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.
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.
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.
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.
Like my review for Mass Effect 2, it's difficult for me to speak in a balanced manner about BioWare's Mass Effect 3 because it's one of my favorite games of all-time.
This game exhibits all the strengths in atmosphere that the prior games do. Its worldbuilding is second-to-none in gaming; this feels like a real galaxy, with real politics, and real culture and history, and it's a pleasure to exist in. The soundtrack—although done by Clint Mansell this time around instead of the typical Jack Wall effort—is phenomenal and does a lot to help shape the atmosphere. And Mass Effect 3's characters—carried over from the prior two games (if they survived)—are some of the most genuine-feeling characters in the medium.
That brings me to my first caveat: Don't play Mass Effect 3 if you haven't played the first two games. You're going to be dropped into a strange situation for which you have zero context. You're not going to know any of the characters or the world, and all of the moments which are meant to be emotionally resonant will fall flat for you because you lack important context provided by the prior two games. With this series perhaps more than any other, it's paramount that you start from the first game and play your way through completely. Doing otherwise will rob you of all the great emotional moments and reveals of the later games in the trilogy because you haven't been properly set up for them, and even if you go back and play the earlier games afterwards, you will still be robbed of the genuine reaction you would have had had you played the games in order.
Lots of praise is given to the writing of the Mass Effect series, and a lot of it is deserved. However, with Mass Effect 3, I noticed the writing dip into the unevenness for the first time.
Plenty of fuss has been made about the ending not being satisfying, and I mostly agree with that. But I tend to find the "Mass Effect 3 has great writing and a terrible ending" statement to be untrue. There are some really, really great and satisfying arcs in this game, which I can't really mention by name without spoiling the experience for players. But for each one of those, there's an equally dissatisfying, contrived plot point which seems like it has had too much material cut and fails to make sense without the story. For example, at about the midway point of the game, there's a sudden and drastic attack which feels like it has no set-up and lots of holes. And late in the game, a key battle takes place off-screen leading to a sudden and colossal loss, which is barely even commented on by the characters. It has always seemed to me that this battle was meant to be in the game and unfortunately cut due to development concerns.
In addition to these, does anyone like Kai Leng? Anyone!? He's by far the worst, most artificial character in the entire series. He has no backstory, serves little point other than to rile the player with cheesy one-liners. Go away, Kai Leng. Nobody likes you. In addition to this, the Illusive Man loses all the nuance which made him such a fantastic, morally gray character in Mass Effect 2. This poor character turn was extremely disappointing to me.
Those criticisms aside, the two arcs I previously mentioned as being excellent (one in particular, involving synthetic hivemind robots and certain aliens who must wear suits all the time due to their failing immune systems) are a couple of my favorite stories in gaming history. I've been playing games for nearly 35 years, now, and I still tear up at portions of this game because of how strong the emotional impact of the story is, and how much history I've built up with these characters over the past two games.
With Mass Effect 3's writing, you've got to take the good with the bad. Some portions will fall flat—Sure. But the portions that strike you are so damned good that they're enough to elevate this game for me. It may not be as consistently well-written as the first two games, but it's damn close to hitting the same highs. And for me, that's more than enough to suggest this game.
I'd be remiss not to mention the gameplay, too. Mass Effect 3 plays easily the best of the three games in the trilogy. Shepard is granted added mobility, cover finally works well, and friendly AI is hugely improved from Mass Effect 2. It's so much fun to play as a Vanguard, for example, zipping around the map, blasting enemies here and there while creating biotic detonations. Ditto to Engineers, who finally get detonations of their own now, or Adepts, who are detonation machines. Soldiers are the same as always; lots of firepower and hardiness. And those who play Infiltrator can cloak and snipe all they want. It all works phenomenally well and is rather well-balanced.
In addition to this, Mass Effect 3 has the best set-pieces in series history. The scale is much larger here (for obvious reasons, if you know what occurs in the plot), but the actual enemy engagements are more varied than in previous games. Some of the situations which you are put into make you feel the moment so much more: Engaging in combat on a fallen planet with an orbital cannon firing and shaking the entire screen, deafening you. Or making a mad dash back and forth and trying not to get blasted by a giant laser cannon as an enormous enemy bears down on you. How about spacewalking, in vacuum, down a tube which is falling apart as a space battle rages on just outside. Mix in the fantastic combat with moments such as these and you find yourself fully immersed in an epic space opera like no other game has ever managed before. It's fantastic, even playing this stuff 8 years later. If you like space opera, the stuff in this game will blow your hair back, guaranteed.
There's so much variance with how to play this game. The plot changes due to all of the past decisions incorporated into it, your chosen character class will strongly affect how combat flows and which companions you use, even your Shepard's chosen gender will change things up. This kind of variance has led to me putting hundreds of hours into this game (500+ on console, 250+ on Origin, and now, Steam), replaying the campaign endlessly just because I enjoy the combat and its strongly affecting plot moments so much. I've never played and replayed a single player game like this before and I don't really expect to with any other game ever again. And, man, I don't even have enough space to talk about the multiplayer! It's great! I expected it to be tacked-on crap when I first picked this game up in 2012, but it's actually quite good. Give it a whirl if you get a chance!
Basically: If you've played the first two games, you've got to play this one. If you haven't, pick up Mass Effect and enjoy the ride. Maybe this trilogy will become your favorite gaming experience, as it has been for me over the past decade. And make sure you play this game with all DLC included. There are some really, really important lore reveals packed in with the DLC that should not be missed!
Perhaps the most important part of playing Mass Effect Andromeda is to go into it with carefully managed expectations.
This was a game made not by the flagship BioWare team (they were working on Anthem at the time), but by BioWare Montreal—the team primarily responsible for Mass Effect 3's phenomenal multiplayer component.
Going off of that, you can expect really good combat. Andromeda is easily the best a Mass Effect game has ever played, combat-wise. You are far more mobile than ever before thanks to jump-jets, there are more powers to choose from in your build than ever before, and guns feel almost universally exceptional. They even fixed the original trilogy's notoriously awful vehicles by having by far the best feeling, looking, and controlling vehicle in the entire series in the Nomad.
In addition to the strong combat, the move to the Frostbite engine (although it caused a severely difficult development, as Frostbite was not intended to be utilized for RPGs) looks absolutely beautiful in comparison to the Unreal Engine 3 which the previous games were built on. Perhaps most stunning about this game's visuals are the lighting and particle effects; the way light glows in space, reflects off of surfaces such as ice, and scatter due to particle effects such as fire and explosions is unequaled by any other game in the series. I would even make the claim that space has never looked better in a video game than it does in Mass Effect Andromeda—no exaggeration! It looks incredible.
To top it off, this game sounds amazing. Sound design is something we don't typically notice much, but Andromeda is one of the best sounding games I've ever played. Gunshots echo beautifully throughout the environment, every weapon has pop, the way biotics distort sounds is really impressive. The deadened sound of space is engulfing. Even the effects used for things like reloads or door switches sound really great. Top-notch sound design, and it really makes a difference in the gameplay.
There are some drawbacks to combat, though. BioWare Montreal chose to remove the pause-and-command features from the original trilogy, which is a huge disappointment. I'm sure they chose to play to their strengths—which are real-time—but the tactical aspect of pausing and assessing the situation was a huge feature that made Mass Effect different from every other third-person shooter, and it feels more generic without it.
In addition to this, managing your squadmates loadouts and power usage is also gone, further removing the more tactical feel of the original trilogy.
Aside from these drawbacks, though, the game really does play wonderfully in combat. Being in the thick of it, causing biotic detonations and hearing the amazing gunfire makes combat a joy.
Unfortunately, though, BioWare Montreal are not a team who have ever put together a story or compelling characters, and it shows.
One of my favorite things about the Mass Effect series is its worldbuilding and its strong characters. The original trilogy feels so alive because its galaxy feels like a real place with real political squabbling and real conflict of cultures. The Batarians versus the humans, the Krogan versus the Turians and Salarians, etc. And its characters feel so real and lifelike that their conflicts ring true and really affect the way you view them and the norms of the setting. Sadly, this is not the case with Andromeda, which feels incredibly basic, tacky, and uninteresting by comparison. The entire setting feels so generically space opera that I find myself wholly uninterested with any of its lore.
Peebee's obnoxious nature falls victim to stale cliché.
This lack of writing prowess sadly extends to its characters as well. Although I really liked Drack and Vetra, there were so many crewmates I absolutely detested that I refused to bring them with me in almost any situation. Peebee is little more than an impulsive moron, whose flimsy loner personality feels completely artificial—she feels like a writer tried really hard to give a "character quirk" rather than simply writing her as an actual, complete person with motivations and desires; which is what all good characters should feature if they're to jump off the page at you.
It often seems the rest of the crew hates Liam as much as I do.
And then you have Liam, who is basically just an obnoxious, impulsive screw-up. Liam is such an unrepentant idiot that it even seems like most of the rest of the team hates him as much as I do. Perhaps some of his hijinks were meant to endear him to me, I guess? If so, his writers completely failed on that front. I truly wished I had the option to kick him off the crew in-game, as he did nothing but act like a fool and consistently put everyone in terrible, life-threatening situations. And then you have people whose dialogue is just flat-out annoying, even at the best of times: an example being Gil, the mechanic. Go away, Gil. I'm tired of hearing your annoying, nasally voice and try-hard attempts at wit.
The entire game is permeated with poor dialogue, too. Characters say things that feel awkward and completely unrealistic. Every time I sit down to play this game, I think to myself, "This isn't how people talk! Nobody would say things like this!" None of the writing feels natural or real. The characters feel like video game characters, the world feels like a video game world. And so none of the conflicts or the ideas this game feebly attempts to discuss are interesting at all. They're just busywork; something that's in place because it's a Mass Effect game, and Mass Effect games need to have things like squadmates and aliens. The writing in general is so uninspired that I've never replayed this game—even though I've replayed Mass Effect 3 a dozen times at this point. It's so, so disappointing to see from my all-time favorite video game series.
In addition to this, the quest design really leaves a lot to be desired. There are far too many busywork fetch quests here. BioWare Montreal designed these gorgeous, huge, atmospheric environments which feel amazing to look at and fight in, and then chose to populate them with some of the most mundane, uninteresting busywork crap-quests imagineable. Get ready to scan 32 plants, mine 26 rocks, kill 10 beasts, etc. Over and over. Ad nauseam. Because, unfortunately, Mass Effect Andromeda is that kind of game.
It's really unfortunate that the poor animations (they are bad, but they're nowhere near the biggest flaw this game has) got so much press at the time of release, because, in general, this game really does look excellent. And its biggest flaw—by far—is how it fails the series' reputation by putting together such a mediocre writing effort.
If you're looking for a fun third-person sci-fi shooter with some nice visuals, give Andromeda a shot. That being said, although Mass Effect Andromeda does indeed do some really great things, I still don't think I would recommend it unless you're a very hardcore fan of the series. And even then, it's important to go in with well-managed expectations: Mass Effect Andromeda is certainly not a great game, but, depending on your tastes, it can be an enjoyable experience.
Witcher 2 is a mix of positives and negatives whose positives ultimately far outweigh the minor complaints I have with the game.
It shares some of this roughness with its predecessor, The Witcher, which I find to be so rough as to be almost unplayable nowadays. The Witcher 2 had similarly convoluted, poorly designed levels which make it a chore to navigate to and fro while completing quests and exploring. The forest outside Flotsam is guilty of this. It's exceptionally difficult to get where you need to go without circling around hedges and trees and carving through numerous cannon-fodder caliber enemies. Additionally, looting and interacting with the environment is a huge chore given the cooldown on your amulet scanning ability, and the way the game locks out looting for what feels like an eternity once combat starts. Crafting and inventory management is a gigantic chore due to the obtuse user interface, which I felt like I had to fight with constantly. I also experienced a few lock-ups in which Geralt would get stuck in an animation, and a few crashes here and there. Transitions into different areas of the map are bothersome as well. There are numerous small complaints like this that show some of the roughness the previous game also exhibited, albeit far less of them overall.
But there are significant improvements, too. This game looks beautiful, especially when compared to the previous game. I was surprised by how high a quality some of the textures were, and the art design in general is noticeably improved from the first game. The character and monster designs are fantastic, with some of the sorceresses and Geralt's outfits being particularly stunning. Even just the background of the dice poker board, or the deranged drawings on the wall of the burnt out asylum are artistically impressive. Due to this mix of artistic prowess and a powerful new engine, a lot of the visuals on display in Witcher 2 still hold up today, nearly a decade after its original release in 2011. This is made more impressive by the use of developer CD Projekt Red's in-house REDengine, which they developed and used for the first time with this game, to glorious effect. Although I dealt with a few crashes, the game otherwise runs superbly (I'm near 150 fps at all times with max settings) and it still looks great despite being nine years old. It's a pretty impressive achievement for what was a small studio at the time to develop such a solid engine, and the game is made much stronger than the first Witcher, which used the ancient Aurora Engine, licensed from BioWare.
The combat is also substantially improved, ditching the previous game's ridiculous and shallow faux-rhythm system for classic third person combat which is far more satisfying to execute. It feels a bit loose to me, especially when compared to The Witcher 3, but it's still miles better than the first game's combat and far more intuitive. Enough depth has been added to make things more interesting throughout.
Where The Witcher 2 really shines, though, is in terms of narrative, quest design, and providing the player agency. The strongest thing The Witcher 1 did was weaving its quests together, so you feel especially detective-like once you begin uncovering all the pieces. This is also true of Witcher 2. For example, in Chapter 1 you very quickly obtain a series of side quests very early, simply by talking to people. Almost all of these quests turn out to be intertwined in some way: An incense-maker turned fisstech dealer and a drunken troll turn out to be related. Sounds far-fetched, but the common ground not only turns out to be reasonable and compelling, but also teaches you more about the political situation in the game's setting of the Pontar Valley. And if you're looking for a game in which you have the power to impact the story with your choices, then look no further—The Witcher 2 features perhaps the best example of "your choices matter" that I've ever seen in a game.
CD Projekt Red took a massive chance in the way they designed this game, because there's a significant choice to be made at the end of Chapter 1 that leads to two nearly exclusive routes through the plot. Meaning that no matter your choice, you will end up missing out on about a third of the story content in this game because the two paths moving forward from this choice are so different from one another.
It's a ballsy choice by the developer, because these people had to be designing these entire areas and questlines knowing that half of their players would likely never experience them (unless you're a nerd like me and replay the game to take the other route). The consequences of this choice further reinforces the fact that you are actually impacting what is occurring in the narrative. Few games take player choice to this extreme, and the fact that CD Projekt Red did makes The Witcher 2 something special for that reason alone. Furthermore, the choice is packaged appropriately—you likely won't even realize that you just made a game-altering choice, even though you still realize the gravity of the choice when you made it. The game won't pause and give you any hint that a massive choice is about to occur, which I love. It's an exceptional, ambitious move that is perfectly executed and it makes this game far more memorable and impactful than it'd be without it. Bravo to the developers for making the difficult decision to include two branching paths like this.
If for nothing else, this game is worth playing due to the quality of its narrative. It's a politically-driven game with strong social commentary and genuinely interesting characters, and it gives you the opportunity to pass judgment and act within this world as you see fit. It's constantly satisfying in this manner and it left me thinking about my own moral code regularly. Although Witcher 2 does not feature the classic, epic story that is featured in Witcher 3, I appreciated the narrower scale and the stronger focus on the political machinations of this world's elites. It might take some concentration, but once you grasp what's going on in the narrative, it's quite compelling.
The Witcher 2 is not without its warts, but it shows a staggering improvement over its predecessor and it remains more than enjoyable today. If you're in the mood for a good story, check it out. You'll probably be well-satisfied.
I feel really bad doing this because I absolutely love CD Projekt Red and I enjoy later games in the series such as The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, but I just can't recommend this game. It's not a terrible game, but its age and some of the mistakes made by the developers working on their first game do a lot to make it a terrible experience to play.
Most notably is that the combat is awful. It's incredibly easy for the most part, but also very bland. Potions are all but useless, leaving you to whack with your sword repeatedly in its faux-rhythm game. I was completely exhausted of it by the beginning of the second chapter and was beginning to choose just to run past enemies.
There are a number of side quests that are worthwhile as far as story and character development, but too many are simple fetch quests and just not worth your time despite the experience and money they reward you with. Too many "fetch 10 wolf pelts", and "find the 10 sephirahs" here—the latter of which broke me for good and had me uninstalling the game.
Probably most tiresome is the fact that the maps are some of the worst designed playing areas I've ever seen in an RPG. I am not exaggerating when I say that 90% of my gametime here was spent running around the map. They are not cyclical at all, but require you to run end-to-end, which is incredibly boring and frustrating. The maps that are open, such as the swamp, often have shrubbery and fences blocking paths that you might use to get somewhere more quickly. I don't mind padding out some gametime, but you've got to be smart about it; give me some good dialogue with NPCs, or entertaining combat. Here even the skill trees—one of my favorite parts of an RPG—feel ineffective, and like a waste of time.
There are minor annoyances as well, such as the awful character models, or poor dialogue writing. The game also starts off about as terribly as possible, with awful, generic, clichéd fantasy dialogue, and bad animations and storytelling.
I used to think of this game like the first Mass Effect—a good game, but very rough around the edges. But while it does do some good things, it's nothing like Mass Effect, which has competent levels, character building, and far better writing and dialogue.
Pretty much all The Witcher has going for it is some interestingly complex quest design and a great setting. Aside from that, this game is nearly completely skippable. Witcher 2 is a far better game, and probably even a better starting place for the series. But if you're dead set on playing the entire trilogy, you can give this one a shot—It's going to be all but impossible to play once you've experienced the later, better games and CD Projekt Red's maturity as one of the best game developers on the planet.
I was interested in Kingdom Come: Deliverance on release but read reviews and decided it wasn't for me. It sounded buggy and unstable, which I can't stand in RPGs—broken quest flags infuriate me. And the save system sounded awful since I can't stand games that don't allow you to quicksave and instead force you to rely on checkpointing, which is almost never as good as your ability to quicksave.
So I decided to pass on it. It sounded like more frustration than it was worth.
2 years later, Epic Store offered it for free so I finally decided to check it out. I recalled the save system being tied to potions you had to buy and decided to check and see if there was a mod available that allowed you to quicksave instead. PC modders—being the amazing people they are—had indeed made one! So I installed the game, installed the save anywhere mod, and booted the game and fooled around a bit. The devs have patched most of the bugs and instability out of the game by now, the dialogue writing was of a far higher quality than I was led to believe, and I liked the premise of being a peasant in medieval times rather than a nobleman or some kind of hero. So the game had me interested from minute one.
However, I got to my first combat engagement in which a drunk made a fool of me in a fistfight. The whole thing felt like bullcrap. I had no idea what I was doing, and I rage quit and uninstalled.
But the fight stayed on my mind. I thought about it more and more and considered that I was a kid with no combat experience, fighting a practiced brawler much larger than me. It made sense he would beat me up. I realized then that the game was aiming for a level of realism much higher than that of other RPGs. I reinstalled the game and decided not to confront the drunk. Like an immersive sim, there are various emergent ways of solving these problems—I ended up doing a favor for my tavern buddies, and in return, they came with me and beat the crap out of the drunk together.
From that moment on, I was completely hooked.
This game has a hardcore group of fans that sing its praises, and after playing for nearly 30 hours I'm starting to see why. It's unapologetic in its identity: It's a hardcore RPG that aims for a level of realism not found in other RPGs these days. It reminds me a bit of Skyrim with a thick coat of realistic paint: There's no magic here, no fantastical elements, but there are survival elements in place of those—you've got to sleep, eat, and bathe yourself. Your inventory weight is going to be taken up mostly by your armor. Archery is insanely difficult, like it is in real life. And, perhaps most rewarding; combat will take literal hours of training for you, the player, to get right.
The game is historically realistic about what Henry, the peasant protagonist, can do. You don't leave your parents house a total bad-ass—you have to train! When I began fighting I would nearly always get my butt kicked unless I was fighting naked, starving bandits. If I got jumped by Cumans on the road, I had to run or I'd die. Luckily for me, you get to a certain point in the story where Henry has the opportunity to train under a Master-at-Arms. Sir Bernard beat me senseless with a wooden sword for a literal hour before I began to get the hang of perfect blocks and master strikes, which require precise timing to pull off. I spent—no exaggeration—2 straight hours (real-time, not in-game) simply sparring with Sir Bernard until I could train completely naked, with real weapons, and counter every move without taking a single scratch of damage. And the the process was actually fun—not grindy! I got better and better, slowly, as I watched for his tells to try and guess when he was attacking so I could counter. It was incredibly rewarding not only to master that and rough up Sir Bernard for a change, but then to take it out into the "real world" and be able to duel actual knights—who would have slaughtered me before I practiced so much—and make complete fools of them using not stats that I had increased, but my own increase in skill with the game's combat system. The fantastic hollow metal clangs make everything ring true and feel satisfying, and the first-person animations when you pull off a master strike reflect the work you put in the become so well-practiced. It's the single most rewarding first-person melee combat system I've ever played in a game. I'll never be able to go back to Skyrim again.
Where it gets difficult is when you're fighting multiple enemies. But I don't think is a flaw—rather, it reflects the realism of how difficult it is to fight multiple enemies and come out on top. It's rare that I will come across a trio of Cumans on the road in an ambush and escape without a scratch. The enemy AI is quite good in these battles: One will pull out a bow and fire at you repeatedly, one with a shield will engage you from the front, while the third constantly tries to circle behind you. And if they have a dog, forget it—the little mongrel will constantly circle behind me more quickly than I can move. The solution in these battles is usually to sneak around the ambush, or run. But rather than frustrating, this lends realism to the game. I never leave such encounters angry because the game is staying consistent with its commitment to realism.
This commitment is also beginning to show now that I'm later in the game and wearing heavier armor. I love vast power scales in games, and this game reflects the near-invulnerability of a fully plate-armored knight in the 15th century. Your errors in combat are so much more forgiving when you're wearing a full set of heavy armor that your opponents need to continue to wail away nearly until your armor breaks before they can properly damage you. It makes all of your war loot even more valuable, while at the same time depicting realistically the intimidating power of a heavy knight. The loot in the game is surprisingly compelling, too—mostly because Henry has nearly a dozen different armor slots for all the layers of armor and padding a medieval knight would wear. I had no idea they were so thickly armored before playing this game.
This sort of painstaking realism also applies to non-combat things such as reading, which no peasant was able to do in the 15th century. You have to go on a specific quest to find someone to teach you, which takes in-game days of practice with a scribe. This is the level of realism to which this game aspires, and I love that about it.
In addition to how it handles combat and the growth of both your abilities and your character's, there are a number of things the game does as-good or better than any other RPG of the past decade or so, and some of these things have not been mentioned nearly enough in media covering the game: It has some of the best story and character writing out there, and that is supported by phenomenal voice acting—I particularly enjoy the player character Henry's performance by Tom McKay, and that of Hans Capon. It has a fresh setting that hasn't been explored in this level of detail before, and it has a strong commitment to historical accuracy that lends weight to it. It has utterly phenomenal music and art design—I spent minutes at a time just looking at the frescoes present in churches.
This game hits on so many things I love: It's fantastic historical fiction, it tells a compelling story with a strong narrative hook, it has emotionally resonant characters who feel like real people. And it has challenging, rewarding gameplay.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Downloadable Content: From the Ashes (2018)
I'm surprised by the lukewarm reviews of this content because I loved it! It provides a nice motivational diversion from the main game. About halfway through the main campaign I found myself filthy rich simply from looting and selling all of the gear I acquire from sacking bandit and Cuman camps. This expansion gives you somewhere to invest that money. The way it ties in to the main campaign and allows you to 'recruit' NPCs you've come across via side quests is brilliant as well.
I haven't felt this kind of ownership since Monteriggioni in Assassin's Creed II. This content is absolutely wonderful and I adore it. Watching your settlement grow in real time and observing the NPCs living out their lives is such a rewarding pleasure, and it gave me more motivation to continue doing sidequests and amassing wealth. I think the folks who were dissatisfied with this were expecting something like a settlement builder which Fallout 4 features, however I'm much happier having things more rigid like this expansion, if it avoids the jank and tedium present in games like Fallout 4.
Wonderful DLC; highly recommended.
From the Ashes Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Downloadable Content: A Woman's Lot (2018)
A Woman's Lot centers on Theresa, which is great because she's very well-acted and a solid character. It also lets you get to know the people of Skalitz better, which is welcome. And, best of all, it introduces your dog companion, Mutt! Mutt is the best, he makes the main game so much more enjoyable. I'd honestly pay the cost of this DLC just for him!
However, Theresa's actual mission and, specifically, the objectives you're given, make this actual DLC campaign range anywhere from incredibly frustrating to, by far, the most boring things I've done in the entire game.
As previously indicated; I really liked Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Part of what I like so much is that honest effort went in to designing the quests and objectives. You're constantly invested in what you're doing because the story is so compelling and Henry's growth as a character feels real and earned. All of that is removed in A Woman's Lot. There's zero investment in Theresa because you know none of this carries over, and there's nearly no opportunity to develop her character through the course of the DLC. Beyond the novelty of playing the beginning events of the game from a different point-of-view, her entire portion is all but worthless. The story, too, is basically what you already know, with one or two little Easter eggs thrown in. But aside from that, it's utterly predictable.
I was interested to play as Theresa because I love her character and she provides a nice change of pace from Henry. And I hope they'll include the option to play as a female character in KCD2, but the quest design here is complete and utter garbage and just zero fun to play.
On paper, it seems good: Introduce the player to Theresa's everyday life to make the impact of Skalitz's sacking that much more severe. In practice it's simply not any fun. You're tasked with things like feeding chickens, picking stuff up from the blacksmith, and various other fetch-and-deliver quests that are about as fun as a trip to the dentist. And on paper, requiring Theresa to be stealthy and sneak past guards rather than fighting makes sense. But in practice this clashes severely with the game's controversial save system. The stealth mechanics in KCD are very realistic, which is something I appreciated in the main game; no more hiding right in front of bad guys because your stealth skill is 100, like in Skyrim. But having such realistic stealth mechanics mixed with the way this DLC makes you utterly powerless to fight or run leads to an incredibly difficult, punishing experience. Once you're spotted, you can't even run from the Cumans, so you basically just get killed. And because you're not free to save whenever you like, you're often losing 15-30 minutes of gameplay at a time and forced to start back at the beginning. I was cursing up a storm playing through these sections, which is a clear deviation from my experience in the main game, which I'm nearly always enraptured by!
The cherry on top of this turd pie was near the end, when you're tasked with collecting random things like 10 flowers, 6 bandages, and some water in the dark, as a Cuman patrols near you. The game tries to have your dog help you seek out the items, but this mechanic was broken for me, as the dog did nothing but follow me as usual. I couldn't use a torch without being spotted, so I walked around the same area, tediously, for almost an hour, looking for barely visible flowers in the pitch dark. It was easily the worst time I had playing through this entire game; an absolute nightmare, and if I didn't love KCD so much I'd have shut this down, uninstalled it, and never touched it again.
And then, to top it off! None of this crap you were forced to collect matters anyway! The task you were trying to accomplish by collecting these various worthless items fails regardless of what you do. Thanks, Warhorse!
Seriously though, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an amazing game. And this DLC is worth getting at a discount just to have Mutt accompany Henry through the main game. But if I ever replay this game from the beginning, there is no way in hell I will ever play through A Woman's Lot again.
I would certainly like to have the option to play as a female character, but more importantly, I want it to be fun and satisfying! And this DLC just simply isn't.
