Enemies are bullet sponges, even on "Normal". The game's too dark generally, with light not diffusing normally in most circumstances. Enemies have no inertia, turing on a dime in all circumstances. There is no leaning or iron sights or cover usage, so you're vulnerable to shockingly-accurate bullets all the time. Enemies don't react when you take a hostage, they don't exhibit self-preservation behavior, they have infinite ammo and only reload when behind cover, not when magazines should be empty. Some enemies have infinite grenades. Enemies spawn behind you and around corners you've already cleared and if you're using Bullet Time you'll see it happen. Difficulty only seems to make enemies hit harder and you deal less damage to already spongy enemies, which is just bad. All this would have been marginally acceptable in the 2000s when the tech was harder to manage, but it is definitely not acceptable now.
Don't buy it, go sailing instead.
Attacking in mid air stops all momentum. You can only save at an autosave point once (?!). Save points don't heal you. Jumping goes to full height every time regardless of button press duration. Inconvenience is not difficulty, it's just bad design.
CDPR is just as bad as Activision, or EA. They abuse their developers with crunch, spend your money elsewhere.
From a company that has something like Fallout New Vegas on their list of accolades you'd think things would be better. Combat is a clunky and unbalanced disaster. Enemies have 100% accuracy at any distance and they all rush your position without tactics or self-preservation in mind. Your companion AI is equally bad, ignoring any distancing setting except the longest and getting themselves killed by rushing your target instead of exercising caution and using ranged weapons. The world is _ugly_. The style is reminiscent of Borderlands but with saturation turned way too high and with poor lighting. Texture pop is abysmal on modern hardware, and the draw distance blurs far-away things even when the camera is facing them. Nothing says futuristic than only ever having short hair, right? There's also lense flare, which there should never be unless I'm looking through, you know, a lens. My eyes are not a glass lens, stop doing this awful garbage. There's probably a good and ironic message about the bleak corporate future the world is heading do but it's totally overshadowed by absolutely everything else.
The arrogant publisher forces you to watch the minute-or-so long intro video every time the game starts up. The antiquated, frustrating checkpoint system leaves you in terrible situations, often facing overwhelming odds and may even get you stuck dying immediately after loading, losing your hard-won progress in the hardest difficulty. Skip this trash. The story isn't worth it for the infuriating, insutling junk you're forced to sit through everywhere. It's not fun, it's not "difficult", it's just pointless player-hating nonsense.
I'm tired of game companies selling incomplete games, so when they're finally completed and at a good price I'll buy them. Achievements don't work, though, so maybe skip it.
Just like everything else "hyped" these days, Cyberpunk was oversold, under delivered, and CDPR abuses their lowest-level employees. All in the name of money. Stop buying their games, they lied about the product and they lied about their treatment of their people. Game industry abuse can't continue.
Slow, plodding, unrewarding combat with timing mechanics that are as outdated as they are frustrating to read. Some combat skills are entirely negated by missing the timing window, adding insult to injury in an already difficult-to-enjoy situation. I'm hours in and I haven't upgraded gear in a meaningful way from any vendor or dungeon chest, so every battle feels like a losing struggle where enemies are poorly-balanced with larger parties and full-power multi-target attacks and you're _still_ stuck dealing 3 to 5 per single-target attack. Bosses are wars of attrition against mean meanies who are mean because they're mean. Skill descriptions don't say anything that help you learn what they actually do, leaving you to experiment in combat, but you don't want to because one poorly planned move means so much wasted time with a game over. Save cats are poorly paced, sometimes two rooms apart or none in sight before a spike in difficulty. So far, the story is unremarkable with flat characters and no character growth, and too much distracting from material plot development with unnecessary unreciprocated flirting. I feel harassed just reading some of the dialog.
I'm surprised at how punishing this is, for a rogue-light, and there are many strange design decisions that are just wasting your time. You'd think this were a mobile game and they're trying to sell you ways to speed up the game with how much of a slog it is. * One level upgrade of the town costs twenty ore, which is a lot, and gives no incremental progress. Then you need _forty_ ore for the next one. * The elevator to send ore back to the town is always far from the exit to the next floor, encouraging you to risk more and lose more, wasting more time. * The first boss' attacks nearly never come out of his sprite from the same direction he's facing, so you needlessly take damage. * Tax when sending gold back reeks of a pooly balanced economy. * Item buffs are so small as to be unnoticable, so the rogue feeling of having different playthroughs is gone because combat is the same between dungeon runs. * The hidden button in the dungeon floors isn't hard to find, it's impossible and contributes to the slog feeling. * Locked chests without keys means you have to buy them without knowing you'll need them, encouraging you to waste gold, which reeks of a poorly-balanced economy. * Intergenerational progress needs many ore to unlock, and it takes forever. * They shove BUY THE DLC ads into your face. Redeemingly, the trash mob AI is surprisingly good, circling around you to kill you efficiently. Too bad other mechanics aren't so considerate.
