Recent reviews by 13pm

Despite all the flaws this game has (and there are quite a few), I can't help but love it.
For the freedom of choice it gives you, for how creative it allows you to get when solving different problems it throws at you.
It is a true RPG with choices and consequences, some of which are absolutely gut-wrenching.

Voice acting is just great for the most part. Animations could be improved, especially cinematics and facial animations for your character who ends up making dumb cringey griimaces 90% of the time.
Act 1 is amazing. But then things start to become less polished, and when you reach act 3, you can clearly see a lot of things were cut. And what was left was rushed. By the very end of the game you feel like the devs were just tired of it all and just tried to wrap it up as soon as possible.

There are some bugs, some minor wrong NPS reactions, weird triggers (like how's everyone in the camp is hitting on you), etc. Nothing game-breaking, but a little bit immersion-breaking.

This game can be very unforgiving at times. The learning curve can be steep, the difficulty is very uneven. If you are looking for a casual play, that's definitely not a game for you. It doesn't hold your hand and sometimes does a very poor job at explaining how things work. Turn-based combat is not for everyone too, although I love it.

But again, I can easily forgive all these flaws just for the sheer amount of fun I had with it. There hasn't been quite a game like this in decades. You can clearly see that Larian lives by the same motto Black Isle did back in a day: "By gamers, for gamers". It's the labour of love and passion for good games.

It could've been better, it could've been more. It's not perfect, but it's still amazing. One of the best RPGs in years and an absolute must play.

A bucket of new content.

SHIVERS: The bleak colors and muffled sounds of a once great city. The decay and decadence. It is the place to finally drown in and meet your true self.

INLAND EMPIRE: This is the feeling that will stay with you for years, you know...

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Disco Elysium is one of the best games ever made.

Cyberpunk 2077 is truly amazing in certain aspects but is seriously underwhelming in many other. It just tries to be too many things at once and ultimately fails to do so.

In a nutshell, it's a decent story-driven action game in a futuristic setting.

It's not really a cyberpunk game. The whole "cyberpunk" theme in the game is rather shallow and superficial. The core feats of the genre are just barely present.
Remove the implants and other cyber enhancements and the game world doesn't change much.

Take cyberpshychosis for example: this could be a very rich ground to explore the conflict of flesh vs tech, transhumanism, how corporations and overconsumerism can ruin someone's life, "what makes a human human" question. But all we have in Cyberpunk 2077 is ultitmately monster contracts from the Witcher 3, re-skinned. And to tell the truth, even those often had interesting stories behind them, which is definitely not the case here.

The world doesn't really feel dystopian either. There's no visible conflict or struggle. Only a couple of areas look grim and have this "high tech, low life" vibe, but you don't visit them too often unless you are interested in grinding. You are constantly told about the evil corporations, the corporate wars, but you can't really see how that affects the world now, so you could care less.

It's not an RPG either (and even CDPR admitted that to a certain degree). Character development is pretty much limited to purchasing combat-oriented perks, your dialogue choices don't really matter for the major part of the game. The "quests" are rather linear missions where you'd be following the map marker and doing what you are told to do. The only difference from, say, GTA series is that you have to click "F" from time to time to progress through the dialogues.

That being said, the way the story is presented is one of the best I've seen in games for years. That's one of the aspects in which Cyberpunk 2077 truly shines. Story characters look amazing, the dialogues are well-staged, the possibility to move and/or look around when talking adds to the immersion. The story itself may not be the strongest ever, but it's still rather captivating.

The city looks great as well, the environmental artists did an amazing job here. Some areas simply look fantastic.
But it's a dead city. Just a facade, an interactive theatrical scenery for the story. Perhaps if the game was structured more like the first Mafia games, it wouldn't be so appalling.

But that's where Cyberpunk 2077 just falls victim of the ambitions of its developers. They wanted it to be so many things at once, but pretty much everything besides the presentation part is either broken or underwhelming at best. Terrible driving and vehicle physics. Annoying and unrewarding looter-shooter mechanics. Broken crafting and in-game economy. Non-existent AI and NPC routines.

The gangs are just different types of mobs, with "monster nests", "treasures" and "bandit camps" making an unwelcome return from the Witcher 3, there's no complexity or substance to that.

There's no innovation either. If you've played Deus Ex, Watch Dogs, GTA and, of course, the Witcher series, you'll see some direct quotes. It's not bad per se, but each of these games does things much better than Cyberpunk 2077.

I could spend another hour listing every single game design element that is broken or problematic in detail, but that's just pointless, there's too many of those.

Yes, the game is also buggy. But no AAA title released these days is flawless. The bugs can and will be fixed, as hopefully will the awkward UI and key bindings. But the mechanics? The core game elements? I dunno. It seems it will take CDPR at least another year of crunches to do so. I highly doubt they do that.

All in all, if you throw away all the fantasies and lies about the truly groundbreaking immersive cyberpunk RPG in which you can do anything and your every action will have consequences, it is still possible to enjoy this game. If you treat it as an interactive movie, it's more than enjoyable. But I can't recommend it for anything else it pretends to be. And since this makes up to 70% of the game, the overall recommendation is a no for now.

I have very mixed feelings about this game. It started promising, but then turned out to be a major letdown. The last episode specifically.
This game does some things better than its predecessor, but in many ways it's worse.

THE LOOK
They've improved lip sync and some character models look more detailed than in the original LiS. However, this is very uneven. There are many low-res muddy textures, one particular male character looks very bad. Overall, many new characters look comical and unrealistic. Something's wrong with their body proportions. E.g. bouncer, the guys who attack Chloe during the concert, the main villain. I mean, the original LiS wasn't about 100% realism either, but there were no such grotesque-looking characters. And you cannot just take them seriously,

Body animations are worse than in the original game. When people are hugging, for example, it really feels like you play a game from the early 2000s or something. And in many other cases character movements just feel awkward. There were some clunky animations in the original LiS, but overall it felt much more smooth and added to immersion.

For the game that pretends to be an interactive movie these things are deal-breaking. I am not mentioning the lack of shadows, jarring close-ups on low-poly and low-res body parts and other things like this.
I even reinstalled the original game, because at first I thought I might be imagining things, No, I wasn't.

PERFORMANCE
I have a GTX970, and the game constantly stutters, suffers from frame rate drops, even on the lowest graphics settings. That's some poor optimization.

THE GAMEPLAY
I felt like this game was much more streamlined than the previous one. I guess this is mostly due to the lack of time rewind mechanics. This one felt like yet another Telltale game. Despite there are couple of more or less meaningful choices, many other choices don't really matter.
The fact that the ending is affected by the choice you make in the middle of the game is nice, but at the same time you cannot really guess that this particular choice will affect this specific thing in the end. That makes you feel somewhat betrayed. E.g. in the Witcher 3 you can see how your choices affected the ending, it's more of a pattern of your choices throughout the game. But here it's just one choice, which is, you know, very random.

The talking mini-game is too easy, it definitely lack depth. Nothing compared to the conversational challenges in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, for example. Not even close. Another problem with these conversational options is that they are often not the ones that you would really like to choose. However, the biggest issue is that these conversations don't really affect anything, Do those or not, you will still progress through the game.

Oh, and you cannot restart from a specific chapter, only full episode.

THE STORY AND THE CHARACTERS
The first episode was good, except for the forced and somewhat ridiculous ending. I get what they wanted to show, but the representation was unrealistic, it looked like the trash can was filled with gasoline or something.
The second one was okay, nothing too special.
And then the third episode came out. Oh man. Acting became a mess (e.g. Rachel's father), sometimes it felt like voice actors were too tired to act. Also, many times the lines... were... read... so... slowly... that... you... could... feel... like... they... were... trying... to... artificially... make... the... game... longer. Combined with some far-fetched plot "twists" it was really tedious. Several times I was just eager to speed the things up or even skip some scenes. And I'm definitely not the one who usually does that. The whole scene with this guy following Chloe and locking the door was a continious cringe. Bad, bad writing.

There are some plot holes, far-fetched things and inconsistencies with the original LiS.

For me, all of that led to that I didn't feel that involved in the story, attached to the characters. That's the worst thing that could happen with a game that basically is a story.

Overall, I think the game is overrated. I can not say I totally don't recommend it - there are some nice moments, and for those who loved the original game it would be great to reconnect with the familiar characters. And I think that's why many people give it thumbs up here. And it's cheap.
But at the same time I can't recommend it either. Besides the nostalgic value, it's a lackluster. A mediocre game with no twists both story- and gameplay wise.

5/10

Wow. Amazing experience.
This is a game and not a game in a sense videogames are called so. You can beat it and you can not beat it. There is a storyline, but there's no storyline.
The voice acting is fantastic. Great humor and many unexpected twists.
It's all about choices and consequences. Not your typical Bioware-RPG-style choices and consequences. Real choices. And real consequences.

This is a real game changer. In every meaning.
An absolute must.