Recent reviews by Tris

One of my all time favourite games, and I still come back to it, even years later.

Shame there's not more to this game, but still worth the cost. Addictive little game, but after 4 hours it's all completed. Would buy dlc if it was made.

Great idea, extremely limited gameplay for an idle game. Collected and done everything in just a few days of very little actually time spent on it

Due to how popular it was, it had some server issues on the first few day, which lead to players until to play. But it appears that all these server issues have been resolved and playing during peak time last night run absolutely flawlessly.
This game is absolute gold. I thought I wasn't a FPS fan and couldn't enjoy this game, I was dead wrong. This game has something that seems to be missing from all fps, feedback. Whether it's firing a fun or having something explode near you, you seem to really feel everything. It's chaotic, intense, and at the same time, causal, funny and fun. 15 hours in and the gameplay loop hasn't felt stale yet.
Best enjoyed with friends! (I haven't laughed so hard in ages)

I've had my issues with Vaheim since day one. I joined the hype train and I tried and tried repeatedly (over over 150+ hours) to enjoy this game, but the progression of the game is so boring and forces an open world exploration game, to be played in single locked checkpoints that everyone has to hop through, ruining the illusion for me.

The game has one of the best building systems I have seen! But then locks it away behind boss battles. Forcing you to fight the first boss just to unlock a pick to get stone and work your way up the tiers of picks/ores.

The game continuously forces you to play it *it's* way. And that's what has always annoyed me.

They put in place lazy 'game reasons' in substitute for realisim, and everyone just accepts it. You can't use the portals with any ores and some other major items, forcing you to sail everywhere. This, in some ways I kinda like. I like the idea of travelling for goods, but there's just no reasons put in place for this rule apart from "it's just the way it is". On top of that, they throw another penalty on sailing by setting random wind. So there are points where you can become stuck and just have to paddle for 20mins of brodem until it returns. (yeah you can zig zag the wind, but cant in smaller channels of water) So this all forces you to scrap and rebuild your base over and over again.

Don't get me wrong, these small issues aren't the entire reason why I don't enjoy it, it's all these reason that add up to the overwhelming annoyance of the game, which is, It forces you to play it it's way, and I could hardly call it a sandbox game. I know I can (and have) use mods to help fix these issues. And I highly recommend you do that too. But I'm judging my experience of the game out of the box.

There's some other issues I have with the game..
-Very little building content (it's been over a year now and I'm still waiting).
-I'm endlessly raiding while I'm alone on my multiplayer server. It's annoying having to protect my builds over and over.
-HP / Stamina system sucks (I think food systems in games are fine, but it's so strange that it's tied into your health in this game)
-Combat is extremely basic. Attack swings are fixed on the x axis, so you will always have trouble hitting creatures higher or lower than you.

I do enjoy the building. I enjoy the farming and hunting/gathering. There's just a lot of guck inbetween.

A seriously hard game to rate because when you first play this game, everything is amazing about it. The art style alone carried it for me. But then you start to feel a little frustrated by not knowing how to progress in tech or grinding long hours just to unlock something that could have made everything a whole lot easier to begin with. Which works for most games, but I struggle to understand what the point is of getting to late game only to unlock an easier way to get to late game.
I still enjoyed it overall. I love these kinds of games. But this game really felt like it was more bone than meat and was missing overall content. I was hoping mods could save it, but they are very lacking and only add to the steps required to the frustration that is late game.
I would recommend this game if it was on sale. It scratches an itch for a little while, but overall does not feel like a "1.0 Full Release". I really hope more content will come in the future, but I doubt it.

I will now flip a coin for my recommendation of this game as it's a 50/50 you're going to enjoy it.

If you are looking for a peaceful game to play that's all about the story, then this is for you. But I was sold under the impression that this game was about real choices that shape your game. It is not.

Pros:
chill game. The story is pretty interesting. The characters and art style are pretty cute.

Cons:
The game is on a very hard fixed path, and once you discover that it robs you of the illusion of freewill and all that the game is as a long winded story you have no control over (apart from meeting the game over screen early).
The right choices reward you, the wrong choices leave you struggling to get the resources need in time for the main story. There's really nothing more to it. While the game can be relaxing, it often gets very frustrating when constantly forced to make choices, when you know there is really only one right path. The hard choices they talk about are just showing you a possible reward that you can't get.

I did enjoy the first few hours, but then became super bored

Destroyer of time.. Highly recommend

Easily a 10/10.
The game stands by itself, but after hearing that the developer was attacked by cancel culture bs, even after delivering honest and fair views was heartbreaking. I have watched first hand the pure passion that was put into this game and its 'thousands' of updates over the years.
I have mad respect for someone that doesn't just give in to hate because he is attacked. So after playing over 500 hours of this game, and reading all about what happened, I wanted to give my 'official' support!
Just stick to the facts people:
One of the best 2D evolving building/survival games I have ever played.
Through pure love and constant updates, the game is the most cleanest bug free game you will find to date.
Multiplayer is amazing, flawless and definitely recommended.
The game dances that beautiful line of ease to understand, but complex enough to forever keep you interested, an art-form that's lost in today's games.
PS. I miss reading FFF!!

If you had of asked me my thoughts within the first 15 mins of gameplay, even the first hour, I would have told you "Cyberpunk is a complete let down".
First of all, I thought I might be able to run it on high settings, but forgot that this is not a 2.5 year old PC, and this is the crysis of this decade. It was frame to frame choppy, so I bumped it down to normal and it was 60+ silky smooth. I'll need to tweak to get the most out of this pc, but I'm running on the last of the GTX (1080), before RTX so no ray tracking, so not a great deal of point in tweaking it over getting a new GPU. I just modded some shaders (reshader) and the game looks amazing now so I called it a day.
So, first cut scene, finish the very first conversation, turn around and the very first NPC I see in the game is missing legs. (I now think it was the graphics level change mid game, but at the time I was blown away by how quickly I saw a rather crude bug). Non main NPC are totally flat. One liners. Solid things that you can't even bump into. Other 'Actor' NPC's walk around in a fixed animation. So fixed that they didn't want to bother with blended animations or being able to interact with so instead, they just phase through you, like ghosts. About the 5th NPC i come up to pulls out a smoke in one hand, then her other hand comes up to light it but her lighter is flying around doing spins in the air, no where near her hands. Peoples mobile phones come out of their hands and float in the air. Guns do the same thing. They have a huge issues with props, It reminds me of the X series, I never played the last one, but 1 & 2 always had issues with this, even after years of patching.
And, btw, this is all within the very first room of the game!
It might look better on higher graphics, but the random NPC's aren't that detailed. They don't even look at you when you try to talk at them, they just spit out their one line, half of the time without opening their mouths, sometimes while taking drinks, also I saw a cop drink from a can with the can facing the wrong way..
The main crafted NPC... they are amazing. You can tell they are animated with real actors. It always throws you into the game in cut scenes and just normal chats with these people, which is amazing, but jarring when you go from that to talk to a random NPC..
It got to the point were I was just testing for bugs, and limit testing the 'so called sandbox' element. I was so disheartened. I was so close to quitting and going to bed early. Then I decided to play the game as 'it' wanted me to...

8.8 hours... I continued playing it straight until sunrise (oops). It's a story game first. The cut scenes are gold, AAA all the way. That's where they spent their time. A little bit of a shame, but when I dove in I was rewarded. The story so far, AAA. While I can not contest to some reviews that say the choices are a lie, I did however ♥♥♥♥ up a main quest, then ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over someone in order to selvage it, and ended up teaming up with the people that I was meant to take down. Completely different from every other play through I have seen online. I started to explore the city a bit, I was disappointing that more than half of it was off limit, not so much that I had to wait to unlock it, but the fact that they just used a really cheap teleport trick with a message "This part of the city isn't available yet". While on my main mission I continually got side missions messaged to me, and as I travelled around I got more and more icons of gangs, hidden stashes and events added to my map. I got sooooo distracted. It was honestly, a world of fun. I was on my main quest but I just kept cleaning up the streets while I was at it. I didn't feel limited to one mission at a time, which was cool.
The gameplay...

The combat in this game is amazing, AAA. The kick of the guns, the levelling system of using things, you really do feel like you are getting better at something, which is a hard thing to translate in games. But they pulled it off with small penalties which were slowly reduced over time. Like panning left or right while aiming has a slight random up/down movement to it so you are always slightly readjusting. This feeling less and less as you level and spec. The movement, automatic cover and peeking when aiming lets you look around corners without popping out like most games. and not locking you to covers like others. You see dmg numbers, but it's so clean and non intrusive, one of the best I've seen. The feeling with gun fire going off, the back and forward swearing, threats and commands of both sides. Destructive environment, motion blur while making a mad dash to your next cover. It's all so clean. I'm not a big fan of FPS, but it feels amazing to play. The driving took a little to get used to, but later on I felt it much easier when I got a better car, you can really feel the difference. In my entire first 8.8 hours of gameplay (minus the first hour of messing with the game to test it and the distraction of the city) all I did was the very first main mission/Act. My house mate woke up for work and came out as I was finishing Act 1 and the opening title "Cyberpunk 2077" comes up on the screen lol. An amazing first mission, a quest line that had optionals and choices along the way. Prepare (like I did) or go in without a plan. I have spent many more hours on the game now and there seems to be endless side missions and quests. I'm so over the moon happy that I'm still a very low level. Most games hand it to you with no work, but I feel like I could play this game for weeks and still be tweaking my character.
I can see myself spending many many more hours/days in this game.