Recent reviews by Swage

due to accumulating bugs that never get fixed, I haven't even been able to play the game in 6+ months at this point. It was a great game, I'm just incredibly disappointed in Arrowhead's continued lack of response to known gamebreaking performance issues and crashes. I sincerely hope they get the game to a state that I could recommend it again.

If you enjoyed the first game, you'll love the second. It's more of the same, but with more variety, quality of life updates, and pretty satisfying puzzles with plenty of secrets to find. I haven't seen any performance issues at all yet, but I know some people have mentioned them so it's worth taking into consideration. Also, armor no longer has set bonuses, but you can make up for that with mutators which can be slotted onto your weapons instead.

I went into this game pretty blind since I never hopped on the hype train before release, and can objectively say that the game has great potential. That being said, most of that potential is not utilized at this time, and I've been enjoying the memes more than the game itself. Cyberpunk has gorgeous world design, excellent character design (apart from children, who can look like small adults), and a phenomenal soundtrack. Main quests received varying amounts of polish with some of them flowing quite well and others feeling somewhat hamfisted into place. The pacing is all over the place, and you can really feel where content was cut to make deadlines; especially with the nearly inconsequential "lifepath" system which boils you down into the "street kid" role despite your origins. In what feels like another narrative misstep and perfect example of cut content, almost all early character development is presented to you via montage, which feels like a cop out to transition out of the meaningless "lifepath" prologue.

The AI is atrocious, and most NPCs are not scripted to do anything other than cower. There is very little interaction with the world around you, so the whole city feels very shallow and fake despite it's intricately designed ambiance. The police "wanted" system simply results in police spawning endlessly on top of you if you do anything "bad", which can be as simple as defending yourself from a gang attack, looking at someone too long, or merely existing in the vicinity of a police officer. We've had better systems as far back as GTA III, and there is no excuse for it now. Especially in contrast with the scope of the game and the intent we were sold. From a gameplay perspective, most perks are unbalanced if not completely broken, and can oftentimes punish you for taking them. Many environmental pieces in game are not solid, and it's not uncommon to find yourself falling through terrain into the void. In addition, many items in the game (including what I can only assume are lore pieces such as letters, flyers, etc.) cannot be interacted with or picked up despite having an item icon. It seems like this is most often caused by the items in question being obscured in some degree by other geometry within the world, and the loot system does not offer any workarounds. I had to mention these points because they are not bugs; that is how the game was scripted to behave, and these are design oversights not glitches.

I have hope that CDPR will fix themselves eventually, but I cannot recommend this game at this time, and have uninstalled it on my own PC until they begin to update the game. Apart from the bugs, it just lacks too much to be enjoyable at this point and I'm hoping to return and play it in the future (pending future updates) before I sour my feelings towards it irreparably.

One of the few games who's evolution I have been genuinely impressed by. We all know launch was abysmal, but Hello Games has more than made up for it as far as I'm concerned, and shows no signs of stopping their active development (which they also haven't charged for). VR integration could use a little fine tuning, but the game is exceptionally enjoyable on both a headset or flat screen.

One of the most user friendly and natural feeling VR games that I've ever played, and easily the best looking. I have no real complaints, which is rare for me.