So, I spent 4.5 of my 5 free hours with the game this afternoon. It went pretty breezily. Keep in mind that everything I'm about to say is in comparison to having spent 22 hours with this game on a base PS4 and no HDR/4K, whereas I'm now on a PS5 with the fancy TV to match.
First off, the most impressive aspect of this release is definitely the Performance Mode. I never wound up saving any video from my time with Cyberpunk on PS4, but man was I conflicted. On the one hand, as a non-PC gamer seeing a game run that poorly was so alien to me it also became the main attraction as I'd stare slackjawed at its perpetual 10-20 frames per second rendering and oil-painting like smears of grey and neon. It was hilariously, spectacularly ugly - unfortunately, it also crashed and wiped progress all the time, which is a raw no go for me. The PS5 Performance Mode is essentially a locked 60fps, only wavering during some mission transitions where you can tell the game is seeding a designed instance into its otherwise open space. To see this game run like that had me thinking the CDPR team actually are wizards, if incredibly excitable and prone to shooting their shot with way too much time left on the clock.
That said, I preferred to spend my time in Graphics Mode because there is something incredibly artificial about Night City and the Badlands that extends beyond the themes of the game and into that uncanny, Far Cry 4 sort of feel where the gunplay's a little bit odd (especially with all the smart bullets and auto-headshot weapons I had at my disposal) and imprecise while the game world is this bizarre mixture of incredibly detailed world building and exceptionally hollow civilian A.I. The motion blur, film grain, enhanced HDR and of course ray traced lighting all combine to hide some of that under a sleek combination of grime and beauty that makes for a truly gorgeous game if you catch it from the right angles.
That said, there's still plenty of ugliness. Enemy A.I. is dumber than a bag of rocks and the game often seems confused by your entering a mission. Three separate occasions I had civilian cars lose their drivers and ghost ride along whatever path they'd been on just because they were near me as I entered a mission. I saw multiple examples of explosions clipping enemies into or all the way through walls and other bits of environment - on one occasion, the guard I'd nearly killed actually just gained the ability to walk through walls on his own accord. Anything to survive, I guess - who can't relate? Likewise, it's not uncommon to be staring in a direction for several seconds only to suddenly realize you had your face in the side of a shipping container, the game had just forgotten to show it to you.
But that's all, in its own way, the charming brand of Eurojank some might say was missing from The Witcher 3 and might be glad for its glorious return. What's truly important is that the game runs, point blank, and it runs exceptionally well in both graphics modes, offering either brand of user exactly what they'll be looking for out of the game. I didn't have any run-ins with the cops or whatever but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they'd been completely removed from the game other than scripted sequences and market fodder NPCs. I'm still impressed by the fluidity of the conversation system and the seemingly large number of options you have to proceed through this story, no matter if they do ultimately funnel into a few distinct resolutions it feels good to roleplay in this game, even if you picked the male voice way back in December of 2020 because you wanted to experience that juxtaposition with a female avatar and had no idea how bland it was compared to the female.
All the other wackiness is still there, too - particularly the inundating with text messages and voice calls about mundane and plain pointless points of interest while you're in the middle of a life and death conversation about your brain slowly rotting away. But the guns are so silly and your player character so comically invincible within a gorgeous world full of intriguing - and stunningly annoying - world building and conversation trees as well as great music and sound design...oh, the sound design! Wielding Jackie's old motorcycle on the highway or rolling a Buick-esque luxury sedan through the downtown feel and sound so wonderfully different! Hell, a sports car takes speed bumps with a different shudder than a van does, and the vibrations even seem to roll through the control at the rate your vehicle rolls over the new/altered terrain. I don't know why I was so surprised by this, but CDPR really went out of their way to take the lead in "what's the haps with the DualSense's haptics" conversations.
In other words...yea, I'm hovering over that $25 buy button, knowing full well this game'll get shelved for about a month while I play Horizon Forbidden West, and I've still got Demon's Souls, Yakuza 5 and the secret third ending of Returnal swirling around on my hard drive with MLB The Show 22 just over a month away. I don't need this game, but at $25 it might just be the best b-game of all-time.
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