Oh, hey! I didn’t see you there, as I was too busy playing Cyberpunk 2077 by CD Projekt Red (henceforth referred to as Cyberpunk 2077). First of all – you probably don’t even need convincing. Heck, it’s almost a guarantee you own this game already! But if you’re looking for a factually supported opinion reaffirming your own purchasing decisions – you came to the right review! Now, let’s get started!

Graphics
There is no better way to start this review other than by telling you to look at the official promotional material and marketing screenshots. It looks stunning and breathtaking. The visuals are absolutely gorgeous and they are by all definitions ‘next-gen’. That, combined with the impressive sound design of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City really takes you there and makes you feel like you’re there. The crowds are massive and the most populated areas of Night City look exactly that – full of life. On the screen there may be close to a hundred people, walking, talking, smoking, doing their own things. Each person gorgeously rendered and painstakingly animated. It was hard to believe that CD Projekt Red could ever achieve the graphical fidelity they’ve shown in the trailers. I was shocked to see with my own eyes that not only did they reach that level of graphics – they might have even surpassed it. All of this is no doubt the accomplishment of NVIDIA RTX™ Ray Tracing technology. It’s turns the already unbelievable visuals to as close to photorealistic as possible. In all ways, Cyberpunk 2077 is the game that brings us all to the incredible future ̵͓̭̓̂a̸͍͘h̴͎̯̉̌ė̶̤̭̀ä̸͓́̓ḑ̸͖̇̀ ̴̫́̚a̴͇̯̐ṅ̵͖̐d̷̞̏͊ ̷͖͑t̴͙͒a̵̻̓͊k̸̺͚͌͑


~~~P̸̢̆s̷̞̉́s̷̤̈́ṫ̵̼͓…̸̘̂ ̵͙͝H̴̜̏e̶̐͌͜y̵͖̎, you, reader, can you see this? I managed to get past the ICE of this corpo shill review and inserted my own comments. To avoid detection, I calibrated my algorithm to only show these comments to those that aren’t fully brainwashed by the marketing of this product. That means if you’re reading this – there’s still hope for you.

Sure, the graphics are pretty, but what the marketing drones will never tell you is what hardware you need to achieve at least half of what was promised. Even with DLSS (Nvidia’s proprietary AI-assisted rendering which is supposed to boost framerates) on, Ray Tracing cuts your framerate almost in half. I have a pretty hardcore netrunning rig (ranks in the top 1-3% in various benchmarks) and it’s incredible how poorly this game runs even on my machine. It should never struggle to reach 60 FPS on 1080p, even with Ray Tracing enabled (not to mention DLSS boosts the performance even further). C2077 is probably one of the worst optimized games this generation, and it does not look half as good as it’s supposed to if it’s cripples even the strongest hardware. Case in point, the best GPU in the world cannot run this game in 4K resolution at 60 frames per second. Absolutely insane.
Speaking of insane, the number of bugs and glitches here is staggering. Objects floating in mid-air, NPCs melting into the environment, me or straight-up T-posing. Game locking you out and forcing a save reload when you do mundane tasks. So much of the game is technically broken. I’d much rather have a less pretty but better optimized and stable game, than w̶̗̐ḣ̸͉̀á̶̹͘-. Damnit, they’re onto me. I’ll send you the next m̵̦̒̊e̶̠̫̐͌s̷͔̿ś̷̥a̷̜̽g̶̣̘̉e̷̚͜ ̵͖͉͘o̵̹͖͗ń̸͇͊c̴͈͙͌̅~~~

Story and world
The Night City is a living, breathing place, filled with thousands of people, each with their own lives and stories. There’s the game’s story, which takes you all over Night City in a wide variety of imaginative scenarios – from corporate heists to detective work in virtual strip-clubs and more. The deep and interesting characters you meet along the way aren’t just thrown to the way-side. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – they will contact you with side missions, that writing wise are just as nuanced as the main story. Completing these side jobs and main story missions will not only increase your level, but raise your street cred, allowing you access to more content in shops and side gigs. Of course, if you want simpler action, there’s plenty of gigs that have your fixers offer you simple jobs in exchange for cash and rep. Still, these gigs are far more fleshed out than your average side-quest: instead of slaying ten boars or helping out a settlement, you will solve problems for people, all of them having their own stories, making it feel like even the smallest mission has its place in the world. And there’s a large variety of them too! Speaking of variety, you can customize everything about your character – from their face to their gender to their origin story, all the while picking different dialogue options depending on how you want to roleplay V! Not to mention there’s hundreds of lore-filled datashards for anyone interested in the world! Night city is different people, different missions, d̸͔̒ĩ̶̬̕f̴̗͌͊f̶̤̀̋ͅê̸͜r̴̨̈́̃e̴̫̬͐ň̶̲̬͝t̷̙͙̃̆ ̴̛̛̮y̴̫̋-

~~~O̷̯̖͆K̸̢̹͂͝,̸̺̩̅ ̵̗̩̎c̸̛̘͠õ̷̢̇nnection reestablished. Sure, variety is great… Too bad there is none in C2077. The game is great at fooling the player has variety, that they have a choice, when if fact it couldn’t be further from the truth. Picking one of three origin stories was painted to be a decision that will make players return and restart the game multiple times, but all it amounted to was having a unique dialogue option every now and again. Dialogue options in general awfully remind me of the Telltale method – making them feel important prioritized over making sure that they lead somewhere interesting. You can hardly ever fail only due to your poor choice of words and while some missions do branch out, there is no difference in the extremely linear story – no matter your choices or which missions you choose to do first, you will arrive at more or less the same conclusion.
Customization in the game is really a joke as you can only do so once in the character select – incredibly ironic for a setting that’s all about expressing who you really are and changing how you look. And the setting itself only shows promise of cyberpunk, without any interesting points to make. Corporations are evil, punk is cool and that’s it. The setting itself practically crumbles under any amount of scrutiny – you mean to tell me that literal immortality through technology is possible, but everyone’s driving around regular cars on regular roads and listen to regular radio? That I can view someone else’s feeling memories and emotions in a video-editor style timeline but people use showers that are identical to the ones in the year 2020? It’s unbelievable that a setting about 57 years in the future (I know, it’s alternate history, but my point stands) is based so much in today’s age. There are a lot of missed opportunities, both in the setting and the choices a player can make. Right now, there is no reason to replay the game more than once if you’re interested in the world or its characters, unless thę̶̲̅̕ ̶̝́ǵ̷̝̀å̸̭m̴̞̅ḙ̴̎͊p̷͇̗̌̎l̵̲͖̏̓-̶̤͇̾̃~~~

Continued in the comments

Summarizing Iceborne in a few words is easy: disappointing. It's an expansion with promising ideas, great effort put behind it and so many infuriating flaws, that it's hard to recommend it to anyone who isn't a huge fan of the series already.

Tommy was a great student, who finished his high school with an honor's diploma. Although he had some stranger tendencies, he was liked well enough that people overlooked them. Due to his volunteer work and perfect grades, Tommy entered a prestigious college, to the joy of his parents. In college, Tommy started to hang around with the wrong crowd and eventually started doing drugs. Tom is 37, he's unemployed and nobody can stay within 10ft. within him due to his terrible odor.

Iceborne is Tom. You are his parents.

Few things to get out of the way, since you'll find them in almost any review. The expansion and the new area is gorgeous. The expansion also runs awfully.

Now onto something I found mentioned less often. The expansion promises a whole lot - almost double the amount of monsters, double the amount of quests, new armor, the clutch claw, weapon moves and so on. These promises are pretty much why I cannot recommend the game, as just like Tom, Iceborne doesn't exactly end up in a good spot.

The game boasts the absolutely new monsters front and center, and the first monster you fight is Beotodus, a reskin of Jyuratodus. The absolutely first new creature you see in the brand new expansion, which touts 30+ new monsters, is the same forgettable fish-like monster that you killed thirty minutes into the original game. But this new one has a horn.
Surely the next monster in the new area will be... a reskin of Barroth with one new move.
Well... maybe they opened up with the fan-favorite palette-swaps (though, who honestly likes the forgettable fish-creature?), surely the next monst-
Three old monsters in a row . Red Toby-Akatsuki, Black Paolumu and Orange Pukei-Pukei. They are literally the same creatures with a different color. They changed up their elements, which does make the fights different... until you equip a charm that nullifies their new element. At least the original game lured you in with original monster designs for around five hours until you saw the first palette swaps. The expansion just bursts out all the colors without any of the foreplay of the original. How fitting that the expansion's final boss is just a different color second-to-last boss of the original game

The first brand new design (although some similarities can be seen in the model with other monsters) is Barrioth - a sabretooth tiger dragon. Sounds cool? Tommy sounded cool too, until he spent all of his income on cocaine. And the cocaine in this weird metaphor is the difficulty. Barrioth reveals an incredible flaw in the entire design of the expansion. It was made to appeal to those, who have already spent hundreds of hours in Monster Hunter World. The short of what I mean is that people, who finished MHW and spent a lot of time on it's endgame had literally the best gear the game could afford. So if the new expansion had weaker gear, it would be dead content to those players. So the new gear HAS to be much better than the best old gear. Still, strong new gear would destroy those poor new reskins monsters, so they have to be much stronger than the strongest old monster... See where I'm getting at?
Now imagine someone just finished the game and they see that after they buy the expansion, they get a whole new story and monsters. Of course they aren't going to replay the same old content over and over for hours just to get some gear for the new content. So they jump in and get bodied.
It's fine, you can fix this. Just ask a better-geared friend to take down the new monsters. Or just pick up some bones. New armor made from some bones you picked up from the ground is multiple times better than the end-game armor from the original.

If only it would stop at that... Remember Barrioth? The cool saber-tooth dragon? It's impossible for an above-average player to kill him with end-game gear from the original. Apparently it's also incredibly hard for a group of players to kill it with the best gear from the expansion available up to that point. It's a monster that, although is pretty fun to fight against, has so much health people struggle to kill it within the time limit. 50 MINUTE time limit! Trust me, if you fought a monster with a group of friends for 50 minutes and still fail to kill it, you'd write an overly long rant of a review too.

Unfortunately, Barrioth is only the first of the rest - all other monsters apart from the first few - have so much health, the fights always drag on to over half an hour. For some - that's only a benefit. For others - doing the same attack moves against the same monster in the same pretty environments for forty minutes only to get 1/4th of the items you need just to progress through the story feels more like work. Don't know about you, but I don't pay $40 to get more work.

To summarize - the new monsters are mostly old ones with a filter over them, while even the new monsters are a slog, because your old gear is garbage and the new gear kills them after fifty thousand repeated strikes.

Other promises: New story quests? Literally all of them tell you to watch a cutscene and then hunt a monster. New armor? The new monster sets look pretty neat, but all of the old monster sets in the new expansion have the same look as in the original. The Beta sets even lost the alternative look it had, so there's technically less choices from the same monster. The clutch claw? More like crutch claw, since some encounters drag on for even longer if you don't spam it. New moves for every weapon? Most of them have something to do with the clutch claw. Otherwise, they're already in the base game, so you don't even need the expansion.

Not only Tom does cocaine and he can't run jack, but he also has rotten teeth, his clothing is tattered and he's carrying a dirty a dead raccoon his left hand all the time. At least he learned how to smack someone with the raccoon.


If you liked the original game and hoped that the expansion will be a breath of fresh air - keep out. If you loved the original and want more of what you liked, you will probably find it here. However, recommendations shouldn't be given to diehard fans - they will buy the expansion regardless - and to an average person I cannot recommend spending $40 or even half that for this expansion. It's bought me more frustration, disappointment and high CPU temperatures than fun or excitement.