Full review didn't fit lol, can read whole thing here: https://steamproxy.net/app/1091500/discussions/0/3111392579686365311/

My first playthrough of CP77 took me 34h: the main storyline + all side quests that you don't need to look for on the map yourself, except for some gigs and competitions like street battles. Took me few times less than I thought it would (about two weeks of periodic gaming in the evenings). Below is a huge #sheet on why Cyberpunk is a bad game.

Unfortunately for me, this is one of the biggest disappointments in gaming in the last few years. Largely because of extremely high expectations, but not only. The developers worked very hard on the city, the visual style, made a fascinating plot, introduced interesting characters to which you get attached, and ... you can watch all of this on YouTube. At the same time, Cyberpunk is not at all interesting to _play_. As a game, it does not work at all, even worse than one would expect from a purely story-driven single. I decided to ponder why.

Games offer us tasks and / or a process. Problems are situations in which you have to make choices, use your mind to compute, find the right answer and the best move. The process is the pleasure of motor feedback, using your skill and reflexes to get into timings. So, for example, chess almost entirely consists of "problems", and Serious Sam - of "process". "Almost", because in chess, in addition to the game itself, it can be physically pleasant to move the pieces and put the King on the side when you win. And in Serious Sam, you can think about finding the best shooting position and choosing weapons against each type of enemy. But in essence, the gameplay in these games is fundamentally different.

A fairly complex game claims to be of both types. In The Witcher, there are moral choices that make us remember the details of the relationship between the characters and try to predict the consequences - this is a "puzzle". But sword fighting against enemies is a "process" which dominates. In StarCraft, you need to know all types of troops of all races and understand what and in what quantity to build, to which point on the map to lead them. This is the "puzzle" on which the whole game is built. But microcontrol in it is a "process". I, for example, as a casual player, do not know microcontrol in StarCraft and do not use it, preferring exclusively the strategic part. And in Quake 3, on the contrary, I do not know any strategy that determines which points on the map to defend and how to move, but I just run and shoot.

I must say, in the same Witcher, the strategic part is very weak, because it is very simple, and does not require much thinking. This is normal for this type of game: they are based on movement and action, so they rely on a combination of plot and points of pleasure from the process. In this respect, Cyberpunk offers a level of tasks comparable to the Witcher or even weaker: hacking is ridiculously easy, and there are almost no ambiguous choices in dialogues. Therefore, the only thing that is exactly the game component in Cyberpunk is the combat process (and stealth as a special case of it). And now it just doesn't work at all. Fighting enemies in Cyberpunk 2077 is not fun, boring and tiring. You want to skip the fights, they are absolutely not enjoyable and are perceived as an unnecessary routine.

Okay, it's hard to make a really fun and "savory" shooting. It is necessary that the combination of feedback from a shot and a hit, as well as the required damage to kill enemies, is on the border between the difficulty of using a skill and the joy of receiving a reward. In Painkiller and Serious Sam, the enemies are thrown in hordes and die quickly, the game generates enough of them so that the destruction of the crowds is not always too easy, but also does not seem pointless. Separate death animations along with different shooting styles with different weapons create the right level of pleasure. In Mass Effect 2, enemies are harder to kill, but the visual effects, the cover system and especially the sound design make it feel like you destroy a piece of armor or other protection with each shot, literally breaking the enemy piece by piece, which is also very nice. In Horizon, you have to hit the right points of the beast to kill it, a kind of mini tactical game within the process. In Cyberpunk, neither one nor the other worked: you either shoot at an enemy for a long time, who almost does not respond to a hit, or you headshot him with a sniper rifle. A really cool weapon to use with smart bullets, but it's not enough to make all shooting fun. Otherwise, the game adds dozens of guns to your gear, which behave in about the same way and are only needed for sale. The remnants of joy from the game are killed by the level of difficulty: on average, you boredly walk through enemies without stopping, and at high, any careless movement forces you to restart the entire level, because you cannot save in the middle of the battle.

Melee also failed, but everything is simpler here - it's impossible to make a cool melee system in the first person shooter, hands down. In all games with normal fights, without exception, battles take place from a third person: from Oni to the Batman Arkham series. And, for example, Deus Ex switches to third-person view at the moment of finishing moves. Because the coolness of hand-to-hand fighting is in acrobatics, somersaults and choreography. It will not work to convey this in the first person. When I installed the Mantis Blades for myself, I immediately switched to photo mode to look at myself, but then I was in for a bummer - they are absent in the third person model. From the first person, a fight even with such a cool weapon does not look impressive and is not interesting to play.

But the most failure is the abilites and the perk tree. In Dark Messiah, I was looking forward to every leveling point to unlock a new spell, and even replayed the game to level another tier. In The Witcher, when I found the Purification Potion, which allows me to redistribute all the points, I was overjoyed - I really wanted to see the rest of the abilities and Signs that I had not yet discovered. I didn't care about that in Cyberpunk. I pumped in points without any thought, because I did not see almost a single interesting ability that would somehow significantly change the game and would contain some really visible effect. The overwhelming majority of skills are dull bull**** like "+ 5% reloading speed." Almost all of them just slightly modify a small numerical indicator, affecting only the animation speed. With cyber modifications, the shame is no less. The developers managed to throw such a huge genre potential into the trash. There are hardly 2-3 modifications for the whole game, which give something valuable and noticeable: blades, enhanced jump, connection with smart bullets and that's it. Most of the other things are the same nonsense with numbers: +10 to armor, +30 to recovery speed, etc. I don't need +10 armor, I need a freaking plasma cannon in place of my arm! Have the developers not seen Deus Ex? There, each cyber modification literally added some kind of fundamentally new game element and a whole layer of game capabilities: invisibility, jumping from any height, lightning in hands. There was even a "Social Corrector" implant that completely changes all the dialogue in the game.

And finally, cyber attacks, which are supposed to be something like spells and debuffs. In The Witcher, even a small amount of magic is quite interesting: all Signs have two modes that work in completely different ways. They have different animations, they have different effects on the picture of the battle, they are interesting to explore and apply. In Mass Effect, biotic strikes are generally imbalanced and allow you to temporarily disable almost any enemy from combat, and in addition to them, there are also abilities of the teammates....