Recent reviews by SmashMaster

2025 Update: it good game

2020 Review:

I'm not gonna talk about bugs or performance, because I don't care about that. Many of my favorite games are buggy as hell and run like crap.

Good stuff first:

Polished story missions - The best part of the game. It plays like a good action-adventure game when you're in a story mission. Characters are interesting and the world is well-represented. The plot is decent.

A huge world and an insane amount of content - There's probably hundreds of hours of stuff to do if you can stomach actually doing all of it. The world is huge and there's plenty to see. Night City is gorgeous to look at.

Now for the bad stuff:

Blatantly missing features - You can't customize your character after the game starts. So you can't get tattoos, a haircut, or plastic surgery. It's especially disappointing because you see NPCs with lots of awesome cyberware, like painted robotic arms/legs, or metallic skin you wish you could have, but you can't. You also can't customize or upgrade vehicles. When you're wanted, cops will teleport right in front of you. There's no consequence for going cyberpsycho and killing 100 civilians. Cops wont search for you like in GTA, and you can't get into car chases.

Leveled items and enemies - This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Two weapons may look, sound, and feel identical, but one does ten times the damage. A low-level helmet will provide less protection than a high-level fedora. Expect to be one-shot by crackheads with pea shooters if you wander into the wrong area. Basic game design says a more powerful item/character should look, sound, and feel more powerful. This is not the case in Cyberpunk 2077.

Unsatisfying combat - On lower difficulties, the combat is very easy, which is fine. On higher difficulties, most enemies are bullet sponges who take multiple headshots to kill. Expect to reload constantly because enemies take so much ammo to kill. I'd love a special difficulty where both you *and* enemies die quickly. Melee is more fun, because it dishes out real damage even on hard.

Lack of side mission variety - 90% of side missions involve going to a place to retrieve an item, rescue a person, or neutralize people. Whether you sneak in or just shoot everyone doesn't usually matter. You rarely resolve missions through dialogue, and there's very few puzzles or anything to mix things up.

My opinion:

It's still a good game. But I wish it had taken inspiration from games like Deus Ex and Fallout, rather than games like Destiny and The Division. The gameplay doesn't really fit the Cyberpunk setting. It also feels somewhat unfinished, even if you ignore bugs. CD Projekt Red will keep working on this game, so I think you should wait until it's more polished or it goes on sale.

Good games tend to have some challenge: they force you to improve your reflexes or strategy in order to win, and this makes your victory more satisfying.

Pathologic 2 challenged my strength of character.

By the 6th day, this game had stripped me of all joy and hope, and forced me to find a reason just to survive. Do you live for yourself, or for others? Do you try to improve the world, or try to enjoy it for what it is? If you must survive, then why?

Everyone's answer will be different, but here's mine: There is no beauty in suffering, but there is dignity. Having decided this, I traded my revolver for a loaf of bread, and I survived to see the 7th morning. In the end, I only managed to save myself and 3 children who otherwise would have died to the plague. I will never forget this game so long as I live and breathe.