I've put in around 160+ hours into the main game, side quests, roaming the city... and finally gave up. I enjoyed finding the hidden easter eggs, the large expanses to explore, battling the various gangs however after a while it just got stale. It just became tiring. There was so much promised and it becomes so obvious that so many things are unfinished and missing. Such a great disappointment. I hope CD Projekt Red can salvage their name and this game however I don't really know if that's possible. I put in nearly 600 hours into Witcher 3 and return over and over to that world however I really don't think I'll ever return to this game.
First of all yes there are bugs, control and balance issues. These can be fixed given time and I'm not including those in this review. This is regarding what the game is and isn't.
For a game based on a RPG, Cyberpunk 2077 is lacking a great deal of the Role Playing aspect. The main story line is rigged from the end of Act 1 and it put a significant downer on my interest in both the character and the game in general. I have a second character that is locked in one area of the game due to avoiding the dead-end main story.
Character creation is ok, you are limited in the physical build of your character to male or female and therefore the options are mostly cosmetic with some minor options to change the face.
All the cyber options your character has are subsurface. During the game you'll see people wearing a number of replaced limbs and body parts in various styles, CDPR used these a lot in the media and none of them are available to you. I feel this was a lie perpetrated by CDPR.
The three life paths (Nomad, Street, Corp) are nothing remotely resembling the narrative that CDPR pushed in the media. Other than a very short prelude the choice you make has no further use other than the odd option during conversations. Essentially the significance of the life path choice was a lie.
The city could have been Steelport from Saint Row 3 for all the feelings of a futuristic corrupt city it generates. The various gangs are set encounter points and have no point in the game beyond giving you the same foe in different styles to kill/disable, no gang v gang territorial fighting etc. Your actions don't cause a reputation change with a target gang, the police or the other gangs. Street Cred is purely to control access to equipment.
What CDPR released is nowhere near the game they pushed in the media it is, it could have been great but as of this review it is poor. The best it is likely to achieve with all the patching and updates is a mediocre OK.
"Endless possibilities... and endless lies." What a poetry. Truly described what this game is. 10 years of development, all those promises and all those flashy ads, and all we get is another Far Cry game with cyberpunk label.
Despite the shiny looks and labels, entire game is not what it looks like. It's shallow, it's broken, and it's linear.
From technical perspective, this game is absolute wreck. Bugs, broken AI, broken physics, and even more bugs. Things actually are getting worse as new updates of the game make even more bugs. For a massive open world game bugs usually can be reasonable, but not in this case. CDPR had 10 years, and this is unacceptable.
Gameplay is mediocre. No 3rd person mode, only 1st person. Melee combat is wack. Blocking and feeling of your weapons swinging feel wack. Shooting guns is fun though. Weapons upgrading is not. Crafting is pain in the butt. Most of perks are "do X% of something or give extra Y points/something for Z", that's it. No special abilities or anything cool like in Fallout games where taking perks means getting to do something new and cool in the game.
Night City looks nice, but it's shallow and gets boring after a while because AI is burning dumpster, there are lots of bugs, and there is very little interaction and activities with game world besides missions.
Customization is awful and almost non-existent compared to what was promised. No vehicles customization. Half of clothes/outfits are forgettable or crap.
Story is meh, I could have written better material than what is given, and lore was butchered or made better to some extent, some people like it, some don't. To each their own. Entire game is linear and it barely matters what you choose. Almost no deep RPG mechanics like it was promised.
Graphics look awesome but also your computer will be sweating bullets because of how heavy this game is.
Only buy it with huge discount or sail 7 seas, or better yet- play other games that are better.
I do not understand how you can customize your junk, but not which keys you want to use to play the game. The whole keyboard binding is janky and a mess. Forced to use the TAB key for activating your cyber gear - then you have to use the F key to interact with stuff. Can't change it with the interface in game - and I'm too disappointed to do it manually by editing some usersettings.json file.
My multi-button mouse is basically useless and I do not game with a controller - this is a computer.
Yes the game is pretty - but if I can't configure the game so I can move and interact like I want to - then I'll just go back to a game where keybindings work, like AC Odyssey.
no matter how many times you patch cyberpunk, even if you patched literally every single bug, it would
still have the fundamental problem of just being another tired open world game. have you played assassins creed or far cry? well then you've played this game. with exception of a few interesting side quests, almost all of the open world content is just a not so subtle variation of go here, kill that, collect that, rinse and repeat. an amazing art style will only ever take you so far, and this game just has nothing particular interesting to say you haven't heard in other better Sc-Fi like blade runner or ghost in the shell. for all it's talk of being human and what it means to be human and have a soul, this game doesn't seem to have any soul at all. it's like the video game equivalent of that guy who can quote the cool guy lines from action movies real well, and wear cool clothes, but underneath it all is just a boring human being who'd rather imitate than create.
