I played this after watching Edgerunners (it's great btw you should check it out) on a PC that more or less meets the recommended specs for the game so I didn't run into any major technical issues. I had a good enough time with the gamd even though it never really did anything to stand out and felt kind of empty in a lot of places. Night City is pretty to look at, but when compared to something like any Bethesda world or most top-down CRPGs, it felt kind of lifeless. The only locations you could ever explore were ones tied to quests or gigs, and there were never just random buildings you could walk into. At one point I found an abandoned apartment building and thought that I had been wrong, but it turns out that it was used for a much later main quest. If I checked every single door maybe there are a few buildings that I could have entered just because, but after about 20 hours I just kind of gave up looking. The mechanics of the game, like the gunplay and stealth, were actually pretty fun to play around with, and I really enjoyed being able to sneak through cameras and fuck up my enemies without ever actually getting close to them. It seems like there's a decent amount of variety when it comes to building V in terms of skills and cyberware, but since I dabbled a bit in everything and ended up playing a stealthy netrunner kind of character that relied on throwing knives and a monowire whenever things got hot, maybe I've actually seen all there is to the gameplay and getting gorilla arms or relying on sniper rifles and grenades wouldn't change that much. The side quests and gigs were always pretty simple in terms of gameplay, but CDPR did a good job of presenting them in a way that kept me invested. The main story was surprisingly enjoyable, even if the balance between the three acts is really weird. My big complaint with the story is that it felt like CDPR came up with one story they wanted to tell, and then just added some fluff to make it seem like the player's choices matter, but events would play out the same way regardless of what the played tried to do. Because of that and because Night City is basically just a Potemkin village, a nice looking facade without any real substance to it, I really don't see myself ever wanting to replay the game like I would a lot of other Western RPGs. I'll probably still play Phantom Liberty when that comes out, though.

Reviewed on Dec 24, 2022


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