Game is fun with a an interesting story. Took me back to Neuromancer at points or a very well put together a (solo player) Cyberpunk/Shadowrun P&P campaign. Playing with an RTX 3070 I had little issue playing through and enjoying this game. It was buggy at times and optimization could use some work. But overall, I'm very happy and found the game beautiful with ray tracing on. A game of this scale is an extremely difficult thing to put together and I am highly impressed by the development team's work. I played through the main story and most of the 'main' sidequests that effect the endings in about 50 hours. I imagine you could throw on another 20-40 hours on top of that if you went through and tried to complete every exclamation mark on the map. Maybe even more. A lot of the side missions and main story missions were very interesting to me and I adored simply driving around Night City and taking in the sights. Found the game to be more enjoyable than the developer's previous works because I didn't need to go about ticking off random crap on the map in order to complete the game without too much stress on hard difficulty. I did leave a lot uncompleted on the map, but polished off all the side quests that effect the main story. I think people have some really unreasonable expectations for this game. I have been waiting 8 years for this thing. Nonetheless I put any expectations aside before playing the game and had a great time. With a bit of post-launch bug-fixing and optimization, I think this will take its rightful place as a masterpiece in the eyes of the community. Even if the company abandoned this game right now I'd still give it 5 stars. Knowing CD PROJEKT RED, however, I imagine there will be a lot of bug fixing and optimization coming soon. I look forward to the coming DLC and replaying the game in a few months when they've taken the feedback offered by their community into consideration and made positive changes.
This review is based on only the first few hours in the first area of the game. I've had my eye on the title for a long time, back in its days on Steam as an Early Access title, but had refrained from buying as I did not want to spoil the experience for myself by trying the incomplete title. So, seeing that it had been released, I bought it immediately and thus far am very satisfied with the purchase. Thus far I have been enjoying it a lot and look forwards to completing it, it has a very nice art style which reminds me of the STALKER series crossed with Silent Hill with a top-down view. The story is interesting and dark so far, tense and leaving a lot to the imagination whilst giving you good direction in a rather open world. Combat is pretty simplistic but has a nice, weighty feel to it and revolves a lot around timing. The experience so far has been foreboding, especially as I am playing on the permadeath difficulty, I find myself trying very hard to avoid being caught outside when night falls, even spending a few seconds in darkness is a very uncomfortable feeling. The game does not hold your hand any more than is absolutely necessary and I think this is a good thing. It's a fairly creepy game with a foreboding atmosphere, but I've yet to have any reason to actually scream my head off, so for anyone with some experience with horror games, or nightmares, it shouldn't be too hard to handle. Choosing the permadeath (Nightmare difficulty) option certainly increases the level of fear felt throughout the experience and I would certainly recommend selecting this difficulty for those who are fans of difficult games, and I'd also recommend you play it with a controller, just because it feels nice and that's what I am doing. All in all, if you are a fan of horror games, I would highly recommend purchasing this game. I see no reason why you'd regret it, I haven't enjoyed a game this much in quite some time.
