Cyberpunk 2077

If you’re a gamer, you probably already know about the glitch-ridden first release of Cyberpunk 2077. Using Keanu Reeves as its main marketing ploy, Cyberpunk promised to be an ambitious, high-performing game to explain the eight-year development phase. Unfortunately, it appears the game was rushed out at the last second (we waited eight years, we could have waited one more…) and suffered some pretty major issues for months after release – especially for those of us on consoles and not PC.

While there are still some minor glitches, on the whole the game is much improved and I highly recommend getting a copy if you have some time to sink into it. Yes the main storyline can be completed in around 20 hours, but if that’s all you’re going to do there’s no point buying it. Cyberpunk offers a rich and varied world with lots to see and do – I’ve clocked in around 115 hours so far – and (unlike the freshly-reviewed Valhalla) it’s definitely worth completing side gigs and romance quests.

The main story is fine, but without Keanu Reeves’ character (Johnny Silverhand) it would be pretty dull. His witty observations and general dickish behaviour are hilarious, and there’s a spiritual aspect of soul/personality/identity that is fascinating to explore. I enjoyed how his and V’s relationship developed, though there were definitely missed opportunities – small things that would have really made it shine.

Really it’s the secondary characters that make Cyberpunk come to life – Judy, Jackie and Goro Takemura come to mind specifically. Their interactions with V, the friendships they build, are a really nice addition and something you don’t often see in RPGs. The ‘texting’ feature really adds to this – your phone can receive text messages and you can choose different options to reply with. Some messages are story-based but others are just friends-shooting-the-shit messages and it’s really enjoyable.

I also pursued a romance, because of course I did. I chose the cop-turned-PI River and while the few romance quests were really interesting (and very dark, trigger warnings all round before you do that quest), I was disappointed that when you finished his quests and were in an established relationship with him, that was it. You can interact with him on a really basic level but there’s not really any conversations, you can’t go and do stuff, or really explore your relationship with him on any level. I did his romance quests early on, and finished them quickly, so it was very dull for the rest of the game – a few more interactions would have been nice and made it feel more ‘real’. There are also two ongoing glitches – one where you ring him and can’t hear any of his dialogue, which by all accounts is very impersonal anyway, the other where his sister and her kids are frozen in creepy places at the trailer park, with no interaction options.

The skills/levelling up is good, one of the better layouts (again, looking at you Valhalla…) and you do have to specialise to a degree – you can’t excel at everything. I chose ‘cold blooded’ perks as my main ones and the majority of them are useful though some seem unnecessary. You do have to put some points into everything or you’ll find yourself becoming stuck, but you can reset everything if needed. The augmentations are interesting enough, though I found once I equipped good/useful ones I didn’t bother searching for more.

The customisation options are really impressive – you can choose pretty much all aspects of your character (even down to pubic hair) and can change them at will at a rip doctor. You do wonder if all the customisation is really needed – sure it’s fun to spend an hour or two at the start pissing about with eyebrow colouring, but you don’t really give a crap by hour one hundred. The same is true of the clothes and the numerous vehicles – it’s fun to have a mess with at the start but after you’ve racked up a few hours they really don’t matter.

Thankfully there’s no real grinding in this game, so you can pick and choose what to complete. Multiple-quest events like the Cyberpsychos can get a bit repetitive, as can getting all the delamain cars back home, but in general there’s enough uniqueness to each quest that it all stays interesting.

Overall, the world-building and character of Johnny are what make this game. The storyline is fine enough but pretty short. The side gigs and random quests are okay, but again nothing ground-breaking. If you can pick it up, it’s worth checking out.

UPDATE: They released another patch and they’ve fixed some of more egregious stuff, but not all of it. What they have done is seemingly reimagined the entire skills menu, which is an absolute ballache frankly. So much so that it has put me off booting up the game to actually finish it. They also seem have taken away the stats of the clothes, so while you can still customise what you’re wearing, it doesn’t appear to make much of a difference to your armour rating. Again seems like an odd choice.

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla

First released in 2020, I did actually begin playing the newest instalment straight away but this pesky thing called a child got in the way. I found it didn’t grab me in the same way that Odyssey did – you begin in Norway and it is a miserable landscape to explore. I racked up maybe 25 hours but then moved on to Cyberpunk 2077 and promptly forgot all about it.

There’s two things wrong really:

1. It’s just too damn big. I’m all for massive RPGs and collectables and random world events, I really am, but there’s simply no need to have so much other stuff to complete. Most of which has no bearing on the story at all.
2. Vikings and assassins. One is sneaky, subtle, agile. The other is a fucking Viking.

There are some really good things about AC:Valhalla – I mean, I’m clocking in at nearly 150 hours now so something is keeping me hooked. There’s enough interesting stuff if you manage to power through all the gumpf. The river raids are very enjoyable, but not in any way related to the traditional Assassin Creed mechanic.

Ivaar the Boneless is by far the best character in the whole thing, and while you might despise him, his character arc is absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately the rest of it pales into mediocrity in comparison, Ivaar being so erratic (and quite funny if you like his sense of humour) means that all the other supporting characters are poorly fleshed out.

The main problem is how repetitive it is. There are 16 areas in total to ‘pledge’ and the storylines don’t vary significantly enough to be all that engaging. Valhalla is set primarily in England in 872 AD, so while it can be quite picturesque at times it really doesn’t lend itself to the free-running mechanic that has made Assassin Creed games so popular. The sprawling cities of Odyssey were perfect for exploring, and differed enough to remain interesting, whereas Valhalla reuses the same (quite flat) landscapes a lot.

There’s also the various ‘mysteries’ you encounter. Similar to Odyssey you meet various inhabitants of England who ask you to help solve their weird and wonderful problems. An argument between two brothers, a woman accused of being a witch, a couple suffering infertility looking for a miracle, the list goes on. While some of these can be quite amusing, your decisions have no impact on the story whatsoever and don’t particularly give out exciting loot. You get to a point where you’ve completed over 100 mysteries and realise that is less than 50% of the total and wonder what the hell you’re doing with your life.

And finally on to the worst aspect of Valhalla: the skills menu. I am not one of those people who pours over every skill tree, plans their strategy from the beginning of whether to tank or bow. I pretty much wing it and hope for the best. However, even for the most lax of players, the skills ‘map’ is nigh on unusable. A star constellation is a nice idea, but it’s so sprawling and difficult to navigate that having any kind of plan is impossible. Not helped by the fact that not all the ‘stars’ are revealed at the beginning. You can reset, which is something, but it makes building your character specs unenjoyable.

The actual storyline at the heart of Valhalla is pretty weak. There’s Odin and a load of lore/fate stuff, but it’s not particularly interesting or engaging. I find this is true with a lot of Assassin Creed games, Odyssey aside.

So… if you can pick it up cheap (which you definitely can), it may be worth playing. But I wouldn’t dedicate the 100+ hours that I did – there are better games out there.

Saints Row V

So, what was enough to drag me back to the murky world of foolish ramblings? Why, the rebooted Saints Row franchise of course!

I’ll start by saying: I’m a massive fan of the Saints Row franchise, from about 3 onwards (2 was fine, I never played 1). It’s GTA on acid and I love the sheer stupidity of it, the ridiculousness of the characters and, of course, the innumerable dildos. It is the best way to waste hours.

The basic premise is that you and three friends start your own outlaw gang (The Saints), and you’ve got to expand by seizing power from other criminal organisations in the city of Santo Ileso. You control ‘The Boss’, who can look pretty much any way you want thanks to the pretty impressive customisation options.

It’s not exactly the most inspiring plot, but hey, we don’t play Saints Row for the storylines.

Unfortunately, for some reason the developers have decided to take Saints Row back to its roots – specifically the more ‘realistic’ feel of 2, and away from the mad horniness of 3 and 4. This means it feels like a poor man’s GTA (or, as my husband said, ‘the Wish version’), with less likeable characters, far less interesting storylines and clunkier controls.

Your three other friends are pretty two dimensional – occasionally you get a glimmer of backstory or character arc but it’s incredibly fleeting. Neena is a member of rival gang Los Panteros and while her story starts out promising, it crashes and burns harder than her car.

Kevin is a member of other rival gang The Idols (why are all these rivals living together?) and is painted with a very broad bisexual brush, but not given much else to work with. Eli is probably the best character solely down to his LARPing missions, which are a lot of fun and the best missions in the entire place.

The only other character of note is The Nahualli – a super-criminal that you team up with on some missions. Aside from that, pretty much everyone else is interchangeable, so much so that I can’t actually recall any of their names.

So what’s actually wrong with it?

There’s nothing really bad about the reboot, it’s just… meh. We waited nearly 10 years for this and it feels more like an RPG from the early 2000s.

A few things off the top of my head:

• There’s tons of pointless things to collect: drug pallets, car parts, dumpster diving, etc. At least in Assassin’s Creed you had to chase the bloody feathers under the pretence of working for the collectible. Saints Row literally highlights it on the map, no effort involved.
• Hidden histories. There are 16 of these, each as pointless as the one before. You have to find 5 information boards in each location and read them to hear about the history of Santo Ileso. Why? Who knows.
• Combat isn’t fun. Have I mentioned that Saints Row is meant to be fun? The only way to regain health is to execute people, meaning every fight is the same.
• The mini map, weapons wheels and menus are unintuitive and in some cases downright useless.
• The church is infuriating. A winding labyrinth of dark rooms that lures you in with promises of customisation.
• The photos. So many photos of things.

And that’s what it comes down to: everything is the same. You go somewhere, do a task that undoubtedly involves you shooting people, and thaaaat’s…. pretty much it. Don’t get me wrong, there are a few glimmers of hope, especially when you begin to buy enterprises across the city. Good old insurance fraud is still present, so you can ragdoll your way across a highway and earn lots of money, and Eurekabator! has a couple of fun side missions where you test out experimental weaponry.

But the criminal enterprises suffer from the same thing as the rest of the game – repetitiveness. You have to deliver 13 toxic trucks across the city for one of them. Nothing exciting happens, you just have to go steady enough to not ‘activate’ the barrels. Long gone are the days of driving a tiger around the city and getting attacked if the drive is too dull or too bumpy.

Like I say, there are a couple of missions that are definitely fun, and some of the cut scene dialogue will make you chuckle, but there’s none of the insanity or vibrancy that I’ve come to associate with Saints Row. There were so many times where I found myself loading up the game, flicking through the available missions, and just turning it off in favour of something else.

In conclusion, stick with the earlier versions and GTA V rather than picking this one up.

Lego Lord of the Rings

My two favourite things – breaking things and Lord of the Rings – combined into one game? Hell yes! 

The Lego games have really been going all out in the past few years, with franchises such as Batman, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones and Star Wars being tackled. Now while I found these entertaining enough, I was never convinced to actually put time and money into the game. The Batman game, as an example, was interesting enough and relatively amusing, but finally got repetitive and boring. Similarly with the Indiana Jones game, there seemed to be a lot of the ‘platform game’ style (such as Mario or Sonic style games) which can get really boring really quickly.

Maybe it’s the fact that I love LOTR, or perhaps developers Travellers Tales have just made a better game, but there was no point in the game that I was bored or that felt repetitive. You go through the entire storyline, so all three books, but they have obviously cut down on the ‘trekking across open country’ bits quite a lot. As you go along you unlock characters, gather the fellowship, complete quests and various other things. The sheer amount of different things that you have to collect throughout the game is enough to keep you occupied for a few hours – true adventurer, mithril blocks, red cheat blocks, characters, mini-kits, to name just a few.

Once you’ve played through the storyline, you open ‘free play’ which allows you to travel across Middle Earth as you will, completing various side quests, killing random bad guys and finding other random characters such as Radagast the Brown. The sheer size of the map itself i pretty mind boggling, and you can travel across it without much trouble, but if even that is too arduous you can always quick travel. On your travels you’ll find people asking you to find lost objects, secret areas and puzzles, and (perhaps my favourite) random races for you to complete. There’s nothing quite like directing Sauron around the base of Mount Doom whilst riding a sheep.

You’ll find yourself replaying the majority of the story in order to collect and complete every level, as in some sections you’ll need a specific character to perform an action. There is also the Blacksmith in Bree, who will take your mithril blocks and forge various items out of them, everything from a mithril shield to a mithril disco phial, which plays the most amazing song.

I’m proud to say that this is the only game on xBox that I’ve managed to complete fully (complete gamer score too) and this is quite impressive considering my attention span. Most games keep me entertained for about a week before I get bored of them – and it’s not like I play them all day every day either.

So in general. It’s great if you’re a fan of Lego, of LOTR, fun if you’re an adult or a kid (they’ve taken out some parts of LOTR and replaced them with slightly funnier cut scenes), and doesn’t get boring. Play this game!