Here's my gameplay impressions of the game!
So these are my thoughts and impressions on cyberpunk 2077 after having played the game for roughly 30 minutes and going through multiple gameplay sequences and tutorial sequences. This was played on the Xbox One X.
Right away, you are introduced to the beautiful world of Night City, and you are introduced to the environment of Cyberpunk and the aesthetic of it all. The first thing that you do is obviously set up your character, and I think the character creation has a very robust amount of options to choose from. What I don't enjoy about the character creation is that there is a Fallout-esque SPECIAL system where you can put points into different categories of characteristics for your character, including intelligence and coolness. The problem is that you cannot max out two or three of the characteristics for your character like you could in Fallout. You're very limited in what attributes you can invest in.
At the moment I'm unsure if the if the pronouns and how your character is addressed based on the gender that you choose has been fixed as my character was just a male character with a male voice that I didn't put much thought into.
After you create your character, you are introduced to this bar called The Coyote, and this is where you begin to start your journey. Probably the first thing that I noticed right off the bat was that the lighting of the game is incredible. It is so vivid and really captures that look and feel of what's cyberpunk entails as an aesthetic. One of the very first things that it reminded me of was how it's very reminiscent of Cowboy Bebop's aesthetic of what the future might look like, where it feels like it's the 90s but with advanced technology in areas that you don't really expect, which makes the dystopian feel more grounded and realistic.
One of the things that I noticed immediately is that the game glitches a lot. There's a lot of texture pop in, and it seems like that all the "cinematics," are actually just jump cuts in between in-game animated scenarios, so as a result, you notice a lot of texture issues, frame drops, and animation weirdness that takes you out of the immersion. When I say a lot, I mean a lot. It's really upfront.
Gameplay wise, it feels clunky. The shooting is good, the movement is ok, but other than that, it honestly doesn't feel as fluid as I thought it would. One the main issues I'm already having is that the UI often feels really cluttered with information. In one of the tutorial sequences, you have like 5 different windows of information presented to you at once.
On Xbox, the select button is X. I fucking hate this. It's really dumb. Just wanted to highlight that.
I'll be playing more, and hopefully will finish the game before it actually releases. I'll give my full thoughts after that.