Recent reviews by Twinins

Getting this game on sale for four bucks is a steal! It's a super arcade shooter with standout voice acting from Duke Nukem, Ion Maiden, OG Lo Wang (that alone is enough reason to buy it.)!!

My vote for GOTY 2021.

First Impressions of Cyberpunk 2077:

• This is after finishing the first mission; The same mission shown in the 45 min. game-play reveal that came out a couple of years back. I plan on adding to this review later, over time. I’m going to leave this as a thumbs-down for now, but I could see that change upon revision. Nevermind the strikethroughs!

Pros:

• Night City is looking pretty, pretty good. (Although the game seems to want to keep me on rails and the city in the background.)
  
  
• The music sounds pretty, pretty good.
  
  
• It's running acceptably on my modest setup; Medium to high settings; 16 gig I7-4770, 8gb 1070ti, ≈1080p; ≈50-60 fps.
  
  
• After long periods of play, (4-5 hours or so) I'm pleased to have never crashed to desktop. Kudos to CDPR!
  
  
• I still want to play it all the way through. despite its egregious first impression flaws.
  
  
• The skill tree looks interesting enough and I want to explore the possiblities.
  
  
• I like the idea of fusing Deus Ex style sleuth and hack with open world freedom... (it’s like Arkham, kinda; but with worse gameplay)
  
  
• I feel that I could perhaps get invested in this story and these characters, if it's worth it.
  
  
• I love photo modes, and CP2077’s seems like alot of fun, but posing your character does not animate fluidly and breaks immersion which is a nitpick of mine.
  
  
• Samurai cola is pretty, pretty good. It's ironic that it was made by Rockstar.

Cons:

• I found a re-creatable bug at character creation, so I had to reboot and validate game files. It happened when I randomized the female model. The assets would get stuck on the model, and for some reason it stayed that way despite restarting the game. When I fixed it, I stopped doing that. A minor issue, but a sign of things to come.
  
  
• NITPICK: I remember noticing when in photo mode that some of the clothing assets were poking through my character model after I changed clothes a bit. Oops! Nobodys perfect!
  
  
• The NPC city pedestrians’ mouths don't move when they talk to me! The pedestrian animations in general are very stiff. Coming from RDR2 to CP2077 really highlights the difference in quality between Rockstar's city-life A.I. versus CDPR's broken, unpolished-looking Night City inhabitants. It’s hard not to laugh at them. It's like you're being spoken to by an invisible ventriloquist! When I saw this play out in action, the hype really nose-dived for me. When it comes to strangers and passerbys, turns out Night City is more like Vice City.
  
  
• Choosing a sneaky playstyle made Jackie behave strangely, and his audio didn’t match up to the situation. He would scream out lines around the guards, but it didn’t matter because they couldn't hear or see him as long as we were "sneaking".
  
  
• The enemy dialogue during the first mission was labled, canned and repeated over and over. Playing stealthily made this pretty annoying. Every enemy just kept saying the same 3 or 4 things over and over at a high rate of repetition and in the same voice. There was a female variation of the enemy which was a little rarer, but damn; as I was sneaking around, it was like no matter how many enemies I took down; the same guy's voice was just saying the same things over and over. I guess this happens in all games to some degree; but here, it was very noticeable and leaves a bad first impression.
  
  
• The first mission boss bugged out! I was able to just shoot the boss down while he was stuck on some burning wreckage. Then I walked up and punched him back to his senses, but it was too late for him by then. This boss was in that old game-play reveal, so it is upsetting (to say the least) that this first mission appeared more polished in the Aug 2018 gameplay reveal.
  
  
• I haven’t seen much of the game yet so this criticism may be premature, but I must have seen the same burrito vending machine a hundred times already. I mean damn, I hate to nitpick so hard, but the variety of visuals within the city should have been like impressive, right? It's this and that above issue about the repetitious enemy dialogue makes me think the game lacked the required time in the assets department.
  
  
• Did I make a mistake playing a sneak? I wonder if all of the playstyles have been fine tuned. Probably not!

Bottom line:Disappointed!
This game needed another year of polish at least!

• I will play a long second session and update this review accordingly.
  
• If you haven’t bought this already, I recommend waiting for DLC and patches.