The story was great, there is lots of stuff to do in Night City but the amount of bugs, glitches and crashes runied the experience for me. Also, the amount and severity of these bugs/glitches/crashes increase the more you have played//the futher you got into the game
One thing that stands out is the police system, is way to simple and compared to similar games like GTA it's absolute trash: When you commit a crime the police spawns directly near you almost immediately, to make them give up you just have to travel a specific distance away from the crime scene and that's it. They won't first have to arrive at the scene, no chases, no way to hide, just dive a few miles away and your good. It doesn't even matter how many stars you have.
This could have been the game that destorys the GTA franchise and shows them how to make a good game without beeing greedy. 9 years of development, and that's what came out of it.. I really want to know what went wrong here.
But still, I hope that there will be more updates and more fixes coming and that the devs haven't given up yet, with the sales numbers increasing it should give them more budget for improvements anyway.
That game has a lot of potential.
Let's start with the good part:
- I really love the story, it's honestly amazing. The end is a bit... questionable. Without spoiling you, I wish it could've been a bit more than what we got. Feels like the story writers couldn't come up with more and left it at that.
- characters and voice acting
- the open world is also very nice
Negative aspects:
- weapons are boring: you get new weapons all the time but the weapon model and icon in your inventory stays the same, just the DPS and other stats improve
- illusion of choice regarding the story: as others mentioned, your dialogue options have ABSOLUTELY ZERO IMPACT on the story and what occurs -> it feels like you're playing a visual novel where your decisions don't matter
- as of patch 1.6 this game got a lot better but if you look at comparison videos on YouTube that compare 1.6 with the release version you see that a lot didn't improve: car physics are awful, NPCs still have a very weird behavior, and cops are a damn joke: I expected something like in GTA V where cop chases were a huge part of the game but in Cyberpunk 2077 it's enough to hop into your car, drive about kilometer and that's it. As of 1.6 cops still don't enter the vehicle to chase you, they just start shooting you and if you're out of sight, that's it.
- though you have multiple choices when it comes to approaching objectives (melee, shotguns, assault rifles, hacking or maybe just talking to someone) I feel like the game unconsciously encourages you to approach missions using the "take-your-weapon-and-storm-in" approach. I barely ever felt like hacking someone because using your rifle always seemed like the easier option
Summarized, the story is amazing and reason enough to play the game but the rest is just... meh. Thanks to Cyberpunk Edgerunners I was motivated enough to replay the game but it gets boring real quick if you don't play it for the first time.
I'm excited about the DLCs and online mode, though!
Story: 5* - just great, cd project can do that very well, a decent amount of dialogue options as well, it feels very immersive overall and I loved it. To this matter, I'd only point out the fact they highlight almost every quest in the city on your map, would be a lot better to freely explore and have more random encounters with people around, just to feel more like I belong.
UI: 2* - like the Witcher, it's a very console-style friendly but on PC I hate the inventory system, very hard to navigate or handle multiple items together. Hacking UI on the other hand has a very good design, somewhat like that I imagined Watch Dogs back in the days. Manage the cyberware and talents is also terrible, the game wont even let you reset your talents so if you play a focused build yu might screw up with one bad judgment in talents and you won't finish it anymore nor switch to a different playstyle the only option is to re-play the whole game....
combat: 2* - don't get me wrong it's very immersive and fun, especially the netrunning or sandevistan BUT.. and it's a big but... it gets very easy very quick... I was able to solo whole buildings from my bike on level 12 on very hard difficulty with a rare quality cyberdeck... because of this, I switched to sandevistan build and even with like 10 extra talents already spend on intelligence(which I totally do not need for this playstyle) I was able to solo EVERY enemy or every group of enemies on a level 19 before the sandevistan ended and in 4 seconds I had the cooldown again + invisibility so imagine that.... at this point what should I do to actually have fun... nothing really, just enjoy the story and be done with it, which is a shame because I'd love to explore
enemies are too repetitive, no matter the level or cyberware or weapon they use, they all die the same quick... if they have a sandevistan and you happened to have it as well, it won't change a thing they will still be totally frozen in time, even final boss. Same thing apply for netrunner as well, other runners doesn't make a difference to your gameplay anyhow, they just use different clothing. This is the most disappointing thing in the whole game for me.
bugs: not very much tho, but those I faced are obvious and I find out they exists for a long long time already and are still not fixed which is just BAD. For example using mantis, you will certainly be mostly annoyed and reload your game a lot if you play stealthy because the finishing animation just breaks your combat immersion, also breaks sandevistan completely and you are still damageable during the animation so you actually die on higher difficulty because of this and there is no option to just turn these finishers off.... very, very bad.
final thoughts:
pls next time make the game harder, add more layers of difficulty to net running play style, perhaps counter-hacking, or just more gameplay loops than just pressing 4 buttons and watch people die. For sandevistan builds etc. make NPC use cyberware properly so if they use sandevsitan as well, they shouldn't be slowed while mine is active, also add some 'humanity' level that limits my use or I become cyber psycho or something, this is ridiculously easy and it needs to be changed
I've started the game when it was out, on ver. 1.0x, but didn't finish; then tried again a year ago. Finally I've started and completed it on v.1.6 several months ago. Initially it felt like a sluggish mess, but with time, I got accustomed to controls, and now every sci-fi game feels inferior. Combat is fun and volatile – at least on high difficulty the balance almost right. I'm missing smart weapons in other games now.
Quests, including side quests, do not feel repetetive. It was a joy completing them all. Also, (almost?) all of the quests have multiple ways to complete, suiting many builds.
As for negatives, some secrets/choice consequences are too obscure and too far-fetching, which causes frustration. Including level limit. I suggest removing it with a mod.
Also, leveling up athletics is a hassle, reminding mindless grind of MMOs. You should basically better abandon driving and just walk around.
It's only possible to mark single location on the ingame map, so I had to use another out-of-game map for markers and navigation, which would be fine for a medieval simulator, but feels clunky in a scifi game.
Once I found an interesting scene on a roof with a nice loot, but then I had to reload and wasn't able to find it again. Some way to discover it would be nice. Just walking on every roof quickly leads to finding unfinished buildings and view-only textures (which are visible but can't be stepped on, you just fall through),
Some systems are too superficial to my taste, including crafting and ammo.
And finally, many bugs certainly remain, including very annoying ones – like soft-locked quests and falling through floor.
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Despite all this, it's a gem.
