Recent reviews by peripheralvision

Fantastic, light-weight looter shooter. Inventory management of Tarkov, with the loot-style of Borderlands 2. Gameplay is simplistic in late game (noise maker -> grenade launcher, rinse and repeat), but the POI's are well made, and provide some much needed variety. Base building is simplistic, but enjoyable, although game lacks any real reason to build a base, other than a place to store all the loot. Would love to see bases come under attack by raiders or zombie hordes in the future. Perhaps bases could be places to modify vehicles and weapons (require a workbench), etc.

Great game in the early stages, highly recommend, particularly for the price.

A most excellent display of rending steel and stomping concrete. This really scratches the Metal Fatigue itch.

High realism, enjoyable squad or solo gameplay. Team is active and fixes issues promptly, and has provided a content roadmap. Game can be punishing, but has a lower player enjoyment-to-pain ratio than Escape from Tarkov.

An excellent little game, with an enjoyable gameplay-loop. Simple gunplay and an interesting building interface propel you, your genetically modified and cloned crew, and your custom designed spaceship through a hostile galaxy.

Your house is burning. Fire. Your. Community. Managers.

Clever yet understandable, sophisticated yet simple, complex yet elegant. This game really manages to capture the intricacies of building resilient, organized, and interesting systems to accomplish any number of tasks. I highly recommend it particularly to anyone with software engineering experience, as it provides an opportunity to work on Internet of Things devices for the control of systems of varying complexities. If you lack software knowhow, but are a logical, mathematically inclined person, this game is still for you.

I'm particularly looking forward to the addition of nuclear reactors as the late game power source (please?).

I live, I die, I live again! Great game for a few laughs with friends, and it's even possible to win a few matches without spending your entire time worrying about aim cones and recoil patterns. Great fun entirely for free. Even worth buying a champion or two, just in thanks to the devs.

A rich world, and tabula rasa main character for you, the player, to define--neither of these promises were successfully achieved. In my opinion, the success of the Witcher series was, in some ways, Cyberpunk's undoing. The Witcher series took a defined, detailed character, and cast the player into the dusty leather boots of Geralt of Rivia, a man who kills monsters and hates politics, portals, and undercooked meat. That might seem irrelevant, but it goes to show the amount of lore, thought, and history that existed behind the character before CDProjekt even began development of their video game adaption. All of this existing story and history meant that the player wasn't defining the character, but rather, experiencing the story through the eyes of an established persona. So when Geralt responded in a particular way to a series of events, it was unobtrusive, as it fit within the parameters of the character.

Now let's apply that to Cyberpunk. While there is existing history behind the world of Night City, namely the pen and paper resources, the main character, V, is an unknown character with no established story--an empty vessel for the player to define, build, and navigate through life as a mercenary. But Cyberpunk isn't a story about the main character, nor is it a story about the city itself. It is a story about a controversial, long dead character--a rebel against the corpocracy, and to some, a mass murderer and terrorist. Clearly, the writers of the game decided that they wanted to tell you a story, and if the player character doesn't agree with their story, and therefore chooses to take another route, the main story should punish them for their reasonable dissent. Essentially, you either agree with the message about the evils of corporate control, or you will, without a doubt, receive the worst possible ending to the game.

So to sum up, this is a relatively linear game, in which there is a cannon storyline to which the player is expected to adhere. The game makes that relatively clear, as it strips out many RPG elements, causing the main character to respond to situations in ways that do not in any way fit the player's intentions or chosen life path. A pro-corporation V, struggling to get back into the good graces of her former employer? Absolutely not. It doesn't fit with the story the devs wanted to tell, and it certainly isn't rewarded. Is that a problem? Not per say, but it definitely means that Cyberpunk is an action-oriented, linear story driven game, set in an unnecessary and lack-luster open world, and confused by a myriad of shallow, RPG-like elements.

Verdict: If you're looking for a true RPG experience, in which you can define your character's views and help shape the world around them to match those opinions, this is not the game for you. If you are comfortable taking a trip through a visually stunning fantasy city, and relinquishing control of your character's destiny to an "affinity" tracker in your inventory screen, there's alot of good things for you to experience in Cyberpunk.

Update, post Phantom Liberty. The storyline of the DLC is well crafted and interesting. More to the point of this review, it feels a lot more like V's story, and a lot less like Silverhand's. While many of the bugs have been fixed, my initial review completely ignored those and judged the quality of the writing instead. Although Phantom Liberty adds better ways to explore V's character, and affect the world in ways you see fit, the core game's storyline has remained unchanged, as has my verdict.

Yes, I have almost 1000 hours spent playing it. There are still some excellent parts of the original game to experience, and the gameplay is much enhanced through the DLC.