Recent reviews by philogogus

The Good:

I enjoy the story. A few of the characters I felt were 'eh' at first but they grew on me.

The Bad:

Where do I start. This game is maddeningly frustrating to play. It is so riddled with bugs I flat out gave up after replaying multiple dungeons/quest-lines over again because some trigger didn't fire or I didn't do something in the order they want you to do it in. Further examples were my game cutscenes that happened outside while in your kingdom showed my capital as being a village no matter what level it was actually at but went back to normal when the cutscene ended. When I clicked to attack a mob my party would go to it... but my own character would just wander around for a few rounds unless I selected JUST them and told them to attack.

Kingdom management was very poorly documented. I had absolutely no idea how to build additional villages and didn't even realize you were SUPPOSED to until I had gotten pretty far along. Several of the 'features' in it apparently just don't work. No matter how many villages I actually had, the count was always 0. Appointing councilors and using them is so janky and weird that alone made me almost stop playing. Sometimes they will just auto-assign to a task but then wait for you to actually START the task. In the meantime since they are assigned, they don't show as being available so you have to go back through and find where they went.

I could go on but just thinking about how much time I wasted on a game I ultimately got so frustrated with I had to drop it is... well... frustrating me.

After nearly 3500 hours I can say this game is pretty alright.

My issues with this game are interestingly different than what a lot of people have. Beyond the well known bugs... I did not enjoy the writing at all. To clarify I played through the game on the 'corpo' origin. I was genuinely shocked at how short the introduction was. I am not talking the long time before you actually see the Cyberpunk 2077 splash screen but the part that is unique to your 'origin'. It was maybe... 5 minutes? You then get a fast paced clip montage that is supposed to establish all of your emotional attachment to Jackie Welles and some of the various 'fixers'. It did not accomplish this at all.

The story itself is 'okay'. My main problem is with the pacing and story/character consistency. My issues with the pacing focus around character interactions. People introduce themselves to you and they immediately start bantering with you like you guys are old friends. The same goes for your interactions with some characters. The most egregious example I can think of off the top of my head is the first time you meet Judy. Within about a minute (and the same conversation) you start interacting with them like you have known them for 20 years.

Story/character consistency is my other main problem. There are two ways you interact with characters in the story (both main story and the 'main' secondary quests), audio interaction (be it face to face or over the phone) or by text. It is clear to me that two completely separate teams who never met or spoke did these. Assuming the actual animated and voice over'd character interactions are the 'canon' personality of the person, the team who did the 'text' interactions had no clue who they were actually writing for. Takemura is the most egregious example of this. In addition, what you 'say' over those texts and how the other character reacts often has no relation to one another at all.

My 'theory' on these problems can be broken down as follows:

Pacing: I think there was more stuff in the script they didn't have the time/opportunity to animate/VO or whatever and thus a lot of stuff that would have built character relationships was cut out of the game... and then the rest of the script was not adjusted

Consistency: I just think it was two separate teams doing this and no one QA'd the interactions and said 'Yes this makes sense'.

Maybe this stuff will be fixed in DLC's. I am more than willing to give CDPR the benefit of the doubt and wait to see what happens. But if you are looking for something more than gratuitous eye candy, I wouldn't bother right now with this game.