Cyberpunk 2077

Despite all the severe backlash, Cyperpunk 2077 was still a game that I was expecting great things out of. With The Witcher 3 being one of my favorite games and just a landmark RPGs, there was no way that their followup game would be such a failure. As with all large open world RPGs, my best approach to them is to wait til the bugs are ironed out... and yeah maybe this one did require a little bit more time to get everything fixed, but I think that I hit the perfect timing on when I decided to play.

And damn, this really blew me away. I'm a big fan of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls and Fallout so I immediately felt at home with this one, the looting and the leveling up just felt like revisiting an old friend. Like I can spend endless hours in these games just doing random quests, exploring, gaining XP, selling loot... this is among my favorite game loops and this is exactly what this game offers. For those that think that Skyrim was shallow and weaker compared to older Elder Scrolls, well you might feel the same way. There's certainly a lot of criticism around this game and everything is being scrutinized, but honestly if I don't focus on that and just play the game I'm having an amazing time.

The game does really feel like a next-gen experience, the graphics and the world are definitely pushed to the next level and it's no wonder the last gen consoles could not handle this game (CDPR did make the grave mistake of holding on to it as a PS4/Xbox One game, and should have been cancelled for those during development). Now that patches have come and with a Series X to power it, this is how the game was meant to be played. I didn't encounter that many bugs either, certainly not to the extent that people were reporting them early on. It's now very well polished, it looks good and plays good.

To be fair when I look at the big picture, there's nothing gameplay-wise that Cyberpunk does that's like best of its kind. It does many things that many other games do, and they are all done pretty well but nothing mindblowing. The itemization is pretty good, the shooting is pretty good, the hacking is pretty good, the exploration and quests too. But I think it's just the culmination of all those elements together that make it a great experience and paired with the immense amount of details in the world. I've put in 39 hours to complete the main quest, and I really had a great time in all those hours. Not really any dead moments, and I plan to go back and complete even more quests while getting ready for the eventual expansion.

The braindance concept is something that really only this game could pull, it's really well done and massive use of technology for these investigative parts. I just wish there was more of it, feels like they could have made more of them. The cut scenes and general presentation is pretty strong too, definitely top of its class in this aspect and among the best in AAA gaming. After self-debating I ended up giving this a 4.5/5, so it's a little behind Witcher 3 which had the best side quests and everything was so meaningful and I don't think it matches it in that aspect. But there's so many other things that the game actually does better, and am still really excited about the future of this game and franchise. So much more potential and will love to see the improvements coming. All-in-all this is one of the great games of this decade, it's in my favorite genre (Bethesda Open World RPGs if we can call em like that) and just completely delivers now that everything has been fixed. Highly recommended for those that are into that.