Cyberpunk 2077

I had low expectations since I didn't keep up with the marketing hype, but I'm still jealous of PS4 players because they can get a refund. My first moment controlling my character was met with a graphical bug. Terrible first impression. The police system is not excusable in 2020. It practically breaks the game for a gameplay system that other companies figured out in the early 2000s. Key bindings are frustrating to use, with some odd choices that contort your fingers. Multiple default graphics options make the game look worse than it would with them off, even though they likely decrease performance. Glitchy, clone NPCs with dumb behaviors that take you out of the world they're trying to build. Excessively busy UI. Isn't the "futuristic" trend to be slim and sleek? This game needs another full year in the oven. See you in holidays 2021, Cyberpunk.

Game doesn't run, crashes to desktop. Contacted CDPR support and they said my CPU needs to support AVX instruction sets, which is NOT listed in any of the system requirements, and apparently can be easily circumvented by a 3rd-party mod. CDPR, however, has no intent in resolving this issue or supporting this and instead suggests either the mod or a refund. Ironically, I was able to play the game briefly before constant crashes to the desktop, so it's clear my hardware can run it (and at high settings no less), so it's a particularly baffling decision on their part. The only thing I can surmise is that CDPR just doesn't want to support their own game, which is already a buggy, lifeless mess. CDPR seems to have forgotten their roots and my faith in them as a developer has been shattered. As for the game itself, as I said, from what little I've played and what I've seen, it's a buggy mess. Texture pop-in through walls, floating characters, characters walking on top of one another, NPCs that appear and disappear, etc. Inability to re-map keys, and sometimes the mapped keys just not working. Movement is janky. And from what I've seen of Night City, it doesn't live up to the hype, and frankly feels empty and lifeless, despite all the attempts to make it seem "busy." Certainly seems like CDPR got overambitious with this game and just decided to dump it unfinished, despite its obvious bugs and flaws, and abandon their fans in the process. Thoroughly disappointed in Cyberpunk 2077, and CDPR as a developer.

There is nothing about this game that you haven't seen done better elsewhere and you have likely played arguably worse games that have had more interesting positive surprises than this one. "Exploring" this game rarely entails interesting surprises with mechanics, gameplay, or storytelling, and largely just consists of a long reveal of mechanics and plot points that you have seen time and time again. Character creation? You have few options to really do interesting things with your characters visually (or from a roleplaying perspective) and I'd argue games like Conan Exiles, which is a few tiers below this in scale and production cost, manage both of these facets far better than CP. The game is a very cohesive-but-standard mediocre open-world game from this generation and nothing about it truly stands-out apart from its marketing. I'm sure had this been released by Ubisoft of Bethesda, it would've been another name on a release schedule, but as a follow-up to The Witcher 3, it's hard to justify the end results. I never feel like I'm pulling an interesting thread that's leading me down paths I never expected and I'm almost always crossing items off a list or doing something that feels inconsequential and tedious. Even without bugs, I wasn't graphically amazed and this game ultimately illustrates how wrong companies go with "bigger is better" instead of leveraging resources in a focused and compelling way. The fact that games like Control or Death Stranding radically impacted me, despite being made by exponentially smaller teams with smaller budgets, but this game fails to elicit even pretty low-level praise is probably a pretty good testament to the fact that CDPR's desire to scale upward was poorly conceived at the cost of a brand I previously admired. Yeah, the Witcher 3 was big and ever-expanding, but I still felt like there was a guiding focus that made it feel impactful without unnecessary sprawl.

I upgraded my PC for this, spent thousands of dollars to get the best experience, and the game is so broken that with a RTX 3080 and 5900X it will not go above 30FPS. Change settings high or low makes no difference. This is such a poor experience, that I'm not whiling to play it in this state. And that is just one of the bugs, but major other ones to be found all around. Incredibly disappointing from CD Project Red, after delivering one of the best, if not the best gaming experiences in recent times with The Witcher 3, now to only burn any and all good faith the might have had. I just can't believe this is the same company, that is now willingly releasing something in this state. As of the date of this review I would not recommend anyone purchasing this mess. Wait till its fixed, but with the way it currently is, that might very well be quite some time away.

Game was too buggy to even run on my computer and I've been waiting for a reply from GOG's support team for over a week on the status of my refund. I wish I had of bought this game on Steam instead. I would have already had the money in my bank account by now. Probably the last game I get on GOG. What a joke.