Cyberpunk 2077 must be grateful for all the comical glitches as they distract from one hardly patchable problem this game faces: the story lacks soul and meaningful choices. Biggest offender was the very first mission. I chose Nomad, expecting a slow introduction to the city. Yet after not even one hour in, a sudden montage happened showing how my V became a mercenary. Erm, I wanted to play that? I expected an origin story more reminiscent of Drag Age: Origins, not the lazy Drage Age 2 approach. My origin only pops up to add some throwaway lines during conversations. It doesn't meaningfully change the narrative. It's especially jarring in companion quests as they all play out the same flirty way even if one is not their type. As a side-effect of the rushed intro, I don't know any of that backstory from my own character in Night City. (If you showed me the map of NC, I wouldn't know where my apartment is at. No worries, you don't need to go there at all.) I attended the funeral "of a close friend" yet I did not know those people -- yet apparently I should care for them? Why? It would have helped if I did some quests for them first to get to know them. The main story goes by fast and the whole Cyberpunk background feels underused. Contrary to the intent, the forced first person breaks my immersion. Witcher 3 had great almost cinematic cutscenes (Beach fight in the Heart of Stone expansion!) In first person, I am the camera now but I am also a very bad camera operator. I also have lost count of how many conversations I remained crouched in due to the fact that skipping dialogue and crouching are mapped on the same button. I would even go as far as to insinuate the forced first person was done to cut costs during cutscenes. Most dialogues are pretty dull due to that and it's a huge downgrade from Witcher 3. There is no point in creating your own character as you won't see yourself much. (I've got more to criticize but I have to little characters left ...)
I like Telltale's kind of games, which is an interactive movie with limited choices and a lot of quick times event. I like the Batman universe, though I feared yet another origin story. And alas, you do get a flashback to that fateful day Bruce Wayne lost his parents again, (and then Bruce Wayne egregiously manages to remember something new about that event decades later). On the plus side for me, Batman as a character is already etablished. Just the viallains are yet unknown to the Batman himself, which somewhat gives the player a headstart over the character, which made some decision-making rather easy for me. Still a few characters get a refreshing twist added to them In short, the story is solid, and would have earned four stars in my books. Yet it's a game, and games have to perform. This title is the weakest in Telltale's catalog. It doesn't have a language setting, so you have to go out your way to set Windows' system locale to the United states if you want the choice-wheel and subtitles to be in English. I got stuck at the first takedown quick time event until I found out that the XBox One controller (I finished Walking Dead: New Frontier just before with that so this is really weird) is not supported and I had to default to my old Xbox 360 one. And then there is the lag. Once in a while, the game's speed goes down to a painful crawl. And my machine can run Witcher3 so there is no excuse in my book, Restarting did help sometomes, on certain occassations I had to watch events happening frame by frame, I was relucatant to buy it on realease due to technical difficulties. Hence I waited for both the availability of all the episodes and a a discount. This is also what I recommend for this one: Get it when it's on a discount and you know you like Telltale's kind of games. It's no "Wolf among us", yet it'll keep you entertained on a weekend.
Prepare to be confused at first. Forget everything you now about controls. WASD? Pff. Point and Click? You are funny! And as a hint: For the love of gawd, remap your keyboard shortcuts. I played the QTE by mapping them for the left circle on WASD, and the right one on the arrow keys. I have no clue how the devs ever wanted you to play the game with that insane preselection. Anyhow, you have to make mouse gestures, and the person you control will do stuff like "take some glass", "pull water in it", "drink it". And whilst this sounds mundane, almost making one mock, "This shall be a game? It is not! It is some sort of weird Sims!", but wait, as you have to keep the interactive movie part in mind and the very likable characters. Note the plural. You do not only control one character, but many, and this is a good thing, even though I would love to have spent more time as Carla Valenti ;) It has some strange appeal to, as one character, try to hide from the police, and then you switch to another trying to unravel the mystery. Like playing hide-and-seek against yourself. The athmosphere is rather dark and cold, and litterally getting colder towards the end. The best attitude your characters can gather is "neutral", it really is that bad, and you should try to at least keep them around that level because if they lose too much confidence, you have a sudden gameover. There is one huge letdown though: The story soon devles into some drastic, ridicolous mysticism. So scratch that "science" part, that was mentioned in gog's description, from this fictional tale and be prepared to be bullshitted quite a lot. Also there are some scenes that pretend you have a choice, while you in fact have none. The most egregious example being the tarot-card scene, which is long, boring, bullshit, and predertimined for the sake of this story's mysticism. This is Fahrenheit at its worst. But then, there is pure awesomeness to be found at other places, e.g. when Lucas' house falls apart and also mostly in the way the people interact. A few other minor critic points would be lack of quick save, and going along with it, misplaced checkpoints, e.g. you always have to cross a fence if you get discovered in a stealth scene, almost driving me nuts in my lastest playthrough. If you can get warmed up to this game, you'll get a nice weekend out of it. If you cannot, your only alternative would be Heavy Rain, a PS3-only spiritual successor which is better in all respects. But you will not get it for 6 well-spent Dollars on gog. I am inclined to rebuy this game myself, even though I own it already, but the DVD-version had a idiotic copy protection claiming the original disk to be fake. So thanks to gog for bringing this game here!
