Cyberpunk 2077

First off I want to state the positives of this game. The character interaction, dialogue and writing is amazing. I felt connected with the characters and have enjoyed the time I've spent interacting with them. Night City is beautiful. The art team have done a fantastic job of creating a dense world that looks believable (emphasis on "LOOKS"). Been playing Cyberpunk 2020 with my tabletop group for years. It was amazing to step into the Night City we'd spent so long enjoying. It pains me to say the rest of the game is garbage. Combat: Boring, easy, playstyle is inconsequential. The AI is literally too dumb to pose a challenge at any point in the game. As flashy as things look combat is tedious and repetetive. You have to actually hamper yourself to make it challenging. Forget using tech or smart weapons and equip yourself with the most basic low DPS weapon you can find and you may have a challenge for a while before the broken skill system lets you one shot literally everyone with a lead pipe you picked up in an alley within the first few hours of the game. The World: It LOOKS great. But it's as empty, dead and soulless as a politicians promises. Traffic is little more than railway toy. No one reacts in any way that makes sense. There is nothing of interest going on anywhere beyond scripted sequences. It's sterile and antiquated. The very first GTA has a more believable and reactive world and NPCs. Driving: There's zero point to it. Cops don't chase you. There's no sort of combat. Apart from sight seeing there's no point. The loot: Having to stop and spend 10 minutes in your inventory after every single boring combat encounter is maddening. It thinks it's Diablo or Borderlands. There's not enough weapon variety or interesting properties to warrant it. The crafting system is broken and meaningless. And tbh the gear generally looks trash.I've seen more coherent fashion in Mad Max. Bugs aside, this game has bigger issues that I don't see patches being able to fix.

The good: Soundtrack is incredible, CDPR somehow got Keanu Reeves to give the best performance of his acting career, and the game looks good... most of the time. And the not so good: Even if the game released with a majority of the bugs ironed out, it' still not a good game. Story is short, predictable, nothing special was done at all. If you've read any cyberpunk fiction or seen any movies, this isn't gonna surprise you at all. There are multiple endings, which is nice, but they don't have any sort of nuance to obtaining them, except for the SECRET ending. A blasé story can be saved with a wrapper of good writing but aside from a few moments, it's decent at best, edgy (mostly in V's case) at worst, and always too wordy for its own good. Despite being a nice looking city, the repetition in the way things are laid out make it feel as if you're always in the same place. No matter where you are, it never feels distinct from anywhere else, and tied with the flatlined civilian AI, it's just lifeless. It's not an RPG. No problem with that on the surface but... that surface shows all the pointless detail they did to make you think it's an RPG. Stats. Perks. Tech points. Hacking. It doesn't really matter. At the end of the day you always got your backstory as your main dialogue choice and loot you find to fight your battles. Too bad the battles are too easy. Except for one spike at the end of the second act, combat basically resolves itself. The other (more important) half of RPGs, character... V is not a blank slate. They're a character with a history and personality, which is fine... if they weren't such an edgy prick. Dialogue also has Mass Effect syndrome. Blue choices: info, yellow: progression in your flavor of "yes." If CDPR tighten things up it may be worth playing as some kind of cyberpunk world experience, but as it is now, there is just no point. It's currently a cyberpunk Disneyland but all the rides are broken. Or there were never any rides to begin with.

So after 200 hours of testing ( builds, gameplay elements) i give it a 2 star because instead of a well developed role playing game with a loot and shooter element what we get is action first person shooter with light loot and rpg element. What add up in it is that some things are broken or plain useless: example i can give you is some of the implant doesnt work despite having the skill for ( looking at you health on full charge) or some quickhacks stop working when enemies dodge or again last perk on the rifle skill tree ( the one that give bonus damage for standing in place) it should have gone to the light machine gun instead. Which bring me to my second point where instead of going with skill tree for a gun "family" they should have made the split between pistol/assault rifle/sniper and Dmr/LMG/Shotgun/Tech weapon/Smart Weapon and btw game is really lacking weapons diversity. Bugs wise, this game is a mess : npc clipping a lot trought wall, npc parts streching, random death do to falling from low high ( like dropped from a floor had no damge, did it again later and insta death) Quest npc getting stuck, like i said before skill not working, Damage you take or give being miscalculated, npc detection problem ( stealth issue)... and cops like teleportation, crime detection fail and they appear out of thin air. Can't speak about the story since what i did was some testing so didnt really follow. What i can say is the Jacky Welles ark is forced and should be switch/change. And that there seem to be no branching at all with the quests, youre on a rail way from start to finish. Welp CD Projekt RED you had my trust...not anymore.

Reviewed on an RTX 3080 + Ryzen 5 3600, builds 1.06 and 1.10 Playtime was about 36 hours. THE GOOD: - Graphics often look really great, especially with RTX on. - Guns sound powerful and are fun to use, making the generic combat pretty enjoyable most of the time - Some very sweet story moments with likeable characters such as Panam, Jackie, Goro, River and Johnny. - Driving from Point A to B in Night City is always visually striking, even if the world itself is incredibly hollow. - Interesting lore, even if the script does an awful job at teaching it to you. - Some creative side missions that successfully flesh out the main cast. - The last few hours of the game, and all of its different endings, are a blast. - Good soundtrack that always puts you in the right mood for the game's story beats. Most of it is pretty forgettable, but it gets the job done. THE BAD: - Pointless character leveling. Your skill tree basically consists of stat multipliers and percentage bonuses. - Main plot is fairly straightforward and boring. - A lot of the story feels messy and badly told. Large chunks are obviously missing. - Awful handling for cars. - Loot scavenging is tedious and tacked on, just like the crafting. THE UGLY: - The majority of side characters are horribly bland and interchangeable. - Brain-dead quest design. Follow waypoint, talk to character, scan something, shoot people, talk to character, collect XP. A mindless gameplay loop, no matter how much you dress it up. - Bugs, bugs, bugs and more bugs. The more I played, the worse it got. - None of your dialogue choices particularly matter, and often V says the exact opposite of what most players would want him/her to. - The unbelievable scam CDPR pulled on console players - The hollow, taped-together feeling of the open world. - Copy-pasted quests are dumped in your lap via CONSTANT phone-calls. - Police that spawn out of thin air when you commit a crime. - Can't change your appearance beyond clothes, at all.

In its best moments Cyberpunk 2077 is the best Game i played in a long time. Story, setting, characters, gameplay, designs, it looks great and runs mostly smoothly on my ageing pc.... i could go on for hours on end praising this games strengths. But these strengths often don't get to shine and convince, because the game isn't finished. Some mechanics like the loot system, stealth or power weapons seem unfinished in contrast to the great attention to details in... let's say the extremely well written mix of story, world and characters. Others are apparently missing, like a transmog system. But despite this, i could still have one of my greatest gaming experiences, if it wheren't for those bugs that interrupt every session, forcing me to reload and replay many quests multiple times. Stuff like that really sucks the fun out of this raw diamont, because i can see the shiny gem Cyberpunk 2077 could be, if CDR finished its developement. Really eager to play it once thats done.