Cyberpunk 2077

Farcry 3 meets borderlands meets the witcher 3 on launch. Insipid sidequests, horrible gameplay, performances decreasing rapidly over time until you have to restart your entire system. This is a review, not a critique. Wait a few more months before considering buying it, especially if your system isn't upper high end.

This is a review that I'd hate to write. But it had to be done. CDPR has lost their way, drunk in their own glorious past. I didn't follow the news on this game's development closely. I never did jump onto that hype train. I ran the game on a decent pc setup, and throughout my full playthrough, I didn't experience any game breaking bug at all, apart from some hilariously immersion-breaking visual glitches. So why did I rate this game as a mediocre game at best, and speak so terribly about it? [The UI and gameplay design] This game's UI needs a lot of work. There's no multi crafting / dismantling button. There's no warning or confirmation button for dismantling Iconic equipments, so if you accidentally dismantle them without looking, the whole upgrade tree is gone forever. [The AI] The enemy and police AI needs A LOT of rework. Police simply spawn out of thin air behind you, and never give chase on vehicles. You can even just sprint away to remove the bounty. Enemies will just cower in cover even when you're using a cover-piercing sniper rifle, making many combat encounters meaningless. [The Factions] You can slaughter hundreds of a particular faction's members, and it won't affect your standing with ANYONE. In fact, they're all (including their leaders) are just there as props. I solo butchered the entire top echelon of one of the factions in the main story, and they're supposed to be this all-powerful and enigmatic cabal of netrunners. They were written in just for the sake of writing. Which brings me to the next point.. [The Writing] The writing of this game is polarized. It can be quite good for the main story missions, but horrible for the side gigs. Lizzy's gig is an example of this. At the conclusion of the gig, there's no option to report her to the MaxTac officers right across the street, or kill her. You can only either help her, or not. Such lazy writing. Don't let me even start on how lazy the "lifepaths" system is. What happened to you, CDPR?

Ladies/gents/non-binary/gender fluid/whatever, this game is a total disappointment. CDPR appears to have pulled a classic page out of Peter Molyneux's playbook by making big claims about what this game will have and what you will be able to do with your V. Bold claims that turned out being totally false. There is all kinds of jank in this game. Bethesda would be proud! The footage we all saw almost 2 years ago was bullshot. The pre-rendered graphics we all saw looked stunning. Unfortunately the game doesn't even come close to looking like that. Not even on my very high-end rig. The game runs at a decent 55 to 75 FPS and then dips down into the teens after laying waste to a room full of stupid AI enemies. As I've progressed further into the game, the glitches and immersion breaking issues become more prevelant. It's not uncommon to see people driving around in invisible cars. My own car has blown up for no apparant reason a few times. The audio cuts out at random. Most of the original soundtrack is pretty lame and forgettable. The gameplay is nothing special, unique, or mindblowingly awesome. It's generic and feels like a few games we've all played in the past. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought this was a cyberpunk mod for Fallout: New Vegas. None of the characters are memorable. V is an edgelord whose origins make zero difference since you will always end up in the same starting location after the prologue. Dialogue options won't adversely affect the outcome. It's nowhere near engaging as the options in KOTOR, Mass Effect 1 and 2, or the entire Witcher series. There's no real reason to become emotionally attached to any particular person. All of the vehicles handle like a forklift on ice. KB+mouse or Xbone pad have issues. Buttons sometimes don't respond. I crouch when I want to dodge, double tapping to dodge is beyond stupid, crouch works only half the time, some keybindings cannot be changed. There are way better older games. Play those ones.

NOTE: This review is from the perspective of someone looking for a good role-playing experience, keep this in mind while reading. tl:dr the game fails to deliver as an RPG 1: The main quest is on rails with very little interactivity, i hope you like cutscenes, grab some popcorn. 2: The world is huge but empty. There is no meaningful difference between areas. The only real difference is visual, and how tough the enemies are. Even Skyrim has distinct cities that have unique questlines with the different guilds. There's tons of radiant quests, and very few hand crafted side quests. And even these are often the bottom of the barrel. (The monk quest is just kill enemies, get berated by an ungrateful guy then you're done). Barring the main quest, play the game for 4 hours doing side missions and you've seen all the game has to offer. 3: No (narrative) character customization. The life paths are a perfect microcosm of the lack of player autonomy. Everyone is a street kid. Your background means absolute squat in terms of the story, barring a few dialogue options which are just flavor text themselves. This theme applies to the rest of the game. There isn't "your V." There is "the V" and you better like the box CDPR carved out for you. 4: It has a looter shooter system, but is just worse than Borderlands in the execution. You will *never* have to grind to get passed a section, just equip the stuff with the highest numbers and you'll always do just fine so long as you don't go into zones labeled very high risk. I grew up on the original Diablo so I love loot driven "RPGs" and this fails at it spectacularly. There simply is no incentive for the loot. To cap it off I'll just compare it to The Outer Worlds. The Outer Worlds is an extremely flawed game that I could spend hours criticizing and yet the game consistently delivers as an RPG in key areas where Cyberpunk fails. Player Autonomy Interesting NPCs World Interactivity RPG stat mechanics (stats, skills, etc) Dialogue

When this game was announced, GTA V hadn't been released yet. They made ambitious goals and gave us all hope for the future. Shortly after, GTA V released and changed the definition of what an open world could be. Since then several games have come out and the boundaries have been pushed further. RDR2 is the gold standard as of today. It is unfortunate that Cyberpunk 2077 is of worse quality and has fewer capabilities than GTA V from 2013. Nothing new or groundbreaking is in this game. Watch Dogs gave us hacking and RDR2 is currently leading the way in physics, wanted systems, NPC interactions and so much more. It really seems as though this was a failed project which had a good concept that marketing didn't want to let die. At the end of the day, this game was marketed as an open world RPG set in a dystopian world. What was delivered was a low quality, buggy game which has just enough features to be somewhat considered open world and didn't even have enough role playing to keep the RPG designation. I haven't been this disappointed since I read "World War Z" by Max Brooks and then watched the movie with Brad Pitt. My only hope is that over the next few years is that CDPR makes this right and keeps rolling out updates.