Cyberpunk 2.0 and Phantom Liberty fix a lot of the problems with Cyberpunk 2077 thus far. Even things I thought would never get fixed like the weapon levels. This is much more the game it always should have been. They got rid of a lot of the restrictions on using items and skills, which results in a game that has you engaging with its systems quite actively. It's incredible. This is my fourth playthrough of Cyberpunk and it is by far the most fun.
In all honesty, there are many things I enjoy about this game. However, it is deeply flawed. The story is excellent as is the voice acting. However, as a game, there are many things hampering my full enjoyment. I'm not saying you shouldn't buy this game. However, next year-- maybe six months from now-- No-one will be talking about this game. Firstly, the music is awful. There is no cohesion at all giving the idea this is a score. It is a collection of forgettable sounds. There is no theme or motifs to bind it all together. The radio music is awful as well. I often turn off the music out of irritation as soon as I get into a car. It all feels very similar and genre inappropriate. The action gameplay feels like an inferior version of Syndicate 2012. I quite enjoyed that game, so this is not such a bad thing. However, it is an inferior version of that game's shooting. Nothing quite feels as unsatisfying as sliding up to someone, shooting them point blank in the face with a shotgun and having them shrug it off. Combat feels non-lethal, which brings us to a third point. The source material seem underutilised. This isn't a problem per se, but why make a Cyberpunk 2020 game if you are going to ignore the themes and setting of this RPG? In a hyper-deadly world of style-versus-effectiveness, you have a looter shooter where you are constantly swapping out your gear for slightly better gear, giving the impression that earlier guns are not actually guns. There is no realism to that progression. This is not an RPG. You have little choices in this game. Most dialogue has a choice between "advance dialogue" and "gather more info" like Mass Effect. But that game atleast had renegade and paragon. If this game is an RPG, then so is the Division. Night City feels tedious and isn't laid out with any sort of rational order. Johnny Silverhand is a carricature of a person. And I hope you like warehouses. With tuning, this game could be wonderful. Presently, it is not.
I love this game with a passion. The feature list in this game is amazing, but you should know going in that while "in the game" many features simply do not work. Those that DO work, many times the AI doesn't understand how to use them. So this game appears to have much greater depth than it actually does. It's a shame, because if all of those features were actually in this game, it would be one of the greatest of all time. As such, I can't say it's a "5 star" game. If you are interested, you should buy it. If you figure out how to get the multiplayer working, this game could be phenominal. But if the concept doesn't grab you then you aren't really missing much. For such people, this will be a broken and hyper-complex boardgame. However, for the rest of us, there are some really original ideas -- and twice more stolen directly from Herbert (and that's okay.)
The majority of this game is walking on planets looking for resources, which the game often punishes you for harvesting. It is bland and uninteresting to look at, which makes the requirement to find a particular resource tedious. This would be workable if what you were doing when you weren't slowly traversing a planet was any fun. Unfortunately, the spaceship controls are nigh unplayable. The flying in the game is idiot-proofed, which means when the game thinks you might crash or do something dangerous, it takes control out of your hands. Unfortunately, piloting is an inherently dangerous activity and leveraging risk is an important part of being a combat pilot. My experience with the game was just tedious, with the music and visuals slowly sapping my will to continue. The game feels post-apocalytic. You're wandering around and it's just ... dead. Sure, you might find an occasional bit of fauna, but nothing you can meaningfully interact with. Anyone you talk to pretty much will buy any cargo you have, sell you any of their cargo or will let you buy their space ship. There are no cities, there are no factories producing these space ships, there is just empty vista after empty vista.
Siege of Dragonspear is beyond mediocre; it's plain bad. Let me address the good elements of the game: they got back almost all of the original voice actors for the companions, including having a large part for David Warner, who voiced Irenicus. David Warner actually voices a player voice set. That's the sum of the good elements of this expansion. This expansion what completely unnecessary. The expansion's level cap is one higher than BG:EE's and you lose all of your money and equipment as soon as you start BG2, so the only concievable reason you are playing this expansion is for the story. Unfortunately, the story is poorly written and delivered. It has little sense of scale, and feels as if it is trying to one-up Throne of Bhaal in order to be "epic". The story is mostly told in little "scenes" told on cut up maps from Baldur's Gate. Often you are given a map the size of a single screen, with nothing to explore and no possible way to miss the plot. The experience spoon feeds you the content because it doesn't trust you to consume it in the proper way, which is a message reinforced by its mechanics. I was playing through as a murderous blackguard and had a habit of answering insolence by making a mountain of skulls from the nearby. Except, often the game would just teleport in a guard-wizard who casts an impossibly high level spell and kills me instantly. I wasn't playing the game the way they wanted, so they decided to take it away until I did it the way they wanted. This is the spirit of Dragonspear. It is a rotten, little attempt to cash in on a legacy of more talented people than themselves. One hears often about an attempt to hammer in a SJW agenda, but that's not why this game doesn't respect BG. If a minor npc who is transgendered offends you and you were around to play the original BG in its day, then its far time to grow up. Dragonspear is a travesty to the BG tradition because it doesn't respect the spirit of those games it steals from.
