Moving past the shakey start in one short sentence. Entered years late despite pre-ordering, found the 1.6s to be an excellent adventure with some questionable design elements. Now with 2.0 the game feels like a lean and masterfully cut version of what I already fell in love with.
The city sights and sounds are the real draw here, though the story and its characters are nothing to scoff at either.
What actually drove me to write the review was how well the game runs. Even on an old 1080ti which, admittedly, was a great purchase with great legs. Constantly surprised and impressed by a modern title looking like this while also maintaining 60+ fps and having snappy saving and loading. Makes it a joy to load up, or even quit, knowing I'm getting a beautiful world in a snap.
This game is amazing. The story has multiple paths and endings and twists coming with it. The cast is really cool with Keanu Reeves (and for the expansion Idris Elba.) there are tons of side missions that will easily take you a good 100% to complete everything so 5/5 for the story & side missions.
The soundtrack is absolutely marvelous with themes like "The Rebel Path", multiple radios with cyberpunk themed songs, incredible OST for everything you do in game like stealth & combat. 5/5 for the soundtrack.
The visuals are exceptional with or even without raytracing with a city full of life and verticality, beautiful weather effects like rain or sandstorm. Cyberpunk ads are everywhere in the city and every district is different with various gangs. When you're tired of the city you can still go to the badlands for another totally unique atmosphere. Visuals get a 5/5 too.
The gameplay is great too with RPG mechanics that let you build your weapons, you can be a cyberpunk samurai, a netrunner and hack people, robots, camera or cars. You can choose your clothes, buy a car, an apartment, buy food, modify your body i.e. replace your arms with mantis blades or a rocket launcher. When you commit a crime you have cops following you and you can fight them by foot or by car until they send you the max-tac. Finally 5/5 for the gameplay.
If you want to play this game and enjoy it fully, I'd recommend you to play it slowly and not rush the main quest but you should definitely play it and I advise you to buy it's expansion "Phantom Liberty" who adds new quests and "Dog Town" a new district so violent that even the NCPD is afraid to go there.
Cyberpunk 2077 has had a rough few years but has finally come into it's own with the 2.0 update.
I found the combat satisfying. There are plenty of ways to organise your build in this game which should keep things interesting if you wish to playthrough the game multiple times. Unfortunately some of the missions heavily favour stealth which would put other builds at a disadvantage if you wanted to get all the optional objectives done. The combat really comes into it's own during the side missions. These give you the opportunity to get inside V's head and make you think about what you would do in their shoes. This is when Cyberpunk is at it's most immersive.
The story is good but can be very disjointed at times. The individual threads are good but they don't stich together in a cohesive fashion. The pacing is particularly bad, especially in the opening act and I was surprised at how short the main questline was. It tries to touch upon some philosophical ideas but doesn't go beyond the surface level which I found disappointing. The characters are fantastic and I found most of them memorable but they don't feel like they have much impact on the overall story apart from giving you a few alternate endings. Even with all those criticisms the writing is still good for the most part with the dialogue being a major strength of the game. Major props to the voice work for this game, it is top class.
Lastly, the vibes of this game are unreal. Night City looks absolutely amazing. They somehow managed to make Night City look diverse while keeping the same overall aesthetic. The music is top notch, the score really elevates scenes during the story and the tracks on the radio are excellent.
There is a lot to say about this game, good and bad, so I found it tough to condense this review. I gave the game 5 stars because it is MY ideal game but if you are looking for an in depth choice driven RPG you may leave disappointed. Despite that I would recommend trying it out :)
2077 manages to fail its source material, the genre of its namesake, and its own framework as a narrative-heavy RPG game all at once. CDPR's half-baked take on R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk setting shows us a Night City that is somehow less of a cyberpunk game than the '80s pen-and-paper system on which it's based. Compared to the scarce lore bits offered up in 2020, this game foregoes Pondsmith's stylistic flare in favor of edgy platitudes that come straight from the mouth of a 14-year-old who just discovered Nietzsche. It also limits nuanced characterizations to the mostly-well-meaning corpos that are far removed from the street-level storylines that made the TTRPG so intriguing to begin with.
This wouldn't be as much of a bother if 2077 at least tried to create its own compelling vision of Night City through its quests, but you'll end up spending the majority of the base game connecting dots until each plotline is repeatedly revealed to be another mouthpiece through which the nearest NPC upon completing the plotline reminds you that this high-tech GTA is meant to be a cautionary tale about inequality in a hypercapitalist dystopia (if only there were countless real-world examples for the writers to draw on!), and that this city sucks and you suck too and your best bet is to never try to make anything better, cuz if you do then Silverhand will make fun of you for you and he's meant to be the coolest cool guy that ever was cool, man.
It's giving "you can't sit at our table" vibes, except you had to pay $60 dollars to be told you can't sit at this table, and it's also the only table available, and it's also missing a leg. But if you pay for that leg, Idris Elba will show up for a few minutes, so that's cool.
So, why bother playing at all? The answer, of course, is that you shouldn't. Go watch a playthrough if you're curious, and expend the keystrokes or button presses on Deus Ex, Citizen Sleeper, Ghostrunner, or RUINER for a more worthwhile cyberpunk experience.
Chooms, this is one of the best games I ever played in my life. It's right next to Baldur's Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2. Preem!
10 out 10 would start another playthrough
