Cyberpunk 2077 first impressions: Not impressed so far

I officially gave up on Red Dead Redemption 2 after going on my 15th fetch quest that consisted of me watching some horse animation for 20 minutes to go pick up something on the other side of the map and then had to watch the same damn long-as-hell animation on the way back. It really would have pleased me if they could have streamlined this process because it was just boring as hell.

I'll get into that a bit more later and be prepared for the criticism of everyone telling me how wrong I am about it.

Cyberpunk 2077 had a very rocky launch with a ton of pissed off customers. Then it kind of disappeared for a while and the other day it was on 75% discount and I had been told that the bugs had been worked out. I figured "what the hell, why not?" and bought it. Well i fired it up for the first time yesterday and played for about an hour and while it does look impressive and the story is OK so far, I already have a lot of problems with it.

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Yeah yeah, I know that 1 hour in a massive open-world game is not enough time to have an informed opinion about a game but I really feel as though a game needs to draw you in during this time and Cyberpunk has really let me down in this department. For starters, the voice acting is just downright awful. It seems as though the actors were not even recording at the same time because the reactions to the dialogue that is going on seems as though none of the actors were even aware of the situation that they were meant to be acting in.

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I do like that you can choose 3 different paths at the beginning but then again I have no idea what effect this has on the story. I chose "Street Kid" and I don't know why, probably because it was in the middle and I am not good at choices.

In the very first segment you are faced with a bar owner that you are friends with and he regales you with a story about how he can not pay back a debt to a gangster that is upstairs. You follow the little yellow line to go and talk to the guy and keep in mind that this is in the first 5 minutes of the game post character-creation.

This interaction with this gangster whose name I don't recall is voiced so terribly bad that they really should have gone back and re-shot it. I mean it is really bad and just awkward. He doesn't seem intimidating nor does he seem like whoever the person is that is voicing it has ever done this sort of work before.

You then go on a mission to steal a car that I'm guessing you can't possibly succeed at because it appears as though the objective was actually to fail and get caught by the police so that they could paint the picture of the prisons being too full to even consider prosecuting minor offenses like attempted car theft.

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Then you go through a tutorial which is definitely necessary for new players and I guess they did a good enough job on it considering that it appears as though the entire controller is going to be used in this game... which as a side note all but insures that I am not going to finish this game.

One of the major issues that I have with this game is that it appears from my perspective that this game was designed for PC and console ports were just an afterthought. I say this because you frequently have to select things on the screen by using the left control stick as a "mouse" of sorts and I can't stand doing this on a controller. Maybe I am just being nitpicky. Also, I have a 60 inch HDTV but sitting on my sofa just 2 meters away I can't make out what the screen has on it for which buttons I am supposed to be hitting. In my mind, this game was designed for people that are sitting 1 foot away from a 25 inch monitor, not someone on the sofa trying to relax.

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You can probably read this because I would imagine you are reading this on a monitor that is right in front of you but for me it was already extremely frustrating because of the font, color, and size of the indicators on screen. I had to stand up on a regular basis just to learn the controls. It's a too friggin small! Maybe i need to calm down and get glasses. I don't know.

Anyway, thus far I am already getting frustrated with this game but I am not going to give up on it because people I know have said they LOVE this game and are on their 3rd playthrough or something like that. I don't know anyone that can say that about RDR2. I'll likely do what I always do with games like this and give it another week. If it isn't something I love by then, it'll just end up being another $12 that I wasted but because of all the hype that was surrounding this game, I kind of felt like I had to at least give it a look.