Ever since I was a little kid watching my older cousin play the Pen and Paper with his friends I dreamt of a Cyberpunk game and
let me start by saying that this game is not what I thought it would be.
My main issue with the game has to be the
STORY.
The first red flag for me was when you meet Jackie, everything up to that point is absolutely amazing the graphics, the fat man sitting next to you, the car ride with that priest godfather it really was breathtaking, you meet Jackie and everything is great and boom, you get a montage of all the great stuff you and Jackie did instead of you actually playing it, which is a weird decision but I'll get into that a bit later. I assume the great things you and Jackie did in the first 6months will be the DLC.
It's just an odd decision cause honestly we all wanted that 6months. Even after the montage the game is still great the missions are awesome you are getting to know the city and its absolutely gorgeous.
The game takes a nosedive after Johnny is introduced. Now I understand that every story needs an overarching story but this is not all that interesting if I'm honest. You're dying and you need to get the construct out of your head...really? With the rich lore and world of Cyberpunk you can easily tell a better story than this. Why couldn't V trying to become rich and famous be enough of an overarching story? From this point on it becomes the Johnny show, you might be the protagonist but he is the main character. In my opinion in every cyberpunk/blade runner story, the city should be the main character always.
As you progress through the game the story becomes worse and worse and by the end of it and you know its the end I just wanted to be done with it. The main story is incredible short if you don't do any of the sidequests, you could probably finish it in 12hours.
It's not the story that I wanted. And I don't think its the story that CDPR wanted either. 1.5years ago they showed us this:
this is not a story where Johnny takes over the whole game, this is a story where YOU are the protagonist and in charge. This is not a story of you dying and the whole story is about you saving your life. This is a story of you being in charge of YOU and taking night city by the horn!
My second issue with the game has to be the
Missions and Gameplay
Lets start with the mission that introduces Militech, Meredith Stout and the Maelstrom. It's the mission we all saw in the 48min gameplay reveal, amazing mission, right? In my playthrough I sided with the Maelstrom cause Meredith game me an encrypted shard which i decrypted cause if the game gives me an option to do something i will do it. At the end of the mission I get the flatbed I'm buddies with Maelstrom instead of Meredith which I'm fine with, the Maelstrom are far cooler anyways so now I'm going to do missions for them right? NOPE, you never see or hear from the Maelstrom ever again until the very end when you do a sidequest with Rogue and they are guarding a container shipment, you have no interaction with them other than choking them out. Same thing with the Vodoo boys amazing intro and yep you never see or hear from them ever again.
It was definitely alluded that you could side with different factions and that would impact you and night city but that didn't come to fruition, imo the two best missions of the game were both in the 48min trailer.
Gameplay-wise its a mess. Lets start by upgrades and leveling up...they don't matter I think I had 10 extra points which i saved for passing speech options and had about 20 perk points by the end of it. The reason is that sneaking is too easy and the game or the roleplaying aspect of it encourages you to sneak it feels canon to do so its the same problem Deus Ex Mankind Divided had where sneaking was so OP that non of the great upgrades you bought you actually got to use, this game doesn't even have great upgrades. The best part of the game was when you were forced to do combat and even then the gun you used was far superior to any upgrade you could get.
You can upgrade everything guns, your body, perks, skill points but non of that mattered cause the game has very little combat and when it does you just sneak.
The hacking minigame is just atrocious I would rather netrunning was eliminated completely, and the only thing you use it for is to either distract and shut off cameras which is not all that interesting honestly and rarely used. A good option would have been to have a netrunner on your side and you tell them to shut down cameras and such. Just like in the mission to save the girl in the bath tub from the 48min trailer.
The boss battles were fine, they were bulletsponges and they didn't really have any tactic or specific thing you needed to learn, the game gave you plenty of cover and they were easy to take down 3 in total they were fine not great but they did the job.
Sidequests
The game bombards you with sidemissions and it becomes all very overwhelming. The sidequests are a mixed bag really, my personal opinion is that the sidequests should work as an enforcement of the mainstory and should pertain to it cause if not it really just throws the pacing off. I'm dying and Johnny is in my head so why am I driving this ripperdoc across the map? Why am I looking for rogue AI cars? Unlike witcher 3 where sidequests were given to you when you visited a specific area and its story pertained to that area here its just thrown at you from phonecalls. Every sidequest should have been about the task at hand.
And another issue I have with the sidequests is that a lot of them are several levels above my own, they should have been evenly distributed as you progress.
Also a lot of the sidequests were kinda lame and felt forced, the jesus christ mission for instance, some of them are not that good plain and simple.
Bugs
Yes the bugs are there, yes they detract from the experience, but to me I don't judge CDPR based on them, cause that is not their intent obviously and they can be fixed. Some missions had a sound bug where you couldn't hear the NPC speaking it was annoying sure. Other times you got stuck in the environment but a reload fixed that problem, I'm not that harsh on bugs I know some people are but to me they can easily be fixed. I didn't experience anything gamebreaking so I'm ok with it.
DLC and the Future
Like I said before I have a hunch that one of the DLC will be the 6months we missed with Jackie. I honestly think this should have been in the game from start. It all feels very much like FF15 where they tried "fixing" the story with DLC and its just nope too late. You can't retroactively fix story, you can fix bugs sure but not story, we all experienced it and that ship has sailed. I honestly think CDPR should not make any DLC for this game and skip the MP as well. They should make their Ciri game come back and focus on Cyberpunk 2. They have the technology they can build it, for me its not a lack of vision that is at fault here its the execution of that vision. They should skip last gen systems and now its just smooth sailing as I said the tech is there and the vision is there too CDPR proved it with their initial trailer
everything for a great Cyberpunk game is all there!
