This is a bizarre game. It starts off strong. You start off playing as both a murder covering up their gruesome crimes and a detective investigating them. Then halfway through it it completely changes tone, both in terms of story and gameplay. The story has a big exposition dump and and becomes a Matrix wannabe, with gameplay devolving into a series of quick-prompt action scenes that make little narrative or intuitive sense. It's an early example showing Quantic Dream's inability to tell a coherent story or come up with fun gameplay. Like Heavy Rain that would follow it, it starts strong, then quickly falls apart.
I played this on the PS3 after seeing all the hype. I never understood it. First, the interface is terrible. It's a bunch of nonsensical and unintuitive quick prompts combined with a walking simulator. In this respect itt barely a game. Still, I could possibly forgive that if it told a good story. This was supposed to be where it really shined. Again I don't get it. The story is terrible. It's incredibly predictable, filled with terrible dialogue, and has massive plot-holes that are never explained. With respect to storytelling, it's almost as bad as Quantic Dream's prior effort, Fahrenheit. This one is definitely worth skipping.
Game doesn't run, crashes to desktop. Contacted CDPR support and they said my CPU needs to support AVX instruction sets, which is NOT listed in any of the system requirements, and apparently can be easily circumvented by a 3rd-party mod. CDPR, however, has no intent in resolving this issue or supporting this and instead suggests either the mod or a refund. Ironically, I was able to play the game briefly before constant crashes to the desktop, so it's clear my hardware can run it (and at high settings no less), so it's a particularly baffling decision on their part. The only thing I can surmise is that CDPR just doesn't want to support their own game, which is already a buggy, lifeless mess. CDPR seems to have forgotten their roots and my faith in them as a developer has been shattered. As for the game itself, as I said, from what little I've played and what I've seen, it's a buggy mess. Texture pop-in through walls, floating characters, characters walking on top of one another, NPCs that appear and disappear, etc. Inability to re-map keys, and sometimes the mapped keys just not working. Movement is janky. And from what I've seen of Night City, it doesn't live up to the hype, and frankly feels empty and lifeless, despite all the attempts to make it seem "busy." Certainly seems like CDPR got overambitious with this game and just decided to dump it unfinished, despite its obvious bugs and flaws, and abandon their fans in the process. Thoroughly disappointed in Cyberpunk 2077, and CDPR as a developer.
