Being marketed as an RPG, and coming from TW3, I was expecting Cyberpunk 2077 to be a player-choice driven experience. It's not. At least not narratively speaking. CP2077 is a game of contrasts: great flexibility in how to build your character, but none in how to influence the story. The city looks incredible, but the desert really falls short. Some NPCs will slowly grow on you, while some others just feels rushed. The DLC "Phantom Liberty" is, hands down, the best part of this game, it fixes some problems with the base game and expand on several gameplay features. When this game excels it has no competition, which makes the few shortcomings even more bitter. Overall very good.
KCD does some stuff very well, and manages to make them fun, but then fails brutally in other fields. 1 vs 1 combat is really good, challenging and fair, but as soon as there's more than one opponent it becomes a mess and all the gameplay mechanics you've carefully learned are mostly useless. The abscence of any kind of crowd control move is just frustrating. Stealth takes in account the clothes you are wearing, and your body odour, but doesn't give you any tool to lure your enemies or distract them, and since the game is really buggy you'll end up facing NPCs stucked in a permanent walk over a campfire, or in a short animation loop that prevents them to reach a place where you can take them out silently. The game fancy itself to be an open world RPG, freedom of choices and approaches, but multiple times forces you into lenghty "on-rail" quests, that will keep you captive for hours into scenarios where you have little choices to make if any at all. Some gameplay mechanics, namely alchemy and weapon maintenance, should have been offered with an "auto-resolve" or "automated" options (not tied to perks), due to the fact that the related minigames are very time-consuming and very repetitive. The way the game handles your ability to save your progress also should have been a selectable option: unless you are nearby a bed, you can only save using a potion (of which you have a limited number of) that also makes you drunk. Being an adult with little time to spare for videogames, and real life responsibilities, I wanna be able to quit the game on a moment notice whenever I feel like, or I need to, without risking to wast hours of progress. Most of the problems can be solved installing mods, including the lack of crossair when you use a bow (wtf, who thought of this!?) or eliminating the silly, lenghty, animation when picking herbs and flowers, but nothing can solve the design problems that prevented me resolve some quests or boxed me out of some options without logic.
