The Nephilim Saga is a breath of fresh air for those of us who've spent the past three decades wishing and hoping that turn-based tactics games like Ogre Battle and Fire Emblem would make their way to our beloved PC gaming platform.
PC has long been a platform dominated by real-time strategy and turn-based strategy, but woefully bereft of quality entries in the turn-based tactics subgenre of strategy games. While consoles and handhelds saw the fantastic Fire Emblem, Ogre Battle, Tactics Ogre, and Final Fantasy Tactics series flourish, we watched from afar. Total War, Starcraft, Command and Conquer are fine games, of course, but there's just something about a good turn-based tactics game that scratches the itch like none other for those of us who love the subgenre.
Enter Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga. This game brilliantly blends Ogre Battle's classic squad-based unit formation with Fire Emblem's general aesthetic and grid map, and it does it wonderfully. There is something superbly satisfying about building your squads and then watching them in action. If you've played a Fire Emblem game before, you will more or less know what to expect here. If you haven't, but you're looking for a solid turn-based tactics game, The Nephilim Saga will be a good place for you to start.
There are a number of complaints I have with the game, though. This game is the first in a new series by a small indie developer, and it shows in some respects. Although the sprite art in the combat screens is absolutely fantastic and certainly inspired by the old GBA Fire Emblem games, and the Sage Frontier-esque super-deformed narrative sprite art is quite compelling, there are certain instances in which the art direction of the game falls well below the standard set by many gorgeous indie titles of the modern day. A prime example is the character portrait art that pops up during narrative scene alongside speech boxes. It is so amateurish that it looks more like a Playstation-era render of a player character; very plain, very wooden. It pulled me out of the narrative so strongly that I wished I had the option to turn off the portraits and just leave a plain speech box, so I could instead focus on the sprite characters. I hope there eventually is an option to turn them off, or a mod to replace the character portraits with better art.
Although the sprite art in the combat screen is really phenomenal and gives you a distinct appreciation of promoting your units, the animation is unfortunately quite limited. Fire Emblem had a real weighted feel to its animations; watching a General attack in the old GBA Fire Emblem games led you almost to feel the weight of their armor and the power of their swing. Unfortunately The Nephilim Saga lacks this same sort of satisfaction; it settles instead for flinging its characters across the screen and having them whack lightly at their enemies, which is a bit disappointing considering how good the sprite art is otherwise.
In addition to this, the user interface is really poor. It's extremely ugly and very clunky to use. There is no option to set resolution, leaving the player only fullscreen, large window, or small window. Additionally, there is no way to rebind keys, which is unfortunate. But even more damning is that there is no way to view keybinds at all, leaving the player to blindly stumble their way through what the controls are in the first place. It took me ages to figure out how to scroll down the right side of the screen in the Tutorial screen, for example. The mouse wheel being functional would be another nice thing to see.
I would also like to see some achievements added. This is a relatively minor complaint, but the achievements we currently have are rather limited and bland, and having some quirky ones thrown into the mix would be a delight for a game as challenging as The Nephilim Saga has it in itself to be.
Despite these complaints, this game has it where it counts. It's got a lot of heart and it gives you the strong dopamine kick that comes along with turn-based tactics in the form of building your units, promoting them into utterly bad-ass looking high-level sprites, and granting you the satisfaction of a proper strategy working out well. There is also the option to turn on permadeath, a la Fire Emblem, should one prefer it.
This is a fantastic first effort and I look forward to future developer support in the form of patches to smooth out some of the rough edges, and I sincerely hope that this series sees some sequels down the road, because this is a greatly enjoyable game once you get past some of its quirks. Rejoice, turn-based tactics fans, the subgenre has finally come to PC!
Citizen Sleeper is regularly compared to Disco Elysium and is undoubtedly inspired by the 2019 title, but I'm not so sure the two really benefit from being compared. They share similarities, of course; they are both focused on exploring the pitfalls of post-modern social organization and how human connection can serve to sustain us in times of hardship, and both are strongly inspired by pen-and-paper roleplaying games. And both clearly have an emphasis on telling impactful, emotional, human-centered stories—which is ironic, considering Citizen Sleeper's player character is not human. But Citizen Sleeper has its own vibe and does its own thing; it lacks Disco Elysium's penchant for bleak humor, and is far more cerebral throughout than Disco Elysium is.
I did have a few complaints regarding Citizen Sleeper's writing, which aims high but falls into its own rough patches here and there. In certain instances its writing team seems curious hateful of the comma, resulting in oddly paced, juddering prose and dialogue that reads stiltedly. This isn't a regular thing, but when it does pop up, it's extremely noticeable. Additionally, Citizen Sleeper falls prey to several instances of writing gaffes, including on of my least favorites: The all-time video game classic, "this is only a twist because two characters didn't have a simple 30-second discussion which would have naturally occurred by any human being who wasn't dumb as a rock". These criticisms being said, the writing does meet par quite frequently and is enough to keep the player motivated and continuing onward. I found some of the characters quite likable and their subplots, for the most part, threw in a few interesting twists and turns I didn't see coming. The writing hits it high points where it matters, though: In its endings. The multiple endings are superbly constructed and all leave the player reeling from the emotional impact. One of them, in particular, is a clear high-water mark for the game in terms of writing, in my opinion, and left me near tears.
Writing is a touchy subject. Some folks demand it, others don't care either way, and it's intensely subjective. Overall, Citizen Sleeper is well-written—for a video game—and the effort places it in the upper echelon of games, though probably not among the all-time greats such as Disco Elysium, which it seems doomed to be compared to.
In general I greatly enjoyed my time with Citizen Sleeper. It succeeds mostly on account of the way it crafts its resource scarcity early in the game, and allows the player to eventually learn enough to scale up and overcome it, giving a real sense of progress and agency in its world. In the beginning, the player is a dirt poor refugee, barely scraping by, their body literally decaying as they slowly starve to death, living in an empty shipping container. And the game succeeds in using its mechanics to make the player feel this pressure. There were several moments early in the game when I was barely scraping by, and more than once I had the distinct feeling of "Huh, so I'm gonna lose this run, huh? That's OK, hopefully I'll learn enough for a second run." But I never saw a game over screen. I'd skirt by, by the skin of my teeth, barely making it through. Whether or not there even are game over screens, I don't really know. But it doesn't matter. That feeling of tension and pressure is crafted carefully enough just by what's happening to the player character and in the narrative that I didn't really need the threat of a fail state to keep me immersed and impacted by what was happening.
Illustrator Guillaume Singelin's hand drawn art is also superb. Each character illustration is so deeply woven I'd find myself staring at them for a few minutes when introduced to a new character. Their faces are relatively minimalistic, but their outfits, their gear, their clothing are given so much depth in detail that I couldn't take my eyes away. The bold lines, the muted color palettes were just wonderful. I understand the benefits of the developers using polygons, but very early on I found myself wishing they had gone all-out and hand-drawn the entire game. It's that good. The art in this game is to die for. I can't say enough about it.
There's a very careful attention to crafting its mood that I often appreciate in games I love. Its quiet, sparse polgyonal visual ambience certainly carries a lot of the weight, but Amos Roddy's excellent original soundtrack picks up the slack otherwise. The muffled, minimalist music glows in the background, floating alongside the player as they make their way through each cycle. Each song is mellow and more than a bit sad, but with minor upturns in note that leave the player feeling hopeful more often than not. It suits the game exceptionally well.
The only criticism I can level at Citizen Sleeper's atmosphere is that it often feels intensely lonely. This is obviously often by design; your Sleeper lives alone and a large part of the game is creating human connections for the player character, which is great! But there are also scenes in which we are meant to be on a crowded space station, packed with writhing masses of the working class as they go about their day. In these scenes I felt a jarring disconnect with the game, as there is only ever what is basically a permanent establishing shot camera view of the exterior of these buildings from space, and Singelin's art—although wonderful—typically only depicts one or two characters on the screen at a time. So while my mind's eye attempted to picture the crowded tubes and walkways my player character was moving through, and the loud, packed bars and restaurants in which the scene was taking place, but my actual eyes were constantly hampering the experience by resting on a static shot of the outside of a gray, dead building floating through space, accompanied by only one character portrait on the screen. Again: I know why developers use polygons, but it would have been nice to have had some hand-drawn backgrounds done by Singelin for these scenes that actually gave us a detailed view of how crowded these places actually are.
In summary, what begins as a relatively straightforward pen-and-paper-inspired RPG eventually allows the player to peel away its layers to reveal a surprising amount of depth both in its mechanics and its narrative, and a heart and careful attention to mood at the center of it all ensures that the game is utterly worthwhile, even if it doesn't surpass the high water writing marks set by other games in its genre. It's not the best RPG out there, but it's so promising a title I find myself hoping the developers continue to build on this foundation with an eventual sequel. I need more of this art and more of this world. Highly recommended.
The indie scene is so strong for video games right now. For every complaint one might hear about predatory practices in AAA gaming, failed promises, broken launches, abuse of fear-of-missing-out mechanics, there's a small indie game which comes along that completely blows one's mind in its compelling simplicity. Vampire Survivors—which is basically Castlevania meets Cookie Clicker with some bullet hell aesthetics thrown in the mix—is a prime example of the golden age of indie games we're currently finding ourselves in.
Vampire Survivors was probably never meant to be anything profound. Although surely the developer has labored a great deal over the balance, it's a relatively simple game. It appears to be a bullet hell, but in reality, there's very little twitch input required from the player. Your player character fires off their attacks automatically so you're tasked mostly with choosing which upgrades and build paths to pursue, while occasionally moving the player character around the map in order to avoid enemies. Enemies have no projectile attacks of their own; they're relegated to contact damage only, which is a great choice that ends up facilitating this more passive style of playing. So describing this as a bullet hell game, while it might appears accurate from the game's aesthetics, is not really all that accurate. This is a more passive, casual experience in which you are mostly tasked with planning rather than taxing your mechanical skill as a player.
Personally, I love that. I'm not a huge fan of bullet hell, and roguelikes are often unappealing to me because I dislike their randomness and the lack of any permanent, long-term upgrades most roguelikes eschew in favor of appealing to the crowd which prefers RNG and chance coming together to facilitate a successful run. Vampire Survivors does have a built-in permanent progression system of unlocking stages, player characters, weapons, and permanent passive upgrades. This all serves to dampen what I dislike about roguelikes, and drew me in to Vampire Survivors even further.
In the beginning you'll find yourself mostly bewildered as you experiment with new weapons and tactics, but as you grow more familiar with the game you'll begin to gravitate toward specific playstyles, and putting together the pieces and acquiring evolutions becomes intensely addictive and rewarding.
If any of this sounds the least bit compelling to you, then take a shot on Vampire Survivors. Although it's in Early Access, I believe the game currently offers more than enough to warrant the $3 USD price tag, and I'm shocked the developer has kept the game at such a low price. It's an absolute steal with at least twice as much value as the current price tag, so there's really nothing to suggest against purchasing this. I'd go even further and urge anyone considering this game to jump on it now before the developer comes to their senses and raises the price.
That's it, that's all there is to it. Oh, and lots of cars.
The Horizon spin-off games have always reminded me of the Fast and the Furious films. They aren't exactly "thinking man's" franchises; there are very few big ideas or serious themes to dig through. No big morals to the story, no ethical struggles, no big ideas to consider or difficult decisions to make. They're just pure bombast, fun, and positivity. And sometimes that's perfectly okay. We could all use a few more smiles in our daily lives, I think.
The design of Forza Horizon 5 is clear right from the get go: Get the player smiling ear-to-ear, and don't have them stop until they're finished playing the game. Horizon 5 is packed to the brim with ostentation, ridiculousness, colorfulness. It's an adrenaline rush and a feast for the eyes. Above all else, this game wants to make you feel good. And it constantly succeeds in that.
This is happening? This is happening.
If you have even a passing interest in motorsports and you're looking for a sandbox to play around in, you'll enjoy this game. In my past I dabbled in automobile modification (with my Supercharged 355 LT1 Camaro, near two decades ago now), and I have even participated in a few proper drag races at the local strip back in my younger days. But I'm more than a decade removed from my last "official" race and I haven't turned a wrench on my own car in nearly as long. I've retired into a quiet life of middle age, in which I drive a ten year old Toyota Camry and pay my mechanic to change my oil so I don't get too dirty. But Forza Horizon 5 brought those old years of cruising up and down the highway and taking trips to the racetrack screaming back to me. While Horizon 5 is focused mostly on being an open world sandbox, it also provides copious amounts of tuning possibilities and car customization options for those more knowledgeable about such things. You can fine tune your suspension, purchase modifications by the individual part, customize the look of your vehicle down to individual parts if you want—or you can absolutely ignore all that and let the in-game mechanic do it for you, and spend your time instead cruising around Mexico and looking for various shenanigans to get lost in.
The actual racing is smooth, responsive, and overall excellent, and the game runs superbly for me, keeping between 80-90 frames per second at 4K on high settings. There are few things that equal the adrenaline rush of taking a jump at 100+ mph, other cars screaming around you, an airplane soaring overhead. The environment is equally compelling and varied, as you'll race through different locales within the beautiful Mexican countryside. And all along the way, the game is drip-feeding your points with which to buy new cars, unlock new abilities, purchase more mods, all so that you're better at getting more XP in a vicious, addictive, well-designed gameplay loop that will keep you driving through the game's content. No pun intended.
The one caveat I have with the game thus far is that it has a tendency to crash on me. Usually within menus, and mostly while editing car modifications. However I chalk this up to launch day jank and I expect these crashes to be patched out very soon, as Playground Games have typically been excellent with post-launch support.
That complaint aside, I really can't say enough about the sheer fun factor this game provides. If you want something to put an endless amount of hours into, something that will make you smile as winter sets in here in the Northern hemisphere, something that will take your mind off a hard day of work the second you launch the game, then buy Forza Horizon 5 without a second thought, because this game will make you happy.
Although Octopath Traveler is breathtakingly beautiful and has a really fun battle system, I can't recommend it simply because the way it manages its characters is so completely broken that it ruins the entire experience.
The game's often a joy to wander through, as the 3D pixel graphics and high depth of field serves to sculpt its atmosphere exceptionally. Each biome offers its own unique feel and enemies, and the pixel art bosses are often stunning to behold. It's clear that a lot of careful design went into making this game the visual powerhouse that it is, and it does a lot to carry the experience. Even something as minor as the art style and menus conforms to this general art direction; taupe, earth-tones, bold lines. I love it. The game looks amazing, plain and simple. I haven't been this enamored with a game's art style since I first played Darkest Dungeon. I really can't say enough about it.
The turn-based battle system is also quite fun. Each enemy having a weakness and a break state is quite compelling, and forces the player to think tactically and make difficult decisions as to when to use their boosts, or instead preserve them to break (the game's term for 'stun' for a few rounds) a tough damager-type enemy. It's very satisfying to navigate efficiently through a battle, and each character has their own utility, which I found a driving force to keep building my team and progressing through the map to find new buddies.
However, the buddies are where the game completely falls apart. The way this game handles its characters is mind-bogglingly awful that it makes the game, as a whole, feel unfinished. It's not that the character dynamics and interplay are bad, it's that they almost don't even exist at all. It's so, so awful I can't believe the game shipped in this state.
The entire point of the game is to recruit eight (hence the "octo" in "Octopath") main characters—each of whom has their own unique story—and join them together in a traveling band. What's so absolutely befuddling about this is that there is almost no character interplay whatsoever! You will come across a new character, they will say perhaps two lines to your main character, then simply offer to join up. And that's it. These characters will never speak to one another again outside of some awfully unnatural canned scenes in which you must press a button to have them play out. It's such an unnatural, obtuse way for party interaction to happen that it renders the entire game dry and sterile, which is quite the accomplishment for a game that looks as good as Octopath Traveler.
This game could easily have been a superb example of a JRPG revival title if it had just had some brief, organic character interplay that regularly occurred. Instead, everyone is silent for the vast majority of the game. Most of the time it's as if the other characters aren't even present. There's a huge missed opportunity here as each character is relatively unique and interesting, but in a vacuum, they read as very standard. It's such a massive disappointment and such a puzzling design decision that I can't believe the developers decided this was the best course of action. It kills the experience of the game for me.
If this game ever receives a sequel, it absolutely needs something akin to the Support system introduced in recent Fire Emblem games. Allow these characters to get to know one another, interact with one another, and be true comrades rather than simply individual stories all occurring in a vacuum, apart from one another. Without something like this, the entire experience is dead and worthless, and the party banter feature doesn't do nearly enough to alleviate things. These characters need to be engaging with one another in story sequences.
Prepare yourself for another boss fight that's going to take 30 minutes!
On top of this fatal flaw, the game also gets more and more tedious and grind-heavy as you progress. Not in that you're required to fight random battles to get stronger, but in that enemies seem to get higher and higher HP boosts, leaving boss fights to drag on for a catastrophically long time, and even forcing general random battles into taking far too long. The game abuses its battle system by keeping the player roped in to certain fights for far too long and upsetting its balance of exploration and battle. There were certain bosses which took me near 30 minutes to complete, the end of which I was ready to quit the session and simply play another game because I had grown so bored of the particular fight's formula of wearing down the boss's guard, disposing of whichever minions they happened to summon, building up boost, healing, rinsing, and repeating, ad nauseam. The game ends up leaning a bit too hard on its battle system, and although it's good, it can't support the entire game by itself, and it's constantly let down by its narrative, which carried no enjoyment for me whatsoever.
This is a pretty game that ultimately lacks heart and is forced to lean far too heavily on its good combat and jobs system. What results is a disappointment unless you're solely looking for a visual masterpiece with a decently entertaining JRPG-style turn-based battle system. If you want even the barest bit of quality story and characters, or find yourself tired out by the more tedious aspects of JRPGs, you'd best look elsewhere.
This is a pretty game that ultimately lacks heart. A catastrophic disappointment unless you're solely looking for a visual masterpiece with a decently entertaining JRPG-style turn-based battle system. If you want even the barest bit of quality story and characters, look elsewhere.
Life Is Strange does a lot of things really well, the strongest of which is the game's commitment to its 'vibe', for lack of a better word. It's at its absolute best during its quiet moments; moments in which the tedium of its gameplay and its wonky, cringeworthy, how-do-you-do-fellow-kids dialogue are relegated to the backseat and no longer permitted to ruin the experience. Sitting on the swing in Chloe's parents' backyard as the neighborhood dogs bark and the children play in the background. Lying on Chloe's bed with light rock music twanging along in the background. Walking through a massive party as the grooving, ambient club music plays and the red lights flicker. These are by far my favorite portions of Life Is Strange; the parts where it sucked me right in and made me want to do nothing but stand around and take in its atmosphere.
Unfortunately, actually playing the game is more often a chore than not. Its gimmicky time-rewind mechanic is something which, on paper, is a fantastic fit for this sort of adventure/RPG game, but its actual, practical use in Life Is Strange is so limited that it's barely ever used interestingly, and never even comes close to living up to its full potential. It's at its most tedious during fast-paced action and suspense sequences—which ought to be when it's at its best. Instead of allowing the player to search for creative solutions to the problems at hand, they're left mostly fumbling around looking for the correct HUD pop-up out of several in order to properly progress the scene, which often leaves you failing the game's scenarios repeatedly and continuously rewinding until you've found the option the game deems 'correct'. It's a clumsy, obtuse, tedious experience which requires zero creative problem-solving from the player. Ironically, all you need to progress through these sequences is time.
There are a couple of moments in Life Is Strange in which this mechanic is used well, particularly a conversation with my favorite character in the game, Frank, in Episode 4. This conversation is focused mostly on dialogue options and does a phenomenal job of incorporating past decisions the player has made in prior chapters. I found using rewinds to be thrilling and compelling in this particular scene, and I really enjoyed the way the game factored in my previous decisions into the outcome of this particular conflict, while allowing the player to have an open-ended progress state (for the most part—there is still one outcome in the conversation which leads to a forced rewind, which I hated). I spent a significant portion of time rewinding, trying different approaches with both Frank and Chloe, and being pleasantly shocked at the amount of differing outcomes that were possible. I didn't feel nearly as much tedium when free to take my time and progress the conversation as I did when it was an action sequence, and the game was rushing me to click different options, despite having infinite rewinds and ultimately being able to arrive at the correct one through sheer trial-and-error since, in contrast with the Frank conversation, there was only one outcome in these action sequences which would progress the game. The rewind mechanic is far more enthralling when you're free to progress the story with whichever outcome you deem appropriate (or, perhaps more appropriately, the best outcome you can manage given prior decisions, or the best one you can find), and I wish the game had used its gimmick like this more frequently than it does.
The characters are probably the most engaging part of Life Is Strange's writing, though they're frequently hampered with awful, cheesy dialogue which always ends up sounding embarrassingly like a 40 year old man trying his best to write 18 year old girls. I didn't jive with Max, the main character, very much, nor did I find Chloe to be much more than a whiny, entitled brat. But some of the side characters have some real texture to them that I quite liked. Nathan and Victoria are excellently written and grow as the series progresses. David and Frank, likewise, seem initially to be rather one-dimensional, before sprouting into dynamic, well-rounded people with engaging histories and clear motivations. Life Is Strange does its best work when it allows its characters to be human and fallible and gives them real motivation for being why they are, but it tends to let its most one-dimensional, least engaging characters occupy the majority of the spotlight, which was a shame.
Life Is Strange will probably appeal to folks depending on how strongly they can relate to its main characters. I found them to be whiny and I thought the game was trying a bit too hard, and I found the plot to be a bit contrived in certain circumstances—as if the writers knew where they wanted to go, but were at odds with exactly how to get their story and their characters properly in-place. Ultimately, what sinks the game for me is its tedious, dry, and grinding moment-to-moment gameplay, and I wish the developers had chucked out the majority of this and chosen to rely more, instead, on polishing Life Is Strange's plot and characters, because that's where I feel the majority of the impact is.
Moments of Life Is Strange do continue to stand out for me, but I can't recommend it just due to how much I hated the act of actually playing the game. There's lots of "walking simulator" criticism out there today, but I'd much rather a walking simulator with good dialogue options than the ineffective time-rewind gameplay that was jammed into Life Is Strange as "gameplay". No gameplay at all is a much better option than bad gameplay, in my book, especially with a game that aspires to quality storytelling as much as Life Is Strange does. Just look at games like Disco Elysium for a solid example of how to chuck out sub par systems and lean heavily into things like story, character, worldbuilding, and dialogue. Life Is Strange is not that, of course, and likely never would have been. But all the same, it could've been a far better game if its developers had chosen to trim some of its fat and rely more heavily on what it does well.
I love narrative- and character-driven games, but The Forgotten City just didn't do it to me. The premise of time-warping back to an Ancient Roman city is perfectly in-line with my tastes, but the setting was far too fantasy-based for me and not nearly as historically based as I'd have liked. The setting did not feel like a "city" to me whatsoever; more like a very limited arena in which to interact with a select few NPCs.
The game's pacing felt terribly off to me. On arrival I felt a bit overwhelmed with all of the people I was sent to speak with, and did not feel the strong pull of any narrative hook investing me in any of their struggles. As I grinded through and dug a bit deeper I began to feel more invested, but this took several hours of running around and clicking through dialogue that I didn't find very interesting. It was a struggle to get through the game's opening hours, as I was simply wandering around, talking to NPCs, with no real investment as to why I was even in this artificial-feeling place, with these artificial-feeling NPCs. This problem compounded when proceeding through one of the game's "dungeons", in which you first begin to engage with the game's combat system. To put it simply; it's not good. The developers do their best to work in creative solutions to being confronted with enemies, but in the end, it's a relatively simple bow mechanic, enemies which react in very few ways, and corridors which don't divert very far. There are also some brief platforming sections which I found horribly tedious and unengaging. I believe this would be a far, far better game if there was no combat whatsoever and it relied more on better execution of dialogue and characters.
Before my purchase I had heard a great deal about how great the character writing is, but unfortunately I can't agree. The effort is there, but the characters feel far more like video game characters than real people. Most of them will have a very obvious quirk, and little else aside from that. I wasn't really touched or motivated by any of their needs or desires, and the way the game tasks you with speaking to them all right off the bat felt a bit clumsy and unnatural to me. Rather than entering a real city, I felt overwhelmingly like I was entering a staged video game world where each of the characters was a cardboard cut-out, spitting lines at me. One character is a stoic, and quotes regularly from famous stoics. One character is a gladiator, and is predictably brutish and reliant on violence. A few are Christians. A couple are homosexuals. One's a humble, down to earth farmer. One young woman is relatively stuck-up and arrogant. On paper, all of these are fine, but they ought to be treated just as starting points for putting interesting twists on these characters and challenging them; pushing them further toward change. However these facets are really all there are to these characters, rendering them rather token and uninteresting, so I left The Forgotten City a bit puzzled as to how the character writing garnered so much praise. Maybe I'm missing something.
The most intriguing the game gets is in how it facilitates the player's freedom in solving its problems and experimenting with new attempted solutions. It must have been a real pain to try and program these quests, many of which intersect with one another, and may be done in any order. I give the developers lots of respect for that. The game worked perfectly for me: No broken quest flags or bugs, and that's significant.
I hate crapping on indie games because I love the hard work indie developers put into creating things that new and unique like The Forgotten City, but this one just didn't connect with me for whatever reason. That being said, I don't regret the purchase and I'm happy to keep supporting indie ventures like this, and I do think the development team behind this game has interesting goals and motivations and I look forward to seeing what they do next.
Deathloop's often an artistic masterpiece that's a lot of fun to play and features a wicked hook. That being said, it's a severely flawed game, and the vast majority of praise I have for the game comes from its higher level philosophy and design and not necessarily in its execution.
The game is an artistic powerhouse. It looks phenomenal due to the incredibly talented artists at work on developing this game. Its sense of style is really unmatched by most other contemporary games. Its color palettes, its character designs, its setting, and its music are all phenomenally good and work to craft a really unique feel for the game. The fact that it looks so good is really impactful, because Void Engine is—there's really no other way to put this—a god-awful garbage heap of an engine on PC. The game frequently chugs in certain environments, and huge frame drops of double digits are overwhelmingly common. This is even more unforgivable considering all of these problems were present in Dishonored 2 when it released back five years ago. Most damningly, Deathloop isn't even that technically pretty, so there's even less excuse for such huge, arbitrary drops in performance. Luckily for Arkane, though, the art at Deathloop's core is more than good enough to carry the experience along.
The game is also quite fun to play. I was surprised to find out how close it plays to Dishonored 2. Many of the powers are simply carry-overs from Dishonored 2, and that's not a bad thing. The player is pushed to use them in a more wide-open fashion in Deathloop than they ever were in the Dishonored games, and it works exceptionally. The shooting is also much tighter than it was in the Dishonored games. Further, the core gameplay loop of replaying levels to gain more infusion points to improve abilities and equipment in order to better replay levels is really compelling and addictive, and Arkane's level design supports repeated playthroughs of the same area—at least, for a time.
The problem is that so much of this game seems to lack cohesion, and playing it for an extended period of time begins to feel disjointed. The world, to me, feels remarkably flimsy, which is a criticism I'm really surprised to be making considering how utterly realistic and lived-in Arkane's previous worlds have felt—particularly Dunwall. Blackreef in Deathloop feels like a set of multiplayer levels. They're designed fantastically for gameplay and they're a joy to play through and explore, but nothing in the game actually felt like a real, lived-in place. I never had the experience of poking through an apartment or a building and wondering how these people lived like I did so frequently in Dishonored, and that really damaged the experience in Deathloop for me. I didn't care about the setting or the lore because none of it felt real or genuine, and thus I never lost myself in this game like I did in some of Arkane's previous efforts. I was never really immersed and was always consciously aware that I was playing a video game. I lacked the transcendental experience I often have with some of my favorite video games, and a lot of Deathloop—despite being fun—felt dry and meaningless to play.
Feeding into this great flaw is the fact that almost all of the story content the player will experience is drip-fed through text items which are picked up in the world. The game does not pause as you read, so often the player finds themselves skimming very quickly through such text, barely paying attention in case they are detected by enemy NPCs patrolling the area. This quickly turned into a huge problem, because I was very rarely grasping where I was meant to be headed, or why, even, I was heading there. Several times I would be tasked with assassinating one of the game's primary enemies without having any idea who they are, what they were doing, or why they were doing it. The game does an exceptionally poor job relaying important plot- and character-critical information to the player, which leads you to simply following the marker on your screen and killing everything in your way. The only effort it shows in developing its characters is between Colt and Julianna, and the effort pays off as they're both the only people in the entire game who feel human. The rest are dry, boring, lifeless NPCs, despite some great voice performances. Cherami Leigh as Fia is a particular stand-out, but they're all really great.
The experience of playing DEATHLOOP, in one image.
Pacing is also an issue. Deathloop is the most blatantly offensive "Sorry, Mario! Your princess is in another castle!" game I have played in literal generations. The way this game artificially stretches out its quest lines is absolutely shameless and infuriating. There were several instances in which the player proceeds to the next step in a given questline, only for the game to throw a locked door or a literal wall in your way with a note attached to it, saying something like "whoops! You've got to come here in at another time of day to proceed in this quest!" Great, so I just spent this time period in a completely wasted manner, only for you to tell me in the most gamey way possible that I can't do this right now, and have to wait until the next day to proceed. This kind of thing grew frustrating very quickly, and my joy in replaying areas to explore further or increase my own power quickly turned to frustration with the tedium of the way the game structures its quest design. The quests are given far too many fetch-quest-caliber objectives and end up being stretched out far too long. This, again, feeds into the feeling gaminess that the best games do a great job of hiding from the player. I eventually went from having trouble keeping a grasp of the game's quests due to the poor way in which it relays its storytelling, to simply not caring, because so much of it felt flimsy and meaningless when I did grasp it, which is a real shame considering some of the character designs are so good, and the voice cast bringing them to life are all exceptional, particularly the game's two leads. There's a real missed opportunity to create some memorable characters here, because the player will end up simply not caring since it's too much of a chore to really become invested in them in the first place.
My issues with the way the game imparts its story and designs its quests won't be a problem for everyone. If you're looking for a rip-roaring time in a combat arena where you can play in a fast-paced manner and kill everything in sight using a variety of weapons and powers, all while being surrounded by exceptional art and level design, while great music plays, then you're likely going to love Deathloop. But if you're looking for a more cerebral experience where you can explore, learn about the world you're in, and piece together things for yourself as you proceed—like you did in a game like Dishonored or Prey—you're probably going to have a mediocre, up-and-down time with Deathloop, as I did. When it's firing on all cylinders it's a joy to play, but I never felt I was truly immersed in its world and its characters, and those are by far the most important reasons why I typically play single player games. So for someone like me, I would not recommend Deathloop. It's an ambitious game made by people who clearly care a whole lot about their medium, but it ended up being a bit too tedious and gamey for my tastes, in addition to running very poorly on PC.
I don't really regret the purchase because I'm happy to fund Arkane as they keep trying creative, ambitious stuff like this, but I sure hope they do it on a different engine next time, and I hope they put more emphasis into executing on delivering a more cohesive, genuine world and narrative to suit such great style and characters in the future.
It's very difficult for me to speak in a reasonable manner about the Mass Effect trilogy because of my undying love for it.
Replaying Mass Effect is like visiting old friends from your college years. You haven't seen them in years, you've probably been lax at keeping in touch via social media. You've grown as a person—perhaps drastically. Maybe your life situation has changed as well; you're working a lot, you've gotten married, you've had kids. Yet the moment you enter the same room as your old friends, you fall immediately into common ground. You're laughing at the same old things, sharing inside jokes once again. It may have been years (nearly 15, in Mass Effect's case) since you first met each other, but the moment you spoke once more, it's like you've never left. Garrus makes a calibration joke and you laugh the same way you always have. Wrex smashes something and you chuckle. Mordin sings. Jacob says something boring. In these moments you forget that these are video game characters and that you've already seen these scenes—perhaps dozens of times before. They are real people to us, and they are capable of affecting our lives the way real people do, despite them being aliens in a schlocky space opera.
This is the impact that Mass Effect's characters have on players. There are thousands of stories out there from people who were ill, or considered themselves depressed, or perhaps were even near suicide—all of whom exhibit undying love for this series because these games gave them succor they desperately needed at hard times in their lives. Such is the power of well-written fiction, and Mass Effect succeeds in spades in that regard. Its worldbuilding and character writing are second to none in the medium of gaming. It confronts us with people who feel real and allows us to take agency on their behalf, to try and make their lives a little better. It shows us a world not unlike our own, with its prejudices and its flaws, and gives us the power that we lack in real life to affect change regarding these issues in the fiction. It allows us to become better people in real life by examining serious issues such as bigotry, state corruption, greed, cruelty, and the cost of due process. We see these issues through the eyes of another and decide what our player character might do to right such wrongs. As always, fiction is the great lie through which we tell the truth, and if Mass Effect doesn't cultivate a little empathy in your blackened, shriveled gamer-soul, then nothing will.
But, enough waxing poetic. I know you're all, "Shut up, Jon, you bag of hot wind! Everyone already knows how great the Mass Effect trilogy is. How does it run!?"
The answer to this, so far, is mixed, but I definitely believe this is a far superior version to the original PC port. On my setup I'm holding 100+ fps at full 4k with relative ease. This is a big deal, as the original games were limited to 62 fps thanks to the way they used physics, so the unlocked framerate is a massive plus here. The higher resolution textures look fantastic, and the new lighting and screen space reflections are really something. I expect we'll see some great photos being shared via the game's new Photo Mode relatively soon. The only drawback to the visual improvements that I've noticed so far is the characters seem to get a bit bug-eyed at times. I think this was due to the original game having much harsher, darker shadows, and perhaps covering up some character model issues specifically with the eyes. The animation has also aged notably, especially with the advent of performance capture technology in modern games, so expect some wooden facial animations and unnatural lip syncing, despite the effort made to remaster these games. All three games lack a field of view slider, which is a big negative for me. It's desperately needed since the camera is quite claustrophobic when your gun is drawn. In addition to this, I experience regular, debilitating framerate stuttering when traversing planets in the Mako in Mass Effect. I'm not sure what's causing this, but my framerate (which is typically locked at 100+) varies wildly from 55 to 75 fps in these instances. Fiddling with graphical settings has not alleviated the issue. I assume it's a texture streaming issue, due to the new high-res textures added to the game. Additionally, I have seen some people complaining about mouse acceleration, but the mouse action feels fine to me. Your mileage may vary.
Ultimately, this is very far from what I'd call a great PC port. However, the original PC ports of these games were absolutely awful, and Legendary Edition is clearly superior to those, even with its lack of graphics options and tendency to stutter. It looks fantastic when compared to the originals. If you played the original game or have a high tolerance for older games, you'll love Legendary Edition's changes. The best remasters make old games look like they do in your rose-tinted memory, and Legendary Edition accomplishes that in spades.
The gameplay changes are rather minor in the latter two games, but even in the first Mass Effect—the game which received the most attention—they are not groundbreaking. I noticed that Insanity feels markedly easier, so I think there's been some balancing done to level out some of the absurd difficulty spikes in the original game. One change I don't care for is that sniper rifles are now easily usable by all classes. I think this is a bit unbalanced and removes a lot of the value of the Infiltrator class, specifically, but I understand why they did it: It doesn't really make sense to pull out a rifle and suddenly begin aiming like a drunk person with Parkinson's. The Mako is still rather wonky, but the added stickiness does make it feel better. There are also some noteworthy changes to boss fights, but I won't spoil those. Suffice it to say they're all excellent, and bring some much-needed freshness to the significant encounters of the game. Ultimately the changes are quite minor; enough to feel like a marked improvement over the original game, but not so much that they alter the core experience of the games. BioWare did a phenomenal job toeing this line. It couldn't have been easy to do, but they nailed it.
The Mass Effect trilogy is an incredible experience, and this is by far the best way to play it, even when considering the great texture mods available for the original games. If you love the original trilogy and are considering Legendary Edition, I'd recommend you purchase it. If you're a first-time player and a lover of well-written space opera, interesting characters, and RPGs, there's never been a better time to dive into Mass Effect.
I've long considered myself a fan of turn-based tactics. When done right, it tickles the section of my brain reserved for improving the efficiency of designs and making correct decisions. I love carefully managing the growth of my units and massaging them into unkillable machines of destruction. I've run cold-to-lukewarm of the Fire Emblem series in the past, enjoying titles such as The Sacred Stones and Path of Radiance, while liking entries such as Shadow Dragon and Fates far less. Turn-based tactics is a genre that's very easy to get drastically wrong, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses—like some of its predecessors—commits several of these cardinal sins, in addition to looking and performing at a level I consider to be sub par.
Three Houses' depth is readily apparent in how it presents you with its three titular houses from which to choose. Each features a set of characters given significant depth that you'll grow to form opinions about. These initially felt relatively shallow, but as you continue your support conversations with them, you begin to realize they've each got their quirks, their pains, and their strengths. Learning about the characters as I progressed was one of my favorite things to do, and continued to fuel my desire to dig through the game's undoubtedly Persona-inspired social sim mechanics.
Some of the new stuff here is a welcome addition to the classic Persona formula. Having a home-base to freely roam in the third person while seeing your units live their lives is a nice touch. Unfortunately, the game leans a bit too hard on fetch-questing to fill out their activities when you're at the monastery. I became unfortunately aware of the grind when, after completing a battle, I'd often stop playing the game rather than having to grind through a bunch of lost items—which I'd imagine are fun little side activities to do when you know all of the characters very well, but become a tedious grind of asking every single character on the map if a lost item is theirs when you're just starting out. The system doesn't really work, and the game should have leaned more heavily on its character interaction than simply having you deliver items to its characters as a way to pass the time.
Being able to increase your character's skills in the classroom while at the monastery is a welcome change to simply grinding out battles, and having your Support levels increased by spending time with these characters is excellent. I, for one, welcome the Personafication of Fire Emblem. Nearly all of the social systems added to this game work very well, and I found the writing for these characters to be suspiciously good. I've criticized the writing in Fire Emblem games very strongly in the past, and although the plot of this game features some of the same silliness as previous games, I found the characters to be markedly better written than those in any other Fire Emblem game I had played before.
Unfortunately, the game's actual tactical play features some pretty deadly warts.
Class parity and good balance is absolutely essential to crafting a class-based turn-based tactics game. And unfortunately for Fire Emblem: Three Houses, its class system suffers from a striking lack of balance.
After about a dozen hours of planning out potential class builds, I realized that skilling in swords is relatively worthless considering there is only one Master-level class which uses swords, and it also requires the character to have high skill in offensive magic. This is a big ask from physical-focused classes, and requires quite a bit of grinding. Additionally, the game features several strong pushes towards Lance- and Axe-focused physical characters, one of which being the ability Deathblow, which grants Brigands (an axe-based class) a whopping +6 Str whenever initiating combat. Class balance is imperative for a successful turn-based tactics game, and Three Houses unfortunately fails miserably at creating parity for its classes, making class builds a rote exercise in which you send all of your physically-focused characters down a nearly identical path.
The game also looks flat-out bad in most cases. I'm usually ready to grant some slack to Nintendo Switch games for running on relatively inferior hardware, but Three Houses looks even poorer than I was willing to expect. I long for the days when Fire Emblem featured charming, hand-drawn sprites, because the polygonal combat sequences have been nearly universally poor in every Fire Emblem game that has featured them. The characters in games like Awakening (which I actually liked) were famous for having no feet—something just as odd as it sounds. And the polygonal characters here, although obviously better than in the past, are still not all that well-done. The character portraits feature exceptionally good illustrations, which makes me wonder what could be if the entire game were done in such a style.
Further, it's not just the execution that's lacking, but the design. Several of the armor sets on these classes look the worst they've looked in several iterations. The Assassin—one of my favorite classes—has lost all of its coolness from older games, instead granted generic-looking fantasy armor. Similarly, the Knight classes have lost some of their thickness, making them look more generic as well. 'Generic' is a keyword, here—for some reason, the class designs of recent Fire Emblem games just don't feature the great art design which initially drew me to these games almost two decades ago. It hasn't been the same since the switch from sprites to polygons, and I wish the series would double back and go for a more classic look once again.
Additionally, the game tends to perform poorly on the Switch. When traversing the monastery (where you spend all of your downtime), the draw distance is relatively poor, and the framerate often tanks to levels below 30. Ditto during combat, during which battalions actions can tank the framerate as well.
These faults are damaging enough to a game of this sort when they all add up, but what finally broke me from the game is Three Houses' tendency to spring 'gotcha!' moments on the player in mid-battle. There were numerous moments in which I felt I was losing units to permadeath due to no fault of my own, but because the game sprung an event on me which was impossible to plan for, such as spawning multiple enemy units literally out of nowhere.
Playing through a combat encounter typically includes a lengthy period of pre-fight analysis, during which the player devises a strategy ahead of time, equips and places their units accordingly, and proceeds to attempt to execute said strategy. Sometimes it doesn't work, and you've got to alter it on the fly. At other times the player makes mistakes, which was fine—that's a part of the game, and often a source of enjoyment as you deal with new challenges on the fly. I personally enjoy living with my mistaken decisions when I enact a faulty strategy, or don't pay enough mind to a certain threat, or even when a sensible plot turn throws a monkey-wrench into the works. But Three Houses' propensity for springing enemy units out of thin air, directly ruining a carefully devised plan, is inexcusable and breaks the entire experience of playing a game like this.
I don't mind when there are doorways or staircases in the environment, clearly visible, from which reinforcements might arrive unexpectedly. The player is taught early that these need to be accounted for. I also don't mind dealing with fog, or forests, which might obscure enemy troops. The egregiousness of Three Houses' gaffes is that you will often send a thief-classes character to pick up boxes, or send only a unit or two on a flanking run, only to have the game drop multiple units literally out of thin air directly in their path, at a point from beyond which there is no return—these units will be ambushed and permanently killed. Now you've got a choice between continuing the game without this unit, or you've got to restart the entire encounter with knowledge of this mechanic in mind. And it's impossible to plan for these occurrences, since they can occur completely separated from any logical expectation.
This is a terrible design philosophy on a game which lives and dies on how it challenges the player's ability to plan. It leads the player to either closely following a guide to avoid such occurrences, or engaging in multiple instances of trial-and-error as they discover where the game will cheat in order to trip them up—it forces the player either to cheat, themselves, with a guide, or to expect to replay content for no engaging reason.
There's clearly some stuff to like with Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but it can't withstand the assault of such poor design decisions and awful visuals. Hopefully the next entry of this series can straighten some of this stuff out, because it's got real potential. But at the moment, that's all it is—potential. Play Persona instead.
Present-day internet discourse certainly leaves a lot to be desired.
It seems like with every major game release a cabal of confirmation bias-seeking nincompoops skitter out of the woodwork with the specific goal of weaponizing any piece of data they can find which confirms that New Game™ is either the best thing since sliced bread, or an unholy amalgam of everything that's wrong with the medium, the industry, and human civilization as a whole.
The amount of ridiculous, false criticism I've heard regarding Cyberpunk 2077 so far is astonishing and depressing.
"It's not an RPG!" It most definitely is. There's ample roleplaying to be had here, and not limited to just whether you want to play stealthily or in open-combat.
"Your choices don't matter!" They most definitely do. I've replayed several story missions and been surprised by how much they change in general, but also by how the game recognizes small things such as reading a single e-mail which grants you a dialogue option with a character who's hiding something later, or asking a minor question which ends up raising suspicion of a snuff film compound you are later tasked with infiltrating, causing them to add more guards patrolling the perimeter (you learn this via a specific email you can find on a computer in the compound, which is not there if you never ask the question earlier). Perhaps most notably, a key choice you make in one of the first story missions has a massive impact on a very important side quest in Act 3. There are dozens more examples I could list.
"The worst open world." NPC AI complaints aside, this is the best open world I've ever seen. Specifically from an art direction and level design standpoint, this world succeeds in spades. It looks gorgeous, feels real, and features an endless number of carefully crafted nooks for the player to explore. It's mind-blowing.
"Stealth sucks! Shooting sucks! Driving sucks!" Stealth is good. Shooting is better. Driving is adequate. All three aspects of this game are much better than I had expected from a developer who had never made a game featuring any of them before.
"It's got no heart!" Cyberpunk 2077 features some of the most human, charismatic, and carefully crafted characters I've ever come across in a game. Cyberpunk chooses a dark satirical angle with exploring its world, but the game's true heart—where it opens itself up, makes itself vulnerable, and, as a result, becomes most earnest—is in its character writing and its characters' story arcs. The experience of this game relies on how you choose to affect the lives of Night City's denizens, and the emotional payoff from following these arcs through to their conclusions is where the game lives or dies.
More than ever, people interested in video games need to take early post-release hot takes with a grain of salt. Cyberpunk 2077 is a hugely flawed game, but every CD Projekt Red game has been hugely flawed due to the ambition the developer pours into the games they produce. Witcher 2's branching storylines feature two wildly different stories, which require the player to play the game twice to fully experience everything it has to offer. On the downside, this makes a single playthrough feel a bit abrupt and incomplete, requiring the player to bludgeon through content they've already seen in order to gain a grasp of the full story. Witcher 3's narrative and world have so much effort packed into them that the actual combat sometimes fails to bear the brunt of it all and becomes dry and repetitive for some players. CDPR shoots for impossible goals and inevitably fails to accomplish everything they set out to, but still makes pretty damn great games because they end up succeeding here and there, and when your goals are so lofty succeeding only sometimes is usually enough to float the experience even when so much of it is flawed and outright broken.
Where CDPR doesn't deserve slack, though, is in the way they've treated console players. I'm a PC-only player, so I played Cyberpunk 2077 on PC. But what CD Projekt Red did in purposely obfuscating how poorly this game runs on last gen consoles is extremely sketchy at best, and outright malicious and deliberately misleading at worst. This company fucked their console consumers. I refuse to believe they weren't able to provide review copies because they were "working until the last minute"; that's silly. They deliberately prevented the truth about how poorly the console versions ran from seeing the light of day in order to cash in on hype and holiday dollars, and that sucks.
CD Projekt Red is a developer of extraordinarily ambitious narrative- and character-driven RPGs, and I love that. They are also a developer who has taken advantage of their reputation as consumer darling who cares about their customers, when that is plainly not true. They are just another AAA developer, and they deserve to be treated as one from this point onwards.
The hype for this game clearly ran out of control, and many people already recognize that the largest problem with Cyberpunk 2077 is not actually anything in the game, but the warped and unrealistic expectations players had when they ran it for the first time.
The lead-in
I'm not sparing myself from said hype. I honestly can't recall the last time I was as excited for a video game as with Cyberpunk 2077. Covid-19 has kept me indoors and not working for a while, now, with books and video games as my chief time-sinks.
I adore Witcher 3. It might be my favorite game of all-time. I've poured nearly 600 hours into the game over the past 5 years, over 3 separate playthroughs. So knowing that the same developer—the same team, even—was working on a new game really lit my fire. I must have watched the 2018 gameplay reveal a half-dozen times. I watched all the Night City Wire preview episodes. I gobbled up preview interviews with developers like I was starved. On December 10, 2020—the game's release date—I counted down the hours, chatted online to friends and others on various Discord servers and subreddits and shared in the collective excitement. In the last hour, I watched the minutes tick by as I took in the release party stream on Twitter. When I finally finished up downloading the day one patch and first launched the game, the experience of starting up the game was something like this:
And then I jumped into the game. So, how was it? Did it live up to the hype? Yes and no—like any CDPR game. But, for me, mostly yes (I know, I know; shocked gamer noises).
The heart and hard work required to craft a city from the ground up
I grew up just outside of New York City, and I've spent a lot of time there throughout my life. Cyberpunk's Night City is the first video game city that truly feels like a real city does. The most minute of back alleys feels like a real, lived-in place. Different cultures melt together, creating numerous examples of differing architecture, shops, NPC chatter, and loudspeaker announcements in different languages. There's detritus scattered about, clutter on fire escapes, empty bottles on back-alley porches. The way the nooks and crannies of this city fold inwards onto each other, overlapping and intersecting, is incredibly life-like and bleeds realism, but at the same time, doesn't; the first time you see glowing, neon advertisements which stretch upwards into the sky, or see airborne vehicles zipping through the air, you'll know you're in a science fiction setting. It's just the right balance of realism and fiction; enough to feel familiar, but at other times, utterly foreign. It's a joy to exist in such a surreal, satirical, curious place. And as far as gameplay, although Night City appears labyrinthine and layered, built up and up on itself over the decades, but its levels never manage to feel overwhelming or too difficult to navigate. It's a truly masterful job done by the people who have designed this world.
There is an endless amount of love put into each and every area I came across in this city. The environmental artists and level designers have created extraordinary spaces which satisfy both your brain and your heart; they appear to be real, logically, while also satisfying your heart's desire for an aesthetically pleasing place. I can't say enough about it. Walking through the city and taking in these spaces and grasping the stories these level designers are telling you just with a few pieces of clutter never gets old, and it subconsciously heightens every other experience I've had with the game. I may be deep into a story mission, focused on what's happening with the characters and how to stealthily clear this next room, but I'm also subconsciously noting what this person's living space is telling me about them—what kind of food they eat, the clutter indicating that they might be depressed, old framed army photos of them and their friends long passed. The amount of sheer effort, sheer manpower involved in designing a single arcade, or a single liquor store on a single block in this game filled with dozens—or hundreds—of these things, is almost unfathomable. Someone asked me recently if it was readily apparent where they had spent the past 8 years developing this game (or 4 years in full-scale, active development). I answer instantly; in designing the bones and the flesh of this city. It jumps out of its pixels and slaps you in the face. You feel as if you exist in this world as just another function. You never feel as if your player character is the focus, you always feel as if you are witnessing one of the thousands of machinations that go on in this world each day. The way soda pop cans are placed on a shelf, doubtlessly the hard work of a cornerstone wage slave. The trash bags piled up against a fence in the badlands; a year's worth of a hard life's waste. The way a food stall's vendor looks at you as you walk past and the way you can read their experiences just from the way their area is organized.
If you enjoy games for these sorts of carefully crafted spaces—the Bioshocks, and the Dishonoreds, for example—then you're going to adore it in Cyberpunk.
The worldbuilding greatly supports this effort. The corporations, the brands of different drinks and porno ads and cars. All of this stuff is so strongly crafted from an artistic perspective that it's difficult, sometimes, to believe it's all not real. The history of this world is alive and mutating as the game goes on, living within its characters and imparted to the player with a level of skill only truly great writers can manage. Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith has a fantastic creation that feels real and lifelike in the worst ways; our deepest fears come alive. In this way Cyberpunk feels more like a post-apocalyptic setting than a cyberpunk one. But I suppose that's perhaps what the subgenre is; post-apocalypse without the big bang. Just a slow slide into ennui, depravity, poverty.
Cyberpunk 2077 is what The Outer Worlds tried so hard to be: A biting satirical look at consumer culture, a rabid display of the dark savagery of humanity, a dark story that's peppered with the naïve good intentions of some of its characters and its black humor. Cyberpunk strikes the balance far more deftly than Outer Worlds ever did.
The game looks flat-out jaw-dropping. I'm running it on my system without real-time ray tracing enabled and it still looks marvelous. Roads throw a damp slickness and reflect the omni-present glow of the city at night, the neon of buildings reflecting off them with precise screen-space reflections even with ray tracing turned off. Textures are high resolution. Cars gleam chrome and red and have so much effort put into them that it's insane to think about the man hours it probably took on behalf of the developer. Each car you own has a fully fleshed out interior, which you can inspect at any time in first-person. Every car has an opening hood and trunk. And all of these designs are fictional, yet look superbly realistic, gorgeous, and appropriate. The off-road cars or heavily modified ones have spare wires and screens strewn about. The luxurious supercars feature leather which looks so real you can almost feel it against your skin.
The sound design matches how ambitious the visuals are. This is perhaps the best sounding game I've ever played. Guns sound universally appropriate; all have fantastic impact. My favorite weapon, a sniper rifle called Overwatch that I got from a character-driven side quest, is my favorite sounding gun I've ever used in any video game, ever. It's that good. The thump it plugs into your ears is matched only by chonky bolt-action effect, and the reload clack is so sexy it'll leave your ears begging for the next time you empty the magazine. Revolvers, silenced pistols both sound great. Submachine guns titter away like late autumn insects.
The amount of music, too, is astonishingly vast and universally excellent. CD Projekt Red has brought on several well-known artists create original music for the game's radio stations and it's all superb. Refused, Run The Jewels, and Nina Kraviz all make appearances. Refused's effort as Johnny Silverhand's band Samurai is particularly good, and I find myself looking for extra driving destinations whenever one of their tunes comes on the radio. In addition to this, some of the ambient and combat tracks are so good I've already found myself listening to them outside of playing the game, when reading or driving in real life. The ambient stuff in Cyberpunk 2077 is so atmospheric and feels appropriately sinister, hinting at what horrifying atrocity is always around the next corner.
I can't speak enough about how unbelievably great this game sounds. Music, cars, guns. It's a cacophony of beautiful noise that all crafts the experience at least as strongly as the visuals do. Bravo to the sound team at CD Projekt Red. They're the finest designers working in sound at any video game developer, in my mind.
In general, the sheer amount of work and heart put into various artistically-driven aspects of this game is nearly unbelievable and readily apparent.
Ambition
The fact that this game does not succeed universally in everything it does is dwarfed by the fact that it tries to do so much.
Quests are constantly interlocked with one another. In the beginning I believed gigs were just uninteresting, one-off, side activities. But as I progressed through them I found this wasn't true. Several of the characters introduced in gigs re-appear later, either by mention from other characters, or in e-mails or shards. For example, one early gig I did—convincing an under-cover cop to drop her case when the gang was onto her—showed up 40 hours later, when I did a separate gig and found out she had been speaking with a crooked cop who refused to help her with the case. There are numerous examples of this throughout the game, but they're relatively subtle and depend on the player paying close attention to be noticed. The way side jobs are given to you, too, feels organic. You aren't simply dumped with quest line, one after the other, but rather the game gives you space of several days before having an NPC contact you with the next 'episode' (so to speak) of the quest.
Nearly all of the Main Jobs, Side Jobs, and a significant portion of the Gigs are high-effort, compellingly written stories, including some of the best characters written into a video game in years. Their production values are extraordinary; the standards in acting and animation in this game are higher than any video game has ever accomplished before. They bring these characters to life, and although the city and the narrative is at times horrendously dark, these characters regularly bring light and joy to it. The missions themselves constantly put the player in interesting circumstances and always ask questions of them: How do you judge a person's crimes, and is it your right to decide death is their proper punishment for what they've done? Is it better to live free, independent, destitute, and in poor health, or shackled and dominated, but in the lap of luxury and with every technological advancement in the palm of your hand? What does identity mean, and where's the line for when you stop being you? It gives you the means to affect not the world, but the characters you spend time with. You cannot save this world—it's already doomed. But you can save some of the people in it, and perhaps even yourself... If you're lucky.
I completed all of the side content Cyberpunk 2077 had to offer
Aside from these high-effort, well-written, well-designed quests, though, there are the NCPD Scanner Hustles. These appear as blue icons on your map, and there are a lot of them—150+ scattered throughout the game world. This is, unfortunately, where the effort begins to lack a bit. These small ambient events usually task you with cleaning out the enemies of an area and securing "evidence", which is almost always a container with a few pieces of loot, and a data shard giving you some background on why the incident was taking place. Typically it's something like a drug deal gone wrong, or a corporate stooge stealing from their employer and getting caught. They add some nice flavor to the world, but begin to become very dry and grindy after hitting only one or two of them. I think it was a mistake to include these on the mini-map and expect the player to clear them. Leaving them off the mini-map and letting the player stumble onto them organically as they played would have worked far better at making Night City feel a living open world. As they are, they feel too much like busywork and open world fodder, and thus come off as far too gamey. The icons appearing on your map and associating with an achievement push the player too strongly towards completing them, when they should have been left more ambiguous and had a more optional nature to them.
When the Scanner Hustles stumble into mundanity, though, you always have the interweaving, dopamine drip-feeding systems of Attributes, Perks, and Cyberware to drive you forward. I cleared every single Scanner Hustle in the game despite their relatively uninteresting nature simply because I was so hooked on the game's character specialization system and I enjoyed both the stealth and combat so much.
The carrots
Attributes, Skills, and Perks. Guns, Gear, Cyberware. Cyberdecks, Daemons, Quickhacks. The amount of systems in place, and the layers involved in each system allow for absurd amounts of depth and customization in the way you play the game. They're all interweaved.
Guns, too, feel incredible. I fully expected CD Projekt Red's first go at first-person shooting to be a sub par affair, but this turns out not to be the case. Shooting as a whole feels good, although the unique reload animations randomly pepper into the game as your skill with a weapon type increases always does a lot to heighten the experience. Once you begin finding iconic weapons, or receiving them as rewards for quests, everything hits an entirely new level.
The player's style of roleplaying is regularly referenced by NPCs
The game is constantly recognizing and calling out the way you spec you roleplay. On missions in which I went berserk and murdered every bad guy in sight, my allies and questgivers would make note of that; calling me a bad-ass, or being surprised I took out every guy. When I was stealthy, they'd notice that, too; calling me quiet as a mouse, calling me a ghost, or commenting on how quick and clean my job was. There are also specific characters you will vibe more closely with, via special dialogue options, if you spec a certain way. Nix, the netrunner at the Afterlife, will be much more chummy with you if you have high Int and netrunning capabilities. Likewise with Panam, a repairing and scavenging nomad, who will respect a more technically-talented player characters. The way the game specifically makes it a point you recognize your roleplaying and call it out to you was a constant joy for me, as it's something RPGs often fail to do. It puts you more strongly into the role you are crafting for yourself.
Your roleplaying is regularly given opportunity to show itself. The game gives you two characters to play: V, the street mercenary doing odd, often violent jobs for cash, and Johnny, whose consciousness has been imprisoned on a biological computer chip. V is the more open-ended of the two, as Johnny (played by Keanu Reeves) is an established anti-hero who's already famous in Cyberpunk lore. In the beginning, I played V as I wanted to roleplay him: cool, professional, competent, but prone to extreme violence at times. I played Johnny as he was written: drunk, arrogant, angsty, and sometimes cruel. I typically chose stealth and hacking with V and open combat and aggressive dialogue options for Johnny, no matter the situation.
As the story continued I found myself bridging the gap between the two; my Johnny softened, and my V became more brash and aggressive. Johnny's responses become softer, V's more aggressive. It's hard to expound on why this is so noteworthy without getting into more spoiler territory than what I've already dipped a toe into, but realizing that my manner of roleplaying the two characters had been slowly creeping towards the middle of the two was an experience I'll never forget, and something that could only be managed in the medium of video games. It was a rare case of the writing of the game matching my own personal experience. In most games, the way I feel and the way the game expects me to feel at any given moment are usually separate enough that it causes a jarring incongruence in the way I experience the game's narrative. Cyberpunk instead took advantage of its designers' ability to know exactly what my experience would entail, and to heighten that experience with their writing.
And yet despite all of this, there are strong criticisms on the internet suggesting that Cyberpunk 2077 fails as an RPG.
"It's not an RPG!"
One of the main criticisms of this game is surrounding its supposed lack of player agency over the narrative, or via dialogue options in general.
I've replayed several story quest chains and dialogue options impact their arcs—sometimes even just minor ones. There are the obvious choices in which you choose a particular faction to side with, which heavily impacts the quest chain, but those are pretty obvious. Examples being Maelstrom versus Militech early in the game, or Voodoo Boys versus Netwatch in the mid-game. But there are more subtle ones, too. For example, at one point I asked a seemingly innocent, information-gathering, optional blue question in dialogue to a BD dealer, which tipped off the snuff film compound you are tasked with infiltrating afterwards. The dealer lets them know that you were asking suspicious questions about them, and the compound added more guards. You can find an email on one of the computers which specifically mentions that someone was asking questions. I'm sure there are more instances such as this that I'm not aware of, but that will be more clear when I replay the game.
Is Cyberpunk 2077 a wide-open cRPG? No, of course not. V is a set character with voice acting, so that was never in the cards. But it's definitely comparable to Witcher 3, and, in my opinion, a more open RPG than that game was. It's not Fallout 4, though, which seems to be what most people are hinting at with this sort of criticism directed at Cyberpunk's supposedly limited dialogue options.
Your questions in dialogue can drastically affect quests, but these effects are usually subtle enough that the player won't realize their impact unless they play a given quest twice
The conversation for how much an RPG should facilitate allowing the player to affect the actual narrative is a good one. Witcher 2 versus Witcher 3 is a pretty solid comparison, just choosing from CDPR's own oeuvre. Personally, I greatly prefer Witcher 3 because, although the player doesn't have nearly as much power to impact the grand narrative (the player's agency to change how things go is typically limited to individual quest chains, like it is in Cyberpunk), I felt it allowed the writers to tell a tighter, more affecting story, and I personally value storytelling over having a major impact on the narrative via dialogue choices. Cyberpunk's method of restricting this agency in order to tell a more cohesive story is what I prefer, because I always found Witcher 2's narrative to be too fragmented. Yes, you can greatly change where the story goes via your decisions (the entire middle portion of the game is completely different based on your choice in Act 1), but this is not always for the best, in my opinion. In Witcher 2, characters become stretched too thin, the plot spreads a bit too unwieldy, and you end up having to play the game twice to fully grasp what is happening. I think CDPR learned from this (I believe the same person who directed Witcher 2 directed Cyberpunk, so there is shared DNA there). But, there's an argument there, for sure. I know some people prefer that kind of agency over the plot. That being said, as far as Cyberpunk offering only (or even "mostly") false narrative choices, and dialogue choices which do not affect anything (or even "very little") in the game, that I definitely disagree with and there are examples pretty readily available throughout the game which contradict that criticism.
Drawbacks
Gushing aside, there are several things Cyberpunk 2077 does very poorly which deserve to be called out.
Firstly, crafting is nearly completely broken economically. It's far too expensive to upgrade the gear you currently have. I got to a point where, in order to upgrade my favorite pair of ~75 Armor shoes, I needed hundreds of rare upgrade components, when dismantling rare loot (which doesn't drop often, as the name suggests) only yields in the single digits. This quickly made my favorite pair of boots obsolete, so I was forced by necessity to chuck them for a clownish pair of neon green plastic snow-boot looking monstrosities. The player ends up endlessly swapping out their old gear for new gear in this fashion because of how broken the crafting economy is. It also has the ill effect of making their character appear to be a complete clown with ridiculous, mismatched clothes when they might rather appear to be street-savvy, or a professional operator. The opportunity for roleplaying with clothing is thus completely lost with the failure of this system.
The UI is also a completely broken mess. The way shards are sorted is particularly awful. I've currently got nearly 100 in two separate categories both titled 'Other'. It's impossible to locate shards by name because they aren't sortable, nor do they default to sorting alphabetically. If a shard pops up on screen, you'd better press 'Z' immediately, because once you have to search for it by navigating the menus it's pretty much gone for good. Even more severe is the fact that the quest log features utterly unhelpful blurbs. I had a quest I set down for a few hours when I felt like roaming, then, upon going back to the blurb to refresh my memory of what's going on, I saw only this summary:
How is this helpful at all? I have no idea whatsoever of where I left off, what was happening in this quest, how it started, etc. How the hell am I supposed to grasp the dozens of quests I've picked up when returning to them later? You'll often pick up quests just while driving somewhere in the middle of another quest, so it's impossible to do them all as you get them, and this sort Quest log fails abysmally at keeping the player's head in the game.
I feel like I must comment on bugs, since that's the big news these days. The only bugs I encountered through my playthrough were either minor graphical glitches—a character's cigarette getting stuck in the air, or my player character occasionally T-posing out of the car when I drive fast—or broken NPC triggers, which were always relieved on a reload.
For comparison's sake, I recently played Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and that game was far buggier than Cyberpunk 2077. I haven't experienced a single crash or soft lock with Cyberpunk 2077, yet I experienced numerous such issues with Valhalla—one of which caused me to lose hours of gameplay. I put about 40 hours more into Cyberpunk 2077 than Assassin's Creed Valhalla and I experienced markedly more bugs in the latter, overall.
Conclusion
At one point in my playthrough I had been forced into seeking out help from a certain gang in one of the more disreputable areas of Night City. My point of contact with said gang had already double-crossed me once before, trying to kill me due to a specific choice I had made. Yet, due to the situation, I felt it wisest to continue working with them. A few steps later in the quest line, and I found out that they actually could not help me at all, and were just using me the entire time—even after having tried to kill me once before, they screwed me again.
I was fully in my character's head at this point. Beyond frustration, my pride as a top-class merc in the city was insulted—they're really gonna try and screw me, again!? I had previously made the choice to side with them because it seemed the better option of the two, but now I realized I had made a mistake. This frustration bled into my roleplaying. The game was going to allow to me to leave the gang's building scot free, since I had sided with them despite being screwed over. But, via dialogue options, I was given the choice to antagonize my point of contact. I took this option (because fuck them, you know?), and progressed it into a decision, hidden in dialogue, to tell them all to get lost, and that I was going to kill them. I gleefully took it, unsheathed my Mantis Blades, and went ham on the lot. Limbs and blood strewn everywhere, I finally felt payback had been due. But it wasn't done yet. Shortly afterwards, a few more gang members came in to see what was taking so long, chattering to themselves. I quickly hid on a scaffolding as they came into the room strewn with gore. They commented, fearfully, that I had killed everyone, and they wondered at why and how I'd done this. I took them out stealthily, continued to the exit, also killing the person who had attempted to kill me beforehand.
This sort of agency is why I play RPGs. A major choice I had made in a quest prior led me to this path, and I reacted as my player character had. Being in your player character's head is something that no other medium offers aside from video and board games, and at this, Cyberpunk 2077 succeeds wholeheartedly. The quality of its world, its characters, and its gameplay only help facilitate this even more by often granting you in-world commentary based on your choices, and NPC reactions to said choices, even when it's a choice most players will not choose to make.
My strongest big-picture criticism is that the main story felt too short. Its quality was so high throughout that I was almost ravenously hungry for more, even after 150+ hours of gameplay. When I hit the point of no return, I was still wrapping up some side quests and map markers (I ended up clearing every single side job, gig, and NCPD Scanner Hustle in the game), and seeing the warning message that there was no more content to experience created a sharp pang of remorse within me. The end of Cyberpunk 2077 left an ache similar to the feeling of mourning a great novel when you're finished, and that's something that only the best, most affecting video games can manage.
I ended up completing every single quest and open world marker. I bought every single car. I completed every single cyberpsycho boss non-lethally. And yet, at the end, after nearly 200 hours of gameplay, I still wanted more. I didn't just like this game—I loved it. I'm still hopelessly infatuated with it. It's one of my very favorites of the past decade, and I would not be surprised to see all of the most fervent criticizers of this game change their tune, years from now, to argue that they really loved it along.
Perhaps in the years to come, Cyberpunk 2077 will eventually get the credit it deserves for being one of the greatest RPGs ever made—as games with rough launches such as Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines and Fallout New Vegashave before it. For me, it's already firmly ensconced in that pantheon, and things will only get better from here as the game receives further patching and post-release support.
There are a number of complaints I have with the game, though. This game is the first in a new series by a small indie developer, and it shows in some respects. Although the sprite art in the combat screens is absolutely fantastic and certainly inspired by the old GBA Fire Emblem games, and the Sage Frontier-esque super-deformed narrative sprite art is quite compelling, there are certain instances in which the art direction of the game falls well below the standard set by many gorgeous indie titles of the modern day. A prime example is the character portrait art that pops up during narrative scene alongside speech boxes. It is so amateurish that it looks more like a Playstation-era render of a player character; very plain, very wooden. It pulled me out of the narrative so strongly that I wished I had the option to turn off the portraits and just leave a plain speech box, so I could instead focus on the sprite characters. I hope there eventually is an option to turn them off, or a mod to replace the character portraits with better art.
