Hello everyone! After playing through Cyberpunk 2077 I just need to write my own review. I think it maybe adressed slightly more to other studios that are planning to make a game in cyberpunk genre than to CDPR itself, because it's a bit late to remake the game completely.
I rated the game 4/5 on GOG, and to be more specific – I gave 3 for the game itself plus 1 for the effort. CDPR wanted to create something unachiavable and now we all see the result.
SPOILERS ALERT.
So, what exactly was unachievable in such game? Why there are so many bugs that sometimes not just absurd or funny, but also interfer with story and playthough? The answer is simple – the result they wanted to have cannot be achieved even with all the modern game development tools. CDPR wanted a huge living open world city with crowds of people and car traffic mixed with cinematic non-linear story mixed with RPG gameplay. Give me a break! How are you going to mix all of this in one game without getting a buggy mess as a result? You would need like 10000 of people and 20 years of hard work to make something really great with goals like these. You may say "Hey, but there is another open world cyberpunk game with truly ideal production quality – Mirror Edge: Catalist!". But let's face it - even Mirror Edge: Catalist developers didn't dare to set their goals too high. ME:C is not open world in fact – your presence in the huge city is limited to the rooftops and simple building interriors. All car traffic is just a number of small low poly models far below, and you don't have AI-driven crowds out there. Finally, this game RPG elements are very limited and story is linear. ME:C developers set achievable goals and created a perfect cyberpunk game as a result. CDPR wanted to mix several games in one, and as a result it didn't become very good in each of its different aspects.
V's story is quite good, as well as the stories of other main characters, and these stories are not lenear. But how exactly crowds and cars on the streets, tons of similar and boring side quests help the main stories? Do they make the stories any better? No, on the contrary, after few attempts of exploring and making side activities I found myself rushing through the City and using fast trevel points just to push the story forward instead of looking around and explore. This open world simply isn't good enough to make exploration interesting because other game aspects required developers' working time to be taken from making the open world interesting. And as you can see other game aspects suffer as well, because making even such limited open cyberpunk world required huge amount of time. The story is not an exception unfortunately. It's good, like I said, but without all its flaws it could be perfect. What flaws am I talking about? Let's for example look at the ending where V takes Rogue's place. It's written poorly. V becomes the boss, and the boss's job is to plan and manage, not to take a solo mission job with almost no chances to survive. But somehow V takes this mission and says she/he have nothing to loose anymore, while she/he actually has plenty to loose at this point, especially with successfully completed Judy's and Panam's stories. This ending is not just flawed, but also too short and unclear – developers simply didn't have time to make something better. Let's also look at another flaw as well – it goes through the whole story like a fox through your apartment. In the very beginning of the game V already knows that she/he has few weeks to live, but somehow willing to take side jobs, take part in illegal fights, street races, and help police to fight criminal activity. But in fact V cannot afford to lose even one minute of her/his time in such condition – to oppose this is to oppose simple logic, and even saying that it's just a game's conventionality doesn't help. If developers would plan their goals more carefully, they could spend time to build more advanced story around V slowly realizing what's wrong with him/her, and gaining full understanding of situation close to the ending, not in it's very beginning. And it's not just about flaws. Existing story is not as cinematic as it could be would they spend enough time for this. What is more important – open world or story? You can't have both here, it's not a Witcher game where the most of the open world is just hills and forests generated by SpeedTree.
Well, maybe at least RPG part of Cyberpunk 2077 is brilliant? Nope. When your stealth skill tree doesn't give you much stealth advantage, or you have items and skills designed to help underwater while you have almost zero underwater encounters, or your sunglasses give you more armor than a metal helmet, or killing the final boss is as easy as kicking some asses in a random open world encounter – something is clearly wrong. And again – where would developers get time to make perfect RPG system when they decided to spend tons of time for open world and cinematic story?
Cyberpunk 2077 is a good game, but not as good as I was expecting. I was hoping to see the best cyberpunk game of all times. This franchise has great potential, but I'm afraid it requires full reboot without repeating past mistakes, not patches, DLCs or sequels.
