Got V up to Level 47 and 100 hours of play time (73 according to the save). Hurtling towards the endgame, now. Just a few missions left. Was going for a highly completionist run with all the side quests and all the NCPD calls. It's amusing as hell that next to no one has the Steam achievements for those. Like, 0.1% of players have the "all sidequests, all scanner hustles" achievements for each district.
I think I have my verdict.
Holy fuck, what a fucking shitshow. It doesn't feel like GTA. It feels like the bastard child of Deus Ex, Borderlands, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. It's
riddled with bugs and performance issues.
Pros:
- The graphics are fantastic if you have a beastly rig. They put a lot of work into the looks of the cars, the guns, the environment art, and the main characters. There are a lot of moments where you just have to stop and gaze at the city because of the mind-blowing vistas.
- The photo mode that helps you capture the aforementioned mind-blowing vistas. Nice touch.
- The consistent aesthetic and use of mise-en-scene is noteworthy. They went out of their way to make the setting come alive. It wears its influences on its sleeve. There's some Blade Runner, some Demolition Man, some Fifth Element, some Tank Girl, et cetera.
- The gunplay is competent enough, except popping heads would be a lot more satisfying if I could get a stable framerate out of this motherfucking pig.
- Fucking awesome soundtrack. This OST could get you pumped up to play anything, even the shittiest game on the planet. CAN YOU FEEL IT?
- The mocapped segments and the character interactions are rather sweet, and they convey the (rather dark and depressing) story very well.
- Lots and lots of different ways to build out V. You start off as an ordinary hired gun, and by the end, you're frying people's brains through walls with your cyberdeck, cracking skulls with Gorilla Arms, or slicing and dicing with Mantis Blades.
- Radiates pure 90s antihero baditude. Everyone drinks, chain-smokes, and curses like a sailor, the setting is obscenely over-sexual, the gangs are racial, and there's no political correctness and no filter at all. Feels like home.
- It has a Porsche in it, I suppose.
Cons:
- Bugs, bugs, and more bugs! Culling issues, LOD issues, sounds dropping out, sounds playing when they shouldn't. Over long periods of play, your footstep sounds may disappear (memory leak?). You may snap a guy's neck and hear that same neck-snap sound play over and over again from his corpse. Some things just plain don't trigger correctly. Weird physics glitches. Hitting stuff at just the wrong angle and having tons of force imparted into your character, sending you flying, shit like that. Sometimes, you'll encounter a guy T-posing, or see your own character T-posing through your fucking car. Really stunning, considering how long it was in development. Where the fuck was the QA team, or did they not have one?
- The melee is kind of a bitch because the narrow FOV and the short reach makes it easy to miss.
- The crafting feels like an afterthought in some ways.
- The way the leveling system works is retarded. You can't level skills past the level of your attribute that governs the skill in question. Any experience points gained past the cap are wasted. If it saved them up and allowed the skill's level to increase when you increased the attribute, that would be fine, but it doesn't. The XP just goes straight into the void. This means you can miss out on a lot of bonus perks depending on whether or not you use skills that have already hit the cap for their related attribute or or not. Basically, the game discourages you from using your strongest abilities. Also, some skills are extremely hard to level, like Athletics.
- Lots and lots of scripted sequences. Sections where you shoot from vehicles are on-rails and entirely fucking scripted.
- Unbelievably hollowed out compared to what we were promised. No, there's no wall-running. Free-running in the city using upgraded cyber-legs to jump over obstacles feels like a consolation prize, and there are so many tall barbed-wire fences, it's almost like the developers are actively resistant to you exploring anything at all. You can't customize your vehicles. You can barely customize your guns with scopes and silencers. You have the same fucking apartment throughout the entire game and can't even get a fancier one once you've got some eurodollars. There aren't really any activities outside of running around and finding some skulls to crack open.
- I remember when they told us that we'd have animated sequences for the implantation of all cyberware. Not true. The first cyberware you get, the process is an animated cutscene. The rest? You swap 'em out in a menu and don't see a fucking thing happen.
- No way to change your hair or tats (except for some useless tats that replace more powerful cyberware in your hand/wrist slot). Your character is locked looking the way they did at the moment of their creation, which, in a setting where people literally swap out their faces and their entire bodies, is completely fucking retarded.
- All of the cars handle worse than in Saints fucking Row. Even the supercars can't corner for shit and everything's drifty and unresponsive as fuck. Forza Motorsport, this is not.
- What the fuck does Street Cred even do? Nobody reacts to you any differently, and nothing happens. You feel like just as much of an unknown at the end as you do at the beginning.
- Lots and lots of pointless, mind-numbing inventory management. It would've been nice if they'd let us tick checkboxes on multiple items and disassemble, sell, or transfer them all at once.
- THE AI IS FUCKING RETARDED AS FUCK! This is the worst AI I've seen in recent memory. Enemies with guns have no idea how to respond to being melee-attacked. Half the time, they just stand there like a dipshit and just take the blows. The difficulty settings do not matter because the AI is so stupid that it is physically incapable of challenging you, except specific bosses with scripted, laser-guided melee attacks like a fucking Skyrim enemy.
- There are a tiny handful of godawful racing missions but the enemy driving AI is so fucking embarrassingly bad, they have to reset the other cars every few feet so that they're always right behind you.
- Keanu Reeves is phoning it in. It's clear he has no real voice acting experience. A lot of Hollywood actors don't have a clue how to read a script into a microphone and emote at the same time.
7 out of 10. One point docked for bugs, one for performance issues, and one for all the damn features they cut.
It's not without redeeming value. The story is wild, the characters are charming, and the tear-jerker moments will pierce even the blackest hearts, but that sounds almost fucking perfunctory to say. Am I playing a game, or watching a movie? What in the hell were they trying to make?
In some places, it feels like a labor of love, and in others, it leaves you scratching your head and wondering if they really gave a shit. If they patch out these fucking bugs, it could eventually reach a more acceptable state, but there's absolutely no hope of it running well on last-gen consoles. They shouldn't have even released it for them at all. Mod support could lead to the community eventually unfucking it on their own, Bethesda-game-style. People who worked on Witcher 3 mods and are familiar with the engine are already hard at work trying to reverse-engineer it. REDengine is clearly struggling to make a competent first-person action-RPG. This engine doesn't
want to do any of this. It's falling apart and bursting at the seams. It's about as much of a shitshow in that respect as BioWare's Frostbite games, except this is especially egregious because it's CDPR's own in-house engine.
How could devs with so much open-world experience make an open-world game that feels so fundamentally shallow? Combat is just about the only thing you can actually do in this game that requires significant interaction, and yet, the devs clearly want you to play this fucking game like Mike fucking Ehrmantraut and use stealth and guile instead of actually killing anyone; many sidequests penalize you for not using stealth, with your fixer chiding you and docking pay for charging in like a bull in a china shop. It's supposed to feel subtle and Deus Ex-ish, but what it really feels like is that I'm missing out on experience points and loot by bypassing enemies. There's nothing to do in-between these missions. There are no bowling alleys, no golf courses, no dartboards, nothing. Hell, even the bars and restaurants just open up a vendor menu that lets you purchase and eat consumables from your UI as usual, rather than sitting down and watching an animation or anything like that. The consumables feel like an afterthought; lots of variety, but they all do the same fucking things. You can't use consumables to slow time or anything cool. There's health items, and a few small temporary buffs, and there are three categories of foodstuff; liquor, hydration, and food, and every item in those categories gives exactly the same buff/debuff. No variety. None!
I'm gonna rage for a bit, so bear with me. It would be one thing if this was just some ordinary game, but this fucker was hyped beyond anything else in recent memory, only to end up launching exactly like Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. I'm embarrassed for CDPR. I'm almost embarrassed to fucking play this. Fuck me. Seven fucking years, and we get a buggy, paint-by-numbers shitshow like this. I'm a firm believer in the principle that in order for a game to be any good, it has to have a fucking
soul. It can't just tick some boxes here and shake some tits there and claim it's crossed the finish line. It's immensely ironic that a game intended as a critique of capitalism and mindless consumerism comes across as drier in places than an Excel spreadsheet of CDPR's financials. CDPR self-publish, and yet, they made this fucking game as if their dumbass shareholders gave them a Christmas wish list. Games are
not made by feckless suits sitting around in a boardroom and throwing meaningless jargon like "le premium treeeple-A title" at each other. Just about the most flattering thing I can say about this game is that they didn't attempt microtransaction wallet-rape of their audience, but when the result is just as soulless and commercialized as a mobile phone game, what's the fucking difference?
Video games have been sucking hard in the past 20 years because game developers have become fucking disgusting hack sellouts. Epic sold out. Blizzard sold out. Bungie sold out. Infinity Ward tossed their leadership in the streets, and then West and Zampella made Titanfall, only to sell their souls to Satan eventually. BioWare, too. CD Projekt Red employs over 1,100 people. They're independent, and yet, any game made by a team this large is going to be ruled more by money and politics rather than creativity. Diversity hires don't know how to do jack shit, except tweak character creators to force you to play as an uglier character and slip in virtue-signaling bullshit here and there; studio heads quitting and being replaced by dumb, mincing cunts who look like Trigglypuff is always a red flag. Indie games are hardly any better. Most indie devs are like Jonathan "Hookers And" Blow; pretentious twats who are miles up their own ass. I'm sick and tired of it.
Tantalizing, isn't it? This was two years ago. Doesn't it look like something you'd love to play? Only, how much of the rest of the game was even done at this point? Was this just a vertical slice, with the rest totally unfinished? This would basically be false advertising, were it not for all the "work in progress" caveats. The whole game is still a work-in-progress, even after going gold.
Anyone who pushes buggy, unfinished shit like this out the door after working on it for the better part of a decade should feel very humbled indeed. This basically amounts to the audience paying money to QA-test an unfinished game, and then, finish it on their own time by eventually modding back in everything the devs cut out.
You know, I never played the tabletop Cyberpunk games, or hell, any tabletop. Never really had friends who were into that kind of shit. This game makes me want to find a group and play the tabletop Cyberpunk out of
spite, so I can have actual freedom and actual choices. Goddamn. Maybe this is Mike Pondsmith's masterstroke. Make a video game adaptation of a tabletop RPG that is so soulless and railroads you so much that you become desperate to buy his rulebooks and play the real fucking game.
The DPS counter is occasionally broken. Try clicking on a craftable weapon a few times and watch the DPS change right before your very eyes.
If you want DPS, the shotguns and other multi-projectile weapons are extremely OP. Mods that add damage count per-projectile, so some weapons are fucking devastating when you have four Epic Crunch mods slotted in them. I have 1100+ DPS on Nash's Widow Maker and 1300+ on The Headsman. They one-shot all but the toughest enemies.
