Cyberpunk 2077

When I saw the trailers for this I got excited and said to myself "Yeah that's a good purchase for the year." I regret that decision. This game does not look and play as it should despite all the time that was put into it. It tires to be everything to everything to everyone and ends up being neither. Lifepaths have minimal input on the story and every V can played identical no matter how you started. The world feels hollow and lifeless despite the envinroment and setting. Food and drink give identical buffs making the variety of them pointles to collect. By only allowing prerendered and curated footage to be used in the media CDPR has shown that it cannot be trusted to me. This game was not ready for release and it shows, the higher ups can apologize on camera and say "We made a mistake" but the damage to their image is already done. I feel lied to. I had hoped for better from a developer with such goodwill behind it, but I can see I my faith was misplaced. I don't have any faith in the proposed multiplayer edition that was announced.

Give it another year of patching at least and them maybe purchase. Giving false impressions in trailers before launch is shady. Censoring footage and denying console access before launch is even more suspect. Using Youtubers to build up hype for a half finished game is normal now apparently. CDPR said "they leave greed to others" right? Wrong. Same BS, different company. Game crashed multiple times first week playing. Texture pop in is the worst I have ever seen. Driving in cars is a nightmare. Use bikes instead. NPC AI is bad. Story is alright but side activities are not. Teleporting police feels more like a meme making fun of UK/USA police. NPC shoots, no reaction from police. I shoot once, immediate death penalty. No vendor or shop is open for business, only vending machines work in the future. Refunds for physical PC purchases are denied. After a month of waiting CDPR supports reply was an offer for store credit on GOG not money back like management promised. So only console refunds deserve money.

The fact that this game launched in a terrible state is no secret, but it is getting patched to where it can be playable again right? In reality, it doesn't matter how many patches this game gets, it'll never be enough to truly fix it... This is a game that was sold on lies. Even if we were to forgive the bugs and glitches and poor performance, there were so many features that were cut or outright never even made. I can understand when features get cut because they would be useless or make the game cluttered, but CDPR cut off or left out things which were in many ways the main selling point of the game. Do choices matter? No; everything is linear except for the bare-bones branching which amounts to nothing or just goes back to the same outcomes anyways. Is there customization? No; the character creation is just a bunch of presets, and the clothing will make you look like a clown. Are there random events? *laughs out loud* Everything is so linear and heavily scripted that you might as well just watch a movie, you might get more enjoyment out of that too.

Much can be forgiven in this game but the gameplay which is the heart of the experience is so incredibly bland and thoughtless that it makes it hard to get through the occasionally decent quest design. The main issue with the gameplay is the quickhacking, you can litterally just sit in a corner and take down everyone in night city easily this way. The enemies have no security against this and they will never find you. Considering how well some of the deus ex games did this aspect of cyberpunk, you would think CDPR would have tried to put a little more creativity and depth into this mechanic. The only way to really describe what this gameplay feels like is that it is painfully generic and makes the world CDPR built feel incredibly dumb, clearly they either didnt focus on this crucial element to the game very much, or they intentionally wanted to make this mechanic as dumbed down as possible to appease a casual audience, which seems more likely given the corporate greed that led to this games awful release. I'm doubtful that they will fix this issue and come up with a more creative and immersive way to hack enemies. But if they did the experience would definitely be a lot better, and I would probably have a decent time getting through this game. But as of right now this world feels too stupidly designed for me to want to keep playing. Its not as if this hacking system is even fun at the cost of immersion, it is both intensely unenjoyable as well as immersion breaking to be able to sit in a corner and take down armies of enemies just by quicking hacking them. The stealth gameplay is also extremely shallow, but at least they can easily build upon this in future updates, and hopefully they take the time to think critically about whether what they add actually adds to the enjoyability and imersiveness of the game.

Too bad, this game was suppose to be the biggest game of the year, but end up with worst gameplay and glitch. NPC are just so stupid. Pedestrian, drivers also dumb