Cyberpunk 2077

 

Cyberpunk 2077 has a huge reputation. Leading up to its release I remember all sorts of stores would have advertisements everywhere for it, there would be bags of chips nad soda cans with it plastered on it. Its one of the biggest, most hyped and anticipated AAA games of the past decade. It's made by CD Projekt Red, the develoeprs of the RPG Witcher games, and those games have massive success and a big following as well. Cyberpunk at first glance, seemed to be a mix of First person shooter and RPG. The game is also notorious for being one of the best graphics games out there, with all the bells and whistles of modern gaming technology, ray tracing and all that. All of this alone means of course I was going to play it at some point. Other than that small bit of primer information I knew nothing really about the game and jumped in blind. Only until recently had I sat down and played through the whole thing in one week.

Upon starting the game you pick a difficulty. Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard. Each with their own brief description. Naturally I try to go with the default experience when playing through a new game, so I go with Normal. Then, you're ased to choose your 'Life path' from one of three options. Nomad, Street Kid, Or Corpo. This selection is your character background. Nomad is the kind of person who's an outer city dweller, living in small isolated tribes. Street Kid is what you would expect, someone in the middle of a busy city, being a gangster and thug. Corpo is the suit and tie Corporate buisness person. I chose Nomad. Then you choose your body type, and finally you create your characters appearance. There's a decent variety of customization options here, even down to the silliness of Penis Size. Why that's a thing I have no idea, maybe for the laughs?  After this, you select your stats. The game has 5 RPG stats to allocate. Body, Intelligence, Reflexes, Technical Ability, and Cool. Starting off I knew I kind of just wanted to be a standard guns blazing, no-stealth, not super high tech guy. So I put points into Body, and Reflexes, which sounded like were suitable for that aim.


Surprisingly I believe that depending on which character background you choose; Nomad, Street Kid; Corpo, you get a different introduction to the game. You start in a different place, and its setup differently. I chose Nomad like I said and it starts off inside some garage in the desert, with the local city Sheriff showing up and giving you a hard time. From here basically the setup is that you're doing jobs for pay, which require you to go into the Night City.

The first impression of the game is that its very immersive and polished in terms of presentation, everything you do has its own animation, theres a real sense of weight behind all of your actions and interactions with the world. Although things start off very slowly,  the game is very cinematic and narrative driven. I thought it may just be the introduction which is very dialogue heavy, but it never really faded throughout the whole game. At times I was thinking to myself "This is a movie game" in terms of how you can go literally an hour straight without doing anything but watching cutscenes, or following NPC's around and listening to them talk. Its just a lot of nonstop chatter and dialogue. Of course its not necessarily a bad thing, it just depends on the pacing and if the gameplay in between these moments are impactful.

So you're in the desert, and you meetup with this guy called Jackie. You work together doing jobs for pay for the first bit of the game, but most of what you'll be doing is again, listening to dialogue and watching cutsceens with little actual gameplay in between. Maybe 30 seconds of driving here and there, or sprinkled in between moments where you hang out of a car window and shoot at people chasing you. The story and writing is engrossing, but I the thought lingered in my head; "When am I going to be able to freely play or have long-lasting gameplay segments without being interrupted by cutscenes?"

Though, of course every character you talk to, you get a choice of dialogue options. Theres a decent variety of options in most contexsts on how you can choose to express yourself, the character you play as , V, is charasmatic and likable and depending on your background you sometimes have unique dialogue options which reflect that starting background. Depending on how you allocate your skill choices you  you can also get other speech options, like since I put so many points into Body (strength) I frequently had options to use brute force to say, force up doors and such. Though you don't get a huge amount of dialogue options, usually just 3 choices to pick from, and the main choice that progresses the conversation through to the objective is colored in Yellow, though overall the dialogue choices do keep the cutscenes and interactions from being too stale where you just sit back and aren't invested at all. This is another aspect of the games mechanics that feel Fallout inspired to me also.

Thankfully the pacing picks up and you start to get your first taste of combat. The game has quite a fleshed out combat system, that keeps becoming more elaborate the further you progress through the game, unlocking more of the skill tree and fitting your character with cybernetic implants. This first taste of combat is in these buildings with Jackie and you get to experience its various mechanics; How when you crouch behind cover your gun automatically can aim around cover, or when you shoot enemies you can see damage numbers fly off of them, When you get a headshot it will popup in text "Headshot" , how you can see the enemies health bars, the combat is engrossing and fun. There is a huge variety of all sorts of guns, but for quite awhile you won't be seeing that much of them sadly. The guns you do use for the first bit of the game, in between all the dialogue and cutscenes feel powerful and fun to use though, like the basic pistols, shotguns and assault rifles. When you kill enemies, you can loot their corpses, and you can explore around every enviornment to find colored boxes and loot which reminds me of Fallout. The game really does make me think of a mix of Fallout and Grand Theft Auto, driving between locations, the high production value and focus on the characters in the world, and then the RPG mechancis going around killing and looting enemies and buildings, its an interesting mix.

And as soon as you get your first taste of combat just like that its gone in a flash. I'll just say it now; a repeat problem I have with the game is the pacing. Its like everytime you get control and start having fun with the gameplay, its short lived and lasts for 5 minutes, and then you have another 45 minutes of cutscenes and dialogue. Valve for example, has something they call Moment to Moment gameplay, when they develop their games they make sure at every intersection of the game, theres some interesting gameplay choice happening or something the player has to actively control and do, to keep every moment exciting and not just dump dozens of minutes of dialogue at you. Unfortunately Cyberpunk has no problem frequently having you just drop controls and stare at the screen for dozens of minutes. At times it feels like its 90% Cutscenes/Dialogue, 10% gameplay, its a feeling that never really went away throughout the whole experience. I wasn't ever too bothered, because really the writing, characters, story, plot, is all really interesting and I cared about all the characters and always was on edge to know what would happen next, but really I'm here for the gameplay, if I wanted to watch a great movie I'd just go watch a movie. At times I was left feeling theres not enough game and too much movie. I understand its an RPG, but that doesn't mean to just dump an hour of cutscenes on a player in the name of RPG, thats not really what I take RPG to mean.


It's like, for the first quarter hours of the game you actually do maybe three gun battles, lasting 5 minutes each. And its not like theres even any other kinds of missions in between, the entire game I don't think has any main quest where you for example are in a car chase and have to escape people chasing you, or any real vehicle missions. Many of the missions and actual core gameplay levels are not that memorable, the main focus of the game is really in the writing, dialogue, and cutscenes, not the actual objectives and missions. In the first quarter, besides the few small gun battles, you also do these Brain Dance segments. These are segments where you basically play as a floating camera and re-watch a cutscene over and over and float around the enviornment scanning the enviornment for new information. Thats it. Its basically an interactive cutscene. You do this stuff multiple times and it takes a dozen minutes or more each time you do it. Again, the cutscenes and writing are engrossing, but I kept wondering when am I just going to do a bunch of fun exciting gameplay missions and not just watch cutscenes.

I don't mean to complain and whine about the pacing too much, but it has to be noted and moment to moment is a big part of the experience.

By this point I'm past the first bit of the game, where you go into a corporate building with Jackie and steal some super high tech chip. The heist goes wrong, Jackie gets killed, and the only way to save the chip is to implant it into your head. You do so, but the unexpected twist is that the chip actually has living inside it Keanu Reeves (Johnny Silverhand in the game), and now you have this person living inside of your head, in this high-tech sentient way. So for the remainder of the game you have this sidekick you hallucinate that no one else can see, where he comments on what you're doing and showing up randomly, arguing with you, and being a general amusing companion. The kicker is that he is also slowly erasing over your memory and identity, so the remainder of the games core narrative revolves around trying to save your life by figuring out a way to remove this chip from your head without it killing you.

Of course the game is open world, and theres lots to explore and see. Night City is extremely detailed and theres always something interesting to look at or discover. I would frquently just walk up to people and zoom in on their faces, looking at all the different designs of pedestrians, all their weird cybernetics, like their eyes being replaced with tech or them having their arms cut off and replaced with tech etc. That alone was pretty constantly fascinating. Besides Night City is the outskirts of town where Nomads roam, the desert outback areas which are also fun to be in. Theres three categories of quests. Main Quests, denoted by a full yellow circle on your journal, side quests which are yellow but no fully colored in, and "Gigs" which are like blue colored. I never really did any Gigs, I figured they were like generic repeatable quests like "Go kill X" "Go pickup this thing" similar to those endless quests in Skyrim for example. Anyway, I never did too much open world free-roaming though, I didn't really have the pull or incentive. I just was eager to get back to the quests and get into some intense memorable missions. The world of Cyberpunk is very aesthetically fleshed out and realized, its just a wonderful game to look at in general. They have achieved the futuristic almost dystopian city vibe, there's all sorts of posters, signs, bilboards, TV screens all over the place which are very obscene and almost downright degenerate, theres always something amusing to look at and see, lots of night clubs with lots of people to talk to, and the graphical fidelity and amount of details and objects on screen are often stunning, especially with Ray Tracing and High graphics settings on PC, the game has very stylish, artistic, but high graphical fidelity visuals, just so roaming around the streets of night city is interesting in and of its self. NPC's frequently do all sorts of things, talk to eachother, they aren't lifeless and boring, the game being so highly detailed and immersive full of atmosphere makes it never really boring, and I suspect on repeat playthroughs it will keep it fresh and exciting too.

The music is also an integral feature of the atmosphere of course. The game is dense with all sorts of electronic, loud aggressive booming music, although I will say I am a bit disappointed with the general radio station music when driving around the city. For one there doesnt seem to be any quick button to swap to the next radio station, you always have to pull up this radio menu which is clunky and so annoying that most of the time I don't change stations or just turn off the music entirely. Actually I googled it just now, and apparently there is some option deep in the menu to enable a way to quickly change radio stations, but why the hell isn't it on by default? Anyway, even after I do manually search through radio stations, a lot of it doesn't appeal to me sadly and theres not many big names you recognize. Its cool theres an extreme metal station, and its funny going around blasting Brutal Death Metal, but overall there weren't too many tunes that made my ears perk up and stay in my head, unlike similar games in the genre such as GTA Radio stations being full of memorable songs.

But yet again,actual gameplay opportunities are sort of few and far between. Sure you can steal cars, shoot pedestrians, get into gun fights with cops, but beyond  that theres not too much to do in this big open world. There is a few side quests like going and doing some Races, or Scanning 20 pieces of Graffiti, or tracking down and killing 25 of these certain Psychos for instance, but these obviosuly seemed like filler. I did however do the majority of the side quests, the ones that involved progressing characters storylines and narratives such as Judy, Panam, River, Johnny Silverhand, and more. Since I was actually invested in these characters and curious what the outcomes would be of their storylines. So in typical sort of Grand Theft Auto open world fashion, its a lot of driving back and forth between quest markers, or going to the various fast travel stations around the map and using that to travel closer. That's basically all I would do, travel to one mission, complete it, and then immediately travel to the next.

It's almost like the core gameplay loop is to do so, travel to a mission, but then be faced with a good 30+ minutes of cutscenes, dialogues, "Brain dances" (those interactive floating camera cutscenes), following NPC"s around as they talk to you, until you get maybe 10 minutes of solid uninterrupted gameplay. Rinse and repeat. Its a problem that lasts all throughout the game, I will reiterate again, its fine to have long cutscenes, its fine to have lots of dialogue, but the pacing cannot be 30+ minutes of cutscenes, 10 minutes of gameplay, over and over and over. There were many times where I would just feel dialogue fatigue and just wanted to play a couple action packged missions without having to watch a TV episode in between. Its just excessive and never lets up. You can't even skip many of the lines of dialogue and scenes (not that I would skip them anyway), so even if you on a repeat playthrough wanted to skip everything, you can't.

I'm not going to go into extreme depth about the story, narrative, writing and characters or anything, this isn't a movie review; I don't really write about stuff like that. I did however find it exciting and was invested in the narrative, the voice acting is overall pretty great and convincing, the characters are not just generic cliches, they have nuance and depth, there's a lot of drama and twists and turns, the overall narrative is good, that's not an issue.

As for the general gameplay mechanics, there's quite a lot to dig into.
The game has an RPG loot system, you can open a character screen to get a good look at your character, his stats, you have various pieces of equipment like you can change all your individual pieces of clothes, although many clothing items are just visual (which is weird because you hardly ever see your character, theres no third person view except on vehicles) although some clothing pieces have minor buffs like +20 armour, or one torso piece I used the whole game that gave 8% reload speed. Then you have weapons, interestingly you can sort your weapons by different categories such as; New, Type, Price, Quality, and the most interesting of all: DPS. Sorting your weapons by DPS is mostly what I did, its just nice to know on paper which weapons you have that are the highest DPS. Although one complaint is that every time you open your inventory you have to manually sort each time, it should just remember your last selected sort. Weapons also can have attachments, usually one or two, a sight attachment like a new scope and then a muzzle attachment like a silencer or different barrel which minorly reduces recoil, stuff like that. Though my Shotguns interestingly had mods and attachments which increased Dismemberment chance which I enjoyed using.

The way loot works is that there are different tiers. Tier 1 is white color, Tier 2 is green, tier 3 is blue, Tier 4 is purple, Tier 5 is unique exclusive items, and they are Orange. You can also get Tier+ weapons, for example Tier 2+, I guess this is sort of inbetween Tier 2 and Tier 3. For the most part I would use whatever highest DPS weapon I had, and the highest tier. This ended up mostly using Shotguns, specifically Double barrel shotguns, as they would obliterate most enemies in a single blast, even the most powerful mega Mech enemies I made quick work of with these Shotguns. You can equip 3 weapons, 3 slots, so I mostly did Shotgun in slot 1, SMG or Assault rifle in Slot 2, and slot 3 pistol. Worked very well. Theres also entirely different categories of weapons, theres Power Weapons which are like your typical modern weapons, theres Tech Weapons which is super-enhanced high tech sci-fi weapons that are usually electrical, and theres Smart
weapons which mostly use Homing technology which lock on and seek out enemies. Also theres a wide variety of Melee weapons and skill trees for Melee. So the game has a wide variety of playstyles and allows you to play how you want. Me personally, I just went with the most typical Power Weapons type character, and didn't really use Tech, Smart, or Melee at all, as I wasn't spec'd into it on the skill trees.


But not only weapons have Tiers, every item in the game does. Clothing, even your quick slot items like Grenades and Health kits you can upgrade to higher tiers, and lets not forget Cybernetics. The whole game is about Transhumanism, far-future technology, so a core mechanic you'd think is based around integrating all this tech into your body. Sure, its a pretty impactful mechanic. Theres a separate inventory page for your Cybernetics. You can only change these implants at various Ripperdocs around the game. Although honestly for basically the first half of the game I didn't care for or touch any of this stuff, there was just no need. As I keep repeating, I felt like there was hardly enough gameplay to justify going out of my way to spend time messing with it, as most of the experience up to that point has been mostly watching cutscenes or dialogue. Though at a certain point I started caring and going around to these Ripperdocs and implanting myself with all sorts of Cybernetics.

 You can implant various pieces of your body, your eyes, your arms, legs, skeleton, and so on. These implants do have interesting and gameplay changing effects. For instance you can get an implant that lets you press E and go into slow-motion, you can increase your carrying capactiy, lots of implants increase your overall armour and make you take less damage (something I mostly opted for), you can get implants that increase your sprint speed, you can get implants that change what kinds of things you can scan and highlight, but none of this ends up meaning that much when combat feels few and far between. Something that is quite disappointing about this Cybernetics system is how it doesn't even change how you visually appear. You'd think implanting your eyeballs with tech, changing your arms and legs, would reflect on your characters appearance yet it doesn't. For a game all about Cyberpunk and far future its a let down that it doesn't show up on your main character. Still, when I did engage with the Cybernetic systems, I found it interesting the variety of implants you can get, and you can even upgrade each piece with materials you find around the world to increase the tier further, giving it extra buffs and more armour. Overall, though, if I had just entirely ignored this cybernetics mechanic it would have hardly affected the game, its not like I needed much help progressing through the combat segments anyway, the game is extremely easy at least on the default difficulty. Its an interesting mechanic, but leaves a bit to be desired.

Then you have the various skill trees. There is a skill tree for each stat; Body, Intelligence, Reflexes, Technical Ability, and Cool
Body and Reflexes is what I mostly spec'd into. You get two different point categories, Attribute point, which unlocks higher parts of the skill tree, and perk points which lets you allocate perks on the tree. I'd level up Body and Reflexes attributes as much as possible to unlock parts of their trees and higher perks, such as with Body: Shotgun damage, dismemberment chance, and especially the multiple Health regeneration perks Body provides, means I rarely had to ever even  glance at my health, the regen was so constant and so powerful that combat became a breeze. Under Reflexes it lets you get more stamina, sprint, double jump abilities, and even Slow motion after each dodge while you aim down the sights which is very powerful. Past that when I ran out of stuff to upgrade, I put the rest of my points into Technical Ability tree, just to make my Cybernetics statistics more powerful, and also unlock higher tier Cybernetics. I didn't care about Technical Ability stat; as its stuff about hacking and scanning the enviornment which didn't interest me, and I didn't care about Cool as its the Stealth tree and I didn't want to do any stealth. Its nice that again, theres a wide variety of choices you can make, and I think the skills and perks are overall well done and interesting enough.

The driving feels weighty and impactful, there are lots of different vehicles, and at the press of a button you can spawn a vehicle which self-drives to your location within a few seconds. However one category of vehicle seemed to just outclass the rest to me. Motorcycles. They're fast, nimble, you can swerve in and out between tight places with ease, and most crucially unlike other games, even if you do get into a high impact crash, you don't go flying off the vehicle. So theres like no downsides to motorcycles. Compared to Cars or even fast Sports cars, they feel slippery, glide all over the place, are easy to lose control, and are big a bulky. So for virtually the whole game whenever I needed a vehicle I would just tap the button and spawn a motorcycle to me and use that anytime. A bit strange it feels so much better than the rest but it is what it is. You can unlock new vehicles to permanently come to your location, and I had a handful or so of these vehicles unlocked, but I'd always just found the motorcycles to be the best choice at any given moment.


That's the bulk of the game mechanics, the first person combat is definitely the highlight. Especially the wide variety of controls, like you can sprint, dodge, crouch slide, double jump, lean out from cover, use  your scanning ability to hack things in the enviornment and cause all sorts of shenaningans like exploding things or distrating enemies, the core of the combat feels fun and exciting. After each kill enemies will have loot, which you can see what loot remains on the minimap noted by an X marker, you'll see enemies have different tiered color items, although its unfortunate that while you are looting things you don't really get a small thumbnail preview or icon showing you what the item may look like, you kind of just get the name of the item so its hard at a glance to tell if its even worth picking something up, so I basically just picked everything up and sold off the stuff I didn't need at the various NPC's or stations around the game. So looting always felt exciting and fun, and anytime a mission had me come up against enemies I always engaged directly. Its weird how almost every mission it seems like the 'canon' way is to approach it with stealth, like the NPC's will want you to go stealthy and its usually setup in a way where Stealth is the default, but I just find stealth so boring generally in games so I'd almost immediately just start blasting. Its funny because multiple times you would devise this big plan to break into some corporation or warehouse, figuring out ways to sneak in and hack this and that, but when I opted to just literally walk in the front gate and blast everyone with a shotgun, it worked very well and it was not a challenge at all. The game is just very very easy on the default Normal difficulty. I didn't die a single time in a gunfight, and I didn't fail a mission a single time because theres hardly any way to fail missions, almost every real gameplay segment is just shooting a few groups of enemies, theres no other kinds of missions, the only other way to "fail" is by choosing bad dialogue options.

  Some dialogue options you choose seem not that important or insignificant but can lock you out of exclusive content or unique encounters in the future, so there is lots of room for repeat playthroughs. There are even romance partners and multiple sex scenes, the game is bombastic and sort of edgy and unafraid to be shocking and in your face at times, which also keeps it from being stale. I did all the side quests for Panam and unlocked her as a Romantic partner, but theres apparently a variety of other characters which you can unlock as a romantic partner also.

Speaking of side missions, they are not boring or unenjoyable. Actually maybe some of the most exciting content in the game are these side missions. They aren't exactly generic boring fetch quests, but fully involved side stories with all of the various characters you encounter. Multiple of these side missions further explore important background details of the side characters, especially Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves character) further exploring his past and personality and relationships and his music band playing gigs. At some point I reached the last main mission and it gave a warning that its the "Point of no Return", so thats why I decided to go out of my way to do most of the side quests, since by this point I was enjoying the experience and didn't want it to end so soon. I'm glad I went out of my way to do the majority of them, because if I didn't it would make the disparity between core gameplay and constant dialogue feel even worse, it kind of feels like the main quest doesn't have a huge amount of actual gameplay encounters.

Many of the side missions have you breaking into some complex or warehouse, or theres this one quest where you have to track down 7 self-driving AI cars that have gone rogue and no longer want to obey, and they act like real people with their own individual personalities which was kinda amusing and funny, it took me almost the whole game to finish this quest and it seems like I got jack shit for completing it? Like there was no actual reward when I finished it, I was quite disappointed. Another side quest has you go around and do Fight clubs, fighting people with your bare fists, which was kinda fun but moreso felt like filler. But still, even after going out of my way to do most of the side quests its not like I was left filling like there was still that many memorable combat encounters, and infact most of the side quests still involve just going around talking to NPC's or watching cutscenes, entire side quests are nothing more than talk to NPC A, go talk to NPC B, go back to NPC A, etc.


As for the rest of the main quests, after the prologue with Jackie who dies, and then you put the chip in your head, from here you just do a lot of going back and forth to different night clubs, doing these "Brain dance" floating camera scenes, theres a mission where you go to save your friend Evelyn from people that sold her into essentially human slavery so you shoot up their club, which was fun, theres an area where you go to a new piece of the map and meetup with these Voodoo Boys, and go infiltrate a mall full of soldiers and shoot them all up, also fun. Theres missions where you go with Panam on some ambushes to get her car back from some thugs, and some missions in the desert with her fight off military and getting a super tank. There's even a few segments where you play entirely as Johnny Silverhand, where you use his exclusive super powered Pistol that just kills every enemy in one hit, these segments kinda felt like gameplay filler in the sense that you're so overpowered the enemies felt more like meaningless flies than real threats, still it was fun to do from a narrative standpoint. There's a series of quests with a Japanese man called Takemura, one involving breaking into a compound which was probably the most fun mission in the game, I basically just stormed in the front gate with a double barrel shotgun and took the whole place by storm. Although later on Takemura gets attacked and it seems like you cannot save him, but after I beat the game I looked it up and theres a secret way to save him if you search around and it unlocks more missions and content with him later, which is a shame that I missed. Then thats the bulk of the main quests. Now its just the final mission, the point of no return. Its this one final big heist to break into some massive corporation and save your brain basically. Theres multiple ways to go about this, depending on how youve played the game. The choices I had was to either allow Johnny to take over my body and do it with Rogue, or there was the choice to just off myself and end the game immediately which is a morbid and odd choice, theres a choice to try to just waltz into the place and talk it over diplomatically, and finally I unlocked a choice to call up my romantic partner Panam and have her and the her nomad clan help me. Naturally I chose that one.

From here its an epic final battle, this whole mission was pretty fun you storm the place with your army of nomads in this super tank, get off on foot and do battles throughout this complex blasting away waves of enemies, until finally facing off against the final boss Adam Smasher. The game had a few boss fights up to this point, but they were so easy and short lived it was hardly notable. There was some other boss fight with a Japanese ninja guy that kept teleporting around, which was pretty exciting however. This final boss Adam Smasher was unfortunately quite easy too, though. Maybe 60 seconds tops, just run up and blast him in  the face with my double barrel shotgun, switch to SMG and spray when hes far away, rinse repeat. Then you get a final choice for the ending to either have Johnny Silverhand take your body and get another chance at life, while your consciousness gets uploaded into the AI cybernet, thus theoretically "saving" your life. But it would make the whwhole assault on the complex with Panam be for nothing as you would be basically dying in earthly form when the whole point was to save you from that. Or, you can return to your body and live as normal, with that caveat that you may die in some amount of months from your brain issues. I chose to return to my body, then I got an ending where I basically ride off with Panam into the sunset, leaving Night City for Azirona far away, and Panam says she may know people there that can save you. Then the game ends, ending credits. I looked it up and apparently this is one of the most hopeful and best endings you can get, out of 7 or so possible ones.

My main gripes with Cyberpunk is the general pacing and moment to moment gameplay, as well as when you finally do get some chunk of gameplay, its way too easy (at least on the default difficulty). The whole time I was craving for just a long segment of uninterrupted challenging gameplay to finally utilize all the various mechanics, but it just never happened. Its weird that they have such elaborate fleshed out cybernetics mechanics (sadly doesn't change how you look), all sorts of Skill trees, Weapon tiers, builds, equipment and items, yet none of it actually matters since the game is so easy. Maybe I'm just really good at making a character and not everyone has this experience? Who knows. But beyond all that the biggest gripe is how you can go for 30 + minutes or more doing dialogue, then get 10 minutes if youre lucky of uninterrupted gameplay, and then its back to the 30 minutes of dialogue. The ratio to gameplay and dialogue is just way too off. Valve was onto something when they spoke about moment to moment gameplay when designing their games. I have no idea if other people have this same sort of complaint about this game, its quite likely this is just a big personal problem I only have with games, but I really was not expecting Cyberpunk to be mostly a movie-game. But when you finally do get those chunks of gameplay, all the mechanics come together and its a satisfying experience, I just wish it had more challenging memorable encounters. Night City is an almost endlessly fascinating place to explore, from your own personal apartment, all the various little attentions to detail, you have a phone with contacts you can dial up, theres all sorts of sub-menus and character screens with further information, even information about the progression of your attitude with Johnny, as well as the progression of your Brain damage, and the graphics are just stellar with all the reflections and perfectly captured dystopian Sci-fi world, so theres always something to come back to. The narrative is gripping for the whole time, so even when I was a bit annoyed from the lack of gameplay I was still invested in the dialogue and the general game world.Maybe one day I will re-play it on a harder difficulty, and theres still even the DLC campaign Phantom Liberty that I will play soon enough also.

7/10