Recent reviews by FoRzA CoRoNA

潛水員戴夫，精神時光屋。

GREAT

Great game

Let me just start by saying that if you like this game - you've won the argument by virtue of enjoying something I'm struggling to. If you're having fun, that's great. If you're besotted with the world, that's fair, and you're not wrong. Nothing in this review is intended to piss off the hive. I just have to write about the impressions I honestly feel.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that is unforgivably marred by one thing and one thing only - overpromotion. A thesis could be written on how audacious Cyberpunk's marketing has been. The hype train is, of course, not all CDPR's fault, but the false promises are. Releasing too early and expecting you to pay £50 for the privilege of being an unofficial beta tester is. Look, I work in marketing, so I know how it goes. But when you promise so much and know you can't deliver on it, and change your marketing material in order to refer to the game as an 'action-adventure' rather than an 'RPG' before release - well, it doesn't sit right with me. If Ubisoft had done this, I would have blown my top. I have to stay consistent.

Let me make this clear - I was not on the hype train for this game. Hype makes me feel nervous, and I try to deaden myself to it. I'm also realistic. I understood that it takes more for a game to be developed in the current-gen to offer a truly next-generation experience, and found it a miracle that Red Dead Redemption 2, by contrast, was so incredibly detailed and complex, if less dense than this title. I'm also not a stickler for bugs. I know they'll get patched and fixed, and that performance will improve.

What I did expect, however, is what was promised. In this game, there is no advanced vehicle AI, which means police chases simply cannot happen. That's a system that was present in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. NPC's are lifeless, and are barely worth interacting with. The world has strong art direction and can look quite beautiful at times, but it's far from 'breathing,' and routinely feels shallow and tired thanks to how repetitive and basic the NPC and traffic routines are. It reminds me of a Mafia game, where the open world is just set dressing, serving effectively as a long loading screen as you move from place to place. But this isn't how the game was marketed. From the offset, they outright promised a sandbox RPG featuring incredibly dense and novel NPC interactions and narrative paths. I didn't buy into everything they said of course, but when your world is even less impressive than the last Watch Dogs game, I have to wonder what's going on.

The gunplay is punchy despite the inconsistent ballistics, the upgrade tree is relatively cool (if deceptively limited), and the moment-to-moment gameplay is all just... serviceable? It's not an RPG I find to be particularly deep. This is a somewhat moot point - but there's little gameplay here you haven't already seen achieved more competently in titles like Sleeping Dogs, Deus Ex and Fallout. Driving feels dated, as if the vehicles have no substantial momentum to them. It's the little details that are truly noticeable, like V not even sleeping correctly in his bed, or QoL considerations, like the lack of a dedicated walk button on keyboard, that culminates in making the game feel average at best. I have no idea what happened with the life paths. I was led to believe they would be as long and impactful as the origin stories in Dragon Age: Origins, but they're just 20-minute starter sequences geared to introduce you to the world at breakneck speed. They feel like cut content.

The good stuff here involves both the reliably impressive writing and story sequences. Yet thanks to the limited input you have for role-playing, it regularly feels like you're watching a (very cool) television show. It's nowhere near as reactive and dynamic I had hoped, not even half as much as The Witcher 2. If this game only featured its story front and centre, I would have given this a positive review. However, it doesn't, and I can't give a thumbs up for undercooked ambition or good writing when it's less than 25% of the experience, especially with all this mediocre fluff surrounding it. I say that even as someone who is willing to tolerate much for a good story. The amazing sequences you see are, ironically, those that would make for the best trailer-bait, and oh boy, did they.

Cyberpunk's writing is far from perfect though, especially in its presentation and pacing. I'm never provided the means to care about V at all. Thanks to his introductory montage, you're given relationships, professional contacts and a criminal reputation in the space of around two minutes. It's hard to get your bearings. Compare this to Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where the horrific origins of Henry's developing heroism are fully-playable, rooted, grounded in your humble status. It helps you build your own relationship to his ambition - ambition that stays with you throughout the game. There's nothing like that here.

A side note - it's very easy to assume that it's the fault of those who are heavily involved in watching the press cycle for getting their own hopes up, buying into every op-ed and/or preview carefully curated to generate clicks and escalating excitement for the game. Unfortunately, you would also have to be blind to the design patterns and trends of the last ten years to not see how derivative the vast majority of Cyberpunk's systems are. It's not a bad thing to be derivative, not always, but if you've marketed your game as being anything but that from day one, well, people are going to notice.

I have no doubt this game will improve in the next year, in terms of its optimisation, performance, bug-squashing and maybe even additional content. For now, I would advise on-the-fence newcomers to steer well clear. I would also recommend that you stay sceptical of people who want to lambast absolutely everything in this game, as well as those who somehow think critical impressions are misguided at best or hate at worst. Certain elements of this game have been crafted with noticeable care and heartfelt attention to detail, such as the side quests, which can show real glimpses of brilliance. I imagine a few of the actual developers want to strangle the marketing and management teams right now - and trust me, I get it.

I would have likely brushed this off as a fine, sometimes above-average game, ignoring the bugs and lack of innovative features as simply par for the course. I may have given it a positive review if it were honestly janky, but feature-complete, closer to the promises we were given. What I can't do is positively review a product sold under wilfully and repeatedly false pretences. That's weird for me because I don't usually take a principled stand, if you can label a cringe review as that. I didn't much care about Epic strong-arming their way into the market, for instance. I'm not entirely sure how much of this ad campaign was straight deception on CDPR's part, and how much of it was comprised of well-wishing narratives that exploded out of control, magnified by the sacred reputation gamers had anointed them with, all while they found their feet in a new and strange genre.

For whatever reason, this time it feels odious. Maybe I'm just getting old.

bad game

nice game