Recent reviews by Otei

Absurdly chaotic fun. Lots of explosions, plenty of enemies, good story building, managed democracy.

What speak to me the most is that this is a constantly evolving story, based on playerbase actions. It branches, it advances and reshapes how you play the game.

A lot was and still is being said about this game. Here's my take after 100+ hrs of play time.

PERFORMANCE:
I want to start with this one since some reviews seem to be incredible to me. I've seen people commenting that it runs much worse on theoretically much better equipped rigs. I don't know what to tell you... Seems to run quite OK on a decently maintained PC. But I am waiting for something to start melting... Anyway.
I definitely do not have an up-to-date rig - my i7 is about 6 years old, I have 16GBs of RAM on 1600 MHz frequency, running SSD and ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 ROG Strix 8GB. Suffices to say, I did not expect to run this game anywhere between High and Ultra settings with decent or at least passable framerates. Still, I get about 40-50 FPS with settings leveraged between the two, which is well enough for me and higher than I've expected. Setting shadows to lower gives me about 10FPS more, but it seemed too flat for my tastes. It does tend to drop by 10 FPS in city center etc.

WORLD:
It is definitely not a completely unknown world, or anything so sci-fi that it's just plainly impossible (or at least for now). There is a sense of familiarity to all of it, when it comes to design or architecture, so it's quite easy to comprehend. What is unknown for me, and what seems in-line with what CDPR promised, it is a very much vertical worldspace - in other words, what it lacks in flat map area it makes up with more space than you may notice at first. Here's an overpass, there are stairs leading up and down, here are the alleys over which you have a shacks on the roofs. It is easy to get lost or sometimes frustrated when you notice that you are two stories too high from your mission target. But it's also fun to see how architecture and general density of everything changes with different levels above the ground. The architecture itself also varies with districts. So you get your general living area, financial district, services district, old industry, outskirts and so on.
Luckily, there are kinds of fast-forward points to which you can transfer from one another - saves some time. Most of them you have to discover by just simply being in its general proximity.
Sadly, the world is very well styled and mostly detailed but it doesn't feel very much alive. Pedestrians just walk around, the same guy stands in the same place all the time, cops don't patrol, gangs don't mean a lot of anything to gameplay. Oh, and the cars - turn around, see a car, turn around, it's not there or there's a difference one in it's place.

SOUNTRACK & AUDIO:
There are various radio stations you can tune in to, from smoothy classical, through your general base, to metal, so I guess there's something for everyone. The tunes are fine.
The general audio experience is cool too, it is dense where it should and atmospheric when expected. Nothing more to add.

GAMEPLAY:
- General:
I get the feeling like I'm jogging everywhere. For a game that was hyped to be all about immersion, this sticks out - there is no walking mode. You drive, you sprint, you jog or you creep around crouching, but you DO NOT WALK. So that's something irritating, a bit. Not that I want to walk around in a normal pace all around, but...
- Driving:
Ugh... Driving system is terrible. I'm not sure if it's a matter of my video settings but I just can't seem to find any sort of mirrors, so if you try to back up from first person perspective, you are just doing it on a hunch - the camera cannot really be tilted backwards properly. Luckily, there's a TPP camera view to let you know what's what. Still, the cars (and one bike) I've driven so far seemed to be terribly heavy on the controls, sometimes impossible to manoeuvre with anything higher than moderate speeds. But maybe that's just me. Also, sometimes I got the feeling like traffic just got bugged, not to mention that if you park on the side of the lane, I did not notice anyone at least once trying to drive pass around the car - they just clog up the street.
- Combat:
Watching the pre-release gameplay vids, I was hoping for a fast-paced combat system. After first launch, I thought it must have been directed, because it did not seem to be possible to play it this way. However, with some time and getting used to the mechanic, it is totally possible - just takes some practice. What I've found especially tough to do at the beginning was utilizing the Quickhacks on-the-go, but you can get used to that. Granted, this was never meant to be a typical shooter game we are all used to, but gunplay feels heavy, without much finese to it... perhaps as it well should, though. As to the AI, I think it's very persistently stuck in a role-system - melee guys will rush you head on, guys with guns will try to pin you and flank, snipers will try to keep their range, so one may say that it works as intended. Nothing fancy though. Someone in some other review said that AI does not react to blood... then again, it can be explained alone with the world setting, seeing how brutal it is.
- Stealth:
It is a very typical crouch mode - hide behind something, don't get spotted. When someone is spotting you, hide back or try to use a quickhack to distract them fast. I didn't notice lights or shadows to change anything, but maybe that's just me (wasn't sneaking that much, really).
- Quest approach:
There are different options to completing a mission, or "gig" as they are called in Cyberpunk. There are possibilities to ambush, go super stealthy, full gung-ho or utilize hacking (hostile towards enemies or like hacking into cameras or turrets, etc.). It's helpful to read through quest briefs to get to know what is actually expected - if you do it properly, you get a cash bonus later on. Now, the synopsis of gigs are often pretty much the same, but since the settings vary I didn't get the impression that the quest giver is playing fetch with me.
- Implants:
Implants are sadly a downer, considering an implant-oriented world. There are a few that give you some cooler options like slowing down etc, but mostly it's just bringing up a stat here and there (hp, critical chance, stamina, etc). And the few implants you can mod (hmm... eyeballs and melee weapons) are too few and lacking variability.

IMMERSION:
No... nope. Nowhere near as advertised. Games like GTA or Skyrim were more immersive than Cyberpunk 2077. And in the latter, you could actually create your own journey. Here, it is a dynamic yet beaten path you have to follow. You cannot really just stay idle and enjoy the view, unless you really want to just stand and glare around. You want to sit down? Unless it's scripted, you can't. All this talk about, somewhat enforced, FPP was suggesting that immersion is going to be a big thing in this game. Debunked hyped ad, sadly.

WHERE'S JOHNNY?
I was hoping for Johnny Silverhand to be more existent and prevalent without anything scripted happening. The voice inside my head that triggers up, only when it is meant to be, kind of defeats the purpose. That went out wrong... You know what I mean.

SUMMARY
There's quite a lot of criticism in my wall of text. There are bugs, some things are done weirdly, some stuff doesn't make sense. And now, here's the kicker. That is the game I was waiting for years. I love the genre mix, both Cyberpunk theme and RPG approach. Are there bugs? Yeah, like with most AAA games released lately. Will they be fixed? I hope so... As for the current state of things (late December 2020), you should think twice before buying... I like hype that produces the promised experience, and this is not the case. Is it a good game? Yeah. Is it a great game? On some levels. Is it the best game ever? Definitely not. Can you enjoy it? I don't know, I did, even though it could have been so much more.

One of the most engaging space strategy games I have ever played (and I do remember Star Wars Rebellion). It may involve some micro managing here and there, but all in all it is a pleasant ride consisting of exploration, diplomacy, policy creation, colonization and of course warfare. Where the basic game may not seem enough, there's plenty of great mods in the Workshop. Update schedule is reasonable, so it's nicely playable even with customized games.