Cyberpunk - CD Project Red

Got around to finishing this over the last few nights, as I only had around 5-6 hours of stuff left to do before the ending. It's probably around half the length of The Witcher 3 all in all (that's completing probably around half of the substantial side quests) which feels like a small mercy.

The game is, alas, a failure in most respects - graphics is perhaps its only area of unambiguous success, and even that's soured by the technical incompetence of the thing (on PS5 anyway). But what's perhaps its greatest failings beyond the hourly crashes is how it doesn't justify being either an open world game or an RPG. It's almost like it felt obliged to be these things because it's a modern AAA game from the developer of Witcher 3, rather than CDPR being able to figure out the game they wanted to make.

As an open world game it's startlingly shallow, and an ultimately uninteresting pastiche of better cyberpunk fiction. Night City is gorgeous but hollow, and none of the systems take advantage of it being open - indeed, some of the key open world systems (such as the 'wanted' system) are laughably half-baked. For a city divided into clear sections and factions, that never really factors into the gameplay itself. For all the incredible detail, the world-building is confused and under-realised. And let me tell you, if I never see the 'Bottoms Up' poster again it'll be too soon.

Similar accusations could be levelled at W3 in some regards. But when you go into somewhere like Novigrad there's a sense of place and bustle that IMO simply isn't replicated in 2077.

As an RPG, meanwhile, I couldn't have cared less. The menus are an unholy mess of items and stats. There is zero joy to levelling up in this game, as it just means you have to venture into the labyrinthine mess of menus to choose boring-as-**** upgrades which make little meaningful difference to how the game plays. Inventory management is a drag, especially when the game hurls mountains of annoying loot at you. The in-game economy seems fundamentally imbalanced - certainly if you're not actively doing the more tedious side gigs, you won't have much spare cash to buy the better cyberware upgrades (let alone cars). V herself feels like an awkward mix between authored and blank slate - the game really suffers from not having a protagonist with as rich and distinct a personality as Geralt.

If we extend the RPG element to its immersive sim aspirations, then the hacking and stealth are hugely shallow and you're better off just going in with a smart rifle blazing most of the time. Once you've used a hack once, you've seen all the emergent potential it has to offer - in other words, none. The bosses are Deus Ex Human Revolution v1.0 bad. For a game all about futuristic style at the expense of substance, it's hilarious how absolutely embarrassing your V will look throughout since fashion is aggressively tied to armour stats.

There is one single aspect where the game comes close to what the designers intended, and that's the Panam path through the game and ending. Now, this is still dragged down by some terrible action setpieces towards the end. But here, as a sort of character-focused friendship study (as a female V, it could only just be friendship) there was a satisfying arc that brought both Panam and V to a place that felt reasonably true and credible.
It's things like that that make me wonder if this game would've been better as a more linear affair - a sense amplified by the extended opening, which clearly received the lion's share of the polish and attention at the cost of almost everything else. There's an affection given to a couple of characters that, at its best, does remind you this is a CDPR game. When you reach the end of the game's handful of satisfying, expansive side missions, you can see the potential here, even if it only rarely reaches the heights of the studio's last major game.

Then you're once again back on the neon streets of Night City, and the tedium resumes until the game crashes to home screen again.