Recent reviews by Starke

An amazing Weird West survival horror game with a late 90's art style.

The 1.2 patch has broken the game. This isn't as simple as balance changes, this is reproducable crashes, at startup (for which the developers helpfully recommend filing a bug report on the main menu, which you cannot access because of said CTD), or being unable to load into saves. The developers have been quick to blame the use of mods, while convienently ignoring that these are affecting players with unmodded installs.

While CDPR has been working to deal with showstopping bugs, there are deeper issues with Cyberpunk 2077 that can't be quickly patched over.

William Gibson's hot take on seeing the early trailers was that Cyberpunk 2077 looked like GTA with a layer of 80s Retrofuturism slapped on top. As it turns out, he was basically correct.

This is GTA4 with an illusion of choice added. Your character stats feel impactful initially, but it's multiple roads to the same destination. In quests, your stats almost never matter. You'll see dialog options that will require you to have enough points in a given attribute, and on your first playthrough this can give you the feeling that your stats matter. They do not. In many cases, being able to meet a skill check will simply result in an NPC telling you, "yeah, but, no." In other cases, being able to pass a check may save you from the arduous task of walking 15 feet to flick a switch.

Similarly, the much vaunted "Life Paths," are just as superficial. They'll determine the first few minutes of your game, but as soon as the montage cutscene plays, you're on rails. Much like with your attributes, your Life Path choice will give you unique dialog options, but these almost never lead to much meaningful difference. The flavor changes are nice when they happen, but the Corpo path has a line that really sums it up, "you keep forgetting I used to be in Arasaka security." The character V's speaking to does, and the game as a whole does.

If you're sitting there wondering, "but what about those diverse quests with multiple paths we saw in the prerelease gameplay videos?" Those exist. The Maelstrom mission has all the options the narrator outlined, and that's pretty much it. The Voodoo Boys mission later in the game also has a few approaches with different outcomes, though, even there, the narrator implied far more variations than the game makes good on.

CDPR sold the game as highly reactive, but it's really not. Outside of those two missions, and the end game mission chains, the meaningful decisions you can make are to play a mission or ignore it. There may be bonuses for completing it in certain ways, but ultimately, there are few choices that matter.

In that sense, this is, ironically, less of an RPG than Fallout 4.

While it would be convenient to compare this to GTA, the better comparison is Mafia 2. Much like Mafia 2, Cyberpunk 2077 has a well written, if derivative, linear story. The open world exists as a set dressing for that story, to add a sense of place. This isn't a bad thing, however, the moment you step away from the main and side quests, the quality drops sharply.

Gigs may look like side quests at first glance (and a few side quests masquerade as gigs), but these are very simple activities, such as killing someone, or sneaking in and stealing something.

Then you have the open world activities, such as Assaults in Progress or Organized Crime, these are simple combat encounters. So, let's talk about combat.

While your stats don't matter for the story content, they do matter in combat. While the game may look like a first person shooter, it is a stat driven RPG. Once you get into the combat loop, Cyberpunk 2077 is a reasonably competent looter shooter. Kill people, take their stuff, check their guns to see if any are better than what you're using, then, if they dropped any clothing, upgrade your appearance to full on murder hobo and continue on your quest to kill people and take their stuff. There's nothing wrong with this, and it is reasonably well executed if you can come to grips with how important your character's attributes are. At the same time, it feels weirdly out of place.

So, ultimately, there's two different games here. One of them is a focused narrative experience with set pieces and fairly solid genre writing. The other is a somewhat bland open world looter shooter. This is not open world Deus Ex. It's not a worth successor to The Witcher 3. It's not a bad game, but it's also not what CDPR promised. It's probably worth revisiting in a few months to see how CDPR has managed to deal with the bugs and shortcomings.

For now, Cyberpunk 2077 isn't bad, but that is damning with faint praise.

There have been some massive improvements since the original launch. I wish I'd come back a little sooner.

Wow, just... wow. If you have any interest in writing in video games, you need to play this. If you have any interest in video games as art, you need to play this. It takes the Modern Military Shooter genre and tears the hell out of it.