Cyberpunk 2077

They took a five star, one of the best ever, games and added level scaling. For skill checks. Fix this Oblivion-style nonsense and my review goes from one star to five stars. This is level scaling: you are 17 years old. You get a job in a warehouse. You can lift a 25kg bag of cement. Five years later, you worked hard, you can use the computer systems without thinking, you have your forklift certificates, you are running the late shift. You can no longer lift the bag of cement because the warehouse levelled up with you.

So we get a dead, lifeless soulless world, no radio in the car, unusable mouse and keyboard, graphic glitches galore, calling your car in and having it land on another car and then be unusable. Mushy movement, bullet sponge enemies, missing features galore. If this game had taken one year and cost 35 million maybe I could understand this but it took 7 years and 130 million USD as I understand... I do not know what can be said except the management there is at fault to their eyeballs.

This game disappoints on so many fronts it's difficult to list them all: 1. Keyboard and mouse are an afterthought, the game was designed for controllers. Unacceptable for an FPP PC game. Driving cars is almost impossible. 2. A lot of elements feel like placeholders. When you commit a crime police spawns right behind your back (hint: stand against the wall). NPCs cannot be interacted with in any meaningful way and just wander around aimlessly. The game world is very wide but also very shallow. 3. Bullet-sponge enemies that survive three point-blank headshots with a shotgun. 4. Useless hacking + stealth is not really an option. 5. No real dialogue choices + useless skills. This really doesn't feel like an RPG. 6. And of course bugs and glitches. The plot is good, all the first-person cutscenes that we saw during the promotions are awesome. The game leads you on rails through the plot and as long as you stick to those rails it's an OK experience. Once you try to get off the rails and explore the open world it all breaks down and you realise how shallow and uninteresting the whole world is. It feels like tha authors wanted to do an open world RPG but then stopped halfway.

I suggest anyone ... wait for another 1/2 year and than "maybe" give this game a new try. Since December the 10th I feel like beta testing this Game. I'm having more frustration with several bugs (small and big ones) than good moments in this game. I never had so many frustrating moments again, and again and again with any other game before. Even Patch 1.1 and 1.1.1 did not seem to change anything on the bugs that I have.

Without going into a long rant about Cyberpunk and what it could have been, I'll just focus on what it actually came out to be. It is a very average game with ok story (nothing of epic / emotional Witcher level), standard shooting mechanics, nice looking but dead empty open world, short main quest line and little else to do. Bugs are far worse than Witcher at launch although not game breaking for most part, if you have decent hardware. Not sure about state of game now as I finished the game on the original version of 1.03. No desire to replay the game a second time as the game plot has close to zero variability - so once you played it once, you have seen 90% of what there is to see story wise. Don't see how this game can ever become epic - don't think it can. Just one of those things. Hope CDPR can learn from this and amend their ways. Going further in CP2077 direction will mean the end of this studio's potential for me - and I truly rate Witcher series as some of the best RPG storytelling, with Witcher 3 being an absolute star. Should you buy this? I think not unless it is on 50-80% sale and going in with a biiiig pinch of salt, but it's up to you.