I loved it. Derivative, not perfect, but really fun and spooky. A mix of Resident Evil (too derivative of that) & Prey.
The general feel of movement and combat in this game is one of....uh...suffering. Mouse input is not smooth, there's no inertia, and "running" is like 2 mph. You crawl linearly through tiny environments and often fight just one or two enemies at a time, with either one of them requiring 50 or more pistol bullets (at least on the "hard" difficulty). It's very tedious. I did, however, enjoy the 2005 production values and excellent performance on my laptop. A fun throwback, but strangely unpleasant to play.
Control is an unusual game. Having finished it, I have absolutely no idea what it is about. I think this is due to willful ambiguity in this story that allows for multiple interpretations, with the intention of the writers being that no one can be sure which interpretation is correct. However, it is also possible that the story is simply a mess. If that is the case, there is little to recommend; the rest of the game is mediocre. The bulk of the gameplay is third person shooting, which has some force-like abilities to differentiate itself, but it becomes repititive very quickly. It's arguably an open world game, but it technically takes place inside a single building, which is both charming and restrictive. I know many reviewers are upset about a crash to desktop that reliably occurs during an optional boss fight. I experienced this myself, and I would have been more frustrated, but lowering the graphics all the way and switching to window mode allowed me to get past it, and I mostly forgot about it. It does run well, and it looks decent enough, with character models based on real people with imperfections and a flare for cinematic storytelling. Again, though, my overall opinion of the game hinges on how much credit this storytelling really deserves. If there's really as much to read into as I think there is, it's arguably one of the greatest games ever made on that basis alone. If not, it's just mediocre.
This may have been a landmark in game development and creative depth. But, when approached for the first time with modern sensibilities, it's absolutely miserable. I simply can't make myself play it. Terrible ui. Terrible audio. Bland sci fi ideas. Inaccessible mechanics. If you've taken an interest in this after enjoying civ 6, don't.
Ghostrunner is a simple, narrowly-focused game that plays at insane intensity and will not appeal to everyone. It's a linear first-person melee-platformer, with one-hit kills and deaths. I love it, and even I get annoyed with it sometimes. Also, it's audiovisual bliss. Looks great, sounds better, runs better still.
Cyberpunk 2077 is just a whisp of the game that was envisioned, and what's there is disjointed and has glaring missed opportunities at every turn. It's also a lot of fun. I have more than 100 hours in it and am far from being finished with it (though I did "finish" the main quest awhile ago). The story is like every other aspect of it: sometimes amazing, sometimes in dire need of refinement and expansion. Even so, I was hooked on it and loved playing through the heavily-scripted main quest. The audiovisual splendor of the FPS gameplay is probably the strongest part of the game. While you eventually get overpowered weapons & abilities, and the friendly AI is awful, the simple look and feel of shooting up shiny foes is consistently satisfying and is what makes the game fun even after all the substantive story content is exhausted. The open world is the least developed aspect of the game, with "activities" that amount to shooting 3-5 random enemies at the spot marked on the map and picking up a text log. These are generally nonsensical, though there is a bit of a connection between the characters mentioned in the text logs at different sites. I found this part of the game painfully bad when playing through it the first time, but now that I've finished all of the story content, I'm having a lot of fun going through these.
