The things that this game does well are great.
The construction of the city environment, the atmosphere, the visuals, the sounds, the car handling. All of those things amount to a superb ambiance and a great foundation for the game. I have minimal complaints. I think you can get a fair amount of mileage out of just vibing in this city, taking in the sights and atmosphere.
Even though I'm going to complain a lot, I want to underline that those aspects are very strong.
How is this great foundation used, however? The game, and the overall experience? That's where the problems begin.
Instead of a twist on a driving delivery game like Euro Truck, the developers decided to instead make the game a vehicle for story. You're driving around not because you need to deliver packages, but to hit dialogue triggers. In essence this game is a walking simulator with more engaging movement mechanics.
The delivery of the packages presents no challenge, your skills aren't being tested nor is your performance rated in any way. You're going from A to B to C effectively just to hear the next dialogue sequence, and that's it.
A game like Euro Truck Simulator presents minimal challenge, but it's more than this. It has other advantages too, like being able to have your own music or podcasts on the background since there's no dialogue from the game to interfere with your experience.
So they made a narrative based game. That in itself isn't a bad thing. It's not what I would've wanted from the game initially but I still like a good narrative. I personally even like walking sims, so I can get on-board.
The problem is that neither the narrative nor the writing is very good.
The writing is not absolutely terrible, mind you. It's just inconsistent, derivative and boring.
The entire story is delivered in dialogue, and it drags on and on. It felt like nearly every dialogue sequence had so much filler that could've been cut. The writing felt like the work of a hobbyist writer who sorely needed an editor.
There's a lot of jokes that do not land. There's a lot of emotional moments that feel weirdly paced and un-earned. There’s a lot of emotional whiplash with how the tone seems to be able to hold no continuity from one dialogue to the other.
There's a lot of characters who are either one-dimensional bordering on caricature, or complete charisma-voids. Unfortunately, the main character is one of the latter, and her companion is one of the former. For the entire game you're listening to the least interesting character drone their way through every dialogue, and her companion prolonging this experience with variations of the same joke for the duration of the entire game.
There's world building that might feel fresh if you've never read a work of cyberpunk in your life. Even then it's very inconsistent in quality.
Overall, the writing and narrative feels like a mish-mash of ideas that were half-thought out. The main narrative is lacking as a story. It feels slow because there's not much to it. The game is mostly disjointed side-stories with a couple of hints toward a narrative throughline, but doesn't end up amounting to much. Could’ve been interesting, but ended up half-baked.
What makes this all worse though, is that it's all delivered in fully voiced dialogue, and the voice acting is a very mixed-bag. Not all of it is bad, mind you, some of it is even great! The main character's voice acting was unfortunately some of the worst in the game and it's what you're hearing for the majority of your time. When the character you're hearing the most throughout the experience is marred with bad delivery, it becomes a fatal flaw.
And a special note on the social commentary.
Cyberpunk is a genre that is inherently tied with class and social issues. A foundational idea of the genre is to depict a world where technological progress leads to more inequality, not less. A cyberpunk game with no social commentary is cyberpunk in aesthetics only.
However, the nature of the commentary in this game is so shallow and heavy-handed that it borders on satire. At times characters completely discard their established personalities, just so they can deliver messages that are about as profound as a typical political tweet. The world is filled with metaphors that are not only well-traveled territory by works that have come before, but also delivered with complete lack of subtlety. This hurts both the verisimilitude of the world and the impact of the message.
As someone who enjoys this aspect of Cyberpunk, and doesn't mind political commentary in my media in general, I am still disappointed with what I got.
So that was a lot of griping about the story. I still liked a lot about this game. However, the developers decided to make this a narrative game, and a narrative game lives or dies on it’s writing.
If only they would have used their foundation differently. There’s so much good to work off of. This game could’ve been great.
As it stands, this game is squandered potential. Impaired by the story it’s forced to serve
The construction of the city environment, the atmosphere, the visuals, the sounds, the car handling. All of those things amount to a superb ambiance and a great foundation for the game. I have minimal complaints. I think you can get a fair amount of mileage out of just vibing in this city, taking in the sights and atmosphere.
Even though I'm going to complain a lot, I want to underline that those aspects are very strong.
How is this great foundation used, however? The game, and the overall experience? That's where the problems begin.
Instead of a twist on a driving delivery game like Euro Truck, the developers decided to instead make the game a vehicle for story. You're driving around not because you need to deliver packages, but to hit dialogue triggers. In essence this game is a walking simulator with more engaging movement mechanics.
The delivery of the packages presents no challenge, your skills aren't being tested nor is your performance rated in any way. You're going from A to B to C effectively just to hear the next dialogue sequence, and that's it.
A game like Euro Truck Simulator presents minimal challenge, but it's more than this. It has other advantages too, like being able to have your own music or podcasts on the background since there's no dialogue from the game to interfere with your experience.
So they made a narrative based game. That in itself isn't a bad thing. It's not what I would've wanted from the game initially but I still like a good narrative. I personally even like walking sims, so I can get on-board.
The problem is that neither the narrative nor the writing is very good.
The writing is not absolutely terrible, mind you. It's just inconsistent, derivative and boring.
The entire story is delivered in dialogue, and it drags on and on. It felt like nearly every dialogue sequence had so much filler that could've been cut. The writing felt like the work of a hobbyist writer who sorely needed an editor.
There's a lot of jokes that do not land. There's a lot of emotional moments that feel weirdly paced and un-earned. There’s a lot of emotional whiplash with how the tone seems to be able to hold no continuity from one dialogue to the other.
There's a lot of characters who are either one-dimensional bordering on caricature, or complete charisma-voids. Unfortunately, the main character is one of the latter, and her companion is one of the former. For the entire game you're listening to the least interesting character drone their way through every dialogue, and her companion prolonging this experience with variations of the same joke for the duration of the entire game.
There's world building that might feel fresh if you've never read a work of cyberpunk in your life. Even then it's very inconsistent in quality.
Overall, the writing and narrative feels like a mish-mash of ideas that were half-thought out. The main narrative is lacking as a story. It feels slow because there's not much to it. The game is mostly disjointed side-stories with a couple of hints toward a narrative throughline, but doesn't end up amounting to much. Could’ve been interesting, but ended up half-baked.
What makes this all worse though, is that it's all delivered in fully voiced dialogue, and the voice acting is a very mixed-bag. Not all of it is bad, mind you, some of it is even great! The main character's voice acting was unfortunately some of the worst in the game and it's what you're hearing for the majority of your time. When the character you're hearing the most throughout the experience is marred with bad delivery, it becomes a fatal flaw.
And a special note on the social commentary.
Cyberpunk is a genre that is inherently tied with class and social issues. A foundational idea of the genre is to depict a world where technological progress leads to more inequality, not less. A cyberpunk game with no social commentary is cyberpunk in aesthetics only.
However, the nature of the commentary in this game is so shallow and heavy-handed that it borders on satire. At times characters completely discard their established personalities, just so they can deliver messages that are about as profound as a typical political tweet. The world is filled with metaphors that are not only well-traveled territory by works that have come before, but also delivered with complete lack of subtlety. This hurts both the verisimilitude of the world and the impact of the message.
As someone who enjoys this aspect of Cyberpunk, and doesn't mind political commentary in my media in general, I am still disappointed with what I got.
So that was a lot of griping about the story. I still liked a lot about this game. However, the developers decided to make this a narrative game, and a narrative game lives or dies on it’s writing.
If only they would have used their foundation differently. There’s so much good to work off of. This game could’ve been great.
As it stands, this game is squandered potential. Impaired by the story it’s forced to serve