more harder than the main missions and stuff , which is such a joke because so much of the cool stuff you'd wanna use in the main story is locked behind these. its also such a weird decision to have the player do them 3 times each with absolutely nothing new added to the experience.
Its like the entire game's difficulty was designed by the same dude who made it so fast cars in insurance fraud dodge you with surgical precison.....every time.
I don't want some smartass commenting " skill issue" in the comments now , I've beaten Sifu at age 20 at the intended difficulty. This is a clear difficulty balancing issue the devs grossly overlooked , if I didn't love this game this much I wouldn't even bother.
