Cyberpunk 2077

It's cute with these bugs everywhere, lame npcs reactions, empty City in lots of places. It's definitely not a great game. It's good but not for that much.

To sum it all up, disappointment. Eight years of hype to launch what is basically an early access game. An early access game that can barely run unless you're one of the lucky people to have an RTX card that can also enable DLSS and even then, just barely. It's a beautiful game when it actually runs. It's massive and sparkly but just like the themes of the original tabletop, it's soulless and incredibly surface level glamour. The laughably integrated "AI" acts on the level of games 20 years older and the gameplay is a boring repetitive loop with less than stellar combat. There's none of the promised "RPG" elements, no side quests worthy of the name except "go here, kill these, repeat", and just nothing customizable whatsover. You can't do anything with your looks outside of the initial character creation, nothing to customize your vehicles, you can't see any actual changes to your cyberware, you can't do anything with your apartment, there are no impactful relationships you can build other than being literally told "you care about this person because reasons." I gave it an honest chance. almost 40 hours of the most bugged and glitchy gameplay I have ever forced myself to play because I wanted to love it so bad. And at it's core there is a lot of promise. The story CAN be engaging, the voice acting is incredibly top notch, SOME characters really are good. But none of that means anything when you don't feel involved in your own story. You're not impacting the story at all, it's being told to you and having your hand held the entire time. It's a game that's all style but no substance.

The game is a mediocre but mostly playable action-adventure looter-shooter in a beautiful but empty open-world. The main issue however, aside from the heaps of bugs, is that this game is simply not as advertised. It is a stripped down, bare-bones, Early Access-esque version of a far superior game that probably got lost on the cutting room floor at the 11th hour in development. As such, Cyberpunk 2077 has neither the quality nor the quantity of content you would expect from the developers of the venerable Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt and its amazing DLCs. I trust and hope that CD Projekt RED will stick to their long tradition of providing excellent, post-launch support for their games, so that Cyberpunk 2077 may become a game worthy of our attention down the line. But right now it is nothing but a mediocre game containing frustratingly many wasted opportunities.

If it weren't for the bugs, I'd love it. I preordered the game months before release because I had faith that CDPR would not pull the same nonsense as all these other "AAA" companies and release a half-baked game that's too buggy to play. I'm extremely disappointed in the state of the game at release, I would have been content to wait another year if it meant that the game would have had a few more passes to clear bugs. Unfortunately, the game seems like it’s barely into the beta phase of development. To understand my perspective on what beta phase means, here’s a quote regarding testing phases in game development from a book on game design, Players Making Decisions, 2nd Edition by Zack Hiwiller: “Alpha, beta, and gold are terms for sections of the test phase. Alpha is the state of the project when all the features have been completed and the testing stage begins. Beta is the state when the bug count has been reduced to acceptably small levels, but bugs are still incoming. Gold is when the publisher or team decides the game is sufficiently bug free and sends it to the manufacturer (or releases it to partners) to be printed, distributed, or both.” Zack goes on to say that the alpha, beta, and gold terms can have different names in different companies, but the meanings are generally the same. Again, I would have been perfectly OK to wait longer. My PC specs: Win10 Pro I9-9900K RTX 2080 Ti OC 32GB RAM TL:DR- I can’t recommend the game in its current state and would have been alright with waiting longer before release.

The game in its current state is riddled with bugs but besides that it's just not what was promised. Sure it's still fun but there are so many things missing which were promised and so many things which one would take for granted are horribly executed. Nomad, Corpo or Street Kid? Doesn't matter, just the 30min in the beginning are different, has no effect at all. Traffic AI is horrible. Police AI is horrible. NPC AI is horrible. If you stick to the main story you'll be (mostly) fine but don't play outside the "script" or the immersion will be broken instantly. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. I could go on about how this isn't really an RPG. How your character customization doesn't matter while playing or in the story or how the diolog options are lacking and often badly written. Oh and get used to a call every 5 minutes from someone who you should know but was never really introduced. There will be no emotional connection to any character because the story seems to have been cut drastically. This was supposed to be a revolutionary, ground-breaking game which would change the genre and push it further. Just a few months ago this and similar statements were made by the developers on twitter and in interviews. This game is nothing of the sorts. It mixes GTA 3 (yes 3) witch RPG elements like Assassins Creed Odyssey and adds known elements from The Witcher 3. Oh and it doesn't mix it very well. Wait until the bugs are fixed, play the main story and maybe the side quests and sure you'll have fun, but don't expect anything new, exciting or "ground-breaking". You'll just be disappointed by what CDPR has delivered here... after all their promises.