"Night City clawed its way back from disaster"
About
You play as V, a mercenary navigating the neon-soaked streets of Night City while pursuing various jobs—from corporate espionage to street-level crime—that shape your character's reputation and story branching. The game combines first-person gunplay and melee combat with RPG progression systems that let you specialize in hacking, stealth, or direct confrontation across a sprawling open world. Your choices in missions and dialogue affect which of several endings you receive and determine your relationships with the city's factions.
Verdict
The launch was a catastrophe and the internet will never let CDPR forget it, but the game that exists now is one of the best RPGs of the era. Night City and its characters do the heavy lifting, while the 2.0 rework finally made the builds and gunplay worth the open world they live in. It still stutters, still throws bodies into the sky, and still wants a GPU that costs more than the game itself.
You'll like it if …
- +you build a character to reshape how missions play, not just how you fight
- +you linger in a dense vertical city for atmosphere and return trips
- +you want a story RPG that earns a downbeat ending
You'll dislike it if …
- −you expect your choices to visibly reshape the world rather than the framing
- −you want missions driven by play over cutscenes
- −you game on modest hardware and skip high-end GPUs
Breakdown
- +2.0 rework made gunplay and quickhack-fueled combat genuinely effective and satisfying
- +Build specialization (netrunner, slasher, gunslinger) fundamentally changes how missions play out
- +Cyberware synergies and weapon interactions create meaningful tactical depth within encounters
- −Pedestrian AI remains dim, causing bodies to fling into the sky and create immersion breaks
- −Mission design relies heavily on cutscenes, limiting player agency in how objectives unfold
- +Multiple distinct endings tied directly to character choices and faction relationships
- +Three operating systems anchor build paths that branch wildly through cyberware and weapons
- +Night City's vertical density and environmental detail sustain repeated visits months after launch
- −Choices land with less narrative impact than the framing suggests they will
- +Supporting cast resonates and carries emotional weight throughout the story
- +V's story refuses the Hollywood happy ending, lending genuine weight to its conclusion
- +World design sells its dystopia hard enough that players discuss real-life burnout afterward
- +Facial animation work is excellent across hundreds of lines of voice acting
- +Soundtrack supports the world without ever upstaging it
- +Neon-soaked Night City hums with ambient life and detail
- −Performance demands are benchmark-tier; a high-end GPU is effectively mandatory for smooth play
- +Years of free updates plus Phantom Liberty turned a 60 euro purchase into one of the better RPG investments
- −Frame rate stutters and dips despite improvements
- −Physics bugs persist: tires fling into orbit and pedestrians clip through geometry
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