Here we go, review that you’ve been waiting for. Biggest fiesta since Fallout 76 probably and I got the opportunity thanks to Antraxo’s gift to try it before big patches arrived. Or well I played one day with no big patches and then first update dropped, so I didn’t get a lot of raw release experience.
70 hours went in with a bunch of side quests and full playthrough of main quests, so now it’s time for my lidl verdict…
One important thing I need to mention is that I wasn’t really hyped for Cyberpunk, so my expectations weren’t huge at any point and seeing all the fiesta after release I came prepared to my own playthrough, so I didn’t get hit that hard with disappointment and can approach it less emotionally. Another important thing is that I was playing on quite a strong PC and not on console, so I didn’t get hit much by performance issues, even though I had weird problem with game eating all my CPU power no matter what that I needed to use a workaround for.
Main thing to start with that most likely interests everyone the most – bugs. Every stream I had at least one minor issue – can’t switch 1st person to 3rd in car, “Reveal Position” getting stuck on screen until reload and so on. Had no major problems, softlocks and other shit though, just a bit of framedrops in some densely populated areas of the map, guess that’s a price you pay for a very beautiful game, especially with RTX. Overall experience felt pretty janky for sure, not something you expect from such huge release with crazy budgets, but honestly quite familiar feeling with many big RPGs.
To tl;dr my feeling about the game outside of technical things it’s a good Keanu Reeves movie with RPG elements. After finishing the game I can’t really call it RPG, it just doesn’t feel like one, felt more like cyberGTA that trades some of that open world quality for hacking mechanics and good story. Doesn’t sounds like a bad trade? Well problem is open world in Cyberpunk is pretty damn shallow, wouldn’t say bad, because I still enjoyed doing all those open world missions for a while, but it became old pretty fast. In the same time main story and quality movie isn’t really that long if you think about it in comparison to all that shallow open world activities.
Gameplay is actually not too bad though, I was expecting shooting to be a lot worse, but there is something satisfying to shooting in this game and variety of weapons kinda excite you to try different weapons in action, BUT enemies don’t provide you good enough testing grounds to go ham. Hacking is fun, but after acquiring legendary deck and hacks (which is not too complicated and doesn’t really take long, just a bit of grind) you can just clear the building without even entering it, which is pretty cool and feel fitting considering the setting, but gets old quite fast. Stealth is there, but feels kinda useless if you are going hacking route especially (which I did), because it’s just easier and faster to kill enemies with hacks while still staying stealthy, instead of trying to actually go full Hitman. Haven’t really tried melee much, but heard you can become very OP with it too, so probably similar to other routes, but bits of melee I tried feel kinda bad in 1st person perspective.
Now to main part of any RPG for me and while Cyberpunk doesn’t give me that RPG vibe it’s still something I came here for – story. One thing for sure is that they really tried to take everything from Keanu Reeves being in the game, whole segment of early game turned into one cutscene/compilation that is supposed to give you some sort of idea what happens to your character between first intro mission and main events of the game, skipping all the build up on relationships between you and Jackie too. Can’t say I’m a huge fan of that, but I can see why they would rush the signature character appearance, since that was their main marketing bit. And despite everything I’ll give them that – Johnny Silverhand parts of the game are actually pretty good, if you treat the game as a movie as I mentioned before you get a pretty good movie. Writing is good, directing is also good, Keanu’s “acting” is good too – pretty decent stuff, but unfortunately it limited their ability to add more turns and choices in the story, so dialogue gives Fallout 4 vibes sometimes and majority of story and quests is absolutely linear. Some of the better parts are actually in side stories, there are whole series of quests on the side that usually introduce you to some characters and that stuff is good, problem usually is telling which side quests are good and which are just filler. Overall writing and story actually touches some interesting topics and makes you think, characters develop pretty well during the game and ending at least in my case was a great finale too.
I understand people being pissed about the game and I totally would avoid getting it on consoles/weak PCs, until full patching for sure, but maybe even after it can be not the best idea. But for me personally game was good, 70 solid hours that were a little tainted by some minor bugs, but also many of them just created a lot of hilarious moments on stream for all of us to laugh. If you plan to get it on PC, then make sure yours is good enough, wait for patches (at least one more major patch that is coming) and probably wait for sale, just to be sure that you are getting money’s worth.
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