I used the New Zealand trick on Series X to play the game 12 hours earlier than my time zone would allow. 12+ hours of gameplay later, I can already say that this is a very special game. I have never played anything of the sort, and it's not even a compliment or a criticism: there's simply no games like this around. The Witcher 3, Watch_Dogs, The Division, Borderlands, Skyrim - they all share similarities for sure, but Cyberpunk 2077 is its own breed of videogame, and I appreciate that.
At first I was... fairly unimpressed, actually. The graphics looked incredibly blurry and poorly detailed, turns out the performance mode of the game is just incredibly toned down. While I always opt for 60fps where possible, the trade-off here is simply not worth it. Everything looks muddy, there's no shadows, lights and smokes are flat as hell, people look like they're made of plastic. I wasn't gonna play a 30fps game anytime soon this generation, but the gap between the two modes' look here is too damn high. DIRT 5 and Valhalla looked fine in the higher framerate mode, this game does not. That should be fixed.
When I went for the graphics mode and got used to the lost "art" of 30fps, things started to click. The game's world is marvelous. Characters are varied and cool. I must have spent at least half an hour in photo mode by now. While the default poses are a bit wacky, you can make some incredible stills in this game's world that just invites you to create magnificient stills. And like Valhalla, much of the experience is that: looking, exploring, absorbing what this digital world has to offer. The fact you can interact with nearly anybody (even if with pre-packed convos most of the time), that there's so much interactivity and animated billboards - it's all so lively and cool.
The RPG aspect seems pretty deep already, but at the same time, it feels somewhat superfluous at times. Pushing towards more effective stealth and better interactions with the world in the form of hacking, forcing or talking is great, but once a firefight erupts, it all kinda becomes irrelevant: you're hugging covers and shooting at braindead enemies with giant healthbars like it's The Division. It's not a bad thing in itself because the first person shooter module is solid enough, but for how deep and varied the rest of the game feels, this one element seemed a bit too standard. It's enjoyable enough to go on however.
What's a bigger issue right now is the glitches. Sometimes objectives glitch out. I encountered several freezes where the game stalled for 10-15 seconds, sometimes even during a fight, once even two times in a row separated by a frame or two. Characters walk through me, they disappear into the ground, a lot of loot can't be picked up as it falls into other objects, I once died jumping from 3 meters high on full health, controls can be wonky, exiting photo mode "locks" the button you were pressing prior, and so on. There's a lot to fix. Nothing gamebreaking, but it's certainly one of the most glitchy high quality triple-A games in a while. Seems like a Bethesda game, though at least the saves seem to be working fine.
The last bullet point I'd touch on is loot. It feels excessive. I'm a bit of an OCD guy in games as I Iike to pick up everything. Well, every enemy drops a weapon. Sometimes clothes and other items. Every room has like 4-5 things you can interact with, maybe more. And at the end of the day, 99% of what you find is salvaged, sold, because once you find a good item that you mod it's probably not gonna be a random weapon on the ground that's gonna change your life. Sure, the solution is not picking everything up you might say. But the loot game, in general, feels fairly unimpressive in that sense, as I keep finding the exact same items all the time with barely any difference in stats. Oh well, at least it's giving me badass clothes.
I focused on a lot of negatives, but it's only because this game is hyped as hell and one of the biggest releases in gaming history. It's a great game with touches of brilliance all over the place, and the first 12 hours on day one flew for me. I do want to see some large fixes and performance upgrades though, because the game does feel a bit close to a beta often. But a Cyberpunk 2077 "beta" is still superior to most games released in the last years, so...