Johnny, I don't have much time to write this review...
Open-world exploration and side gigs
If you liked the anime and the idea of exploring Night City sounds appealing to you, I'm happy to announce that this is where most of my 64 hours of playtime comes from. The radio station called Body Heat plays a song from the anime sometimes, which is great for immersion. Cleaning up the city's cyberpsycho problem to that music was the most enjoyable part of the game for me.
But that's just a side gig, and my thoughts of the anime were doing much of the heavy-lifting. Beyond that, the open-world can be a fun waste of time. Nothing too breathtaking, even if the game can be quite pretty. It'll keep you occupied for a good amount of time, and if that sounds solid enough to you, you could probably stop reading this review and buy the game while it's on sale and before I ruin it for you.
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Main story
About 20% good, I'd say. I'll keep it quick as I'm dying. Jackie good. Vik good. Takemura good. Johnny has a couple of good moments but his entire concept becomes annoying long before the end and harms the pacing. That's pretty much it. The rest of the game is filled with biochip malfunction cutscenes where you're forced to fall to the ground and cough up blood and then argue with Johnny. There are also like 10 different stoic female characters that all act in a similar unlikeable manner. The writing largely consists of crass language, drugs, violence, betrayals, deaths, and a shallow "corpo bad" message that is never expanded on and merely shoved down your throat at every opportunity.
Whether or not you agree with this message isn't the point; corpo bad isn't some novel take. You need to do something with it. We were getting somewhere with Takemura for a bit, but he didn't get enough screen time. The point is that the plot almost never makes you think. It doesn't make your brain dance. This is fine early on, as you figure more things will happen later, but no, that's the whole game. Choices don't matter, your playstyle doesn't matter, it all leads to the same outcome. Compared to Deus Ex, the main story of this game is a joke with no subtlety, even if I enjoyed a solid 20% of it.
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Gameplay
So, get this. I tried playing this game the way you'd normally be encouraged to play most immersive sims (Deus Ex, Dishonored), meaning I took the stealthy pacifist approach. I also played on Hard. Well, that was a mistake, because CDPR thinks difficulty equals making everything a bullet sponge. How are you going to design a stealth game where enemies are bullet spongy? That doesn't work. If you don't take out your enemies in one shot, they alert everyone. Two shots can work if no one sees them, but it still feels like you alerted everyone since the combat music kicks in if they survive the first shot.
The game also forces you into non-stealth encounters much more often than I'd like, so if you're trying to be a lightweight spy, good luck with that. It's plainly obvious that they didn't intend for this game to be played all the way like this, even though the developers claimed to be "huge Deus Ex fans" and one of the skill trees is entirely dedicated to stealth.
That didn't stop me from trying though. My first priority, after paying back my debt to Vik, was to find a silenced pistol that would be strong enough to take out enemies in 1 headshot during stealth. The most adequate pistol type I found for this task was the "Neue", but I had to find one with sockets so that I could slap a "Pax" mod on it, which renders its bullets non-lethal for my sought-after playstyle.
After many hours of completing side gigs to increase my stealth damage skills and going to every shop in the game trying to stock up on damage mods, I finally had my weapon of choice, which I still had to remember to upgrade as I gained levels.
Now, you might be thinking that having to do all that just to have a usable stealth gun in a stealth game is bad design, and you'd be right! But it was an emergent goal I set for myself and it made me explore the open world, so I didn't mind too much. Just be aware that even if you bruteforce (ironic) your way into playing as a stealthy pacifist like this, you're still going to despise the bullet-spongy boss battles even after grinding, at least on Hard.
I wasn't built tanky, and I avoided body augmentations because in any well-designed first-person stealth RPG, I shouldn't need heavy armor or super fancy body tech if I'm sneaky and clever enough. But this game doesn't work like that. My damage outside of stealth didn't scale very well even with a powerful revolver, because most of my points were into stealth and hacking. Since I had no armor and no damage, I had to blind every boss constantly by using flashbangs and various quickhacks, and unload comical amounts of rounds into them.
You'll also need netrunning skills for stealth, otherwise there's no real way to distract guards. Early on, quickhacks like "Whistle", "Ping" and "Reboot Optics" are very helpful for stealth, and they make this playstyle quite enjoyable in situations where stealth is possible.
Some of the cyberpsycho fights can't be done in stealth, so I had an electric baton that I used to whack 'em around till they fell unconscious. It worked, but felt janky. I would've preferred to sneak up behind them and hit them in the back of the head to knock them out, like in the first Deus Ex. You can't really do that in this game due to unpredictable damage scaling and bad melee animations. It's a shame because this game could at least have had better melee stealth mechanics than Deus Ex: HR and MD, which both lacked a proper melee weapon and instead opted for cutscene takedowns, which looked cool but felt lame. A precise baton strike to the back of an unsuspecting person's head will always remain the most fun way to take out someone in a stealth game, so it's a shame so few stealth games play like that.
Anyway, later on, the "Short Circuit" quickhack did so much damage that I could take out most regular enemies with a single use. Unfortunately, selecting a hack from a menu is so much easier, faster and risk-free than lining up headshots or distracting enemies, that it ended up trivializing stealth to the point of boredom. If I can just delete every enemy, where's the fun? So at that point, I figured it was time for me to move on with the main story, as I had seen all the stealth had to offer.
Problem is, the main story takes control away from you constantly to drown you in repetitive and mediocre exposition. So that wasn't much fun either. My patience ran out during the final boss, as it swiftly became clear that defeating him and his many reinforcements would be nearly impossible with this build. He at least commented on the fact that I didn't kill the previous boss, basically saying mercy is cringe. I didn't bother dropping the difficulty level, as my desire to see how far I could take this playstyle was the main thing that kept me invested. That, and my love for the anime. It's only fitting, then, that I would fall at the hands of
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