Recent reviews by SPEC

Not worth 70 bucks (every year), try to grab it when it's on sale if you really want to play F1.

Positives:
- the career update is a small step in the right direction
- when the handling + AI works the racing has gotten better compared to the older titles
- standard setups actually drive pretty good (but are slow)

Negatives:
- barely any actual new content
- still the same ui it has had for 3+ years, except you get a much more ugly speedometer now
- still the same graphics, even tho there were rumors '24 would finally get a new game engine
- still more than 75% of the tracks not laser-scanned/accurate
- no more helmets, suits or liveries to choose from - they literally removed them all to make you pay for it
- fast setups mess up the handling a lot, it's not bad but it doesn't feel good either
- once again the equal cars are somehow not equal
- not a single thing the community has asked for (like customizable race calender, new animations, myteam updates ...)

You can personally like the game or hate it, but in no world does it deserve a positive review.

A horrible game. Take everything bad the newer NFS titles have had and mix it into a pod. Throw that pod into the garbage and look back after a few days. That's what Unbound is.

Some of it's con's:
- graphic looks still worse than NFS2015, which is now almost 10 years old
- the most cringy, non-engaging story of any NFS to date
- terrible car handling - if you go airborne for a mere second you completely lose control of the car
- boring and stretched campaign, you basically have to do the same stuff over and over
- if you spend too much of your money it will take you ages to build up bank again, since you cant afford the buy in for any event
- 2 years of "updates" which are really minor things, somehow it still prevents the entire studio to develop a new game
- overpriced dlc's, some of them are literally a single car for like 10 bucks

Also lets not forget: THE MOST HORRIBLE SOUNDTRACK I HAVE EVER HEARD IN A RACING GAME.
The whole game feels like it got directed by a 10 year old kid from TikTok.

Run across the map for 5 minutes, get sniped, repeat.

First of all let me tell y'all that this game is not that bad by any means. I had a lot of fun playing it and will continue to complete every side gig and job anyways. But considering all of the problems surrounding the launch, I just cannot recommend this to anyone (yet). In this review i will rarely talk about the things that Cyberpunk 2077 does good, but rather about the things it does bad. Because oh boy, there is a lot of that.

But the real reason for my review are actually the lies and promises made my CD Projekt Red. Which were made till the last second before the release. I'm talking about stuff like the console versions which were said the be running "surprisingly well" (which they did not). Or just cut content and missing features.

The overall experience and RPG aspects
If you came here for an RPG experience similar to the Witcher 3 (which is where i came from), you will be utterly disappointed. You would think that a game released 5 years later would be somewhat as good, or maybe even better. But Cyberpunk just does not deliver in that aspect. Not at all. Things that made TW3 a fantastic game seem to be forgotten here. I remember myself googling stuff and saving before a lot of dialogs, just because i wanted to make the right choice going forward. In Cyberpunk it really does not matter at all what you do or what you say. Except for like 1 or 2 side missions, where you can actually impact the outcome to some extend.

So pretty much all of that "your choice matters" talk that CD Projekt Red did was just straight up WRONG. Your choice means literally nothing. Whether you decide to kill or spare someone in a quest, it doesn't change anything. Even as a more stiff character like Geralt from TW3 you had more options on how you would approach or say certain things. You had the option to be rude or nice. In Cyberpunk there is only one version of V. No matter what dialog option you pick, you end up with saying "yes" in 2 or 3 different ways. Once again don't get me wrong, this doesn't make the story feel bad. But it just wasn't what was promised to us at all.

The open world
Let's try to make this one a bit shorter. Night City looks fantastic and has to be one of the most beautiful maps of the last decade. But it his completely dead and empty. Apart from side quests and gigs there is absolutely NOTHING to explore. After you first open the map and see all these quests and jobs to do, you would think that this city has a ton of stuff to offer. But it doesn't. There is nothing happening in Night City outside of any scripted quest. Which wouldn't even be that bad, if it wasn't advertised differently from CD Projekt. Which brings me right to the next point of criticism:

The AI (NPCs, Cops etc)
Long story short: It is hella bad. From braindead NPCs with 1 line of dialog in the streets of Night City. To the terrible police, that just spawns out of nowhere if you commit any crime. It is mindblowing to think that this was the best they could do. Let's not forget that they promised us next level AI with daily routines and a full day and night cicle. Don't know if I want to laugh or cry about that one.

Customization
Another big part advertised by CD Projekt was character customization and so on. The character creation at the beginning of the game is decent, but nothing special. You get a lot of options here and there but nothing too fancy. You have predefined positions for tattoos and visible cyberwear. You can't change your body type or anything like that. If you want your character to be black it just looks... weird? But now the worst part: going forward there is no possibility to change your appearance apart from clothing, You heard right. There is no barber, no tattoo studio, nothing. A game that advertised "looks are everything" and "you can exchange everything if your body can handle it" does not give you the option to do that. Adding cyberwear to your body is just going to a cyberdoc, opening a shop window and clicking whatever the f you want. No cutscene, nothing. You can literally change your arms and legs and just go out of the shop like you bought a can of soda.
Clothing itself is also managed terrible. The worst looking clothes have the best stats. If you are playing the game on hard or very hard, chances are high that you will look like a clown most of the time.

Bugs and performance
This seems pretty random on PC. I've heard of people with the best hardware and the game running like poop. But also people with mediocre PC's running the game fairly smooth. For me it was somewhere inbetween. After some tweaking the game runs on around 60-70 fps, but still feels far from smooth.

Bugs are another issue. You can get through the game without any big issues, but it can also be the other way around. For me it was fine for the first 20 hours of the game. Apart from some minor glitches nothing strange happened. After that it just got worse and worse. I have to reload my savefile almost every session because of audio glitches, missions not continuing and so on. In the end it was hard for me to tell apart if something was buggy or just meant to be as weird as it was. I couldn't tell if a quest wanted me to find a way myself, or if the marker on the map was just bugged and not appearing. So yeah, while the first part of the game definitly feels the most polished, the end feels really really rushed.

False promises and cut content
This part actually made me write this review. Because for me it is utterly mind blowing how anyone can give this game a pass, considering what CD Projekt promised us and actually delivered. Even in their latest trailers they advertised stuff that is completely missing from the final game. We are talking about things like:

- The ability to buy a different apartment / house (this one was advertised both in 2018 and in late 2020)
- The ability to tune your car (i think they stepped back from this one, but it is still said to be possible in the "Dark rides of the Future" Trailer from late 2020)
- What you say and do impacts the game world (hahahaha...)
- Third person cutscenes (probably cut due to missing time, cd projekt told us it was because it makes the game feel more immersive which is just straight bs)
- The monorail trail or whatever it is called (the train tracks are still in the game and you can even access a train station right next to the megabuilding your apartment is in)
- wanted system and corrupt police (talked about that already)
- NPC unique daily routine and AI (missing)
- the bot from maelstrom being useable outside of one mission (cut / lie)
- Meaningful lifepaths (just straight up a lie, all you get is a different opening of 20 minutes which changes NOTHING for the rest of the game)
- Weather system (talked about in the 2018 gameplay reveal, completely missing now)
- Variety of braindances (outside of main missions there is nothing to actually you can do with them, you can even buy some but they are not viewable)

And so on. You can literally just watch ANY of the trailers now and will notice things missing right away.

Completely bugged while playing with controller. After fixing the bug where you constantly do a burnout, the game just doesn't let me use my controller anymore.

Furthermore the game is trash, EA is even worse than trash.

Better than Fallout 76, worse than every other Fallout :)

Counter-Strike peaked with CS:GO and dies with CS2. 25 years and the game has never been worse than it is right now.