Posted February 23, 2021
The good:
Since I started my playthrough of the game I've been in no hurry to get to the end, opting instead to complete almost every possible quest in the game (minus the stupidly difficult unfun unbalanced brawling matches). I spent a rather large amount of time deep exploring night city in every nook and cranny just about everywhere, including intense parkour to the rooftops of tall buildings and other areas one might think are totally inaccessible. Had a lot of fun with my crazy deep exploration runs, as well as finding a multitude of secrets and random stuff left by the devs to find.
I really enjoyed the main story and its twists and turns, and a number of the key characters in particular Johnny who was fantastic. A few days ago I opted to trigger the final point of no return and chose my path to the end. I wont mention any spoilers nor what ending I got as I don't want to ruin it for anyone else, suffice to say it was a bit of a surprise for me and not what I expected. The story itself is the strong point of this game IMHO.
Night City is amazingly huge, and just when you think you know one area of the city then you discover a new vertical layer of it, or an alley you didn't notice before that leads to a labyrinth of new areas you wouldn't have known were there, new walkways that are over other walkways, rooftops, underground tunnels, etc. It's quite a complex place with a lot to discover. In fact despite the intense amount of detailed exploration and wandering I did, I'm certain that there are tonnes of places that were right under my nose that I missed and might discover on a future play of the game.
I also enjoyed a lot of the side quests and optional missions and random things that are there if you want to do them, including some hidden missions that do not show up on the map or hand hold you to figure them out. One of them in particular was very challenging to figure out but I managed to eventually get through it.
In summary I enjoyed the story of Cyberpunk and the characters, and the overall aspects of Night City itself, and have a lot of good memories from my 2.5 month long playthrough of about 800 hours total.
The bad:
There is so much I could say here that wouldn't fit into a single forum post so I'm going to try and keep it short. Having played the game for as many hours as I have, it is ultra clear to me that this game was released at least 1 to 2 years before it was finished. It is "alpha" quality or early "beta" quality at best. The game has more bugs in it than every single game I've ever played on PC in my life combined, including Skyrim and other Bethesda games combined. The number of bugs is shocking in fact. Surprisingly while I know a lot of people had the game crash a lot, I personally only had it crash maybe a dozen or so times, most of the time while trying to take photos in photo mode. One crash was my own fault due to computer configuration, 2 of them were due to video driver problems and the rest were game bugs (Watchdog timer timeout).
The absolute worst thing in the game that I literally hate so much I want to punch an NCPD officer right in the face in real life... is the NCPD. They serve no useful purpose in the game other than to break your game immersion and piss you the hell off spawning in 3 inches behind you for accidentally bumping someone whom you wouldn't have if the NPC AI didn't suck balls so bad. Games from 20 years ago had better pedestrian, police and other NPC/car AI as videos people have posted online have proven beyond any reasonable doubt (quite sadly). The NCPD randomly spawning in and killing me for little to no reason whatsoever and for the slightest or even no reason at all, was thee single worst part of the game that ruined the experience for me and from what I can tell from searching Google - for tonnes of other players too.
If/when I do another playthrough of the game, I am absolutely going to install the "no cops" mod on the Nexus before even thinking about it as NCPD offers absolutely zero value in the game and just destroys the experience for me at least. Alternatively I want to play a game that ONLY has NCPD in it, dnd with a godmode cheat enabled so I can just do nothing but violently hunt down and kill 1000s of NCPD officers like a cyberpsycho psychopath for hours on end.
What I'm really trying to say is: I HATE THE FRIGGEN NCPD AND THEIR SHITTY AI FROM 1994, PLEASE REMOVE IT THANKS!
Ok, I feel better now. :)
Now pwdestrians.... their AI is atrocious. Terribad. Where are these 1000 NPCs that have real lives and do day to day stuff the devs promised? They don't exist in Night City anywhere, just dumbasses that walk in circles bumping into each otehr and bumping into walls and stuff mindlessly. And why does every single person in Night City have an option to hit F to talk to them and 99% of them just tell you to "fuck off" or "Do you need a friend?" or some other ultra rude comment? Even if you don't talk to them they'll say rude ass shit to you. The end result is that I just started hating everyone in the game pretty much and had to save my game a lot more often so I could shoot rude assholes in the face, in case the NCPD got me after.
So much for immersion.
Anyhow, Keanu was awesome and the main story is great, it was fun exploring the city. The city might take place in 2077, but the game AI is from 1877.
I do want more Night City, but I want bugfixed non-shitty-AI Night City. I want what the devs promised Night City. I have some level of faith that they'll deliver some or all of this over time and so I'm hopeful, but I need to see them deliver a lot more now first in order to overturn my disappointment before I'm totally convinced.
If you're on the fence about buying the game, I'd recommend waiting a year for them to fix it first, then buy it on a seasonal sale.after you build or upgrade to a new computer if you don't already have a current or last gen decent system that can get at least 30fps out of it. No sense spending $80 for the game in its current buggy and incomplete state even though it is totally possible to have a lot of fun with it (and I did). It isn't all fun mind you, but rather a mixture of fun, an earth shattering amount of bugs and insane frustration.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt still remains the best game I've ever played and IMHO the best game of all time ever made, and despite Cyberpunk kicking up the graphics and scale/scope of some things etc., it doesn't hold a candle to the Witcher 3 even remotely although I hope within a year or two they'll have patched and updated Cyberpunk so that it much more can hold its own.
Final review score taking all of the good things I loved and all of the things that I hated into account, as well as the bugs and problems:
Final score: 65 out of 100
If they do actually fix all of the bugs in the game, fix the crappy AI, fix the horrible user interface for the inventory and crafting systems and make them more useful, add as many of the missing features that they promised as possible, then I think the game has the potential to become 90 out of 100, but it is just nowhere near there yet and has a long way to go. Fortunately they have hundreds of millions of dollars now to spend on making that happen if they are serious about this franchise in their long term game plan as a game studio.
Posted my review here rather than in the review section of the website because this is editable over time (as|if) the game improves, plus bidirectional discussion can occur here unlike the limited review system.
Since I started my playthrough of the game I've been in no hurry to get to the end, opting instead to complete almost every possible quest in the game (minus the stupidly difficult unfun unbalanced brawling matches). I spent a rather large amount of time deep exploring night city in every nook and cranny just about everywhere, including intense parkour to the rooftops of tall buildings and other areas one might think are totally inaccessible. Had a lot of fun with my crazy deep exploration runs, as well as finding a multitude of secrets and random stuff left by the devs to find.
I really enjoyed the main story and its twists and turns, and a number of the key characters in particular Johnny who was fantastic. A few days ago I opted to trigger the final point of no return and chose my path to the end. I wont mention any spoilers nor what ending I got as I don't want to ruin it for anyone else, suffice to say it was a bit of a surprise for me and not what I expected. The story itself is the strong point of this game IMHO.
Night City is amazingly huge, and just when you think you know one area of the city then you discover a new vertical layer of it, or an alley you didn't notice before that leads to a labyrinth of new areas you wouldn't have known were there, new walkways that are over other walkways, rooftops, underground tunnels, etc. It's quite a complex place with a lot to discover. In fact despite the intense amount of detailed exploration and wandering I did, I'm certain that there are tonnes of places that were right under my nose that I missed and might discover on a future play of the game.
I also enjoyed a lot of the side quests and optional missions and random things that are there if you want to do them, including some hidden missions that do not show up on the map or hand hold you to figure them out. One of them in particular was very challenging to figure out but I managed to eventually get through it.
In summary I enjoyed the story of Cyberpunk and the characters, and the overall aspects of Night City itself, and have a lot of good memories from my 2.5 month long playthrough of about 800 hours total.
The bad:
There is so much I could say here that wouldn't fit into a single forum post so I'm going to try and keep it short. Having played the game for as many hours as I have, it is ultra clear to me that this game was released at least 1 to 2 years before it was finished. It is "alpha" quality or early "beta" quality at best. The game has more bugs in it than every single game I've ever played on PC in my life combined, including Skyrim and other Bethesda games combined. The number of bugs is shocking in fact. Surprisingly while I know a lot of people had the game crash a lot, I personally only had it crash maybe a dozen or so times, most of the time while trying to take photos in photo mode. One crash was my own fault due to computer configuration, 2 of them were due to video driver problems and the rest were game bugs (Watchdog timer timeout).
The absolute worst thing in the game that I literally hate so much I want to punch an NCPD officer right in the face in real life... is the NCPD. They serve no useful purpose in the game other than to break your game immersion and piss you the hell off spawning in 3 inches behind you for accidentally bumping someone whom you wouldn't have if the NPC AI didn't suck balls so bad. Games from 20 years ago had better pedestrian, police and other NPC/car AI as videos people have posted online have proven beyond any reasonable doubt (quite sadly). The NCPD randomly spawning in and killing me for little to no reason whatsoever and for the slightest or even no reason at all, was thee single worst part of the game that ruined the experience for me and from what I can tell from searching Google - for tonnes of other players too.
If/when I do another playthrough of the game, I am absolutely going to install the "no cops" mod on the Nexus before even thinking about it as NCPD offers absolutely zero value in the game and just destroys the experience for me at least. Alternatively I want to play a game that ONLY has NCPD in it, dnd with a godmode cheat enabled so I can just do nothing but violently hunt down and kill 1000s of NCPD officers like a cyberpsycho psychopath for hours on end.
What I'm really trying to say is: I HATE THE FRIGGEN NCPD AND THEIR SHITTY AI FROM 1994, PLEASE REMOVE IT THANKS!
Ok, I feel better now. :)
Now pwdestrians.... their AI is atrocious. Terribad. Where are these 1000 NPCs that have real lives and do day to day stuff the devs promised? They don't exist in Night City anywhere, just dumbasses that walk in circles bumping into each otehr and bumping into walls and stuff mindlessly. And why does every single person in Night City have an option to hit F to talk to them and 99% of them just tell you to "fuck off" or "Do you need a friend?" or some other ultra rude comment? Even if you don't talk to them they'll say rude ass shit to you. The end result is that I just started hating everyone in the game pretty much and had to save my game a lot more often so I could shoot rude assholes in the face, in case the NCPD got me after.
So much for immersion.
Anyhow, Keanu was awesome and the main story is great, it was fun exploring the city. The city might take place in 2077, but the game AI is from 1877.
I do want more Night City, but I want bugfixed non-shitty-AI Night City. I want what the devs promised Night City. I have some level of faith that they'll deliver some or all of this over time and so I'm hopeful, but I need to see them deliver a lot more now first in order to overturn my disappointment before I'm totally convinced.
If you're on the fence about buying the game, I'd recommend waiting a year for them to fix it first, then buy it on a seasonal sale.after you build or upgrade to a new computer if you don't already have a current or last gen decent system that can get at least 30fps out of it. No sense spending $80 for the game in its current buggy and incomplete state even though it is totally possible to have a lot of fun with it (and I did). It isn't all fun mind you, but rather a mixture of fun, an earth shattering amount of bugs and insane frustration.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt still remains the best game I've ever played and IMHO the best game of all time ever made, and despite Cyberpunk kicking up the graphics and scale/scope of some things etc., it doesn't hold a candle to the Witcher 3 even remotely although I hope within a year or two they'll have patched and updated Cyberpunk so that it much more can hold its own.
Final review score taking all of the good things I loved and all of the things that I hated into account, as well as the bugs and problems:
Final score: 65 out of 100
If they do actually fix all of the bugs in the game, fix the crappy AI, fix the horrible user interface for the inventory and crafting systems and make them more useful, add as many of the missing features that they promised as possible, then I think the game has the potential to become 90 out of 100, but it is just nowhere near there yet and has a long way to go. Fortunately they have hundreds of millions of dollars now to spend on making that happen if they are serious about this franchise in their long term game plan as a game studio.
Posted my review here rather than in the review section of the website because this is editable over time (as|if) the game improves, plus bidirectional discussion can occur here unlike the limited review system.
