1.5/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Cyberpunk 2077.

[SPOILER FREE] Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most disappointing and frustrating games I've ever played. I know I'm not supposed to pre-order games, but I was so confident after E3 2019 that this game was going to be breathtaking that I honestly didn't care at the time. Keanu Reeves, the dirty yet beautiful streets of Night City and all of the awesome looking gameplay was pointing towards Cyberpunk being incredible. I set my preorder up a few months before it was meant to release originally in April of 2020, which then followed several delays, which inevitably lead to it being released in December 2020. To say Cyberpunk released broken is an understatement. It's so widely reported about how unfinished and broken this game shipped, especially on consoles and last gen hardware, that I don't even think I need to get in depth on how absolutely busted this game was and still sort of is. Even though I mentioned that I preordered it, I never ended up playing it until January 2022, a little over a year since it had released, based on the stories I've heard from other people who had played it and the recommendation to just wait a year for it to be fixed. So... is it fixed? The short answer is not really, but it's way more complicated than a simple yes or no response. The general consensus a year ago seemed to be that this game would have been good if it were actually in a playable state at the time of It's release. This game has way more issues than just it's bugs. Things you can't retroactively fix with patches is the story, dialogue and just this general uninspired plot with bad characters. Outside of Johnny Silverhand, I can't say I connected with any of those people throughout what I played of the story. Even with Johnny Silverhand, but I'm unsure if I'm ONLY charmed by that character just because it 's Keanu Reeves playing him. V, the main character of the story, has almost no personality to them. This is a big issue that's fairly prominent with a lot of RPGs that require you to make some sort of dialogue options to progress the story. The writers don't know how to equally balance motives for a certain path compared to others, and with a big game like this you'll end up having to write a lot of different paths for the game to compensate for a bunch of character types. Most of it doesn't really matter in the long term of the game, but it's clear when listening to certain lines that the writers definitely put more effort and emphasis into a certain direction than the others. Another BIG issue with this game is it's tone. You'll have some missions where a character could be dealing with some heavy things that happened to them, and then V will just get a call from someone else and start saying the most physically recoiling dialogue I've had the pleasure of hearing in recent memory. I remember playing a mission where there was a guy in an apartment dealing with the grief that came with a loss of a loved one and the objective was to make sure he was okay. Then 10 minutes later I have to destroy Flamingos on lawns because a car became schizophrenic and started thinking Garden Flamingos were going to destroy the world. The constant tonal shifts in dialogue between missions make this "gritty cyberpunk world" not mesh in the slightest with the tone that some of these missions present. Cyberpunk might have some of the worst combat in a triple A first person shooter I've ever played. You'd think with games like The Witcher in their catalog, CDPR would have figured out how to master combat. Your gun is either way too powerful, or you die in 2 shots. Usually in games like this you have to level up and collect new weapons and gear from higher level enemies. You slowly work your way up and gain better stuff to conquer the higher areas. In this, the turn to the game becoming more difficult is so incredibly drastic to where it almost feels like padding for the sake of padding without even progressing the story. This game is desperately trying to do way too much at once, as a result, it has one of the most confusing UIs and Inventory systems I've seen in a while. You have Skills, Advancements, Body Prosthetic upgrades, Armor upgrades, gun upgrades, attachments, modifications all of this stuff is just lumped together. All of which have their own associated sub menus with them. I can't for the life of me figure out what the point of half of these are. The skill menus alone became so overwhelming that I didn't even want to attempt to read all of them to work towards something. In this case, more is not a good thing. Melee combat is so botched and clunky too, to where half the time I can't tell if I landed even if my weapon clips through the enemy I'm swinging at. It is remarkable how little combat was play tested and unchanged in a year. The main plot consists of V dying and being slowly taken over by Johnny Silverhand as they share a consciousness. This is not a spoiler as it's literally in the trailers and happens really early on in the game. That concept sounds awesome for a dystopian cyberpunk game, but it's handled in the most pathetic way imaginable. There's this fake "ticking clock" element that's loosely introduced towards the beginning where someone mentions he only has "a certain amount of days before he's fully taken over by Johnny Silverhand". For a solid second I thought they were going to pull a Majora's Mask and add an actual way for time to run out, but nope, it's just something that progresses as you just lazily do main quests. I wouldn't even be so upset if every mission didn't feel the same. You go to an area, kill enemies, cutscene, kill more enemies and then there's another cutscene to wrap up the mission. you rinse and repeat this same process for nearly every mission, beat for beat sometimes. I became so fatigued when doing these missions that I honestly just stopped playing. I know I'll probably end up getting people upset for not finishing this game while still reviewing it, but I got really far into it and became so disengaged with this game where I just didn't see the point. There is no way that playing for a dozen more hours would change my rating in any significant way for the better. The side quests are both better and worse than the main story. The problems lie with the fact that they're the most copy and paste Far Cry-esque missions imaginable. Sometimes it's clear that they literally just copy and pasted missions when you do the same exact quest for someone to get the same exact reward as the other time you did this quest in a different spot. Other times you'll get fun quests like the one with GladOS or Flaming Crotch Man, but those quests are far and few between. Whenever I had a fun quest I felt like I was enjoying myself, which really put into perspective for me that I mostly was so disengaged by this game because of it's main story. I don't care about the adventures of V, even when the game desperately tries to convince me that I SHOULD care. I don't, and no matter how much the writers attempt to tell me that I should through long exposition dumps of dialogue that mean nothing to me, I simply don't care because I wasn't given a reason to in the first place. Sometimes in between missions I'd just be driving around this filthy yet visually stunning city while listening to this game's awesome score and just think about what this game COULD have been. I know this game was pushed out the door years before it should have, but even with a few extra years of development this game would have been in a similar spot story wise. I know a lot was cut, and who knows, maybe it'll become fun when they add DLCs or whatever to the game. But as it stands right now I do not recommend purchasing this game. I wish I could see the alternate universe where this game ended up being a masterpiece, cause instead we just have a big pile of disappointment.