Cyberpunk 2077

Still needs a lot of work.

Technical and visual glitches aside, this game has the most gorgeously rendered and designed cyberpunk city I've ever seen... filled with with some of the shallowest gameplay ever. It's like someone built an opera house for a recorder recital. This is the shortest open world game I've ever played. Completed all side missions and main story (excluding the laughable buy-my-car "missions") in under 100 hours, and there is literally nothing left to do. The main story is about as deep as the first 4 chapters of a 3-book novel trilogy. The NPCs behave just like the mindless villagers of Witcher 3. Which works in a tiny, rural village full of simple, superstitious folk terrified of their own shadows but weird when a whole city street runs away from you because you bumped into someone while running. The traffic is also notoriously dumb, with cars just stuck in place if blocked with no attempt to leave. Completely immersion breaking. Gameplay wise the skill tree and levelling is highly unsatisfactory and unrewarding. Half the time I was holding on to points until I reached a benchmark to spend them on the skill I wanted to because the other available skills were just useless. Honestly, everything just feels pretty unbalanced. Melee combat is just so overpowered I killed bosses with several hits by stacking crit damage mods on melee weapons plus the guaranteed crit skills. When a katana strike does 5 digits of damage per swing consistently, you don't bother pulling out anything else. The game was fun as a theme park ride cruising through Night City as a badass cyborg if that's what you're after, but as an RPG or action shooter it's just barely okay.

been playing well so far with patch 1.20, but since I updated to patch 1.21, the game is riddled with bugs and glitches, that I didn't have when playing on 1.20. this is the aspect of the game currently for this patch. OVERALL: - The game was quite underwhelming. So many cut corners, so many lost features, so many broken promises. The city is damn empty with braindead NPCs dead set on only moving around the city. Where's that handcrafted AI? Where's that city packed to the brim with things to do and explore? Night city ain't it, chief. The whole town literally has signs and ads for sex, yet there are only 2 hookers for you to bang. enemies are really unbalanced. either you can one shot them, or they're bullet sponge. there are literally no in between. And for god sakes, remove the player shadow! feels like it's more unimmersive without player shadow than having a clunky mess flailing around.

There is no meaningful open world, no interesting game mechanics, decisions and player actions barely ever matter, bugs and glitches are still omnipresent and the graphics, while beautiful at times, regularly fail to convince due to stuff popping in and out of existence, strange lighting, low-res textures, … I really hope the management at CDPR gives the devs another 5 years or so to make the game they originally envisioned.

I have a really complicated relationship with this game. Pros: - The graphics are absolutely insane. - The story is very engaging from about hour 2 to hour 7. - The animations are very detailed and (in theory) provide immersion to the player in an almost unprecedented way. - The radio is full of some of the best music I've heard in a video game, ranging from Cyberpunk-themed black metal to groovy soundcloud rap. - Jackie and Takemura Cons: - The story feels extremely disjointed and an amalgamation of several narratives that the game doesn't really give you any reason to have personal attachment to - The immersion is broken with extremely janky animations and bugs. - The game is optimized like hot garbage. - Night City is more or less empty. - Your choices don't really matter since you're always railroaded through to the same result, so you just pass through the game with no regard for consequences. - V has one personality with slight variations depending on player choice, leading to a jarring disconnect between how the player wants to approach a conversation and how V approaches the same conversation. - The combat is moderately fun but you can mindlessly shoot your way through every encounter with whatever gun you want. There's player choice with no challenge to contextualize said player choice. Overall I'd say it's a game that's not really worth it, I plan to finish it but it feels like an absolute chore to play because it's hard to get involved in something that doesn't demand your attention and involvement.