Cyberpunk 2077

Let get the bugs out of the way first. I've played roughly 40 hours, mostly on Stadia but some on GoG on my laptop as well. I've noticed a few graphical glitches like a person holding a phone in her hand but the phone moves 2 feet away from the hand when the hand moves. The car handling isn't great, but I've noticed some cars are easier to drive than others. Once or twice I've had to reload a save to get around weapons not reloading or doors that won't open (I think they fixed the former in the latest patch). I have full confidence they will fix most or all of these issues over time, just like ever other game does. As any old time gamer will tell you, save frequently and often in multiple slots because that is often the best way around some of these early bugs. None of this detracts from the beauty and immensity of this game. Now that's out of the way. The setting is awesome, the music is fantastic, and the quests are fun. The story so far is interesting and the side quests are also interesting and fun. The city is a huge diverse playground with tons of neat little things to see and do. It is alive and vibrant and colorful. I find myself drawn to this game over and over again and am excited to see what DLC comes out for it once I finish all the tons of things to do in this place.

I got the game on launch day and I loved it. Many bad reviews in this terrible outrage culture online. my advice is play it for yourself and make your own mind up. I play it on PC with fairly high end hardware and it is fantastic. I think the main problem people where having was in part, the game being ahead of its time and rather demanding on graphics cards or old consoles. If it ran beautifully on last gen consoles, the hate would have been about how dated or low end it was. I love it, its different, beautiful to look at and a triumph in my opinion. When the hardware catches up this will be viewed as a master piece.

Far Cry-style open world FPS, a buddy movie plot, inventory management intensive looter-shooter mechanics, some nice scripted quests with good quality NPCs. Total playtime was net 57 hours. LIKED * no bigger bugs (with 1.5) * the writing, especially main NPCs, is very good, CDPR has the best crew in the industry currently * voiceover is superb * quests are enjoyable to play * weapons are fun to use, there is a meaningful difference between guns, melee and hacking * clothing, car and weapon designs are very good * the city looks very good in general * even shorter side quests support sneaky and combat approaches (no dialog solutions though) * NPCs act very lively, this is truly step up from anything I have ever seen (small things like smoking or handshake) DIDN'T LIKE * the main story is shockingly short and linear (10-15 hours) * the game has very few dialog scenes. Actual conversations are limited to quests, you cannot even ask questions to the fixers when doing gigs * the player agency is minimal. There are not many meaningful, important choices in the game (less than ten!). This is a great letdown from CDPR! * looter-shooter mechanics (level scaled enemies and level scaled loot) add inventory management tedium, and ruins sense of progression * there are not many developed NPCs with enough screen time (4-5?) * the recognizable locations in the city are done well, but between them there is a grey goo generic city, where it is easy to get lost. A quest hub design would have worked better than open world * the enemy variety is lacking, there are only six types (melee, hacker, shooter, robot, drone). It is possible to offer better enemy variety with human only opposition (ie. Wolfenstein TNO) In general I had a good time with this game, but the lack of player agency, few meaningful decisions and few conversations with NPCs is a very bad surprise from CDPR, especially considering that these were their forte until now.

It's everything I expected. After the various delays and how obvious it was that the execs were pushing for things behind the scenes. Expecially a faster release. The bugs were to be expected. This did not take away from my experience at all. I've played many, many early access titles as a PC gamer. I'm not saying CP2077 felt like a early access title, I'm saying I'm dissapointed so many of my fellow PC enthusiasts couldn't handle a few bugs, some major. The vast majority of reviews I've read also bring up the keybindings. Which is baffling to me. People seemed to forget that most every game doesn't allow to rebind every key. This game is everything I could ever ask for as a fan of the original tabletop. I wish the death sytem from the TTRPG was included but that would be very very hard. Mostly cause people would cry it's to easy to die. And furthermore as a hardcore fan of RPGs this game does many things well others barely come close to executing. The Outer Worlds has a bare minimum perk tree and a small world(s), Skyrim I have to mod it till it barely runs just to enjoy the bland world, and countless others but those are the "top dogs" right now so I thought I'd point them out. I feel like I'm in Night City when I play CP2077, the combat is insanly fun and most the time now I just cruise listening to Mike on Morro Rock Radio because the world is beautiful, large, and even after 300 hrs I'm still finding new spots to explore. Night City is the best virtual city ever crafted. Traveling down each alley, every backroad or dark street is believable and feels like the world was here long before you decided to press play and keeps living after you stop playing. It feels like a real place. After seeing all the petiness and individuals regurgitating critics (which critics do not have consumers in thier best intrest they only want views to get paid) I had to say: Be an individual. Experience for yourself. Come to your own conclusions it's better for you.

Like so many others, I was very excited for this game as an RPG fan with the promise of the deep roleplaying systems and dynamic world. Did Cyberpunk fully deliver on that? Not entirely. But it's still an incredible experience for what it is. THE BAD: As an RPG, it works well enough but it's nothing special. Yeah, there's skill trees and different things you can spec points into like intelligence, strength, etc. but ultimately they're pointless. In conversation, I never found that having the "cool" dialogue option (the attribute that I focused on) changed the outcome much. As for gameplay, I very rarely saw any situation where I couldn't get into some place in multiple ways so it was never important to have the "right" skill (such as having enough intelligence to hack a door). Quest choices also didn't seem to matter for the most part. There's some major choices in the main story in some points but most of the moment-to-moment dialogue affects nothing and many of the side quests (which are mostly generic open world ones) always play out in the same repetitive way. THE GOOD: Design wise, the game is seriously one of the best ever. The lighting and verticality of Night City is often jaw dropping, even at the end of my ~60 hour playthrough it continued to wow me. The story is very well written and unique. Almost to the point where I could see it working as a linear game. If it was marketed differently, this easily could've had the acclaim of Witcher 3.