Night City is really well done, its hard to not dwarfed by it during your time there, the districts have all their own style and during my entire 50ish hour run I never got tired of traversing and exploring it.

If you actually bother doing stuff like gigs and the cyberpsycho capture missions it paints a pretty bleak world. Nobody has truly "made it" in night city, top corpos are left to rot the moment they turn useless to the company, elite soldiers are hunted like dogs once their high amount of cyberware starts acting up. Truly the best you can hope is to live your life in your own terms and die in a blaze of glory.

Now my issue with the game lies in what are the typical pitfalls of open world games. While this alone scores tons of points for night city being an actually fun map to explore and traverse unlike most Ubisoft games there's still a myriad of very dull choices. The skill tree seems overwhelming at first, but then you realize that most of the skills are just "do 2,5% more damage with handguns" or "3% more chances of a crit". The looter shooter aspect just made me groan, its no fun that after every shootout I had to comb the are to see if I find a gun that does 5 more points of damage than my current one. While the majority of secondary missions are well done gigs are a very mixed bag, some are good and help paint what kind of world Cyberpunk is more, but a lot of them are just very basic "go there, kill some guys and then leave".

There's a pretty cool narrative and characters here along with a world that's genuinely well made, but sadly everything is just kinda buried under a pile of trite AAA choices.

Reviewed on Mar 20, 2023


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