Recent reviews by Failsoftheweak

Highly recommend

Solid game

Solid game. To hell and back achievement is a cool challenge and worth doing if you get that far.

Ez game, ~30 hrs to plat + all DLC rememberances trust :)

Hesitation is defeat... so don't hesitate to buy this game.

Could easily be passed off as official DLC. 10/10

Certified hood classic

aMoGus 2

It's star wars

TL;DR: A classic example of overpromised and underdelivered; still worth a play as long as you can get it on sale.

To preface this, I have 100%d the game and have experienced essentially everything it has to offer. This is not worth doing for most people, but I will say that completing all the side missions and gigs is in fact worth it.

- Tons of awesome pop culture references and nods to other franchises, especially in gigs (blade runner, witcher, john wick just to name a few easily recognizable ones)
- People in side missions will sometimes remember you from previous optional encounters, at least giving the illusion of choice and sometimes is a nice surprise
- Side quests explore many interesting concepts related to future technology and culture (if it wasn't clear already, play the side quests or you're missing the best parts of the game)
- Fun to be OP and run around with the monowire one-shotting everyone
- Graphics and *aesthetics*
- Crowbcat came back from the dead to roast this game
- The "worst" ending story wise is actually the best ending execution wise; while the happier endings are shallow and uninteresting (you never get attached to most of the characters), the atmosphere and dystopian nature of the final sequence truly conveys the hopelessness and utter defeat in V's final predicament. Regardless of which ending you get, I highly recommend you play through the "bad" ending just to see what I mean.

- Worldbuilding is subpar (this is no Witcher)
- Main character and motives are not relatable/super generic
- Most other characters are flat and not very endearing; very little character development outside of Johnny/V
- City is deceivingly lively, but upon closer examination there is little to do:

• Many areas are inaccessible and there are sparingly few recreational activities to partake in
  
• NPCs are not interactive, models are recycled extremely often to the point that it's immersion breaking
  
• NPC AI is terrible, they don't even have routines or any set objective and so just walk around aimlessly. See La La Land, wheelchair, and the Crowbcat video for examples
  
• To add on to NPC AI, police spawn behind you when you have wanted stars, and you can lose them instantly when you walk into a noncombat zone or by running 10 meters away...

- Driving is not as fluid or as nuanced as GTA and needs significant work to feel realistic
- No vehicle customization (they mentioned this in pre-release interviews, but it's still a con imo)
- Combat feels clunky at times, stealth options are limited because enemies can be put on guard by stealth takedowns that they couldn't even see or hear, meaning that if you want to do something stealthily you often have to reload multiple times
- A huge amount of bugs; some gamebreaking, some not, but frequent enough to be frustrating and immersion breaking. Still, I mention this near the bottom of the list because it's something that will almost certainly get better for players in the future.
- Performance was so bad at launch that it was a meme, even on relatively high end hardware

*I listed the cons in order of increasing "fixability" which is my subjective opinion on how easy (or likely) it would be for CD Projekt Red to remedy the issues. Problems with worldbuilding and character depth are, in my opinion, unlikely to be resolved even in future iterations of the game, and will continue to be significant drawbacks to the experience as a whole.