Cyberpunk 2077

Reviewed on an RTX 3080 + Ryzen 5 3600, builds 1.06 and 1.10 Playtime was about 36 hours. THE GOOD: - Graphics often look really great, especially with RTX on. - Guns sound powerful and are fun to use, making the generic combat pretty enjoyable most of the time - Some very sweet story moments with likeable characters such as Panam, Jackie, Goro, River and Johnny. - Driving from Point A to B in Night City is always visually striking, even if the world itself is incredibly hollow. - Interesting lore, even if the script does an awful job at teaching it to you. - Some creative side missions that successfully flesh out the main cast. - The last few hours of the game, and all of its different endings, are a blast. - Good soundtrack that always puts you in the right mood for the game's story beats. Most of it is pretty forgettable, but it gets the job done. THE BAD: - Pointless character leveling. Your skill tree basically consists of stat multipliers and percentage bonuses. - Main plot is fairly straightforward and boring. - A lot of the story feels messy and badly told. Large chunks are obviously missing. - Awful handling for cars. - Loot scavenging is tedious and tacked on, just like the crafting. THE UGLY: - The majority of side characters are horribly bland and interchangeable. - Brain-dead quest design. Follow waypoint, talk to character, scan something, shoot people, talk to character, collect XP. A mindless gameplay loop, no matter how much you dress it up. - Bugs, bugs, bugs and more bugs. The more I played, the worse it got. - None of your dialogue choices particularly matter, and often V says the exact opposite of what most players would want him/her to. - The unbelievable scam CDPR pulled on console players - The hollow, taped-together feeling of the open world. - Copy-pasted quests are dumped in your lap via CONSTANT phone-calls. - Police that spawn out of thin air when you commit a crime. - Can't change your appearance beyond clothes, at all.

In its best moments Cyberpunk 2077 is the best Game i played in a long time. Story, setting, characters, gameplay, designs, it looks great and runs mostly smoothly on my ageing pc.... i could go on for hours on end praising this games strengths. But these strengths often don't get to shine and convince, because the game isn't finished. Some mechanics like the loot system, stealth or power weapons seem unfinished in contrast to the great attention to details in... let's say the extremely well written mix of story, world and characters. Others are apparently missing, like a transmog system. But despite this, i could still have one of my greatest gaming experiences, if it wheren't for those bugs that interrupt every session, forcing me to reload and replay many quests multiple times. Stuff like that really sucks the fun out of this raw diamont, because i can see the shiny gem Cyberpunk 2077 could be, if CDR finished its developement. Really eager to play it once thats done.

After the Cyperpunk 2077 hype of the last years, it was to expect that virtually no game could match all the wishes and expectations of the players around the globe. But somehow I get the feeling that CDPR was influenced by the hype, let me tell you why: First and foremost - the actual campaign itself is amazing up to the point where I currently played it. The atmosphere, the voice-acting, its really really good. BUT then came the open world and oh my gosh ... The city simply feels empty, all the NPCs have ridiculous routines, always banter the same stuff over and over and over again. The street crimes feel as if they have no impact whatsoever. You killed various gangleaders, freaks and whole groups of baddies? Well, good for you and your headcanon ... it changes nothing The cars handle like total sh** as well, so even taking a ride through the city does not mean fun at all. Then there is the RPG-ish-system with clearly OP-perks and those noone in their right mind would ever use. The gunplay is mediocre, melee fights are repetetive as hell ... I do get the feeling that CP2077 was supposed to be everything. Great storyteller, awesome rpg, open-world master, GTA 2.0 etc etc etc and it failed to deliver in so many of these departments. It really hurts to say this, but I actually prefer Deus Ex right now. CP2077 should have been focused on its core element, the story. With a smaller world, more dense and lasting decisions, it could have been one of the greatest games of the years to come. Right now it is a beta version of Witcher 3 with neon lights :/ Oh yeah and the glitches and bugs are horrible ... In nearly every cutscene at least one item like a coffee mug just floated midair, while its owner was already on its way. Cars crashed outta nowhere and the AI is simply stupid. The love for the music, the art style and the core story are the main reasons its still played by me 3/5

As other reviews already state, i'll skip all the bugs and performance issues. At this point you've seen a lot of those and they will (I hope) get patched eventually. I was mainly hyped to this game as it is probably one of the first open world games based on the cyberpunk genre (Blade Runner, Altered Carbon, Deus Ex, Shadowrun,... to name a few). The game looks AMAZING, I love exploring this city and the NPCs around with implants but that's all, that's all I like about the game, add probably music in, some songs are pretty good. Now, what I don't like of the game... You can get broken pretty easily, I started out going melee and was a bit hard but later on you can annihilate everything, even without rifle perks, you can pretty much pick up one of the sniper rifles and shoot your way throught walls and kill bosses who are not even in your same floor. The game needs balance changes to skills, weapons and even AI, because they won't even bother to move where you are most of the times. AI needs a rework, NPCs just spawn or despawn on your back in the city, most enemies trip over their dead comrades or can't even reach you. Hand to hand combat, there's a fist fight quest so I expected hand to hand combat to be pretty good, but nope, enemies punch REALLY hard and they're hard to get down, also dodging feels really bad when the enemy just pushes their combo on you regardless if you dodged his first attack, so your only option is to abuse the heavy attack to stagger the opponent. Police system, there's no police, really, you kill civilians or even the police that's around the city and they just start spawning around, even behind you. Losing them is even as easy as picking a car and just driving away from them, they won't chase you. Lacks player customization options, I want implants to be more relevant on how you look and what you see (eye implants), as well as clothes. Lacks adult content, cmon it's cyberpunk genre, sex and how you look is what really matters.

The game is is not just filled with bugs and performance issues but its just not good overall in terms of design and gameplay and even story.