Despite the rocky launch, CDPR has taken a good game that underdelivered on its promises, and turned it into one of the greatest games in the history of gaming. With over 30 years of hardcore gaming, and thousands of games under my belt, it's hard to come up with any game that can truly stand up to this masterpiece. It is without a doubt the most visually impressive game you'll ever play as long as you have the hardware to support it. And it will absolutely eat up everything you can throw at it. The gameplay is best described as Open World Deus Ex mixed with some GTA. Because that is pretty much exactly what it is. A dystopian world run by corporations, where technology has ran amok. Mixed with corporations are a veritable army of gangs and fixers, all carving out a little piece of the city for themselves. The main quest for survival with Keanu Reeves in your head, takes you through all of it, The city opens up fully after the prologue, and again further with the DLC after about the halfway point. We're talking about ~75 square kilometers of fully explorable and interactable, mostly urban landscape. Filled with a hundred quests you can solve in a myriad of different ways, from blasting your way through, to hacking, to stealthily sneaking. All the while Keanu whispers in your head. Many of the quests feature characters that are linked into the larger story or the city itself. It's not uncommon to do minor quests and find notes or meet characters you're already familiar with from previous quests. In some cases, they will even alter future quests and characters. Aside from actual quests, the entire city is your playground. Your sandbox. Like in GTA, you can choose to wreak havoc on the city itself. Kill civilians, gangs, steal their vehicles, run from the police or fight them off. Though expect to be defeated eventually. The bugs are effectively nonexistent at this point, and the performance amazing. In 2024, Cyberpunk 2077 is an amazing game.
Played some 30 hours on Steam but I just felt the need to write this review because I can't believe how highly rated this game is. It just makes no sense. Technically it's fine. No issues. So I guess it all works as intended. But I've been gaming for 25 years and I can't recall any game as boring as this. You spend the entire game doing the exact same repetitive tasks of setting up an automated system that then runs itself. After which you pick your poison on your second monitor - whether it's watching Twitch streams or jacking off - because the game just plays itself. I don't understand who thought it was a good idea to make a game about automation which by definition means you don't have to do anything once it's set up. There's no game to play here unless you want to manually gather and craft everything which takes a million years. So you set up automation to do everything but then you've got nothing to do yourself. There's no challenge in the game. No complexity. The factory mechanics are extremely simplistic and easy to figure out. It's just busywork to set up the buildings and conveyor belts to gather and process everything. You can't fail at it. You're not on any real timer or pressure. The enemies are a joke, the one turret you put down at the start of the game will keep you safe for 10 hours. If you want a game with a city manager with actual shit happening - just get Rimworld. If you want engineering complexity and a serious challenge - try Oxygen Not Included. This game is just sandbox engineering minecraft. A kids game.
One of the best games in this genre to come out in recent years. A tactical, real-time map, turn based party combat RPG. You lead a squad of mercenaries in a randomly generated map, filled with different factions, villages, towns, cities - separated by vast areas of wilderness but also connected by roads. How you make your living and how you survive this harsh land is up to you. You can choose to focus on trading by buying and selling different resources available in different towns, or you could choose to take on mercenary contracts. Or you could simply pick a direction and explore the wilderness, discover what's out there. Regardless of what you'd prefer to do, you can't get around doing battle with various enemies on the map. Be they monsters roaming the wilderness, bandits lying in wait of traders and innocent travellers, or even warring noble houses or an Orc or Undead invasion. To deal with the threat of combat you can recruit various soldiers into your army. From inexperienced but burly peasants, to retired veteran soldiers who can barely move and who's bones break from every injury, but who can thread a blade through any defense. You equip your soldiers with different armor, weapon and utility items to boost their effectiveness. Your warriors will also gain experience which gives you stat points and talents which all you to improve them in a way to best suit their individual abilities and your party composition. A lot of people complain about the RNG in the game, and while it does exist (attacks and defenses roll a dice within the ranges of the unit/weapon stats), I would like to say that there's no such thing as "bad luck", only lack of preparation. Yes your troops can get one shot under certain conditions. But as the leader it's your job to make sure they're never in that position. You can get ambushed on the road, you can get impossible contracts. But again, you're the leader. Prepare for ambushes, avoid impossible contracts. It's all about you.
This is not a PC game. This is a console game. Selling this on PC is a travesty. It screams to be played on a big ass TV with you sitting 5m away, high on weed, because a 480p UI that looks like it was made in 2005 with a barely functioning mouse icon is not PC friendly. I could tolerate the game for exactly 5 minutes before uninstalling. Terrible low quality game menu, instantly dropped into a tutorial area with zero information, no cinematics no introduction. And your first order of business is to whack some crates with a sword like it's Zelda from 1995 or something. Please keep this nonsense away from my PC. This game is for mindless console players who only know how to mash buttons without any regard of anything else.
CRPG's have been my life for decades. From Infinity Engine games like Baldurs Gate, Torment and the like, moving to Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age games, all the way to modern CRPG's such as Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny. I've played them all to death. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is like a breath of fresh air, scented with nostalgia. It plays in so many ways like the CRPG's of old, yet brings so much new to the table as well. Here's the key features of the game that tick all the boxes for me: * Great Story * Great Characters * Great Music * Great Gameplay * Innovative travel and kingdom management * INSANE replay value You play with a party of 6 adventurers in the modified 3.5 DnD ruleset, very similar to the old Infinity games and NWN series. DnD rules aside, it looks very much like the newer PoE games and the like. Beautiful graphics with an isometric camera angle. The biggest difference however, is the advanced overhead map travel and resting system, as well as kingdom management. Traveling on a big map, running into random encounters and discovering points of interest isn't new to CRPG's (most recently Pillars of Eternity 2 offers a very similar thing), however what sets Kingmaker's travel system apart is its high number of locations and the detailed encumbering and resting system. Traveling takes a lot of time and you need rations to feed your party when resting. You can hunt for them, but that takes even more time. Or you can buy rations, but they weigh a lot and slow your travel time, requiring you to rest more often. Careful balance is needed. Resting can involve many activities from cooking to guard duty, hunting, fighting and more. Kingdom management is almost a whole other game in itself. A mix of 4x city building and random event management. If you loved NWN2's or PoE's stronghold mechanics, you'll be blown away by this Kingdom Sim. The game has some bugs as of writing this review, but devs are releasing patches almost daily to fix them.
