In my over 300 hours of experience with this game, I gotta say... Honestly? In my humble opinion, this has to be one of the BEST games I've played in a while! Everything about it just... clicks, snaps into place. The story, the atmosphere, fun gameplay, memorable characters, the city... This game just REEKS of fun and it immerses you with its narrative! Putting aside all the warranted and overwhelming majority of unwarranted heaps of garbage poured on CDPR over this, they did an incredibly good job of making this fun, immersive, memorable and a very enjoyable game for many hours, and playthroughs to come!
Let me go over everything I consider good, bad, and ugly. Though seeing as this game's strong perks are criminally underrated, underappreciated and often outright ignored, let me start with...
I know this is weird thing to open up the "good parts" list with but honestly? This is severely underappreciated.
I know that CDPR may not be everyone's cup of tea but the developers have worked their backs off to create a game for people to enjoy, and in the end they do not slap any sort of DRM onto the game, trusting you to not facilitate piracy and rewarding you with a copy of the game without any anti-consumer "protections" built in. Seriously, cherish this.
It's exceedingly rare for game development companies to not put DRM in nowadays. Usually, you receive the standard pack: either denuvo, arxan, vmprotect, maybe some 3rd party custom made DRM... Maybe even a combination of any of these! Oftentimes it doesn't help much with copy protection thing itself (i.e piracy) and actually only serves to harm it's consumers! Either by shredding the performance to pieces, or by outright refusing people access to the game, even if they bought it with their own money legally.
DRM is a very anti-consumer measure, even if you try to justify it as one. If you see a DRM slapped onto a game you want to play, this is basically developers/publishers saying "nah, we don't trust you with it" and then they expect you to trust them in return. You usually only see this with very small indie developers, since they're more level-headed and way more in touch with reality than 'big' players. Yet to an exception CDPR comes...
So what they did is a very respectable decision, regardless of how you spin it.
Hands down, one of the best narratives of its kind I have seen in a while.
There are all these little details throughout that you may not catch on your first playthrough. Took me 4 replays to catch some of those, and even I am pretty sure there are more things I haven't noticed yet. All the setups, all the tension buildups and the entire story executed is just... I literally cannot describe it in my own words, you HAVE to play it to truly see its genius.
This story is so good that I consider it (VERY HOT TAKE) to be right on par, if not better in some regards to other critically acclaimed titles with good stories such as Half-Life, Silent Hill, The Last of Us... You name it. I consider all those games to be absolutely awesome as well, do not get me wrong, but Cyberpunk simply deserves to be held up with those giants. Hell, why shouldn't it? It's from the same people that made The Witcher 3 for crying out loud!
Even smallest of quests here has more story and character than some of the other games entire story lines...
One of the most criminally underrated points of the game. Not only you can play however you desire, but regardless of how you approach it, it's just plain fun!
Personally, I mostly played with assault (guns) + netrunning (hacking) skills, and let me tell you... There are more ways to skin that cat! Surprisingly you can approach gun combat here in quite a lot of ways! Non stop jumping, sliding around, slowly mow your way through... And possibilities just vary from one place to another, making up for immense variety you can approach each battle with! This alone is infinitely fun and makes me come back for more! Couple that with different builds you can invest in makes this ever so much more replayable and enjoyable each time!
Now of course it's not all guns n' roses, balancing may take a while to get since at some points it just gets... A bit too easy, even on harder difficulties. Plus the lack of NG+ doesn't exactly sound great. But still, even without any of those its still a multi-hour long fun!
Graphical capabilities of Cyberpunk are honestly very impressive! Even without mods, in good amount of times the game looks nearly photo realistic! I was honestly surprised when taking screenshots that I was playing a game without modded graphics, because I would expect something like this to be possible only with 3rd party graphical enhancement mods... Yet that is the picture it comes with by default. Mind boggling.
Yes, yes, I hear you, I will go on a bit of a rant here but whatever - at times people tried criticising it because when you zoom onto something like a non-interactable food item it, surprise surprise, looks a bit low quality! Even comparing it to older games, like Battlefield, which had small map and had a fully modeled high quality hamburger! Who would've thought that in Cyberpunk, which:
...would have to compromise somewhere, so that it even runs on something that is not a supercomputer? Those nonsensical comparisons are ridiculous and please for the love of everything do not use them. Thank you, rant over.
Either way, the graphics overall are absolutely amazing, and graphical designers deserve every bit of praise their way! Look at the city, look at the cars, look at character design! The amount of love that went into creating this picture is immense, and should be acknowledged with respect.
That is interesting, because this game has managed to convince me to like genres of music I did not appreciate as much before. Now THAT is impressive! Composers for this game should get a raise! It still often times makes me want to involuntarily bang my head as some of the fire tracks come on! Not only just that, the timing at which the music just... hits is spot on!
Though as more of an avid DnB enjoyer I was a bit disappointed to find out that the game only had roughly 2 DnB tracks in total. Not the end of the world, as the soundtrack is still plain FIRE! But still, this stings a bit. :(
Either way, overall the soundtrack in Cyberpunk is AMAZING! Way to go, CDPR Composers!
No matter where I turned or went to... Every corner, every little bit I have walked or drove past just outright OOZES atmosphere! Like it just REEKS of love induced handcraft! The city itself, i.e Night City just feels... Real. It actually feels like a city that could exist! Though with how dark the Cyberpunk world is... I hope that it won't become an actual thing of reality lmao. I have nothing more to say. Just... Mwah, chefs kiss!
There a whole lot of things, either outright explicit or subtle, that help build the world, from random NPC lines discussing the life in Night City, to random shootout events, to random NCPD chases, to places where NPCs are hanging out or are walking together, all round up and add to a life-rich map full of things to help build its environment and get players to understand the beautiful, yet dark and cold world of Cyberpunk around them.
See, it's all those small things that add up together for a rich environment. It doesn't explicitly have to be in your face to be something noteworthy for world building. For some this may not seem a lot, but this small thing can go a long way. You may choose to ignore random NPC voice lines, yet little will you realize that you miss a part of world building. Maybe you will get revealed the actual crime rates that happen in the city, maybe you will get told about how the police is underfunded... Yet...
Many say that the world is dead, and there is nothing building it... I totally understand your predicament, however I recommend just venturing outside of main quests at least for like 30 minutes, maybe an hour optimal. I would also suggest to stop rushing everything through. Seriously, just relax, take a breath. Try to stroll around the city and outsides of it for a little while. Put down your gun, your blade, your kiroshi optics or your Sir John Phallustiff. Listen to what NPCs have to say, try to read the data shards you find around, read the emails and files within computers you come across, try to see the environment around you. After trying to do that, the picture of the world will, at very least, start painting up nicely.
It's those little things that matter, and its those things that help the world have its own unique, yet cold and brash story. Absolutely beautiful.
The highlight, quite literally one of the best parts about Cyberpunk. Either its memorable stories they convey, or their well written dialogue... Once you do not have more of them to do, you will be begging for more!
But that is not even the best part...
Their nature of being as least scripted as possible make this ever so much more enjoyable! The game for majority of the time does not put you on metaphorical 'rails' by locking down your abilities to just... walk away. Although obviously not accounting for times when, for example you get to be ridden in a car. Otherwise you can just... go do something else. Or refuse to do the quest altogether to progress its storyline. Granted, you may fail the quest itself but you can still play other quests and do whatever you desire! For 90% of the time, you are not obliged to follow the quest directly (or do them chronologically), and you can just walk away - unlike some other games where a wrong step in one direction is an immediate mission failure.
Quests are very approachable from every angle. They may even be approachable in different angles if you have met some conditions prior to starting the quest. At times there are optional objectives for you to do, which obviously aren't mandatory. Yet doing them gives you either a bit more story for you to explore, or just gives you nice bonuses for you to play with.
Hands down, the best quests with greatest narrative of its kind. Kudos to CDPR for this!
The only way I can describe this is:
Launch a game -> "I'll play for like 1 hour" -> Look back at time -> "Oh? It has been 5 hours already?"
Seriously, the immersion is on the next level. All the things that come together: fun gameplay, entertaining narrative, atmosphere that at times makes me question reality... They all add up to just getting you hooked on. For hours. Several hours. For several weeks even.
I will admit though, it's hard for me to get attached to a game for long periods of time (talking several weeks), yet I got addicted to Cyberpunk like a kid to energy drinks... Nothing more to say but: Bravo, developers, bravo!
Despite the claims of this game lacking content, it is actually chock full of it! Almost drowning in how much you can do!
Although yes, of course sure the main story line isn't the longest or one of the longer ones you'd usually see in a story game, hell it's shorter than the one in Witcher 3. Yet anything from side jobs, gigs, NCPD hustles... The game throws tens, if not hundreds of hours of content at you! It gives you hours of addicting gameplay and entertaining stories that aren't even related to the main story line.
For my latest playthrough on my last save, I got just over 100 hours on it alone! And that's consider that I play games pretty fast! Come on, how can you say that it got no content and there is nothing to do? There is plenty! Venture outside of main storyline quests! Go explore!
You are literally given a ridiculous amount of choices you can make at any given point. Anything from how to approach a combat you are about to have, to small little talks between characters that can help you give a better idea of the world, to whether or not you want to give a homeless person some money.
While on the topic of choices, choices actually do matter in Cyberpunk, despite the infamous claims of them not being 'significant'. The only reason you may feel that is because the game does not spell it out to the player. There is no "this action will have consequences!" prompts, or "action taken prior influenced this decision!" popups. The game just smoothly and dynamically adapts the world to your choices, and if you pay attention and re-play the game multiple times, you will see that a lot.
The choices also expand depending on your initial life path you chose at the beginning. Nomad, Street Kid and Corpos all have unique choices you can get to use at given points in the game. Not just those though, there are skill specific choices! For example, if you have like 10+ body - you will be able to intimidate some people with your strength during the dialogue. Or let's say you have 10+ intelligence - you can point out or comment on something techie related, showing your technical prowess!
It doesn't end there, it actually gets better! Some gigs and quests give you a task to retrieve either a file, or clean up a certain area. You may meet a person that may have worked with some scum of Night City, but you don't know for sure if that person was forced to work with them or they worked on their own volition. Well, funny thing is, if you actually do a little reconnaissance in the area prior to meeting that person, you will find a few emails where they explicitly and willingly agree to do such business. Later when they tell you something about being forced to work, you can call them out on their BS. Now you get a choice of either getting a permanent discount from that person, or putting a lead to their head and ending their scummy business for good. If you actually decide to take up the discount from them, they will be no longer available for trade, and nobody will replace them!
The amount of choices is seriously ridiculous, and is far more that I ever could've expected from a game!
Cyberpunk is not, never was, and never was intended to be a GTA clone to begin with or at any point. Quite honestly? I'm thankful for that!
If this was another stealy wheely shooty robbing mayhem police defense autocar simulator this would've been pretty disappointing! Seriously, why would we need another one of those? Why does everyone ask for this to be GTA 2077? Why not something more relaxed, easy going and something that is based on a great universe? Seriously, and I'm saying this as a long time GTA player/enjoyer!
Generally I'm very pleased with the choice CDPR made to have this be story-driven RPG. Gives a breath of something different for once!
Some may not consider this to be a major point or much important, but imho this is BIG! This is HUGE! This is big for a pretty decently sized company to treat their most passionate fans with respect and love, creating a safe and welcoming environment for modding and fan expansion of a game.
Unlike Take-Two Interactive and Nintendo, instead of sending Cease & Desist letters and DMCA notices, CDPR sends job offers to modders.
They could've DMCA'd all the modders who add more content to the game or add QoL improvements, and then they could've sued them (cough cough Take-Two cough cough). Yet... They did none of that. They actually did the opposite and hired some of them to work on the game. Regardless of how you see CDPR, this is a very commendable and respectful way to treat their community.
While all that is good and all, but let's see a few present issues (as of patch 1.52)...
Sadly if an enemy swarm dies during NCPD hustle or a gig, it dies forever.
Enemies, for the most part, do not re-populate later, they're gone for good. Sure, there are a lot of NCPD hustles, quests and shootouts, but they are temporary - you will eventually run out of them (like I did).
You may have noticed that I said that it "mostly" lacks perpetual activities, and "for the most part" enemies do not repopulate. Actually, they do! There are random non-hustle or quest related enemies in the world that, if got taken care of, respawn at some point later. They are not marked on the map, nor are they tied to any quest. Some of them even have unique world building NPC lines! Sadly, they are simply not enough. They do not give you any reward, apart from loot of these enemies if you clear them out. They are also not marked on the map as a NCPD hustle, quest, or an enemy swarm.
This game really needs some sort of 'dungeon' system, where you would have a 'dungeon' marked on the map, where you can come in and just have a blast mowing through enemies, either through stealth or with guns. This can be done with something like a bulletin board where "daily bounties" are published, kinda like some of the MMO games. For example, on a bulletin there is a 24 hour bounty to clear through a 'dungeon' in Watson, and rewards are 20,000€$ and 1,000 XP, maybe optional objectives for bonus items, and this rotates every 24/48/72 hours. This is pretty story friendly, and gives players an incentive to keep playing! Although NG+ would still be nice, even if this becomes a thing.
Though it does not necessarily has to be something like "go here and kill" type of objective. This could be anything, for example defense missions where you have to defend a package while an AI drives from point A to point B. Sure, it's relatively primitive, but it adds to the world activities! One could argue that this is not lore-friendly and why would some merc defend a package when they have better things to do? See, in the Cyberpunk world by the lore, there is this company called "RCS" or "Revere Courier Services" which hires mercs to protect shipments during transit... See where I'm getting at? This is a brilliant base for missions of these types!
Character creation offers you a wide variety of options to create your own personalized V. This is cool and all, however there is a small issue...
You only see V a handful of times in:
Come on, all that customization just for this very little limited use?
There obviously had to be more to this in development, but understandably that had to be cut due to time constraints. Do not get me wrong, FPP is great and all for things like combat and maybe immersive roleplay during dialogue, but for all other cases like strolling around the map, doing non-combat side activities...
You know, this reminded me that people who are fans of the game are categorically against something like optional TPP. Hey, I'm a fan myself, though why would you be against some optional feature? You think its immersion breaking? Just don't use it! You think it works better in FPP? Cool, then just don't use TPP! You think that having any FPP in the game ruins the immersion? That ship has sailed! There are FPP cutscenes, inventory menu, 3rd person camera in the vehicles AND photo mode itself! Does it detract anything from the game? No! It doesn't make anything less immersive, and if anything it makes it more immersive or at very least more pleasing.
Then there is photo mode, while it is a very good idea to make up for the lack of seeing your V too much... It feels a bit hacky, or at least incomplete in its current state. For example, while it has a good amount of poses, they are simply not enough, and you cannot make your own to expand the collection (Yes, I know you can mod some in, but they replace already existing poses with another already existing ones in the game). You can also only have 3 presets for camera which... Is alright but I definitely would favor having more. Besides, pretty much all photos that come out of there look... Same-ey. Which isn't that bad for like first few hundred of pictures, but after a while it does get repetitive.
Then again, time constraints, I perfectly understand why there isn't more at the moment, especially with janky animations.
In order to build the world around the player, you cannot cram all information into the game in form of a place, quest, voice line or event. So for that exist datashards, which contain text written information that you have to read in order to get a better understanding of what is around you in Cyberpunk.
Datashards are not an issue in itself, but rather that they sometime span for over several minutes of reading, which may make pacing a bit... Stiff, to say the least. Not sure how developers can solve this one since datashards are vital to world building and giving a backstory to quite a lot of things. Would be nice if those were paralleled with some voice lines you may encounter.
Of course, I couldn't leave that one out, could I? The game obviously had a bad launch. Fair and square, no denying that.
While sure, it was pretty jank on release, it primarily affected last gen equipment (i.e PS4/Xbox One). Of course, yes, the game was also very 'buggy' on launch... However imho that is not an issue in itself, or rather not an isolated one. I experienced a very minimal amount of them (on day 0 of launch mind you!). Seriously people, bugs are not the end of the world. Losing your crap over something going a tiny bit funny is seriously noteworthy in this day and age? With each technology advancement there has been far more room for error. The games got more complex, the deadlines became tighter, and as a consequence this will affect games in a way that they have more bugs because of it.
Seriously, I have no idea why but when Bethesda or Ubisoft release a buggy game on launch, it's all fun and laughs! Hell, a few years back the bugs were celebrated and people had a few laughs with them! Yet CDPR makes a rocky launch and it's suddenly end of the world, problematic, and warrants countless bland bug compilation videos. But I digress...
And finally, the most glaring of it all...
The animations that are not within scripted scenes are... Janky, to say the least lmao.
For example, when NPC enters a vehicle: the door opens by itself -> NPC performs sitting onto a vehicle seat animation -> the door closes by itself. Or Male V's running animation, just look at Male V's shadow when running! While I admit it is pretty funny, it's a massive glaring issue and is very much immersion breaking. Only in a very few missions, for example in the "The Hunt", you can see properly animated character entering the vehicle.
The title is a bit misleading, since some scripted animations are pretty janky too! For example when an NPC drives a car during a scripted sequence, it looks... It looks really stiff, and does NOT look like it behaves the same way it would behave with normal, unscripted physics!
Finally, the most disappointing part about Cyberpunk.
Most disappointing part about Cyberpunk was... Well, not actually the game itself believe it or not. It was rather how people reacted to its launch. While of course, no denying that it was far from perfect, everybody and their grandma have completely blew everything out of proportion, making up ridiculous claims about what was actually "PROMISED!!!1111" and what we got.
Even more so disappointing are all the things people hate Cyberpunk for what it isn't, rather for what it is. You don't say it's not a Battlefield Sims Theft Auto! It never was that! Cue all those "X game" vs. Cyberpunk compilation videos, about how Cyberpunk isn't copying everything from everyone. No wonder the games industry is in shambles lately! People keep peddling low to mid tier stuff and actual half decent titles get all the flack.
In a nutshell, this entire situation made me lose little respect I had left for "gaming journalists" or "unhappy gamers". On the positive side of things, it has exposed the unconditional hate bandwagon people are ever so trigger happy to jump on nowadays, regardless of nuances.
Note for everyone in the future: manage your own expectations and try to judge the game for what it is, rather what you imagined in your wet fantasies it to be.
Cyberpunk offers several hours of fun, content and lore within the base game alone. It provides fun and engaging gameplay, engaging quests and lore which are accompanied by the absolute banger tracks with an immense and believable world! Granted, there are a few problems that need smoothing out, but that does not cancel out that this is a great experience!
Overall, Cyberpunk 2077 is a very solid game with a few issues that need ramification - just like any other game out there. I have spent hundreds of hours playing it, learning new things about it, and just outright having a blast! This is a definitely must-play from me, and gets my personal seal of approval!
In total I give Cyberpunk 8/10 or even 9/10. Needs smoothing of a few rough edges, but otherwise a really fun, engaging and promising title with a lot of potential in it!