Great but held together by duct tape
I played for 60+ hours, experienced all the different endings, and completed most of the side quests. Here's the good, the bad and the ugly for Cyberpunk 2077 (1.06.):
The Good:
- The writing is great, the characters are memorable, the emotional attachment for the main story is definitely there
- Mature themes - definitely 18+ (very rare for mainstream games)
- Night city and the world itself is fantastic
- Many side quests (that are not gigs) are also great, some of them having multiple outcomes
- The visuals (when they are not bugged out, and if you have a medium/high-tier PC) are amazing
- Most of the music is excellent
The Bad:
- An illusion of choice. Your lifepaths, your looks or whether you choose to be combat- or stealth-focused simply don't matter at all. Yes, if you complete some optional story arcs, you can influence the ending of the game but that's pretty much it.
- The open world elements are shallow. Nothing to do besides the quests. They even have lots of arcade machines and you cannot interact with them! Pedestrian and police AI is almost non-existent.
- Same thing with the romances. Once you finish a side quest with a romance option, that's pretty much it apart from 1-2 extra dialogues.
- Some of the storylines feels rushed. In one side-quest, you stumble upon a huge conspiracy...and it just ends there.
The Ugly:
- Contrary to the promotional material, this is an action-adventure immersive sim and NOT an RPG, not even a fully realized GTA-like game. This is a huge fault of the marketing department.
- Many immersion-breaking bugs, barely functional collision detection
- "Runs surprising well on current-gen consoles" and "we leave greed to others" certainly didn't age well. Considering what Cyberpunk is mostly about, the irony is astounding. All goodwill from Witcher 3 is simply lost.
So yeah, apart from the bugs, I enjoyed the game for what it was and felt really immersed in its world...which is obviously held together by duct tape.
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