Cyberpunk 2077

Visuals are mainly amazing, story is meh, characters and acting is pretty good but the motherflipping controls are what get me. You are constantly overshooting your movements, jerking back and forth, running into everything and everyone regardless if you're on foot or in a vehicle, and aiming with a controller is incredibly challenging, to put it in positive terms. It feels very Golden Eye-ish, like travelling back in time to the N64 era of controller functionality. The only real difference between mouse and keyboard and playing with a controller is that aiming is actually reasonable with the mouse. You can tweak controller settings to remove a lot of acceleration features ("bonus"), but it's a slight improvement if anything. Combat and aiming is still impossible. And by impossible I mean you 100% lack the ability to fine aim, which translates to you burning through all your AR ammo and grenades in any proper fight for dealing AOE-damage. There is one more thing that grinds my gears: the constant bombardment of sensory stimulus when you're exploring the city. The loudest fudging radios or other audiosources blasting "music" at several locations at the same time, and as you go to turn one off to chill the heck out for a second you discover there's two more playing the same junk in the area you're in. Too much constant, obnoxious clutter in the audiovisual spectrum which only feels stressful and annoying. Less clutter and more tact, please. Other than that it's pretty cool.

This is a hard one to make, after so many years of waiting and marketing feeding us lies... literally. Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way: Bugs happen, way too often. Performance, is awful, so here's my specs first: * RTX 2070Super with latest drivers * Ryzen 3600 * 16GB DDR4 Memory@3200Mhz * Game installed on 1TB NVMe drive At 1440p, with DLSS turned on, the game can't keep a steady 65fps at MEDIUM and LOW mixed settings. Also, despite my NVME drive, the game stutters when driving fast and I still experience texture pop-in. Now, to the misleading marketing and lies part: * This is NOT an RPG. At best it's a linear looter shooter with RPG elements. Barely any of your choices matter, your V acts the same regardless of your lifepath. * NPC and Driving AI does NOT exist. Everyone goes in straight lines and stops if you are in front of them, they won't do anything. No interaction to be done with them. * Open-World is shallow and lifeless. No minigames, can't change your hairtstyle or body. No interactivity with AI. Even TRAFFIC LIGHTS don't work, they are literally Red in the distance and cars go past them, but they FADE to(not switch, but FADE) to green if you get close enough to a traffic light. Enemy AI is awful and stiff, paired with bullet sponge health regardless of your level and gun damage, because they keep leveling up to you automatically. The bugs and performance can be fixed, I can look past them, but the shallow, lifeless state of the world and design decisions can't be fixed, ever. CDPR gained a lot of trust and goodwill with The Witcher 3, which also launched in a questionable state, but they lost it all with this game, and I didn't even talk about the shady practices they pulled with reviews lol

The game was surrounded by an extreme amount of hype, which is never a good thing. Hype creates expectations and very often those expectations are not delivered. This is the unfortunate case with Cyberpunk 2077. Remember those first gameplay videos from 2 years ago? The almost an hour long demo of the beginning of the game with the Maelstrom gang and all the little things they kept hyping up? I wish the game was like in those videos. Most of the little things they were advertising then have been stripped out. As an example, remember that jacket and the talk about street cred? Not in the game. Remember the talk about an interactive world? Well, there's nothing interactive in the world. It's really sterile. Pretty much the only things you can interact with are the two types of food dispensers and stores that sell you guns and clothes. The city, while it can look pretty, is lifeless and void of activities. There's nothing else to do except shoot gangbangers. It's pretty, but shallow. The game itself is really buggy and janky. When it's not the animations bugging out, cars floating in the air or things falling through the ground it's the sounds cutting off or not playing at all. The performance is also really horrible. The recommended specs are not very accurate in my honest opinion. The game is being advertised as a roleplaying game, but there's almost no roleplaying in it. V is written on tight rails. You're just pressing a button to advance to the next line. The only way to play is to shoot everything dead. Even all your attributes and perks are focused only on making your guns, melee or hacking abilities more deadly. There's nothing else. With patches, after all the bugs are ironed out, I can see an OK game in here. But it's just that. OK as in mediocre. Certainly not very "breathtaking." Maybe within a years time, if this game ever gets an "enhanced edition" treatment like the Witcher titles, things might be different. Right now I feel misled and cheated.

The popularity and hype surrounding Cyberpunk 2077 can likely be attributed to its setting. We've all longed for a dystopian, futiristic open-world with colour and grit (in contrast to Fallout 4's dull hues). Essentially, we were looking for Blade Runner: The Game and that's partially what we got. Unfortunately, the RPG elements promised by CDPR are not fleshed out. The core mechanics of the game are basic, outdated and have already been done and exceeded by other studios. This is a shallow, basic action game with a lick of neon paint over it and dose of false attitude. It's not the RPG we wanted and not the one we deserved. I also had to pay for the game twice as it didn't work on PS4. Cannot get a refund from Sony so have now spent €130 on this game.

Many bugs, poor performance but I expect these to be fixed soon. What really bugs me is seemingly cut content / features no fleshed out enough. Weapon customization is severely lacking, no way to change V's apperance later, life paths don't as well as dialog choices don't matter AT ALL, everything leads to the same results. Open world is huge and stunning but lacks interactivity. NPCs might as well not be there. The only way you'll interact with them is by accidentally running them over (poor vehicle controls). Minimap too zoomed in to be useful. Enemies are too spongy - I get this is more RPG like but unloading several magazines into a random plebs head while most of the other ones die with one shot kinda breaks immersion. I could go on like this for probably a solid 30 minutes... somewhere under this huge mess of bugs, glitches, bad decisions and cut content lies one of the best games ever. Let's hope CDPR doesn't only fix the bugs but also adds a LOT of content and fleshes out the existing stuff. Otherwise this will never feel like a finished game.