Recent reviews by Dapper

I've played all kinds of games involving melee fighting, from chiv, to mordhau, to witcher, vermintide, and games from the souls series. KCD's feels like a mobile game in comparison to those. Some RPGs' progression is based more on character stats, like Fallout. Others are based more on player skill, like Dark Souls, KCD's progression, however, is based entirely on gatekeeping crucial game mechanics from lower lever players.

The combat has a bunch of mechanics copied from Chiv, like swing manipulation and directional attacks, but any decent NPC enemy is hard coded to be impervious to anything you do, perfectly blocking every attack you make. Instead, combat hinges on one single mechanism called "master strike," where based on pure luck, sometimes your character does an automatic, unblockable riposte upon blocking enemy attacks. The chances of it happening, however, is not based on timing or accuracy, but entirely on player's level. On the other side of the coin, if you do mistakenly try to swing at NPCs during anything other than a riposte, they will do the automatic unblockable riposte on you, further punishing you for trying to play the game. Whoever swings first in duels will do zero damage with a chance of eating an unblockable counterattack. One on one fights in this game is about doing absolutely nothing while waiting for the NPC to swing at you so you can hit Q and pray for a random riposte.

But the bigger problem is that there are nearly no 1 on 1 fights. For a game where almost every fight is 1vx, there is zero support for fighting multiple enemies. Once combat starts, your character target locks--which cannot be disabled--to one enemy, and your screen starts automatically spinning to have them perfectly centered. This being extremely annoying aside, other enemies just constantly run to your side and hit you for free. It's literally physically impossible for you to block their attacks because your character, try as you might, won't look at them.

It's a fresh take on open world RPGs in many aspects, however, nothing can make up for its lackluster combat. No matter how immersed I am in the world, it's ruined the moment I get into a fight and my guy target locks on an enemy and starts tracking them like a CSGO spinbot.

Rock and stone!!!

So awesome

I thought this was a horror franchise
It's not just that it wasn't scary at all, it never even tried to be scary at any point. In fact, it never tried to be anything--I was just bored for the whole hour of walking around finding ♥♥♥♥.
Also extremely poorly optimized. I had to spend 20 minutes adjusting graphics to get the FPS above 20.

Phantom Liberty edit: while the game has finally left closed alpha, it still remains the single buggiest game I've ever played by a long shot... My experience has been about one funny bug every couple minute and one game breaking bug every hour or so. The impact of this on immersion aside, the game is still barely playable. Performance wise, I can run every other AAA game on stable 144 FPS yet Cyberpunk barely floats above 45 on lowest settings with garbage graphics, dynamic resolution, and no shadow. Bugs and performance aside, the setting, dialogue, and story are still every bit as cringe as before. Given the state of the base game now, three years post-release, I will sooner tip my landlord than pay for this DLC.

The style of the game feels like it came out of the brain of an edgy 14-year-old. The aggressively monotonous “dark” aesthetic immediately overwhelmed my sensory system. Every other store in the city is a sex shop, every third person on the street is a hooker, and the game might just have more dildos than Saints Row IV. Edgy, endless, and meaningless gore and violence are thrown around so much and become so normalized that they act practically as the background wallpaper. Not only was I completely desensitized by the heaps of bodies and dildos, it was at the point where if a mission did not have unnecessary nudity, mutilated bodies, or literally takes place in a strip club or an organ harvesting plant (I can think of at least four different strip club missions), I began to think that there would be a catch. The game is so dark (literally), with no flashlight, that I sometimes had to turn up my monitor brightness to even see where I was going. Don’t forget to sprinkle in some casual racial stereotypes with foreign gangsters with atrocious accents and some fetishization of Japanese culture—this is a cyberpunk game after all. All this topped with endless loops of the same dubstep tracks made the game no less than exhausting to play.

It’s like Zack Snyder was the head of the art direction.

On a brighter note, the combat system is only the second worst out of all the big studio games that I’ve played, closely following that of Dying Light. The guns in the game have pretty nice animations and satisfying sounds, but the good news end there. Enemies’ health pools are so insanely large (I was playing on the second hardest difficulty out of four levels), that it usually took me around the entire magazine of a rifle or SMG to kill a single person. This, on top of how enemies hardly react to your attacks, makes the game feel like a Adobe Flash browser shooter. Melee combat consists of rapidly clicking your left mouse button, but it’s not like it matters, since on my difficulty, I would die in about two seconds every time I get out of cover. Before I can close the gap, gun-wielding enemies would’ve killed me two dozen times.

The advertised cybernetic enhancement system along with the skills and perks tree are no more than stat bonuses and feel extremely underwhelming. Fallout 4 has a perk where you can aim your weapon at enemies and try and make them surrender. If the perk’s level is high enough, you can even make them do your bidding. Fallout: New Vegas has a cannibalism perk where you can chomp the bodies of fallen enemies and gain HP. In Prototype, you can evolve an ability that turns you into a human glider and lets you fly around the city. In Saints Row IV, you can unlock a perk that lets you mind control enemy NPCs and force them to fight for you. In The Witcher 3, you can unlock a spell that let you shoot a stream of fire, basically turning your hand into a flamethrower.

In Cyberpunk 1977, you can get a perk that increases critical hit damage with rifles and SMG by 10%. That doesn’t sound enough? How about increasing attack speed using knives and katanas by 10%? No? What about decreasing the reload speed of pistols by 10%? 15% chance to stun enemies with your melee attacks?

Cybernetic enhancements are just perks with extra steps. There is nothing (except maybe the double jump) that would change your play style. All of them—second heart, subdermal armor, RAM, etc.—are just over-complicated stats bonuses. The bullet-time implants lock you in a very specific reflex build. The mantis blades that got everybody all excited is just a katana with different animations. Before I played Cyberpunk, I was worried that the game might become a power fantasy with crazy sci-fi abilities and cybernetic implants and leave the writing—the soul of any RPG game—on the backburner. The writing was indeed left on the backburner, but I can’t say if I’ve ever fantasized about having +10% crit chance on my knives and katanas.

The writing is the most disappointing element of the game. There are three types of missions in Cyberpunk: side quests, “gigs” and assaults-in-progress. Assaults-in-progress are copy-pasted content where you kill a bunch of people for money. “Gigs” are assaults-in-progress where you have to kill a bunch of people or sneak into a building and steal something for money, but there is supposedly backstory if you cared enough to read the mission description (PERSON A WRONGED PERSON B, NOW PERSON B HIRED YOU TO GET BACK AT PERSON A! JUSTICE SERVED!). Side quests are the actual side quests with cut scenes, stories and voice acting, but even their quality is so inconsistent, ranging from actually pretty good to complete and utter dildo/gore-filled garbage. The good ones leave you wanting for more but do not deliver. Some offer you extremely interesting insights into some relatively fleshed-out side characters for you to completely disappear out of their lives after two seconds with no follow-up missions (Elizabeth and Jefferson Peralez, Sandra Dorsett, Ozob Bozo, Meredith Stout and Anna Hamill just from what I can remember). Not to mention that most of these are basically just cinematics—the dialogue choices rarely actually affect how the stories progress. You can choose to agree to the option the developers intended or have your character complain about it first. What’s even worse is how few of them there actually are. I have played The Witcher 3 for over two hundred hours (yes, yes, I know) and I’m still not done with the game. I have only played Cyberpunk for a mere fraction of that, but I’m already utterly finished.

The main quest is straight up a chore. Doing these stupid gimmicky “brain dance” missions makes me miss calculus homework. The story is not based on motivation or conflicts, but is instead driven by one McGuffin after the next. Go to this place, get this chip, go track that person down, now go to this place. There is no escalation of tension, nor resolution to any conflict, nor any sign of progression, and I had no idea where I was in the plot at any moment. Is the story about to be over? If so, why is this NPC still shoveling exposition down my throat? Am I still in the prologue? Is this the halfway point? And before I knew it, out of absolutely nowhere, the game was over. If Cyberpunk was made into a show, you can watch only the first and last episodes and skip every single one in the middle, and the story will still make perfect sense. In hindsight, the entire body of the plot is one McGuffin filler quest after another, and the game as a whole, a gargantuan waste of my time.

Cyberpunk’s issue is not with polishing. Nobody cares about polishing. Even significant amounts of bugs can be overlooked if not embraced by players if the game is good. Cyberpunk’s issue is that it’s not good. The passionate, creative and dedicated studio that made Witcher 3 is gone. What’s left here is just another corporate publisher.

Best money I've ever spent

NOT a survival game, NOR open-world: it's Call of Duty with zombies

Side quests are boring and stupid and involves nothing more than going places to pick ♥♥♥♥ up for side characters. Unrewarding and unnecessary. Currency system is dumb: there's no reason to ever buy any weapon because it will be obsolete 20 minutes later because of the game's RPG style progression system.

Combat feels more buggy than a bucket of cockroaches. Gunplay is worse than some browser shooters, not to mention that there are only 3 guns in the game. Weapon modification is nowhere near the level of Fallout: the system feels like it's out of a mobile game. The "crafting" system entails adding 2 scrap metal and a duct tape to your weapon and now it has +5 damage.

Overall, it's NOT meant to be a shooter looter. It's COD with extra steps. Main story is the typical Michael Bay crap with unrealistic over-the-top action and an antagonist that is more one dimensional than Adolf Hitler. There are NO choices for the story: it's all pre-written, so after Witcher and Fallout it feels like a massive step backwards for me.

Before level 9, combat is restricted to basically purely melee. Ammunition is extremely limited so that the player would only use their gun in dire situations, not to mention that gunfire draws more zombies. After level 9, ammo can be purchased from shops and is more abundant than dirt, and there is no reason to ever not use a gun.

Parkour was cool for the first 5 seconds. The game wants to show off its parkour mechanics so much, it made it so that every mission is 17 miles away from the next, so more time is spent traveling than actually playing the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game.

Changed my review to negative

Was an amazing game. Is now borderline unplayable, and extremely hostile to new and returning players. Community might just be more toxic than League of Legends and old Overwatch combined.

Playerbase has dropped by 80% for very good reasons. Dead game, don't buy. Literally hard to find a match now.