Cyberpunk 2077: The Re-Review

[Music] what's going on everybody morm here this time bringing you my re-review of cyberpunk 2077 to go along with the many changes and the recent DLC that cyberpunk 2077 has received that in many ways make it a much more enjoyable experience so I thought it would be a good time to just completely take a second look at the game as this particular game was one of the first reviews after 100% that I ever did which is something I'm a little more known for though back then I certainly wasn't so in some ways more than just this game have changed since then though given this game's pretty infamously poor launch you can guess that that prior review wasn't exactly glowing but that was then and naturally I think a lot of people want to know how the entire game is now given update 2.0 and the recent DLC so let's actually dive into that a little bit I want to kick this off with a sort of overview of the past couple of years of updates I think for the most most part everyone kind of knows what cyber Punk is at this point firsters action adventure in the cyberpunk tabletop setting that takes place in night City just for those who have somehow never heard of this that said with the game's original release all the way back in 2020 all of the changes and updates didn't suddenly happen overnight in fact there have been many updates to the game over the past almost 3 years that have actually brought it more in line slowly over time with updates that made the game better and better and in fact I personally covered many of those such updates as many of them were of interest to me and for me personally I would say around patch 1.5 and 1.6 were about where I was pretty happy with the game myself but many of the updates over the past many years have addressed the Myriad of bugs though we'll get to those in a second alongside making changes to things like how driving and vehicle collisions work and even a little bit of additional content to go alongside the edge Runners anime that they put out and while they did much more than that over the years it's worth mentioning that update 2.0 overhauled so many things that a lot of those just aren't worth talking about but these days things like the much lambasted police and wanted system has been changed to something more akin to Grand Theft Auto with a five-star wanted system police being present in the world having Dynamic interactions with certain gangs all things that go a long way towards making the game feel a Little More Alive as opposed to a bug ridden mess so over the course of this review I want to dive into many of those things and how they're looking now of course as you would expect from a full review but I do want to kick this video off talking about the technical state of the game these days because as with any game this is far from bug free now I cannot speak for every level of Hardware as I am playing this on a very high-end PC so people with mid-range systems have encountered more problems than I have which is especially important to mention because update 2.0 specifically increased the PC requirements to go alongside the game and update 2.0 and the DLC in particular I believe dropped support for prior console Generations things like PlayStation 4 and I believe it was Xbox one which isn't a huge surprise as that is where the game had its biggest issues having played this game on PC with a good PC at the time this game launched I didn't experience most of the issues a lot of other people ran into the vast majority of what I ran into was almost non-stop visual glitches especially with the UI which isn't as bad and makes the game playable but it is nonetheless annoying and occasionally I would fall through the map having played through the game again with 2.0 I didn't experience anything gamebreaking at all I have seen some reports of people who have which may be down to changes to the PC requirements Etc it's hard to nail that down especially someone who is not a tech Channel but things like the game not loading at all save files being corrupted with the DLC actually so I have seen reports of things like that personally though again on a very high-end PC I ran into almost nothing occasionally I would see an NPC either floating or sunk half into the map and that was about it with the only other notable thing being that sometimes just NPCs in general would behave a bit oddly but it was otherwise very playable and I didn't experience problems but other people have especially on a variety of Hardware so even these days with these updates there is a possibility of you running into problems though they do not seem to be nearly as widespread as they were with the launch of the game from there let's move on a little bit to difficulty I wouldn't say this particular game was ever a difficult one truly but there are several difficulty modes and that's important to mention here because there were changes made to the scaling and progression systems but generally speaking obviously if you want an easier time play on easy but the game is a little bit harder in the beginning for the higher difficulties in particular very hard is a decent challenge especially if you don't have a proper build planned and put together hard mode is a decent challenge in the beginning but once you get to a certain gear level you're going to be rolling over everything but I did mention scaling with update 2.0 every enemy in the game scales to your level however while that might sound like it never amounts to a power curve for you like I just mentioned on hard when you get to a certain point with gear you're just going to be destroying everything one-shotting enemies Etc so there's still very much so that power progression to it but what enemies drop and the experience they offer never goes down enemies based on their faction as well as a couple of tiers of enemies can have more armor and more health and be harder to deal with but the vast majority of enemies if you are geared up you're going to just be walking through as long as you have good gear we'll talk a little more about that in the progression system though but do be aware if you want a challenge just go straight for very hard unless of course you're looking to power fantasy a cyber psycho from there let's talk about the story setup and my thoughts on it this game's a few years old so I'm not really worried about spoilers and while I'm not going to be going over the entire plot they are almost certainly going to be spoilers throughout this video in some degree so do be mindful of that and use the time stamp STS to jump around down below if that's an issue for you but with that out of the way as many people are aware cyberpunk 2077 story revolves around our character V after an introduction to the game based on your origin choice we ultimately wind up becoming a Merc in night City someone who takes on mostly illegal odd jobs in the Crim ridden night City to make a living and just kind of get by this ultimately leads us to a heist that puts us into contact with a biochip that we are forced to install on ourselves before knowing exactly what it does we actually die a short while later before the biochip kicks in and saves us which activates the Ingram on it which turns out to be a personality known as Johnny silverhand or more specifically Keanu Reeves but in game Johnny silverhand a legend of night City from 50 years ago who attacked arasaka Tower before being caught and trapped in an Ingram on this chip due to your death he is slowly taking over your body there's nothing he can do to stop it and there's nothing you can can do to stop it so with your life quite literally counting down on a clock albeit a vague one you need to start finding solutions to that problem pretty fast which is what most of the main plot revolves around however in spite of that interesting setup and a ton of marketing that was pushing choice and Consequence the story of cyberpunk 2077 is anything but a choice and consequence driven narrative it's really just a linear story about V and the biochip there are choices to be made technically with the DLC there's now seven endings but we'll get to that in a second but reality is most of the choices in this game don't make much of a difference they're going to lead you to the same place with the same content with most of the choices leading to slightly different dialogue in different places there's really only a few significant choices throughout the game most of which come right at the end at least in terms of its narrative there are obviously gameplay choices that you'll make all the time and these are much more impactful now where this changes a bit is with the recent DLC that actually has a lot more choice but we'll get to that in the DLC section for the base game I would say the most significant choices you're going to run into are your Life Path decision or your origin this is going to change the start of the game the introduction for you a little bit and then it's also going to give you access to dialogue specific to that origin later and while none of it is groundbreaking it can allow you to roleplay somebody a little more effectively and occasionally you can like skip certain steps in something based on that origin but it also affects things like how people talk to you Etc which is a decent amount of roleplay option for the game the other big choices come down to saving takamura befriending Johnny silver hand and then finally picking an ending one of the characters we meet along the way is a arasaka employee known as takamura who's pretty heavily involved in the main story there comes a point where he gets attacked and if you double back and save him even though there's no prompt and you're actively being told to leave him you can actually save his life which will lead to a variation on one of the other endings but it doesn't actually lock you out of it if you don't save him you can can still do it the other thing is befriending Johnny silverhand again this can lead you to A variation on one of the endings but it doesn't effectively change anything you're not really locked out of much outside of one unique endgame Mission befriending Johnny silver hand and picking the right choices in a conversation can lead you to a secret ending people like to call it though I personally take issue with that classification if you will because an actuality this is just a secret mission not a secret ending doing that befriending Johnny and everything thing gives you the opportunity to just you and him take on the final mission which is a much harder version of it that then just leads to two of the normal endings but people all the time refer to that as the secret ending so there you go I guess but then finally at the end of the game based on whether or not you did a few different quests here and there you'll have a ton of options for the ending again you can't really lock yourself out of most of these outside of the things I just mentioned and one of the endings requires you to befriend the nomads VI via their quests which just requires you to go do the quests basically and I tell you all that to tell you that the base game struggled with choice and consequence and that was a big part of the backlash at the launch because even discounting all the bugs and everything this game had it also just wasn't the game they advertised and while the game has done great things in order to make this a really great action adventure that doesn't change the fact that the base game here does not have a branching story it's pretty linear you will make choices none of them really have much impact though outside of in the moment things or maybe a character shows up a little later now while I don't want to get too far into the DLC we'll save that for a little later I did want to mention here as well though that the DLC Phantom Liberty actually does a lot to correct this it is better in this regard as there's a few pass through that DLC you have a good amount of choice there including to just turn it down alt together there's like four endings to that DLC and a couple of those endings lead to another ending for the main story as well which I thought was pretty cool but outside of those things a few more notes on the story in particular one I do think the intro is a little bit on the long side because you are locked to one section of the city for a really long time and the reason for that is they want you to have done the heist and have the Ingram with Johnny silverhand before they let you run around too much but because of this and the fact that the main story is honestly relatively short if you're just blasting through it you can wind up spending most of the game in that one section of the city if you're not doing any of the side content really so I do think the beginning of this story could have been structured to get you to that point a little bit faster because the story is very short otherwise which means the pacing can feel a little bit off at times especially since we're kind of racing against the clock cuz we're supposed to be dying and it can lead to some dissonance here and there but in spite of that one thing I do really enjoy about this game is the way it handles its narrative in particular that is to say conversations with various NPCs and while we are locked to first person for most of it having that up close interaction with NPCs that have all these really well done animations it can feel like you're actually having a conversation with someone especially on choices that have a small dialogue timer that can make a lot of those narrative moments really impactful and that's something I've always really enjoyed about the characters of this game a lot of them feel very human while being trapped in the Cyber Punk hellscape dominated by corporations alongside ethically dubious cyberware implants so that said I enjoyed the story a lot of the endings can be really Bleak there's only one of them that I think is actually positive let's say though I think that's probably pretty appropriate for the setting the story solid I enjoy it just don't go into it expecting this big choice and consequence narrative and you should be okay from there though let's talk progression systems probably one of the biggest changes to this game are the overhauls that patch 2.0 made to the perk system and cyberware in particular at the start of the game you'll assign some attributes each attribute has a minimum of three points point with a maximum of 20 each point in an attribute gives you a small passive bonus to a particular thing such as the technical attribute giving you armor the body attribute giving you a little bit of Health Etc and while those aren't to be ignored another thing they do is of course give us access to perks you need a minimum attribute level to access the higher tier of perks that will then of course enable various play Styles though attributes do also come up outside of combat related things as you will have the occasional dialogue check and environmental interaction gated by these often times you can open up extra paths if you have a high particular attribute such as body allowing you to force doors open technical allowing you to fix a problem with a path or tear something down Etc so there's a little bit of that out in the world and the gameplay part of that is pretty impactful but the choices in dialogue are usually just for fun for instance having a maxed out cool stat of 20 opens up a lot of dialogue options that will give you a little extra context in a lot of situations but won't really change anything now every single time our character levels up to the maximum of 60 with the DLC 50 or otherwise we earn an attribute point and a perk point because we get so many attribute points you can actually max out or close to max out many of our attributes you won't get quite all the way there but you'll get pretty close to it perks however tend to be the more defining factor in your build as each attribute has a large amount of perks associated with it that lean into the various play styles every single attribute has a car combat perk alongside perks for play Styles more associated with that thing so intelligence will open up things like net running and hacking via the environment as well as combat itself cool gives you access to a lot of more stealth oriented gameplay that does to say things like sniper rifles Precision rifles headshot damage that kind of stuff so it's important to go through the perk trees when you get a chance and decide what you want to focus on so you can actually lean into the play style you want to use but let let's talk a little bit about what has changed with the perks since the original version the perks saw a complete overhaul from earlier editions with update 2.0 this changed a lot of them though it is probably worth mentioning that previously a lot of them just didn't work which was another big problem on launch but with this revamped version perks are divided into sort of major abilities and then passives that go along with them so the major ability in the tree or the bigger icons typically allow you to apply multiple points to them and sometimes this will give you just passive benefits like extra damage Etc they usually also give you a big combat ability such as the cool tree giving us access to focus which allows us to slow time while we're aiming with something like a sniper rifle or a pistol which can be great for setting up stealth kills in particular and because of this those bigger abilities that we can pick up are very immediately impactful towards the game play so when you grab those perks it feels like you've genuinely changed something and then the smaller icons that surround those bigger perks usually amplify the effect you just picked up in some way making it better or giving you little tweaks to that play style that make it a little more approachable that said while you will be able to come close to maxing out most of the attributes and you'll definitely be able to grab the ones you want perks are a little more limited you're going to get 60 from leveling up and a few more from other sources mostly the skills which we're about to talk about that allow you to lean into a play style but ultimately there's a lot of perks so focus on the perks that amplify the thing you want to use be that throwing weapons blunt weapons melee weapons bladed weapons or just all sorts of guns such as assault rifles Etc or in an almost seemingly mandatory pick we have these cyberware perks that will amplify your ability to install cyberware and use that which we'll talk about granting you extra options and slots for them which can make a huge impact on your character kind of regardless of your build but more than anything Focus the perks on what you want you can refund them pretty freely so it's not like a locked in decision or anything but you won't be able to do everything everything which means builds are a little more defined and how you approach combat is important another big part of play Styles though is the skill system this was heavily changed from the original version which had several skills per attribute previously now there's only five skills and they essentially are ways you play the game head hunter Netrunner Shinobi solo and engineer basically when you engage in combat and use these types of skills you'll gain experience to those particular things for instance you get a lot of experience for Head Hunter simply by sneaking around and making silent kills engineer you'll get experience for if you use Tech weapons or grenades Netrunner you get experience for by hacking enemies or just using Netrunner skills in general and every five levels of these skills we gain access to a passive benefit that amplifies something we do this can lead to things like extra carry capacity extra damage more perk points at 15 and 35 for every single one of these skills we get a perk point which can can lead to an extra of 10 total and then the final ability for each of them usually amplifies the effect of one of your major perk abilities which can be extremely useful which means leaning all the way into a certain play style to max out your skill progression and your perks for it can lead to some pretty impactful gamep playay but for the most part just play the game the way you want and these will naturally level up accordingly enemies also drop shards of these for experience so you'll find like a head hunter Shard or a net running Shard Etc and those are just experience for these skills which is probably how you're going to level up the ones that you're not using so much which is certainly worth bearing in mind now another huge change to the game was cyberware cyberware has been turned into one of your primary forms of progression in terms of things like armor and passive benefits things that just kind of give you extra little effects such as head shot damage damage resistance to certain types that kind of stuff all of that has been removed off of clothing and onto cyberware now in order to to install cyberware we first have to have the capacity for it the capacity available to us will increase as we do things like level up pick up certain perks Etc so there's a few different ways to do this you can even find Shards that increase your cyberware capacity as well but basically every piece of cyberware you install has a certain amount of capacity associated with it and while it is possible to exceed that limit a little bit with a perk you can pick up you are very much so limited with how much you can install on that capacity limit each little bit of cyberware comes with a passive amount of armor alongside performing all sorts of functions for the most part they didn't change too much of the cyberware abilities so we can still pick up things like second heart which just revives you once if you die every I think it's 5 minutes you can pick up the gorilla arms the Mantis blades for a more cyberware melee approach this is also where you can install a cyber deck in order to perform hacking you can also install things like the sand of viston which will slow down time around you there's a berserk one you can put on if you want to use smart weapons you need some amount of smart link capability via cyberware which is usually the hand slot Etc so in addition to just providing us armor and extra little benefits they can also provide very substantial gameplay changes but to go along with the new scaling both cyberware and our weapons in particular have a tier system now normal through legendary it's all color-coded as normal so white is the low tier stuff then we have green blue purple and orange for legendary as we level up the higher tier stuff becomes more and more available so by the time you reach max level you're pretty much going to be picking up legendary tiered stuff all the time and higher tier cyberware becomes available based on your level because higher tier cyberware comes with more and more capacity of course associated with it which means you can't install it all right away so while you'll start out with pretty basic cyberware once you get to a later level even if you don't install the craziest of stuff ability wise you're still going to have pretty complicated cyberware simply because it is of a higher tier that gives you more and more passive bonuses that are still going to do a lot for you and add more armor Etc it is also possible to upgrade your cyberware via crafting materials but we'll talk a bit more about that with the crafting section just like before though in order to install any cyberware at all we have to visit a ripper dock around the city as installing cyberware obviously is not a simple ordeal and is down to the practiced hands of professionals such as Victor but in any event while it was a little more optional I would say with the previous versions of the game cyberware and having tons of it are a huge part of the game now it's a central pillar of the progression system as you might expect with a game called cyberpunk so don't ignore this otherwise you might have a bad time clothing and cosmetic things have pretty much had the stats removed from them so changing out your clothes wearing different things is a cosmetic decision now there is an outfit system that allows you to make your character look however you want though most of the time you're in first person you will still see your character if you're doing something like riding a motorcycle or you switch to third person while you're in a car driving and of course in the inventory screen so while there are still a ton of cosmetic outfits so to speak They Don't Really contribute to progression anymore however some of them do still have small stat modifiers but they're mostly insignificant however on the other hand we have things like weapons and our utility slots such as our healing item and our grenades Etc whatever our Throne item happens to be these items are also associated with the new tier system so while you'll be able to find pretty much any type of gun available right away depending on its tier it may or may not be as useful we can still find iconic weapons and even clothing even though it's not useful anymore iconic weapons are upgradable and they usually also come with special effects that make them more useful than the average weapon weapons can still be modded with things like Scopes silencers muzzle braks things that make them a little more tailored to you though mods are not interchangeable anymore you can add mods to a weapon but once a mod is added to a weapon that's permanent so while you can swap things like Scopes and silencers and stuff in and out the more Tech oriented mods to a weapon cannot be changed once they're in there we also saw changes to the healing items and grenades these are not things you pick up and have a supply of anymore rather they are on a recharge timer now based on your perks and stuff basically you have a healing item you can use every so often depending on your load out these are also tiered as you pick up new tiers of these things they automatically replace what you have so you don't have to manage this at all you just hit the button for the healing item and that's it same thing with grenades or whatever you have assigned to the secondary slot but I mentioned crafting and upgrading a little bit earlier so you can craft various things you can find recipes throughout the game crafting has pretty much been removed from the perk tree so you don't really worry about that there anymore but throughout the game you can find crafting specs and disassembling items you run into or just finding them mountain in the wild can give you crafting components that are based on the new tier system as well you can use crafting to give you ammo in a tight spot for instance and you can also craft weapons with it the most useful thing to do with it is mostly upgrading you can also craft the occasional iconic if you find the recipe for it but when it comes to upgrading which also uses our crafting components we're going to be upgrading our iconic Weaponry this is how we're going to keep the unique weapons relevant throughout the rest of the games so they're not being outdamaged by just basic stuff but as I mentioned you also use these crafting components to upgrade your cyberware that's actually not necessary though because as you level up higher tier cyberware becomes available from the Ripper docs in particular so you don't need to upgrade your cyberware but it can save you some money which can be helpful overall in terms of the progression systems which saw again pretty sweeping changes I think they are great changes that really suit an action adventure in particular they lean into the setting in many cases the perks actually work they let you settle into a build naturally there's a lot you can do to focus on specific types of damage and all of it works really well and makes sense in the setting so I'm a pretty big fan of all these changes that they made here because while the narrative might not have a lot of choice and consequence you have a ton of choice and consequence in terms of gameplay and how you build your character to deal with certain situations and the progression systems really exemplify that that said let's talk about the gameplay and World finally the game takes place in night City a sort of epicenter of the cyberpunk dystopian future of 2077 we see here that has absolutely tons of lore associated with it which is honestly what I love about games that are adapted from tabletop systems and while I won't be diving into all of that I will say right here at the beginning of this section that night city is as much a character in this game as anything else is and I love seeing stuff like that but the city itself is divided up into various sections each section is generally controlled by a gang or at least one gang in particular has a heightened presence in various parts of the city and these individual sections of the city usually also have a fixer that will assign us the side content for that area this can lead to various gigs that we can take on as a Merc most of these are short and sweet just little stuff like go here kill a particular person go here save someone go here wipe everything out go here steal something that kind of thing but how you get in and out of those situations is where the fun of that content comes in but they are relatively minor we also have actual proper side quests of course these are bigger than gigs and usually much more involved when we start interacting with other characters in the story such as Judy Alvarez PanAm River Ward A lot of them have extra side quest content that is really well fleshed out some of which even leads us to the areas in the immediate vicinity of the city that show you just how bad things have gotten basically everywhere else with anything outside of a City Hub like this kind of just being a bit of a wasteland which has given rise to things like The Nomad Clans the people who live out there in order to avoid more governmental intervention or corporate intervention even though Nomads come with their own problems and strengths regardless of where you go though KN city is riddled with crime violence is an everyday occurrence police often don't even show up for minor crimes such as shootings between gangs things like that which is why we are able to basically go to town on a given gang in a given Mission without pretty much any intervention from the authorities because that's kind of just daily life and this cyberpunk dystopia in any event though every section of the city and the outskirts of it all feel unique they have their own identity the people you'll see there are appropriate to that section and that's something that actually improved from the original as well there's a lot better crowd diversity you don't see a lot of repeated NPCs they even made adjustments to things like traffic and the flow of traffic to make the city feel a bit more alive and for the most part I think they succeeded there and while you still can't walk into every building or stop at every possible shop there's still a lot to be enjoyed here you can walk down the street and find shops to go into you can buy clothing go to various vendor shops you can find down on the street levels you can even buy apartments across the city now so there's a decent amount to engage with there's even a lot of hidden stuff you can find simply by exploring side streets and back alleys which can lead to other side content and given the revamped police system we can even see more Dynamic events involving the police and the gangs and while this was always a thing in set locations you can now see police just wandering around as part of the crowds out and about and sometimes these individual police officers will run into street gangs and have Dynamic interactions with them which is kind of cool to see sometimes they don't really seem to get engaged at all though even if crime is happening right in front of them which is always kind of humorous but strangely on point for a city as corrupt as night City but should you choose to go full cyber psycho and start murdering innocent civilians let's say police will respond to that now you'll be assigned a wanted level and the longer it goes on the more proportional the response will be up to an including Max Tac which is the Cyber psycho response Squad now while you yourself can never be driven to genuine psychosis by your cyberware implants you can choose to kill everyone which is basically what a cyber psycho would do and maxtech is assigned to deal with those situations no matter the difficulty you have the game on Max Tech is as difficult as they are period which means when they show up it's a pretty big deal and they're very capable of killing you and putting you down so if you want to engage in that gamepl it's there as well and a lot of that stuff goes a long way towards making the city feel more Dynamic and alive and for the most part I think they got that right even from the beginning I really enjoyed the city but even now it's still not perfect either for instance despite working with fixers that have ties to local gangs Etc you can basically just run to gangs and eliminate them without any repercussions or further consequences The Gangs themselves have very little to do with basically anything outside of the side quests they're involved in you don't interact with them much you can't join any of them anything like that and I think there was a lot of missed opportunity in terms of the various Gang Related factions and what they could have brought to the table but they have a very limited interaction with the rest of the game outside of just being an enemy to kill in various gigs and side quests it does feel like they could have done more there with like a reputation system or something but we're definitely never going to see that at this point in order to get around the city you can of course drive around in vehicles but there is also a fast travel system we know at one point there was a planned tram system that's still not in the game or anything so don't expect that you basically just go to a fast travel point and then fast travel to other points you've already been to it works there's nothing wrong with it a little uninspired maybe especially when we know we could have had that fully functional train system that would have been cool to see but basically it is what it is at this point another thing that is a little bit of a let down is there's a lot of water around night City and exploring any of it is a waste of time you can technically swim there's even a mission that will see you doing some diving but there's very little to find underwater and it's mostly just a waste of time there's not a point in doing that and it's just weird that they added that context while not putting anything at all in there and while I'm fine with that conceptually it would have been cool if there was like just one or two little things happening in or around the water not really a criticism so much as an observation really but all of that says nothing of the new car combat system with update 2.0 you can purchase vehicles or find vehicles with weapons things already pre-installed that you can then use in car combat this makes certain quests with like chases and stuff a little more interesting but some of those are scripted and no amount of car combat will pretty much affect those at all which can be a bummer in some cases but in other instances where you're actually supposed to track down or destroy a vehicle or something car combat does come in quite a bit of Handy there and it's also interesting to run up on a side mission with the ncpd where you're just asked to put down a bunch of violent gang activity you can just roll up with a car and use your car's weapons to wipe them out and then keep driving on and as I mentioned every attribute has a perk associated with car combat in particular that can make it a little more engaged and while it's a decent enough system I do think it adds a little bit of gameplay to what you yourself can do that makes it pretty welcome don't expect anything too drastic you're pretty much limited to the weapons that that car has pre-installed so it's relatively basic you can also shoot and use your actual weapons from a car as well and on motorcycles in particular you can even use your melee weapons a nice system adds a certain amount of dynamic elements to certain quests but don't expect it to come up a ton unless you're just really into it and use it for everything even when you shouldn't I suppose but certainly not unwelcome overall for the gameplay in the world of cyberpunk I would say that I really love this city like I mentioned earlier it is as much a character of this game as anything else is and while it's always been pretty cool to see it is a very large realized City with all sorts of districts that show off how people without means are doing versus how the people up in the high corporate towers are doing you can even go outside of the city and see the wastelands it's become and both the DLC and the update and the systems they've added kind of really lean into that so in terms of the world I really do love the city at play here but all of that said let's talk about combat combat has naturally seen some significant changes over time which is most recently down to all of the perk changes and cyberware changes they made but fundamentally it still works the same way you might have a different ability or two here passives and things like that have changed they've made some changes to net running that make it a little less powerful to be honest but still very usable alongside changes to melee weapons like giving you certain finishers that make the melee portion of things more impactful it's still important to remember that because of the progression systems combat largely comes down to the build you have set up and how you are approaching it it and any event is pretty much down to guns melee or net running and of course some stealth mixed in there but that can be used with all of these approaches in fact you can completely go in as a ghost in many instances where people never knew you were there to begin with if you are good enough and they even added the optical camo that was missing from the base game as well you can equip Optical camo to make yourself semi invisible to really lean into that stealth play style which again is applicable to everything else but beyond that we have all of our various guns and melee weapons which are all available as iconics as well which have their own unique abilities that can add a lot of dynamic elements to the combat as well on top of all the various weapon types for guns we have things like power weapons smart weapons Tech weapons smart weapons can be linked with your smart link cyberware to allow you to shoot things automatically within a certain range without having to say perfectly line up or aim anything which can be a nice buffer for people who aren't so great at lining up head shot we have Tech weapons which can let you charge up a shot for as much as like 1.5 times the damage which combined with something like a sniper rifle can be really effective especially if you have a perk that slows down time to allow you to line up a head shot for instance which is a play style I leaned into pretty heavily so even just from that you can see there's a lot of diversity in the guns that play but that's to say nothing of the melee side of things where you can pick up things like katanas or blunt weapons that combined with abilities like the dash function that allow you to quickly Dash with a katana to attack all sorts of enemies in melee opens up all sorts of other play styles with weapons in particular and with the changes they've made to all the perks all of those play Styles feel really really impactful they're fun to mess around with and the gameplay of it just feels great net running is a little bit different they made some sweeping changes to this in terms of like ram cost and everything but basically if you have the cyber deck cyberware installed which comes with a default but it can be changed if you're not using it cyber decks give you access to to various slots to install quick hacks as well as access to the ram which is our resource to use them so once we have the cyber deck installed we can then go to that item in our inventory and assign it its quick hacks which become the abilities we can use with that cyber deck some cyber decks especially depending on the tier of quality will have certain quick hacks pre-installed so you don't have to use those as a special ability install they're just kind of the default if you will and then in combat if you activate your scanning mechanism that you get as part of the story which comes from your eye cyberware you can then activate your quick hacks on things like enemies cameras turrets Etc there's even things in the environment you can interact with which opens up its own sort of gameplay the new net running perks allow you to queue up quick hacks allowing you to perform combos of sorts with certain quick hacks being used in quick succession with one another and then special quick hacks that allow you to do things like set enemies on fire or electrocute them shut down their weapons reboot their Optical making them less likely to notice you there are even ultimate quick hacks which allow you to do massive damage there was a favorite of mine that I found called system collapse that would just outright kill anything that wasn't a boss and bosses would be stunned for a significant period of time when I used it and while that came at a massive ram cost it was obviously worth it however doing a lot of that will now open you up to being traced especially if you're using the stealth route basically some quick hacks will allow enemies to start tracing your position to see where that hack came from so you have to be a little bit careful about this if you're actively trying to be stealthy obviously mid combat it doesn't make much of a difference there are perks and things you can do to mitigate that but it's something you have to watch out for which means if you're doing this in stealth it can be a sort of cat and mouse game which has its own little Dynamic element to the game play and all of those things I just mentioned make combat A real blast to play around with I really enjoyed the changes they made to combat the Gunplay feels great the things they've done with net running and stealth make it really interesting net running I think technically saw a little bit of a Nerf but it's still really fun to play around with and for combat it really kind of feels like they leaned into the action adventure side of things and it makes for really smooth solid gameplay depending of course on how you built out your character but more than anything it's fun that though brings us to the DLC very recently released we have the Phantom Liberty DLC the only paid expansion this particular game is getting and as this particular video is coming out out after my own review of that DLC most people might know that I'm already pretty positive on it and because I've already covered that in a separate video there's no need to go over it in Great depth here but I will say for those watching this review The Phantom Liberty DLC does choice and consequence better than the main story I think the story of that DLC is frankly better than the base game story there are things I prefer more from the base game but by and large it's just better it also opens up a little bit of extra progression via The Relic abilities that can enhance a given play play style that much farther it also gives you access to a new area of the city called Dog town which itself is pretty small but is packed with a lot of really great content especially with the gigs and the side quest they did there almost all of it is better than anything in the base game the gigs have more impactful choices are more involved outside of just like go here kill this person that kind of thing it usually has a full little story attached to it and then the actual side quests are really well done almost all of those really interesting but ultimately the DLC details the conflict between the leader of a section of KN city known as Dogtown which is a former member of the new United States who set up a military Hub there before kind of being abandoned by the new United States who just so happens to shoot down the president's mode of travel space force one above night City forcing a crash landing and you get involved and deal with the drama and Fallout of that situation which gives a lot of context to the broader happenings of the world outside of KN City in particular which which if I had to guess given that we know they're already working on a cyberpunk 2 so to speak likely has implications for what they're setting up there I imagine they might be getting a little broader than just night City there either way though Phantom Liberty is a great bit of DLC arguably better than the base game in many ways and it's a very solid add-on to the rest of the game that brings us to our steam deck compatibility however and even with the recent changes and updates to the PC requirements you can still play this pretty handily on the steam deck but you do need to adjust some settings you're probably going to be forced down to the lowest settings possible and even still have to use some upscaling via FSR I believe 2.1 is the recommended one for this and with those settings you might be able to get about a stable 40fps give or take so even with the 2.0 changes the steam deck is still very much so playable the game itself has a verified rating which is still the case and it comes with the usual things you would expect such as Steam Cloud saves and this type of game does play pretty well there for the most part if you like playing with a controller but the main thing I wanted to mention here for this section is just that the update 2.0 and the graphical stuff that they did to the game does not render this unplayable on the steam deck by any means that though however does finally bring us to our positives and negatives before we start trying to wrap this thing up on the positive side of things for me it's the world and the game play the world that is to say the city of night city is just so well realized I love the City that this takes place in they did a lot of cool things to make it feel more alive and dynamic as well and that really shines through in a lot of these more recent updates the game play has also been significantly enhanced it has improved a lot over the last 3 years they've done a ton of things to make that feel fun and a lot of the options and perk overhauls really lean into that stuff so while the feel of it was pretty much always on point in terms of things like the shooting Etc they made a ton of improvements to the various builds and play styles that really really make that stuff Shine the combat and engaging in it in this game is just so fun now that it was a real highlight for me in terms of negatives these remain what they've been for quite some time for me just discounting the bugs even from launch a lot of this stuff was present even then for starters we have Superfluous features in my opinion like the game does like this whole mission around brain dances which are these things that allow a character to basically relive a given experience that someone else went through like feeling exactly how they felt Etc and it gets used for the x-rated things you would expect it to be but it can also be used for other things and the game sets this up like it's going to be this big feature in the main story and it's used like maybe two times after that it's very annoying you have Superfluous stuff like that that they leaned into and then it just doesn't really get used you have missed opportunities with things like the gangs and the water around night City and other places you can swim just not amounting to anything and on a personal note the game leans into a lot of the illusion of a choice which annoys me to no end honestly a lot of times choices are presented to you and the choice doesn't actually matter or change anything and while the DLC does actually a decent job of addressing that the base game it's a huge problem you don't make a lot of impactful choices as I mentioned in the story section which is still what this game was originally marketed as which leads me to my conclusion update 2.0 the Phantom Liberty DLC all the patches and things 3 years later from its launch cyberpunk 2077 has seen a pretty compelling turnaround that makes it a fun action adventure and in terms of that action adventure I'd very much so recommend it it's very fun I wouldn't pay full price for it simply on principle you can find the base game on sale all the time at this point so you know personally I wouldn't buy it for less than like half off just because of how long it has been if you're looking to jump into this game and experience it I think it's a blast from that perspective but at the same time especially for a video like this I think it is worth acknowledging that this game and the turnaround and changes they've made are not nor are they ever going to be at this point as this is essentially the final update for it going to be the game that they advertised and marketed it as which was this big choices matter RPG with a huge branching narrative and not to mention several other features they marketed that never made it in and that to me is frankly a little disappointing for starters just from a more business level I think they very obviously flubbed the marketing on this very hard I think if they had marketed this game as an open world action adventure more to what it is they wouldn't have ran into as many problems they obviously still would have been lambasted for all of the bugs and just unplayable nature of it on lash gen consoles for instance but I think a lot of this game's initial problems come down to the fact that the game we got is not the game they marketed and that hasn't changed I love a lot of these changes and what they did for the game I think the game is fantastic if you look at it as an open world action adventure especially when you start looking at some of the really memorable character characters and moments that this game can set up and give you so because of that I think a lot of the story around cyberp punk and its place in gaming history is going to wind up being one about marketing than it is anything else because after all these changes and the bug fixes cyberpunk 2077 is a great game now but it still isn't the game that they marketed it to be which is a lesson I hope they take to heart for the next game because while I would very much so like to see more of this cyberpunk world I could do less with the let's say very meta corporate dysfunction that cdpr put on display for it but to bring this fully to a close yes it's a great game it's worth playing do be mindful of some of the technical issues I mentioned towards the very beginning of the video but otherwise the game is very much so worth checking out now all of that said I certainly hope you enjoyed this video I hope you found it informative if you did please remember to like comment subscribe all that YouTube jazz let me know how you are feeling about this game and its updates down in the comment section below but regard of any of that truly just thank you so much for watching I really do appreciate it may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing [Music] day

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 310,041

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, cyberpunk 2077, cyberpunk review, cybperpunk 2022, cyberpunk dlc, cyberpunk phantom liberty, cyberpunk 2077 phantom liberty, cyberpunk 2077 news, cyberpunk updates, cyberpunk 2077 updates, cyberpunk 2077 new details, cyberpunk 2077 update 2.0, cyberpunk 2077 update, cyberpunk 2077 2.0, cyberpunk 2077 review, cyberpunk 2077 2023 review, cyberpunk 2077 dlc review, cyberpunk 2023 review, cyberpunk update 2.0 review, cyberpunk dlc review

Id: MFf1jGOk9Nw

Length: 46min 16sec (2776 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023