After some days of reflection and 50 crashes on PS5, I think I'm ready.
Here's my spoiler-free review of Cyberpunk 2077:
Imagine for a second that a third division team from England builds a massive, high-tech stadium. You'd expect that players like Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo would play there, but instead, only untalented and low quality players are using it. That's Cyberpunk 2077: a big, masterfully crafted, beautiful world, yet hollow and without substance. Night City is amazingly designed, but it is static, empty; you can't interact with most of the stuff, the city and its assets are just there for visual pleasure, it lacks interactivity for added immersion (which is essential for a game like that). You have no animations for eating, drinking, you can't just sit down and enjoy the city, there are no minor side activities to partake, there's nothing aside from the quests and excessive gang hideouts. This is actually very interesting, because a lot of the stuff that could make the game livelier are already in the main quests: you can drink during certain missions, you can also eat, there are dancing and sitting animations; couldn't they just add that to the open world as well?
Even if you ignore its dead world and game-breaking glitches, Cyberpunk is still a very flawed game, specially in a department that shouldn't have been flawed: the main quest. It is all too brief, some plot points that seem to be important are easily discarded and replaced by other stuff and then the game ends. No ending feels even remotely satisfying and your choices hardly matter in anything, CPDR could've just made a linear game without dialogue options and nothing of importance would truly be lost. Main characters are uninteresting and the overall plot is also lacking development, it feels like most of the effort was put in the secondary quests, which are probably better written and designed than the main content. If there's something that this game shines it is in its secondary quests, it is there that the best characters are shown, but I don't think that's a good idea; the game would heavily benefit from more time with characters in the main quest, and leaving the best of them to side content feels cheap and unsatisfying.
In the gameplay department, Cyberpunk seems to not know what it wants. It wants to have a Borderlands-esque loot 'n shoot mechanics, but the weapon variety is laughable. It wants to incentivize crafting, but there are huge roadblocks for the best stuff. It wants to make hacking a viable option, but it is too weird to be really interesting, copying Watch Dogs 2 system would be better. The level design takes some notes from Deus Ex, but it's still not enough; those games had a huge amount of options during missions, and even if you didn't have a certain amount of skill points, you could still find alternate paths to reach the objective.
Overall, Cyberpunk is a game that shouldn't have been released this year, it wasn't ready and there are a lot of game flaws beyond bugs and performance. I didn't really enjoy my time with it. There are good stuff, like the sidequests, characters and some interactions, but it also lacks a lot of stuff. I really doubt updates will fix most of the problems I have with it, therefore, it is probably a game that I'll replay after the next gen upgrade and then forget about it.
If I had to give it a rate, it would be a 7/10. Very unimpressed with it. Even without the technical issues, I don't think it even surpasses previous CDPR games.
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of dev time.
