Cyberpunk 2077: A brief review
Been playing Cyberpunk 2077. This game has been in development for 7 years. While the original environment feels like it took 7 years to develop, the game is sadly filled with many bugs.
It runs sluggishly on everything except a PC with the very latest RTX video card, or presumably on an XBox Series X or a PS5 — these last two are rumors as no one has these to actually verify.
Of course that means it runs sluggishly for me, even with all the graphics turned to the lowest levels. I’ve had less lag on a MMORPGs.
The writing is good and original, and there are fun sci-fi tropes that are emulated in this game, like cyber implants, and VR capture that can be enhanced. V is a purposely generic player character, but the primary character you hang out with Jackie Wells, looks like a scary creep, but is actually a pretty decent character you will learn to like.
The combat is pretty standard stuff, FPS shooter with some stealth and driving that doesn’t work very well, especially with all the computational lag. Driving STILL does not have mouse steering (ASDW steering sucks people!), so I have to grab my game pad every time I drive. At least it is not as unusable as Watchdog driving was, but it is not that much of an improvement.
The vast majority of the game is good old visual novel dialog with 70% of the choices being pointless, and most of the rest asking for more info. (I know why: pointless choices makes the game feel more interactive, and more info choices are there to not pick on your second play through. I have learned to do both on my games.)
One of the oddest decisions was to sync dialog with the animation of the character, which looks really cool when it works, but leads to long pauses after each sentence. So not only does computation lag interfere with combat, it is so bad it interferes with dialog scenes!
You can press the “C” key to skip those pauses, but the “C” key is also the button to crouch in stealth segments, so I find my character crouching and standing a lot during dialog segments.
I want to like this game more. Working on my own sci-fi visual novel, while playing a well produced game in the same genre gives me ideas, but the wonky laggy combat and dialog just does not make for good game play.
I’ll probably play some more until I get bored, but at some point I’ll stop until I can invest in better PC graphics.
Date Ariane Games 
Cars are a lot more sluggish, while using a bike is much easier. I watched YongYea’s review 1 and 2 to see what bugs to expect, and I didn’t get many of the bugs he did. The first bug was when sound/animation to Evelyn stopped close to the first time I followed her. I saved, reloaded and it worked fine. I didn’t see floating weapons. One bug crashed the game during a mission, so I restarted it and it worked perfectly. I think the issues are the game isn’t optimized, and they’re working on it. But for the most part I didn’t have other bugs. I never experienced lag, and my gaming-rig is a laptop with the 1070-card. Of course I didn’t turn on ray-tracing, and I scaled to High on most settings (very few Medium, those were for shadows).
The story is what drew me in, and it’s really touching in parts. Specially what happens to Jackie. I wasn’t to happy what happened, due to the consequences of the shoot-out in the quest to get the chip. I hope a stealth-netrunner approach can make the difference to save Jackie. But that’s for a different play-through. I began as a Street Kid, with pistols and rifles.
I agree. I’m enjoying the story, but instead of actually playing, I’m watching the RadBrad “lets play”. He has an RTX video card and its a much smoother game experience.