Optimization is terrible. Controls are horrible(even on gamepad crouch is for dialog skip). Immersion sucks - if you leave your car on driveway, you will get traffic jam that will silently stand behind your car. You build up your game about openworld with cars, but those cars have terrible controls. Quests are buggy sometimes, nothing critical but you need to dance in front of an npc before quest trigger will activate. This game can becobe one of the best games in 2021, but in 2020 thats a dissapointment. Oh and btw you have dicks and guts everywhere in this game, but you can't kill a child? wtf?
Disclaimer: 25 hours played, couple main quests after lockdown. Don't treat this as a completed review.
I'm dissapointed and feal slightly cheated.
I've been waiting for this game since the teaser aired all those years ago, I didn't really think my expecations were unrealistic - I wanted an rpg with an immersive open world - full of memorable stories and the freedom to engage in them in whatever way I pleased. What I seem to be getting is mostly a pretty good story on rails and shiney, superficial fluff. I really think the game could have benefited from a node based approach like Deus Ex, because of how shallow the current open world feels. In the interest of saving me some time, I'll just do some bullet points:
Pros:
-Gorgeous visuals and graphics design/art direction
-Fun combat
-Great story writing, character design, and voice casting
-A lot of side quests of varying complexity to do (spent most of my time so far in Watson)
Cons:
-Stealth gameplay leaves much to be desired
-Perks don't feel impactful, mostly just passive number boosts
-City feels like a setpiece, there is almost zero interactibility. You can't sit at food stalls, grab a bite, chat, and soak in the atmosphere. You can't join in at roulette tables or arcade machines. You can't play pachinko! I feel like even GTA San Andreas did a better job at making the city feal interesting
-A lot of immersion breaking nitpicks such as the lack of eating/drinking animations outside of scripted events or repeating setpieces.
I'll continue to play as I still find the game to be fun but I do hope that CDPR will pull a No Man's Sky and really save this game from mediocrety, because as it stands, I feel like the marketing/media/critics have been extremely disengenious and misleading.
Some issues you can overlook in a AAA title, some you can overlook in an indie title, & there are some issues: annoyances, tedium, poor design choices you just can't take. Cyberpunk has all of them. In some ways it reminds me New Vegas in the sense that it's bugged out of it's mind but you still want to go back to it. It 's a game you want to like and want to give a chance to, not because you pre-purchased it or it's overhyped.
Main story is not much to look at, nor are the side stories. Mostly generic, nothing that shocks or amazes you. You can see how it'll end from the start and you don't get surprised at all. Game doesn't bother introducing a huge plethora of insignificant characters that does very little, other than calling you randomly causing phone interface to occupy 1/3 of your UI, limiting movement for some reason and scuffing whatever you were doing may it be driving, fighting, moving towards a marker in the middle of a quest or running from cops -who decided to summon an army with drones and all because you bumped into or God forbid, walked too close to one of them.
It's the open world filled with things to do and places to explore that drives you to go on. Unfortunate that so many of the missions, gigs, jobs whatever tey're called are bugged to a point that you end up having to return to an old save. Almost one in every 3 activities get bugged. So hard save before you start, and keep quicksaving. There's seeming variety in guns, armor, abilities etc but doesn't go further than "seeming".
I think controls are designed with consoles in mind, so PC users: get f**ked. Your character gets input lag or straight up becomes unresponsive especially if the quest you're in dialogue etc gets scuffed from time to time. Especially driving, to me at least, was terrible.
You may think a studio like CDPR to know a thing about what not do in an RPG like sticking people behind a slow walking NPC, unskippable/mandatory long monologues, tedium but nope, you'd be wrong.
The writing is unbelivabily good. Its hard to create a belivable world but CD project easily pulled it off. Gameplay is solid.
But now the big issue, it its in an beyond terrible state at the moment. In my 5h of gameplay i already expirienced the following bugs:
- Glitching through the floor (multiple times)
- Characters improtant for the misson objektive just randomly disapearing
- loosing hours of progress
- Viusal glitches roughly every 10 min (sometimes very distracting)
Some of the glitches litterly ruined the game for me. dont let the same heppen to you. Wait a few months and this game will (hopefully) be in an much much better state. People who give this game a 10/10 at the moment are obvious liers, dont let them fool you. But this gam e has the potential to be a solid 9/10 in a few months.
