crashes

yes

Oh man, I'm not sure why all the glowing reviews. This game looks like Realm of the Mad God gone Tarkov except the maps are small but they kept the load times. 1+ minute load times are unacceptable when the sprites are about 7 pixels and the maps take 45 seconds to traverse. Kinda a poor experience for $20.

Fun horror experience for 5 bucks. Nice puzzles that aren't too convoluted, a balance between easy and hard.

Has a good "Backrooms" atmosphere. Though, I'm not sure how loyal it is to the original lore... but I don't necessarily expect it to be.

Worst part is the ending... But at least the ride there is enjoyable.

Oh man, where to start?

What comes to mind after playing this game, beating it once, finishing all the side missions and content... is that it was such a shame it didn't spend a little bit more time in the oven. There are many aspects of it that are excellent... and there are others where you can see they cut corners in order to finish it. Though, perhaps the engine simply wasn't all that capable to begin with.

The storytelling is phenomenal. Each person will experience it differently based on their personal worldview and philosophy. There's no definitive good or bad when it comes to the main story and how you feel about it will depend on your personal beliefs. Johnny Silverhand embodies this sentiment, as he is either a legendary rebel or a narcissistic terrorist depending on what the player thinks. Cyberpunk 2077 has told one of my favorite stories, and I don't expect anything to come close any time soon.

The voice actors and writers did their job extremely well. The characters are rational, real, and mature. Their voices sound great, and everything seamlessly comes together to make it as if they're real people. The dialogue is interesting and clever throughout.

The worldbuilding is superb as well. Whereas some settings from other stories have references that can be copied from, Night City is very imagined. Whether you're in a grimy diner, luxury hotel suite, back-alley gangster den, or coasting the desert badlands, the world is very immersive and there is a ton of detail, small and large.

Now, let's get to some of the shortcomings...

First of all, in it's entirety, the game feels like it's missing the first act out of three or four. It feels like they were desperate to shove the player into the narrative rather than let you ease into it and fully understand the world and your position in it. As a result, I found it very hard to get into the game or care about anything initially. Right off the bat your character has a terminal illness and it creates an air of futility and frustration and you have nothing to motivate you to pursue survival other than life itself.

Secondly, it generally didn't feel like alternative dialogue choices had much of an effect on the story most of the time and I feel like that limits the game's replayability simply because so much of the game is dialogue to the point of feeling more like a story game than an RPG shooter. Apparently, some dialogue choices affect possible mission rewards but it seems in a way that is arbitrary and you have no way of knowing.

The combat and movement is subpar, and it's hard to tell if it's a result of the time-crunch or the engine couldn't do any better. The movement and combat almost felt like I was playing doom 64 at times. However, it's still decent fun getting into a large firefight, or using cool tech-weapons, cybernetics, and smart guns. Things just didn't feel that solid. The melee boxing mechanics were somewhat garbage as you can simply stunlock opponents. Enemy punches come in at about 2mph which just looks off.

The stealth gameplay was okay, I am not a fan of stealth in games regardless. Cyberpunk's has probably been my favorite but that's not saying much considering there are many tools to strong-arm your way through stealth encounters and there are plenty of buggy things going on with detection and grappling mechanics. Usually the worst case scenario is a sneaky camera placement spots you and you simply have to reload a save once or twice.

The quickhacking mechanic is pretty neat. Think of it as a sort of magic system that uses a mana pool (ram) and cooldowns. The only thing that disappointing me there was the enemies don't use it on you much. It'd be cool to have a mechanic where you have to counter-hack enemy netrunners. Oh, and at times the scanning mechanic was buggy and either couldn't scan or scanned the wrong thing in its reticle.

Alternatively/ to having a cyberdeck and quickhacking enemies, you can have a Berserk or Sandevistan ability. Berserk seems entirely useless from what I could tell... and Sandevistan is cool and useful combat-wise but the cyberdeck gives you so many more options and utility.

The breach-protocol hacking puzzle system has been some of the worst I've ever seen in a game. Starting off, all the puzzles are easy as pie, but later on they become more complex and your upgrades don't keep up. Also, some of the puzzles are not even possible to complete because I suppose the code they used to randomly generate puzzles wasn't good enough to guarantee there to be a solution, and it's a pain in the butt when there is no solution. As the input code becomes longer, the chance of not having a solution increases.

The amount of content feels slightly lacking. 100 hours in and I've completed absolutely everything-save for playing through alternative endings. A lot of that content was slightly repetitive too, not that I mind necessarily, but I'm not exactly going to remember a single NCPD bounty. There are no repeatable missions, heists, etc. Simply restart the game if you want more. And it's not necessarily a bad experience, doing the same small things, driving around Night City, etc, just not as fun or memorable as the rest of the game.

The stat system felt a bit underwhelming to me... especially how they were incorporated to weapon perks. Most of the gun types befit off of the 'reflex' stat, while all the crafting perks are all over the place. You can't really "have it all," and a lot of the perks felt necessary to a decent build. Then again... endgame does not pose much of a challenge, so perhaps optimization isn't necessary. The crafting system is rudimentary yet acceptable.

Alright, maximum nitpick accomplished.

In conclusion, I think I'd summarize Cyberpunk 2077 by saying the masterpiece story is overshadowed by some of the other lesser aspects of the game at times. It's a shame, because the universe is quite rich, and I think many more games could've been spawned from this one, and I think it'll be hard for CDPR to recover their reputation, especially with this IP. If you can grab the game on sale it's definitely worth it, perhaps even not on sale depending on what 60$ is worth to you. I'll certainly be looking forward to a possible sequel.

Game is decent and shows a lot of promise but still needs a lot of work and possibly rework.

Overall, the game is an enjoyable experience if you're into turn based open world RPG games with a pixel art aesthetic. However, after you've explored the world things become a bit of a slog with the movement system. To explain further; the map is comprised of tiles and each map tile has many little squares, and moving to each square requires a turn. Even in the best case scenario you spend a lot of time moving from tile to tile, in game and out. Worst case scenario, you've traveled many tiles, some of which have passive and aggressive npcs in it that cause you to "lag" when walking. Then, perhaps you get unlucky or you weren't paying attention, you get jumped by strong bandits or dangerous wild animals and can't escape, dying. You then have to repeat all that travelling all over again and it's quite boring. Could be easily fixed if there was some sort of better fast travel or scouting system. As of now you just get hints from NPC as to where points of interest might be, but the map is very vast even as rudimentary as it is now for that to be very reliable.

As far as I can tell, that's really the main fundamental issue with the game. The only other complaint I'd have is that loot from dungeons is lackluster and all your top gear is simply purchased from towns... And perhaps that the dodge and block animations aren't distinct enough from each other but I can see those things changing with further development.

Otherwise the world design is very rich, the art style is phenomenal, and I'll be looking forward to future updates.

Low quality and boring right off the bat.

microraptors

While I'm overjoyed to see competition to a game like EFT, this game could use some serious tweaking. The profit model is brilliant... Free base game, cosmetic microtransactions, seasonal battlepasses. The maps/regions are neat and diverse, the structures are immersive. The plot makes enough sense.

However, the gun design is subpar, as it seems the way it's intended to work is that the guns are supposed to be very bad without mods, which is a pain when you have to invest more money into mods than some of the guns and if you die it takes time buying and re-equipping the same mods since there is no loadout system. The reload animation is the same whether or not a round should be in the chamber. I dislike when a game is supposed to be futuristic yet modern firearms seem like they'd be a lot more effective.

Some utilities are redundant or outright useless. The heavy mining tool is heavier than the default pickaxe and for some reason mines SLOWER. The mineral scanner is useless when you just remember what parts of the map have ore-the nodes are not random and don't change, you can spot specific ore with your eyes, and to make it worse you need to buy mods for it to detect ores other than nickle. This wouldn't be so abysmal if you didn't just lose it on death, or weighed 10 units. At the very least they should make it a belt item that you can't lose, because right now it's reeaaally bad. It even makes a sound audible to other players when you're using it in its lengthy pulses.

The armor economy is strange... as you can easily unlock the ability to buy tier 2 and 3 guns but as for armor you need to craft them which costs money and time. Right now armor is a bit simplistic, as there are 3 kinds, healing, agile, and normal. The specialized variants just have a bit less damage reduction. As far as I'm aware, there is no visual effect of armor either. It feels like a wasted opportunity for monetization too, as they could implement paid cosmetics that change based on tier or type of armor. Oh, and I can't forget to mention it seems like nobody has any clue how armor works mathematically. Sure... high tier armor absorbs damage from lower tier weapons.... but by how much? What about weapons with penetration equal to armor value? Who knows?

The matches being continuous is... interesting. An aggravating aspect is when you need to find something specific but the location you find it at has been looted before you even loaded into the match. Or when you repeatedly get people spawning on your extraction, preventing you from escaping. It is not all to uncommon to spawn, someone sees your drop pod and meets you within seconds. I suspect the game tries to push players to meet each other by spawning incoming players close to the ones already in the game.

Extractions can be frustrating as well. You get two extract locations which are random, sometimes they're both very far away from your spawn, and also very far away from your objective, so you get a whole lot of walking. Many are also in difficult to reach clifftops that are out in the open. It's not uncommon for people to see your exfil coming in, wait till it lands, and then start chucking grenades inside it. The process of the ship warping in, flying over, landing, and then waiting to take off takes a bit too long. It also makes a loud sound that other players can hear when calling in extraction. I get that it's to build tension, but it's a bit ridiculous that the pilot doesn't shut the doors and take off once you get inside, what's he waiting for? A more interesting way they could've done it is to have a weapon that can disable dropships momentarily while they're on the ground rather than make it a deliberate fish-in-a-barrel scenario.

PvE feels very wonky, as meleeing hostile creatures will desynch them, causing a fake "ghost" creature to appear which won't take damage sometimes, and the real invisible creature will be nearby hitting you. A lot of the higher-tier creatures have way too much health as well, requiring many, if not dozens, of magdumps. It seems like they want them to be a threat and couldn't figure out how so they just gave them a ton of health. In the end, the PvE just feels like a nuisance and unrewarding. The real danger is players hearing you fighting creatures and shooting you with your pants down.

Where this game shines is the PvP. The gunplay is fast yet the time to kill is slow in most cases. Some weapons need balancing, as the default AR-55 is probably one of the best guns in the game. Healing and grenades need their own hotkeys. Headshots have weird multipliers that differ weapon to weapon so I have no clue how much damage they actually do. The base sniper doesn't 1 shot headshot kill somehow... Weapon tooltips have barely any information, just mag size, "damage" and penetration. No firerate, velocity, headshot multiplier, dps/dpm, hipfire rating, reload speed, nada.

The lobby "hub" isn't very useful, though it does add some immersion. For the most part it just forces you to run around vendor to vendor picking up quests or buying specific weapons. You can't even see your friends in lobby. Perhaps one day they could add more interactions. Your home and income generators are a bit boring too. Nothing changes with upgrades and the only benefits are random loot crates, currency, and inventory expansions.

With long-term updates, fixes, content, and maintenance, this game could become the next big thing that people don't stop paying. Something like EFT gets boring as each wipe progresses, but with the season and battle-pass model of this game, that could be avoided.

Right, now that the game has officially released I think I can comfortably review it in it's current state. Consider this a review for the multiplayer only.

If there's one thing positive I can say about the game is that it's free, and the battlepass is cheap. The gameplay doesn't have a lot to offer really, and there's some glaring issues too, and rewards from the battlepass are fairly thin. It's not a terrible experience if you wanna chill out a bit to some low-effort game. Ah, and the maps aren't all that bad.

I haven't really played a halo game since Reach on the 360, and a brief stint on reach for MCC before refunding the game. The general gameplay does harken back to those halo feelings with a faster, more modernized touch.

But despite releasing from beta, it still plays like a beta, or some mobile game, and here's a short summary why.

Even though I usually only having around 40ms ping, opponents will lag and jump around on my screen. I "rubberband" when using gravity lifts, lag will cause ledge-grabs to randomly fail. Lag will make it feel like my opponents have a faster firerate all of the sudden. This lag is unacceptable when every bullet matters in some trades, and it causes me to miss and die a lot. It makes melee inconsistent to the point where it is common to hit people in the back and instead of getting the "back smack" it either negates all damage somehow or counts as a regular melee.

For whatever reason there is no player collision in this game. This makes for some janky interactions in close quarters when your opponent can run away inside of you. Pretty sure even COD and Battlefield games have collision... not sure why they skipped it here.

Vehicle physics truly suck ass. Nothing has any heft to it, and if you're going faster than 20mph you're crashing and flipping over.

There is no matchmaking for specific gamemodes, this can be problematic if you fancy playing one in particular or have a battlepass challenge that is gamemode-specific.

Many of the weapons are just useless in multiplayer. The human weapons are all hitscan and are fairly well-balanced, but some of the alien weapons... they really are laughably bad, be it zero damage or the fact that they're impossible to hit anything with due to their low velocity. Some of them I regularly kill myself with unintentionally because they're such memes. No weapon is particularly cool or strategic.

They added some gadgets like grapple hook, shield, repulsor, and some boost. All people really want to use is the grapple, the others are just kinda in the game found in inconvenient spots and if you have them you're probably not going to notice or use it.

Now, I don't really care about this part... but some people are pretty upset about microtransactions. If one thing's for sure it's that they're way overpriced, usually $20 a bundle. What's more disappointing, is that a lot of the stuff isn't new, they just imported it or copied it from previous games because there were some obvious development issues... so all the good armor, including the stuff in the battle pass, is just copied from previous halo games.


Anyway, hopefully that was helpful and maybe I year from now they'll have fixed some things and my review will be positive.