Folks, we've come to the end of the year and I have two final items on my plate to get through before I start writing my end of the year lists. So, the time has come to just get them both out of the way! Here goes!
Available for: Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Playstation 4, Google Stadia, Xbox Series X, Playstation 5
Reviewed for: Playstation 4 (unfortunately)
It was a cold night out in the desert beyond Night City, and V (the customizable protagonist), his love interest Panam, and the nomad gang Panam called family had just spent a full day preparing for a heist that was to take place the next morning. A former corporate city boy, V was an outsider to this ragtag posse of desert folk, but having spent so much time helping them out over the course of the past few days, he was welcomed by the campfire that evening as an equal. As he sat in front of the fire, Panam's head in the crook of his neck as she pointed out stars to him, the only other sounds to be heard were crickets in the distance, the faint crackle of the flames, and a guitar softly being strummed by one of the other nomads in the circle. Breaking the relative silence, V picked up the bottle of beer next to him and called for a toast in memory of a nomad who had been killed in a previous mission. As the rest of the group echoed the toast, Panam added the name of one of V's recently-deceased friends to the toast verbiage, soft enough so that only the person who needed to hear the gesture could hear it. At that point, the gang decided it was time for lights out, as the heist was set to begin at dawn. But as V went to bed likely feeling contented, I simply felt depressed. Because when the in-game sun rose, I'd stop enjoying the immersive storytelling experience that developer CD Projekt Red intended and instead be back to playing the absolutely horrendous game that they actually delivered. I'm not the kind of reviewer who wastes his time purchasing games that were doomed to be horrible from the start, so I haven't ever played a Fallout 76 or a WWE 2k20 or the like. My love of Bioware caused me to give Anthem a try, but for the most part, I don't play games that I think are going to be horrible. So while it's true that there's no way Cyberpunk 2077 is the worst game ever made, I have to be 100% honest and say that it's absolutely the worst game that I've ever played. Normally when an assertion like that is made, it's made with an overarching angry tone, but in this case, it's just upsetting given the little slivers of hope that the game gives you, such as the scene I chose to open this review on. I also want to be clear that I never expected this game to be the life-changing masterpiece that its most ravenous pre-release defenders expected it to be. Here's what I expected: It would come out and be good, maybe even great, but for one reason or another it would maybe earn spot #8-#5 on my GOTY list. Then, it would go on to win GOTY at literally every outlet in the year it came out, much like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Red Dead Redemption 2. And then, every time I saw it win GOTY, I'd get slightly more annoyed (like in the case of those previous 2 examples), with my attitude being "yeah, it was really good, but it wasn't that good". That's entirely how I expected the Cyberpunk 2077 experience to go. But instead...well...you know. Before I begin, I need to get a couple things out of the way so that the weirdos, well-meaning humanists, and/or rose-eyed players can't come at me in the comments. #1) Obviously it isn't the fault of the developers who toiled on this game (under abusive crunch hours that CD Projekt Red Executives lied about not having) that Cyberpunk 2077 launched the way it did. The developers kept on reporting and reporting and reporting problems only to be ignored by upper management, who only cared about shipping the game in time for that sweet Christmas moolah. #2) There's a trend in the game industry where a massively overhyped game ends up getting delayed multiple times, the company gets met with death threats from "The Gamers (TM)," and then the game gets released earlier than it should have been, and it gets critically and commercially panned for being a buggy, unfinished mess. The Gamers (TM) never learn from this, and there's been a talking point lately that seems to place the blame for the state of this game on this crowd of man-children. But while people who send death threats over digital entertainment products ought to absolutely be publicly shamed, Jim Sterling made an excellent point in his most recent Jimquisition episode: It isn't their fault the game released early and in an unfinished state. It doesn't matter how many people complain and threaten over delays, if development studio executives make the decision to release a game early in spite of warnings from their employees, the blame lies solely on them. I've seen the fanboys (which this game somehow has in its current state) outright blaming consumers for this, but no matter how bad the consumers are, they don't make decisions, and it's a little *inhales through teeth* corpo to suggest otherwise. #3) At the time of (starting this) writing, it's two days after I finished Cyberpunk 2077's main story and three days after Hotfix 1.05 was released, and while that hotfix did fix some stuff, most of my play time (all but the last mission and about ten minutes of running around the city, in fact) is from before that patch. It's not my job (or, I guess, my hobby-itual responsibility) to wait until February for the game to be fixed before reporting on my experience, rather, it's to report on my experience now. If you're one of the (lying) people who has never had any major glitches, good for you. Now shut up. Anyway, let's get to it!
-Call with life coach didn't hang up in prologue, so he was just on screen for a long time
-Rival corporation NPCs stood to the side waiting for their cue to start the walk animation to confront me, awkwardly.
-During the combat tutorial, every time I spawned in an area I would randomly start sprinting in the direction I was facing.
-NPCs walked through closed elevator doors
-Game froze entirely for a couple seconds at the start of the vehicle combat tutorial.
-Subtitles randomly turned off after the first vehicle shootout (and several times through the rest of the game)
-Lots of NPCs randomly popping in.
-Pause menu takes a couple seconds to load in
-Inventory/map screen takes a couple seconds to load in
-Center button sometimes doesn't make the inventory/map screen come up at all.
-The whole interior of a garage fizzled in as I entered it
-In apartment complex, an NPC was just walking up and down thin air because he was meant to be taking the stairs, but was positioned way too far up in the air
-Frequent framerate drops in the city
-Had a truck disappear right as it was running into me
-Lines of dialogue played out of order during food plant mission
-The phrase "Your call, carnal" kept on appearing in the subtitles throughout the entirety of the food plant mission
-Framerate somehow even worse during open combat
-Misleading objective markers (throughout the game)
-Game soft crashed after the heist briefing
-Brought up inventory screen to find my character's "substance" off-center. Silhouette was where the model usually was, but the right leg was in the left leg position and the head was in the left shoulder position with the rest of the usual model area just black
-Jackie kept saying "V, they'll see you!" while we were in an open gunfight during heist mission.
-Elite enemy in heist mission in the elevator kept circling around the elevator, then floating and hopping, noticing and re-noticing me.
-Weapon description stayed on screen at the end of the heist mission during a critical moment, had to reload save to get rid of it (later patched to be removable by looking at another item, but still a prevalent issue if no items around, like in a cutscene)
-Custom waypoints sometimes refuse to clear
-Bringing up the radio stops the car and takes 5-10 seconds to pop up, sometimes no songs actually play when you select a station (throughout the game, no fix still)
-NPCs have entire faces and body textures pop in
-Had an entire skybox fizzle in while entering Jig-Jig street
-Visual settings never saved throughout my entire experience (except the final night of play), had to re-apply my settings every session
-When my car crashed once, fell through the world and into miscellaneous water
-"Hostile" area warning didn't go away after finishing clouds mission, had to reload save.
-Killed a torture porn dealer, but could still strike up a conversation, just with no response
-Enemy walked on air because there were stairs behind him and the "walking down" didn't trigger
-Weapon assets didn't load in off and on throughout the game
-After reloading a save during a rescue mission, enemies with scripted dialogue did what they were programmed to, but other enemies taunted me for hiding despite the fact that I hadn't been discovered in that save file yet.
-Accept call button seems to never work the first couple times you press it, sometimes it doesn't work at all
-Multiple calls can sometimes play at the same time
-A whole chicken wrapped in newspaper asset popped in during butcher shop mission
-car was summoned missing a door and nearly broken when called on my way to the first big mission in Pacifica.
-"animal" guard literally saw me through cover
-Heal button stopped working during "animal" mission, had to reload save.
-Boss fight against "Matilda Ross" had her sitting down, standing up, sitting down, standing up, teleporting, noticing me, and re-noticing me, never fighting back
-Wrong UI and HP in second Johnny segment until I died and reloaded save
-slid all the way back when dropped in to one of the cyberspace areas
-flat blue textures in the road while driving fast
-enlarged, see through minimap with no gps route after pausing the game while driving fast
-many building will lose their walls if you walk close to them
-spawned inside Panam's body seeing the inside of her eyes after reloading save during vengeance mission
-aaaand then the game hard crashed after getting out of the car, PS4 took over a full minute to compile the error data and let me continue
-echo in Takemura's dialogue on van ride (common problem)
-music often gets cut off by radio djs at weird times
-wrong control menu on the right while driving the van in "Riders on the Storm."
-dialogue gets cut off at crucial times because no programming was done to ensure you'd hear it all before getting to the trigger point for the next line.
-switch camera button stopped working on bike, had to reload save
-laser mine loaded in and killed me long after I'd left the exact location
-relic error visual effects didn't go away after parade mission, kept me from saving for a while, had to eventually reload save
-combat music didn't stop after a side gig, had to reload save
-spooky breathing sound didn't stop after a cyberpsycho side gig, had to get far away from the area
-weapons stopped working after police opened fire on me
-after dying to police, I was sent back to the previous gig I was on
-text messages regularly come through in the wrong order, making it hard to progress in the conversations
-important NPC I was supposed to follow ended up teleporting to the very end of the area
-lots of audio stuttering in the last half hour of the game.
So that's a grand total of about 62 bugs, meaning that if I stick to this particular convention and try to be fair as possible, that's 6.0 points off. Fun fact, I played this game for about a week in total (with one of those days not consisting of much content...for a specific reason that is the next point I'm making), so on average, I had about 10 unique bugs every single day that I played this.
But that's before taking into account the one bug I got that kept me from progressing until I did some mumbo jumbo. In one main story mission, I had to wait for a character to call me. In the meantime, I did a couple side gigs for Panam to advance the romantic subplot, but found that the character in question still hadn't called me despite a couple in-game days having passed. During those in-game days, I'd died a couple times and thus had to reload saves. As I started trying to get the guy to call me, I did all the things you normally do shake up the works: I reloaded my save, I restarted the game, I restarted the console, I called the character myself, everything you can think of. But nothing worked, and it seemed like I was no longer going to be able to progress. I spent the whole of my time that night researching and trying things, and eventually I was able to jerry rig this unfinished product into functioning by doing the following: Making sure the mission was being tracked, going to Jig-Jig street, hiring a prostitute, waiting for 10 real-world minutes (making sure not to do anything in the meantime or let any other job get tracked), skipping an in-game day after the 10 minutes were up, going and finding the nearest group of hooligans, intentionally letting myself die, and then reloading the save. After doing all of that, the character called me instantly. But here's the thing: that string of steps was a combination of things I found while researching the bug and some desperate steps I took when things didn't end up working...and you know what I discovered in my research?
My progression-inhibiting bug wasn't the only progression-inhibiting bug in that specific mission. That mission had more than one way to keep you from being able to progress unless you did some nonsense that shook up the programming. Remember, I died over the course of the in-game days I spent doing side content, so dying wasn't what made it work in the end, it was a combination of unrelated things that I couldn't possibly have known without extensive research. That, in my book, is another full point off.
So, taking both the points from the technical problems and the point I'm taking off for having had to spend a full night of gameplay not actually playing the game in order to be able to actually progress, that's 7 points off so far. That means that if the rest of the game is perfect (which, spoiler alert, it isn't), the maximum score I'll be giving it is a 3/10. So, if that's going to make you angry, then feel free to stop right here, grab a coloring book, and keep pretending that CD Projekt Red cares about you. Remember how I said that hotfix 1.05 (which came out a couple days ago at the time of writing) fixes some things? The only obvious fixes I've seen are a bump in framerate while driving and walking/running (not in combat), a noticeable decrease in menu load-in, and my visual settings may have finally saved. This hotfix is, what, the fifth hotpatch? The amount of size the patches alone take up seems to be somewhere between 80-100GB (keeping in mind that GTAV as a whole was around 50GB), and that's the most improvement that's been seen so far. That's what I and many others mean when we say that Cyberpunk 2077 is borderline unplayable. I managed to get through it, but I was literally only able to through effort, because if the game had its way, I never would've gotten past that one bug! The technical state of this game is simply unacceptable, and it doesn't become acceptable because a beloved developer made it. Nor does it become acceptable because gamers got angry about delays and would've gotten angrier at another delay. Nor does it become acceptable because the PC has had bad ports of games in the past. Nor does it become acceptable because next-gen consoles are out now. There is simply no universe in which Cyberpunk 2077 is an acceptable product, no matter how much you (or indeed, I) like the game personally. And I have to applaud Sony for their recent decision to no longer sell Cyberpunk on the Playstation Store and to offer full refunds to anyone who bought it. Having spent around 20 or so hours with the game and having played it to completion, I feel it would be unethical for me to take advantage of that, so I won't be doing so, but I have to commend the move nonetheless, even if it's as cynical a corporate decision as the decision to release Cyberpunk was in the first place.
Speaking of cynical corporate decisions, how about the blatant false advertising CD Projekt Red engaged in by telling early reviewers they couldn't show their own gameplay footage and not sending out any console code? They admitted in a call with their investors that they knew the game was unplayable on consoles, and so they engaged in what I would only slightly hesitate to call fraud in order to make as many day 1 sales as possible, and then they foisted the refund responsibility on Sony, Microsoft, and physical retailers, possibly in the hopes that nobody would be able to get their refunds. Well, if I'm going to take points off from my final score in The Last of Us: Part II for anti-consumer practices, I'm sure as hell going to do it here. I didn't preorder Cyberpunk, but I did purchase and start downloading as soon as I woke up on launch day, and by the time it was finished downloading, that's when all the videos showing how poorly the game ran came out. Had I known before I downloaded the game (at which point, prior to Sony's recent decisions, I became ineligible for a refund) that it was unplayable, I wouldn't have downloaded it. So though I don't intend to get a refund at this point for time-based ethical purposes, CD Projekt Red's fraudulent business decisions ensured that I spent money on a game I wouldn't otherwise have spent money on. So have another full point off, Cyberbug!
Receptionist: I'll just go ahead and call [name] for you then!
V: Did I tell you to do that?
R: W-what? Well, I
V: Answer the f***ing question. Did I. Tell you. To do that?
R: N-no sir, I just thought
V: Yeah, and who asked you to think? 'Cuz it sure as hell wasn't me!
R: *silence*
V: Word of advice, just do what you're told.
R: Yes, sir.
As I'm sure goes without saying, that falls under the "excellent" side of the equation. This delicate balance is pretty much omnipresent throughout the story, with certain plotlines feeling altogether unnecessary and some having me on the edge of my seat. Now...can you tell me what the downside of a story torn between these two extremes is? On the whole, the experience feels underwhelming. I knew going in that this was going to be shorter than CD Projekt Red's magnum opus, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and I actually did welcome that. The Witcher 3, though brilliant, largely had its runtime padded out with level gating, and despite this being an RPG with different tiers of "danger" warnings on missions depending on your level, there isn't any level gating to be found in Cyberpunk's main story. There's a bit of money gating, but that's one mission and the cash can be scrounged up incredibly quickly, so it's not a big deal. So I want to be clear that the game's length doesn't feel like it contributes to the overall underwhelming feel of the story. So other than what I already laid out about the constant battle between rushed and excellent storytelling moments, why did I watch the credits roll and just feel empty inside? The answer I found deep inside was a resounding "that's it?", and I wondered what that meant as the credits continued. First I wondered if it was the length of the game, but I put that notion to bed pretty quickly for all the reasons I've already laid out. Then I wondered if it was because of all the bugs. Like, I'd spent so much time fighting against this game to try and experience it, and maybe the end result wasn't worth the effort it took to get there. That turned out to be part of it, but not the main problem. I eventually realized that the main problem was that there was no sense of impact, and this story, in spite of the many small good moments contained therein, was completely disposable. There was no sense that anything I'd done had meant anything, which is weird to me because from the beginning this was a personal story, not a "save the world" story. It could be that I'm missing important lore pieces from the tabletop game this is based on. It could be that going down the corporate path results in the least satisfying ending. It could be that the specific choices in the corporate path that I made result in the least satisfying ending. All of these are definitely possible, but the fact remains that when the credits rolled, I felt nothing other than, "well, now I can start writing the review." I think it ultimately comes down to a combination of the technical state and that feeling of lack of impact. My theory is that I could've been satisfied with the story as it is and acknowledged the lack of impact simultaneously had it not been such an uphill struggle to get there. Ultimately I'm going to go easier on the story in the scoring than I normally would when I feel like this (since I'm not 100% sure of my reasoning myself), but I wanted to give as full an impression as I could in the body of this review.
Let us review:
Bugs 1 through 10 - 1.0
Bugs 10 through 20 - 1.0
Bugs 20 through 30 - 1.0
Bugs 30 through 40 - 1.0
Bugs 40 through 50 - 1.0
Bugs 50 through 62 - 1.0
Game-breaking/progression-inhibiting bug - 1.0
Purchased the game as a result of fraud - 1.0
Unfulfilling overall story - 0.5
Gunplay incredibly difficult without smart weapons - 1.0
The final score for Cyberpunk 2077 is...
0.5/10 - Borderline Unplayable
Never pull this s*** again, CD Projekt Red, never pull this s*** again
Available for: Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch, Google Stadia, Xbox Series X, Playstation 5
Reviewed for: Nintendo Switch
By far the best way I've heard Immortals: Fenyx Rising described is as a "junk food" game. Part of the reason I wanted to specify that I don't need games to consistently break new ground in the Cyberpunk review is because Immortals: Fenyx Rising doesn't have much in the way of original ideas, yet I had a ton of fun with it! Like junk food, it isn't going to enrich your life in any way, but it'll at least taste good going down!
Now, before I move on to the technical section, there's one last aspect of gameplay that needs to be discussed: the puzzles. This being a Breath of the Wild-like, the map is littered with puzzle dungeons, some of which being required to progress in the story. A common criticism I see of Immortals is that all the puzzles boil down to picking up boxes and putting them on switches. This is an accurate criticism, but it's worth noting that the developers go some interesting directions with the concept. I (like everyone else who has played this) would've liked to see some more variety, but the puzzles never really got stale for me. Perhaps if I'd done more of the optional side dungeons I'd be in a position where I never want to see another box ever again, but as it stands, the lack of variety was inoffensive to me. What was offensive to me, however, was the way the game controlled in these puzzle sections. Fenyx is always pretty floaty to control, and while this doesn't impact much in the overworld, when you're down in the dungeons, it can get in the way pretty quickly. The puzzle dungeons (called "vaults of Tartaros") take place atop several floating platforms, meaning that there's very light platforming that takes place inbetween puzzles. Most of the time this just entails jumping up to a platform that's so close it would be impossible to miss, but when maneuvering around the vaults becomes even slightly more complicated, it can get a little frustrating. There were a couple puzzles early on that weren't remotely difficult, for instance. For one puzzle, the solution was incredibly simple, but it involved traveling across four platforms of varying heights, and I kept on falling off because Fenyx controlled so poorly. Another puzzle involved sprinting through an obstacle course of lasers to get to the top of a platform and catch a large ball before it fell through a hole in the ground. I ended up dying quite a few times in this section as well for the exact same reason. I don't know if it was a learning curve or something else, as I never had quite as many problems in subsequent vaults, but instances like this had me yanking my hair out in an experience that I was enjoying otherwise.
Let us review:
Hit-or-miss humor - 0.3
Frustrating sense of control - 1.0
Technical problems - 0.5
The final score for Immortals: Fenyx Rising is...
8.2/10 - Great
Good work, Ubisoft, good work
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