Cyberpunk 2077

If you pay full price for this game you will probably feel tricked since it's not a AAA experience. But if you picked it up on sale you will find a fun sanbox game with a cool city and some unique mechanics. The game doesn't have any staying power but if you run the nomad lifepath and nomad ending you will find a satisfactory fun story in a city just deep enough to keep you entertained for the duration of the story,

Story and characters: I actually loved the majority of the story and character work. 90% of the main plot is fantastic, has great setpieces, bombastic soundtracks, meaningful deaths and more choice and consequence than there initially seemed to be. The side characters are much richer than I thought; for example, I initially ignored one character's quests thinking they were some obligatory shallow racing thing. I had no idea that they built on her character and provided a moral choice at the end. The game stops to provide quiet character moments that take the game beyond flash and style. The female romances are deep, involved and could rival the best Bioware characters. Negatives; the male romance options have so much less development than the females it's honestly shocking, given that we were told to expect equality of content pre-release. It's about a quarter of the content the girls get, neither are in the main quest and the m/m option is met literally right before the final quest and only if you make certain story decisions. Why even bother? Both males feel like an afterthought. I also wish there more RP opportunities to have agency over who my V is/what motivates him in dialogue. Both these issues need work for future content. Other thoughts will be shorter because the story and characters are mainly what I care about but; gameplay was still fun for me after 100 hours, which, for me, is the only metric of whether it's good or not. I did have to police myself with quickhacking, though, and felt REALLY overpowered with a crit headshot build REALLY quickly. It's quickly trivial, but remains fun. The feel of the car became fun as I got a feel for it. Character animations are meticulous and most importantly, are used in unique ways to build character for the NPCs. The soundtrack gave me chills. Voice acting was top-notch (except for Grimes's cameo). Playing on PC I didn't have a single crash and only encountered minor bugs which were usually fixed by a reload.

I agree with many criticisms of this game, but fact is that I've nevertheless enjoyed the 40+ hours I've spent in Night City. My hope is that there will be free expansions and patches, and maybe even some kind of multiplayer mode in the future. The world is beautiful, although it lacks the immersivevess of Skyrim for example. The voice-acting is great, there are lots of fun side-missions, but the main problem is that Cyberpunk 2077 was massively overhyped from the getgo and didn't live up to expectations. Hopefully CD Projekt Red have learned from their mistakes and will do better if they decide to make a sequel (which I hope they will)

Let's start with the good stuff: - 3D guys did an amazing job. everything you can see looks amazing. - World is somewhat a fusion of Miami, Tokyo and the state of Arizona. Looks great in my opinion. Matter of taste I suppose. - Cars are probably the best 3D thing about this game. They look amazing, sound great. Doesn't handle that well though. - Gunfights, when you get used to them, feel great. - Nice character/inventory upgrade progression. The bad: - Gameplay mechanics are not finished (Let's wait for the re-release that's coming in next few months). - NPC AI is not finished (maybe it's coming with the re-release? Who knows...) - Story. It's bad. If you have played Mafia 2 you will notice that the two main character interaction and chemistry is a pretty bad copy of that. Even the main characters voice is heavily similar and in this environment it really doesn't come off as believable. In other words the whole interaction feels fake and unnatural. All dialogues feel unnatural. People don't talk or interact that way. So yea, to sum it up, my beaf is with the story mostly. You could probably bear the gameplay mechanics and npc's and visual glitches, but when the story is not done right it's a pain to sit through. Dialogues are painfully boring and pointless. It feels like cd projekt red didn't hire a professional storyteller and if that is the case it shows. Even if the story is made up in a mind of CEO or whatnot you have to have a pro storyteller to pull it off and it can't be an ego trip. I don't expect the story to be changed in upcoming re-release (as they call it), but if the visual part and mechanics is fixed it could be at least a fun adventure to go through. I am giving it a four stars just because the 3D guys. One last note...I heard that cd projekt red is about to name re-release something to the effect of "Samurai". Please don't. Main character sounds like a grad student. This will not come off anywhere near as samurai'ish...

I purchased after patch 1.31 was out so my experience wasn't as buggy as others; I also purchased when it was 50% off which was a fairer price for what was delivered. I had a lot of fun playing it. It looks good and has a great atmosphere but it's not enough to disguise the string & bailing wire holding it all together. Hopefully CDPR doesn't abandon it; there's plenty of stories left in Night City. I won't repeat the laundry list of bugs; others have done a more thorough job of it. My biggest gripe is that the crouch button skips dialog and you will miss a lot as who wants to have a conversation while crouching!? That's a basic QoL thing that should have come out of testing. Otherwise, it ran as well as any Bethesda product; I'll leave that to you to decide if that's good or bad! ;) My setup is a reasonably beefy Linux PC running wine-tkg 6.23 with vkd3d-proton 2.5.