I enjoyed this game at first, but it gets old really fast. The combat and driving are lackluster, the characters are bland, the MAIN character is completely forgettable - unlike Geralt, which is the caliber of writing I was expecting and paying for. Then you have all the bugs, which screams that nobody tested this or that if they did, nobody cared to fix the problems - too busy playing with their virtual dicks, I suppose. The graphics are amazing, but I paid for a game, not a movie. I have requested a refund. My only hope is that they'll pull a "no man's sky" and make the game significantly better, in which case I'll grab it when it goes on sale.
Others have reviewed the clunky mechanics, shallow combat, and world that is simply an initially impressive but ultimately shallow stage, so I'll focus on the narrative and how it led to expectations that were sadly not met.
Without delving into spoilers, the main story locks you out of exploration in Act 1, and in Act 2 it opens up with one of the most "urgent" main storytelling I've experienced in an open-world game, making doing the side-gigs feel tonally dissonant to say the least. Worse, there is a grim and at this point overdone theme through all the available endings (unless there's some no one has discovered yet hidden behind high-% completion) that makes going back to do more side content feel pointless once you beat the game.
I was also particularly disappointed in how little available interaction there was with the few NPCs that V can come to consider friends and lovers; outside their interactions in the main story most get no further content. There is little point in stopping at your lovers house or calling them, most have a few lines of extra dialog, and that's it for the entire game. What you get in their main story/side gigs is all there is. After the rich interactions with friends and even acquaintances in the Witcher games Cyberpunk falls massively short.
The side-gigs are also a mixed but mostly shallow bag. Side-gigs with any depth are usually given to you by phone call, but there are are very few that come anywhere close to a satisfying depth. Most of the maps 'extra content' consists of MMO style repeatable events consisting of gangs/crime scenes, cyber psycho mini bosses, and 'rogue AI taxi' missions that constantly intrude on main story quests via reports from the taxi HQ.
Unless further % completion unlocks another 30 hours of side-gig narratives, locations worth exploring, more NPC interactions with friends and lovers, offer a less grim series of endings, and post-credit play, I think I'm done with Cyberpunk after several days of play.
I purposedly didn't watch much of the game's advertisement before launch, I wanted to experience the game fresh without a tainted view from watching too many "hype" videos.
I expected an new and exciting kind of RPG in the Cyberpunk setting. What we got is a relatively generic shooter which does nothing new except for the visuals.
Sure it looks great and some of the story missions are quite nice, but nothing feels special in any way. Everything that we see in this game has been done before, and better at that.
The crafting system is a mess, the item progression is broken. After nearly every fight you find better weapons than you had before, you are constantly switching out your items and selling stuff. Many of the talents are rather useless. The AI is broken at points, especially the Police system.
You can't play the character you want because in the end every lifepath is the same. Sure you get one different mission at the start but right after a montage plays which is the same with every lifepath making every V essentially the same story wise. Sure you sometimes get +1 dialogue option but in the end it doesn't change much of the game. There are different endings though and I haven't seen every one of them yet.
All in all I am somewhat dissappointed, I didn't expect Cyberpunk to be a 11/10 masterpiece. But what we got is a pretty generic game at best. I would only recommend playing this if you are an absolute fan of the cyberpunk visuals, if you just want to play a good rpg/shooter there are better games out there.
I started the game on a XBox One, which led me to the conclusion that CD Project Red doesn't care about gamers like they say they do. It's ugly and unplayable.
I was so hyped that I bought it again on gog.com, but what can I say: it is still a bad experince. The controls are bad, driving especially is a nightmare. Graphics and sound are fine and the main quest seems to be intriguing. But it shouldn't be an Open World because of its lack of detail.. Cannot recommend.
I am enjoying the gameplay enough, but this game is not what the developers have hyped over the past couple of years as open world game "with strong RPG elements." There are a lot of basic features missing such as key re-mapping, re-spec character, change character appearance during game, and body slider (fat, skinny, muscle mass) to name a few. It seems the developers, whether at the behest of management or not, focused too much on graphics and ray tracing than implementing proper open world RPG elements. CDPR lost a lot of goodwill it earned with fans through their development and support of W3. I only hope they take a lesson from No Man's Sky and continue to develop and add features that were promised but missing at launch.
