Recent reviews by Packy21

And there I am, watching as my character's story of 80 hours is rounded off, and while this beautiful scene is unfolding, my brain thinks that what I see is a visual bug, instead of the water I am actually seeing.

Given that I had to reload twice during the finale because of visual bugs, I don't think it's unfair to say my brain is not purely at fault for this.

But that is the frustration with Cyberpunk that, unfortunately, to this day persists, and will likely persist until the end of times. I like this game a lot. I did a rushed story playthrough in its earlier days, which I was more critical of. Since then, everything has been replaced with memories of my playthrough post-release of Phantom Liberty, which added the game's best story content and followed a series of updates which truly made the game a lot better.

The game is not the 1.0 mess that it used to be by a long shot. And in a lot of areas, it's a fantastic game. The primary loop is tight, the visual design is striking, night city feels like a living, breathing place, and the audio is stellar in most places. I especially like the revamped progression system. Unlike my first playthrough, leveling up felt impactful. Specialising in a playstyle actually worked for me; normally i play more generalist in RPGs, but this time I went full on "f*ck your facebones, here's a shotgun blast" build and it rocked. You never feel locked out of other options, but specialising is rewarding.

The writing is very well done. Some of the questlines genuinely impacted me in a way few games have. Others made me laugh when I really needed it. Some others again had me on the edge of my seat. Sure, there were a bunch of "eh whatever" quests as well, but they're not disruptive in any way. Everything at least feels at home in this game.

And it's for all these reasons that I am so disappointed with the persistence of bugs and glitches. The NPC spawning is, frankly, fundamentally broken with vehicles and people fading in out of nowhere in very obvious ways. Plenty of my cars, when called, were suddenly dropped from the sky. These two in particular stand out to me, because I recently finished Red Dead Redemption 1, a game from 2010, which somehow managed to hide these things way better and only occasionally messed up by spawning the wrong type of NPC for the location. But I digress.

Quests where I had to sneak had me suddenly get detected out of nowhere, prompting a reload. Other times the AI just stood there not doing anything. During the finale, my POV got stuck aiming at my right armpit TWICE, ruining a bunch of cutscenes. I've fallen through maps, sent spinning with my car through the skybox, and seen NPCs who were giving me a lift drive in circles 3 times before leaving the car park because of their wonky pathfinding. It's not infuriating stuff, but it's definitely disappointing and frankly harms a great experience.

I still absolutely recommend the game, but be prepared for jank.

Definitely a slower strategy game which takes some getting used to, and can use some more time in the oven, but definitely a fun time overall

No Step Back and the Barbarossa update maasively changed the game and the way it was played, and for me showed a massive improvement over previous updates. In comparison, this DLC and update (which I do judge along with the DLC) feel like a "dotting the i's" type of improvement. It's not groundbreaking, but the game is certainly worse off without it. The plane designer completes the vehicle designer trio, the overhaul for peace conferences and airwings were QOL fixes we definitely needed, and while arguably not *as* important a player, Italy still was one of the most important countries in the war, and absolutely deserves the detailed focus tree it got in this DLC. The minor country content for Switzerland and Ethiopia are welcome too, and I'm especially happy to see PDX experiment with paths that try to go beyond the rigid intepretation of their "4 ideologies" system.

Is it perfect? No. As much as I like the work put into Ethiopia and Switzerland I feel like other countries deserve the attention more, though to be fair, it'd be hard to thematically justify. There's some bugs and quite a few balancing issues at the moment. Lastly it's still expensive. Given the amount of time I put into this game over the years it's a price I'm willing to pay, but there will always be that small sour note to it.

Ruined my friendship for the fourth game in a row. Must play.

Well, that was a journey.

I slept on this series for years. I'm a big sci-fi person so this was right up my alley. However, when trying ME1 for the first time about 4/5 years ago, it felt so clunky and old I didn't enjoy playing it. Boy was that a mistake on my end.

I took my time getting through the first game, and taking a short hiatus from it after a couple missions into the 2nd one, but these past two weeks I started blazing through what was left. The story is masterfully crafter, the gameplay gets better with each game, ME1 feels a lot better than it did back then, the characters and universe are intriguing and engrossing, and visually it looks stunning. Performance wise it ran mostyl amazing, with only ME3 having regular dips in specific areas and some actual noticable bugs. I am very glad I picked this up, well worth the money.

That ending though....

can not recommend this enough

cpu go boom

tur factory go brrrrrr

honest to god just straight up bad. All you do is click some menus and hold RMB, there's no depth to any of it, sound design is horrendous, especially the awful footstep sound effect on iron, bugs aplenty, tutorial tells you basically nothing, i can go on and on but just trust me and avoid it.