So, Cyberpunk was initially a disappointment for me. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Baldur's Gate III, where you can genuinely create entirely different characters and follow distinct storylines. We didn't get that. We got basically a mega-budget JRPG with a canned character for us to live through. And yeah, there are a lot of foundational things that are letdowns: - The police system is AWFUL - Decisions have very little effect on the world - Reputation system is almost useless - Netrunner build was never thought out - Corpo and Street Kid stories are nothing Basically, the SYSTEMS in the game offer little world depth. BUT... the world itself is incredible. I can just wander the city for hours. If you let the experience just wash over you, it is unparalleled.
I was so, so, so disappointed by this game. The core problem is that the game's core gameplay is in conflict with itself. The trailers made it appear to be a sneaking game along the lines of Splinter Cell, or maybe Metal Gear. It presents itself as that. It WANTS to be that. But it is actually a puzzle game where the player must move to certain places at certain times, often to get seemingly random inventory items. The rails of this puzzle path are so strict that you could write a bot to play the game from beginning to end. The game felt like a 3D Dragon's Lair to me in that it is basically trial and error until you reach the end. Unless you are a masochist, you will be driven to physically rip the bits of this game out of your memory and throw those transistors out your window. It pains me to write this because I love to encourage smaller studios, especially when they swing for the fences. And when a small studio hits the hype lottery, I WANT it to work out. They are working on Hello Neighbor 2. I hope that they focus on the sneaking gameplay and make this game what it should have been, beecause it could have been amazing.
