Cyberpunk 2077

A controversial launch marred it, a big-time turnaround with numerous subsequent patches aided by a successful anime tie-in redeemed it, and now Cyberpunk 2077 is regarded as another modern classic from CD Projekt Red.  But is there anything here for me as someone jaded by open world design that focuses more on volume than quality, or is it done in once again by its own hubris?

Cyberpunk 2077 was a public relations disaster when it launched, for a variety of reasons.  Whether completely unnecessary health hazards to epileptic people, alleged exploitation of CDPR employees (later offset by a suspiciously large number of positive employee reviews appearing to offset negative ones), or a conveniently timed data breach that may or may not have been staged for publicity, the game was a pretty big font of negativity when it launched and continued to be so for some time after.  Of course, it had its defenders too; mostly people who decided it was the best game of all time years before they ever played a single second of it and continued to do so in spite of its horrifically buggy design and poor performance.

I passed it for several years for all those reasons, as well as just not enjoying the Witcher games at all.  Mostly because rather than showing you tangible evidence of themes and ideas and letting you draw your own conclusions, they instead sit you down every five minutes to smugly tell you all about how intelligent and important and poignant and progressive and visionary they're being, all while showing disappointingly little in the way of innovative design, compelling writing or interesting gameplay.  I mean, unless you count "follow quest marker and push confirm button until it says you've finished it" design, permanently botchable quests, no hard saves and guessing at which dialog options will lead you to a bad ending 40+ hours later as compelling; I certainly don't.  It's the equivalent of a pretentious film student roping you into watching his 2-hour magnum opus and then spending the next six hours explaining all the symbolism in extreme detail to make sure you get it.  Not because they have any anything poignant to say, but because they desperately want you to admire and worship them; preferably through their wallet.

Cyberpunk (the heavily-patched version) at least has more to offer in terms of gameplay than Witcher does.  Built as a gigantic open world game in a sprawling city, it feels like a logical mashup of elements from Grand Theft Auto, Deus Ex, Borderlands and Watch_Dogs.  You drive around, you get into fights with hostile NPCs, evade the cops, and complete various side missions, getting different dialog and rewards depending on your approach.  Going in guns blazing, using stealth to disable enemies and hacking to create distractions or destroy targets (NPCs and mundane objects like air conditioners, lights and even oil barrels can be "hacked" with destructive results, which makes little sense to me).  There's also semi-randomized loot in the form of armors and weapons with various random attributes and stat bonuses, and you get core stat upgrades and perks depending on your playstyle.  You can install implants to improve your character as well, either finding them about the world or ripping them off dead gangers and psychos; so long as you have the cash to install them, of course.

Of course, balancing all these elements out is never an easy job in a sprawling open-ended game like this, and Cyberpunk... doesn't really do a great job.  I mostly stuck to melee weapons as they consistently drop enemies in two or three hits, whereas even an average thug can absorb half a magazine of assault rifle ammo or more without even flinching.  Combat doesn't feel good in general either, with some very floaty movement, weightless action that lacks any visceral impact and strange hit detection at times - I've visibly leapt backwards from a boss enemy, saw their weapon fly right past me and still taken damage, while I've swung at them multiple times while they're a foot away and dead center on screen and never seem to land a hit when it counts.  Some of the earliest powers you get also afford you health regeneration at a pretty substantial rate, and you get free regenerating grenades and emergency health packs, so as long as you don't take too much damage at once you're pretty difficult to actually kill.

Dialog in the game is also considerably more streamlined than most.  Outside of scripted cutscenes you're not locked into a separate dialog screen, instead just getting options for what to say next depending on the character you're currently facing.  There's usually little choice in these - you can generally just ask a second or third option for a bit more information before you're forced to pick the first one in order to progress to the next part of the dialog and ultimately accept or decline a mission; Ultima-level deep conversations laden with puzzle solving these are not.  They're also punctuated with a lot of V's smarmy dialog and characters bouncing constant comic book one-liners off you, which is cute for a bit but quickly gets grating when they have to cram heaps of it into every single exchange.  Hell, they never manage to turn it off even during the serious moments.

Presentation wise I can't say I like the game much even when it is performing well.  The dialog is all well-acted and some of the radio tracks are honestly pretty catchy, but it's just not a pleasant game to look at.  The whole world is dingy, grimy and utilizes a pretty garish color palette and overbearing harsh lighting.  I suppose it fits the cyberpunk aesthetic in that regard, but it does get a little annoying when there's bright neon/sun glare in your eyes every 2 seconds and all your targets just blend into the constant environmental haze and clashing colors.  The only thing that does stand out are the weapons, which are painted in bright yellows, purples and blues; they look more like Super Soakers and Nerf toys than anything that can do harm.  It all controls decently enough with a controller, though if you're playing the Switch 2 version you can also utilize gimmicky Wii-style motion controls with detached joycons. I mostly just stuck to the Pro Controller; normally I'm not a fan of twin stick aiming but in conjunction with axis aiming it's good enough here.

Cyberpunk 2077 is relatively competent at everything it does, but nothing it does is very unique, deep or fun.  It just feels like a mish-mash of every popular open world game and futuristic action-RPG made in the last 25 years, cynically engineered for maximum marketability and play time with little thought spared for giving it any identity of its own.  Not to mention stretches where CDPR takes control away from you for several minutes at at time so they can play long, plotless cutscenes full of head-banging music and terrible self-aggrandizing narration about how badass and cool their world and characters are; how unconfident do you have to be to straight-up tell your audience what to think instead of letting the material speak for itself?  The gameplay kept me amused for a few hours, but with the repetitive setup, bare-bones core story and combat, uninteresting characters and dialog that's more tedious than compelling, I got bored of it well before the end.  It's the most competent CDPR project yet in terms of design; unfortunately being competent and being captivating are two very different things, and CDPR still has yet to get a grasp on how to do the latter well.

 

Developer: CD Projekt Red
Publisher: CD Projekt
Released: 2020, 2022, 2025
Platform: PlayStation 4, PC, XBox One, PlayStation 5, XBox Series, Switch 2, macOS
Recommended Version: Definitely avoid the early releases on PS4 and XBox One and go for one of the newer versions instead, or the PC port if you have a powerful enough machine.  The Switch 2 version is surprisingly solid though, with a smooth framerate and overall good performance.

The Witcher III: Wild Hunt

The third in the series and the only one anybody seems to talk about.  But is that because it addresses the flaws of its predecessors and becomes something amazing, or is it just a lame game getting by on empty hype and pretty graphics?

I really wasn't impressed with the first Witcher game; a general sixth-grader-trying-to-sound-tough maturity level and lackluster design overall took me out of it pretty quickly.  The third game in the series at least makes some significant improvements, adding considerable polish to the combat and attempting to give the player more to do with numerous side-quests (that don't all lead to cheap smut, surprisingly), an in-depth crafting system, banter as well as a less grating, though still very sex-heavy and profanity-laced, tone to the dialog on the whole.  It still hits all the same sour notes that turned me off to other modern RPGs like Mass Effect, though - overly simplistic and hand-holdy design despite describing itself as "open-world" and near-constant scenes of dull/inane exposition between characters you get zero context or buildup for beforehand and therefore have no reason to actually care about; not to mention Geralt's constant smug speechifying just to give the illusion this game is taking some kind of moral stance when it really isn't.

The boredom is only compounded by the stock gameplay that consists largely of endless tedious material farming, monotonous combat, buggy collision detection (getting my horse snagged on things was an all-too-common occurrence.  And since the game auto-saves with no opportunity to make manual ones, I was out of luck if that cost me a mission), and overall design that requires no mental engagement whatsoever.  Quests consist almost entirely of autopiloting from one map marker to the next, and there's never any decent puzzles and rarely any problem-solving more involved than "kill scripted monster" or "push button when prompted".  Not to mention it flatly spells out for you what choices will change the narrative later, which immediately ruins any feeling of gravitas; or at least, it would if it ever allowed you to form an organic bond with any of the disposable cardboard-cutouts who milk every drop of pathos they can out of their one throwaway scene each.  Gee, another character I've never met before and will never hear about again (save maybe in one line of dialog long after I've forgotten about this dumb side-story) is subject to trite fantasy racism/sexism/classism/homophobia and I can side with them or their oppressor because CDPR is too cowardly to commit to a message for fear of harming sales; rinse and repeat ad infinitum.  And this is supposed to quality as intelligent storytelling; yeah, right.

Witcher 3 as a whole just feels manipulative and cynical, like the devs are trying to cover for their tedious, sterile game design by manufacturing whatever moments of trite emotional weight they can so they and their trained attack-dog fanboys can easily write off all criticism, related or not, as the words of a homophobic sociopath nazi (or a godless filthy hippie commie socialist lib; it's generic and cowardly enough to let bigots of all stripes project their personal bugaboos into it) and give pen-for-hire gaming rags easy fuel for their glowing reviews and meaningless award shows.  It's all done not because CDPR's devs have any genuine attachment to the content they're creating, but because they want to make back all that money they spent on ad space (the true determinant of any game's Metacritic score) and rack up enough millions of sales to earn their conditional Christmas bonuses.  To say nothing of their games being shamelessly derivative of countless older, better titles they've been selling on GOG for years, and are probably mostly financed from sales of those games too. Witcher 3 is a graphically gorgeous title, but with such shallow, monotonous gameplay, a stock dark fantasy setting, a cast and narrative that put no new spins on any of their already-ancient tropes, nearly all of the characterization and lore relegated to flat exposition in dry articles in an in-game wiki you have to bring the whole game to a dead stop to read, and an active contempt for the intelligence of its audience, it's painfully clear that this is all just a shallow confidence trick to win awards and earn sales, not a fresh gaming experience that needs to be played or anyone's poignant story that needed to be told. 

If you want gameplay that consists of more than watching a boring character run from dot to dot for 150 hours and a narrative where the characterizations and storytelling come from a place of genuine passion and don't just feel like some committee of shysters trying to Pavlov cheap reactions out of you, there's dozens of better games to play.  But to name just one: NieR.  Yoko Taro is also at ease enough with his style and bizarreness that he allows his settings, concepts and characters to speak for themselves and he doesn't have to bring the gameplay to a screeching halt every two minutes to beat you over the head yet again with how DARK and ADULT and MEANINGFUL and IMPORTANT his work is until you start saying so too just to make the abuse stop.

Developer: CD Projekt Red
Publisher: CD Projekt
Released: 2015
Platforms: PC, Playstation 4, XBox One, Switch

The Witcher

Based on a series of books I've never read (and after playing the game and interacting with the gross-ass fandom, I can now confidently say I never want to), the Witcher is purportedly an "adult RPG".  Like so many that apply that label to themselves, it mistakes gratuitous gore, T&A and foul language for "adult content" and as a result becomes far more juvenile than E or T-rated games of similar design.  There are too many examples of this to recount in a short review, but the most prominent one is that a major sidequest involves bedding every named female character in the game so you can get nudie pictures of them as trophies in the main menu.  Yep.  It isn't very fun to play either, being a mostly-railroaded experience with endless sessions of boring follow-the-dot quests and mediocre combat that, while ostensibly based around timed button presses and dodges, is rendered trivial by the fact that you can simply mash the left mouse button and win every battle with ease, doing damage with every press while your character's swing animation resets over and over again.  Yeah, somehow nobody caught that in testing.  I also had to link a video of it because its fanboys fervently insist that said problem doesn't exist and that I'm a retarded faggot (their words) for implying it does; they continue to do so despite being presented with evidence to the contrary, but it makes me feel better at least.

  Witcher also sells itself on having choices that actually matter (and which you don't see the consequences of until several hours after making them to prevent save-scumming), but when my intelligence is being constantly insulted by being served a version of Krondor that's ten times crasser, less than one-eleventh as engaging, plays worse and stars a really lame Gary Stu protagonist, I don't particularly care about what happens in its present, let alone hours later owing to a choice I likely won't even remember making.  Too gruesome and smutty for kids but too shallow and sophomoric for adults, the Witcher might briefly entertain those who think buying anything with blood and boobies and the word "fuck" 11 times per sentence makes them more grown-up and manly than everyone else in the room; however I suspect they'll lose interest immediately once the next sexist meathead power fantasy franchise comes into vogue. Or that part of them dies from a fatal dose of graduating high school, whichever comes first.

Developer: CD Projekt Red
Publisher: Atari, CD Projekt
Released: 2007
Platforms: PC, OS X