I think my short review of Cyberpunk 2077 would be this:
Broken so good.
Is it broken? Oh yeah, yeah it is. Granted, I don't have quite the same complaints (or complaints at all?) quite like the previous gen consoles have. I run on a 6 year old PC, so there is always a hack to fix most issues I might encounter with the game.
* Crafting doesn't seem all that broken when the game just gives away all the high end loot you will ever need. There are, for instance, no better "armor" items that you can craft than those you will find generously placed all over the map unguarded. You can't BUY plans for a legendary 3 piece suit... but you can pick the pieces off of 3 random bodies without firing a shot.
* Don't listen to what anyone tells you about the most powerful weapons in the game... except me.
Without a doubt, the most powerful weapon in the game is any smart weapon. Don't be fooled by their low relative DPS. DPS in this game is a pointless stat since you can pump the power of any weapon to bean effectively 1 shot kill. For early game, the Ashura Smart Sniper is utterly broken.. mind bogglingly broken. Even before you can afford the biotech to make full use of the Smart function the weapon is broken. Here's why:
The AI controls the target of a smart weapon, later when you have the biotech you get to see how the smart weapon picks it's target, but you can figure it out with a little trial and error. Essentially, the huge aim-space of the weapon denotes the area in front of you that the AI will use to find a target. When it finds a target, it will attempt to pick the target closest to the center of the aim space. This makes perfect sense since you'd expect it to try and best match where you are aiming... but, here is where it goes haywire, the AI, after selecting the most central target will then target the BODY PART closest to the center of the aim space. This is utterly broken because once you know this you can easily force the smart weapon to shoot headshots 100% of the time.
Early game this is best exploited with the Ashura at very long ranges because the AI is broken and doesn't really even engage until you are at some minimum distance. Out in the desert you can headshot as many enemies as you want at long range and they'll never really alert to your location. The damage of the Ashura, given the 100% headshot ability, far surpasses any other sniper, and doesn't stop being a 1 shot kill until the target is 20+ levels higher than the rifle. Moreover, the Ashura legendary crafting plan is amazingly easy to acquire since several gun shops have it in stock for 20k, and the resources to graft it was absurdly low.
LATE game, however ,I set the Ashura aside because, for some unknown reason, SMGs and Sniper Rifles share the same skill bonuses, and there is one SMG in this game that is even more broken than the Ashura. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, or how I acquired it, but in a pinch in a long mission I equipped the SMG since I ran out of sniper ammo, and never looked back.
All Legendary weapons have a bonus damage-over-time (DOT) stat that has a chance of happening ("proc" in game parlance) per-hit. The devs tried to balance the effect by having the proc rate lower for faster firing weapons, as well as lower damage per-tick. But one SMG in the game is special. This SMG (I'll find the name when I have time) doesn't have one legendary Proc, it has all 4, and all 4 have the same base proc rate as any other SMG. So the chance of a special damage proc with this SMG is roughly 40%... and that means that in a full clip it will proc 3 DOTs of each element type!
To make that even more broken, all enemies in the game have one element that they are especially susceptible to, and with this SMG you don't have to bother figuring out which weakness they have since you apply all of them pretty much all the time. Robots are especially laughable since I blow them all up with, it seems, the first bullet.
With the Smart weapon Biotech, the weapon selects new targets as fast as I kill them, and so long as I "aim" the weapon above the head of a crowd of enemies, I can kill every enemy in the target box without even changing my point of aim since ever round I fire is an almost guaranteed headshot. There was one mission where I needed to sneak into a heavily guarded night club and steal assassinate someone. I walked in the back door, waited for all the guards to be in my reticle and pulled the trigger. 2 seconds and 20 rounds later and they were all dead.
wow, that's a ramble. If I get some time I'll load the game up and check the name of the SMG so I can find out where I picked it up.
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