My review covers ONLY the base game. I haven’t touched the DLC please don’t provide spoilers but let me know if I should play it and better yet if I would enjoy it based on my complaints here. No Spoilers though

As much as you probably, I remember being incredibly hyped for this game since it’s first gameplay trailer in 2018, to be fair I’m not really a Witcher kind of guy but Cyberpunk is a genre that intrigued me, back then I was more of an Outrun type of aesthetic guy, with an interest in how the future would look, flying cars, tall buildings, technology, augmented strippers, younger me was obsessed with the genre.

The presentation of the game shocked me, I still remember the trailer by heart with the apartment shootout the trauma medics coming with their vehicle at the end of the gig I thought, I don’t know if it’s a random encounter but it looked next gen gaming to me imagine if we were to do a gig during the night get involved in a shootout then walk back to our car overlooking the city, which leads us to.

Presentation This is one thing I think the game nailed it, younger me didn’t realize all of this future would take part in a Capitalistic futuristic dystopia, the city does shine but also beyond the neon and the fancy lights you can see the gritty texture of the city, It still looks beautiful and I’m not running at the highest settings.

Even now I like traversing the city with a fast car but here’s where my first criticism lies, while it may look beautiful even the backalleys the NPCs literally have nowhere to go, It’s like they are walking in a straight line and they just exist so the city wouldn’t look empty. Also there’s nothing dynamic about the city I feel like it had some untapped potential for random encounters and minigames.

But what else did the Trailer hype younger me? Well the missions, you can imagine how hyped I was when the trailer narrator said “Random encountersl ike these are an example of how your actions directly influence your open world experience” So I was like “Holy shit, you are telling me I could actually maybe piss off some random corpo guy and I would maybe Roleplay as an outlaw”

Nope. You can imagine the disappointment when in 2020 I found out that the game has different introductions and they all lead to the same exact story, Corpo, Street Kid, Nomad, It’s all the same, but that’s fine I thought what about the side quest I mean it’s CD Project Red we are talking about, what if someone random calls you up for a gig and it would be more of a Fallout situation where at least there’s some flexibility in how you approach gameplay, No not really. I mean technically there are choices but it’s mostly binary.

I didn’t care about the bugs, I guess like all games have them what also mattered to me was the broken police system (still is) like what if the police could chase you in an interesting way, but most chases and detection system relies mostly on GTAs system. My main problem with the game as I was slowly playing it was “I mean I’m having fun, the story is engaging. I love how nicely written it is how the characters actually behave like human beings sitting in bars and talking like normal people, but imagine if it had a better groundwork”

Gameplay: gameplay is great, I had fun with the weapons, melee some side missions were neat I loved how they satirized the average surface level cricitism of Capitalism in a mission with Johnny not in favor of it obviously., I loved organizing my build and sneaking my way through most missions, shooting being the final choice.

The story while I liked the characters, I just wish my actions impacted the world I dreamt in 2018. I think the 30$ I gave for the physical version of the game are totally worth it, I got hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of it, It just wasn’t what I anticipated.