Cyberpunk 2077

Pros: I really like the music Lots of shiney things Some great characters Cons: Inconsistent writing Juvenile tone Poor pacing Lack of basic pc control options/functionality/interface customizations Lack of depth It is old news as far as the cyberpunk genre goes The more I play it the more I realize it isn't about very much and hollower it feels Replay value nonexistant - your "choices" are mostly inconsequential and your backstory is irrelevant I've realized that if it weren't for the cyberpunk setting and what I thought I was getting terms of story and mechanics (deep choice and consequence rpg) I'd never have bought the game. All that aside, I'm having fun and hope the game gets some much needed tlc and will eventually be worth more stars.

tl\dr: CP2077 is an okay gtav-with-rpg-elements game on it's own merit. But measured against CDPR own standards? It's a flop. CDPR set the quality bar very high for themselves with both success of witcher 3 and, for the most part, all the irresponsible hype and overpromise during the last few years. And, naturally, they failed to deliver. Like, really, at some point hype gets so high that it's just plain impossible to live up to it, even if you move release date another 2 years into the future and hire half of Poland as game designers\programmers and force them all to crunch. And I was actually dumb enough to preorder it. Hope CDPR management are happy they managed to move so many copies on release. Because any paid dlc they release for this - I'm probably going to pirate it. Because I know they will never fix it, and it will never be even half of what they promised it to be. Sorry about that. P.S.: And that rushed cinematic in the beginning of the game about V and Jackie becoming chooms? You just cut all of that awesome story and character development content due to time constraints and settled for a cinematic exposition dump, right? Right?

I didn't experience many bugs, so I'm not going to talk about that. It's bad. They really, really managed to screw this up big time, like nobody could ever in their right minds expect from CDPR. If you're playing because you loved The Witcher 3, this is going to be a sour disappointment. Boy would I be glad if it were a third as good as that game. If you're playing because you're a fan of the source material, this is going to be devastating. Nightcity by day looks like a poor man's GTA. Nobody passing behind you while you're playing would ever guess it was a Cyberpunk game and the "fashion" in the game is so grotesquely messed up that you will spend 50 hours praying to find the jacket you saw in the trailer so your character will not look like a joke - but to be fair it doesn't matter anyway because you pretty much only ever see them when you're driving a motorcycle. CDPR just mercilessly killed the fashion element which was such an important part of the Cyberpunk 2020 books. Speaking of killing elements, they came up with some plot trick to kill the Net (I wish I was making this up), so they wouldn't have to be bothered to include netrunning in the game. I'm not exaggerating. Netrunning in the game is just stuff like remotely activating vending machines to distract guards and playing an encryption minigame to open randomly placed caches of money. The 1993 SNES Shadowrun did a better job at letting you play as a hacker. And how about the thrill of getting dangerous missions from fixers? Getting the job done as part of a memorable mixed-roles team? Nope. 99,9% of the game is you killing people alone and missions are "kill/steal/investigate" phonecalls you get when near a place of interest. I swear it feels impossible that the same company made the Witcher 3 sidequests which were each so original and meaningful. In all honesty, is this an RPG? This was so unexpected that it took me a while to be able to admit it, but the game is an extreme disappointment.

I played this when it came out. I am now playing through it again. The fact is, even with all the patches and all the fixes, the game is still a beta at best. Everything is missing. The city is empty. Driving is a chore. It feels like playing a demo version of something, only that you can go ahead and complete the story. The story is great, the graphics are awesome, but you can't shake the feeling that you're playing something pirated, something running on an emulator, something that you know it's going to break at the weakest push at the boundaries - perhaps permanently. It's sad, because you can feel the awesome potential the game concept has. This could have been the game of the millennia. If they only had released it like it is - a very expensive early access closed beta - the experience would have been completely different. See what happened to Baldur's Gate 3 - They released it incomplete, no lies and half truths about it, and the reviews are rampaging through the roof. TL;DR Even with patches, Cyberpunk is a gigantic, unfinished mausoleum to what it could have been.

Cyberpunk 2077 looked great and I was glad to play it on launch day. But the gameplay is plagued by bugs, some minor and some game-breaking, so I've given up playing and am waiting for the title to be patched to the point where it actually plays without problems. I pre-ordered this game because I thought CDProjektRED would make a great game, but I've learned my lesson. The game is on sale and still filled with bugs that make it too miserable to play so I'm still waiting, but I could have paid less if I had waited to buy. I've learned my lesson. I'll never buy another pre-order again and especially not from CDProjektRED.