Man, the turn range on some of these vehicles is terrible. I shouldn't have to do a three-point turn on a
bike to get it on the opposite lane, it's not an F1 car, for fuck's sake! I know keyboards make for a bad driving experience, but come on!
Where can I buy a Quadra? I picked up a Tyger Claws one for a joyride and at least that thing had a functioning steering wheel.
This design fucks with the flow of the game. You begin a mission, you end it in 2 mins, you start a mission, you end it in 2 mins, this start and stop gameplay flow that go nowhere and dont reach a climax make gigs really repetitive and unsatisfying.
Yeah, this is definitely something that's been growing in my mind as well. It's the same formula as The Witcher 3 but it doesn't work in this one, and I suspect the problem is space and density. In the Witcher, you've got those wide open environments to traverse, which provides a completely different pacing to how everything's crammed together in Night City. Cyberpunk's sidequest economy ends up feeling simply superfluous as you constantly trip over little 2-minute missions.
Another minor aspect which I think makes Cyberpunk fall further short of The Witcher's experience is - and I never thought I'd be saying this - the first-person perspective. In the Witcher, you
see Geralt pore over a crime scene, bending and squatting to examine various details as he delivers quippy one-liners, and that helps give a more "cinematic" feel to these interactions. In Cyberpunk, having all these things happen in first person, even when they're replete with the same lines and animations, keeps the player's focus in "game mode." Now, don't get me wrong, that's perfect for your Deus Exes and I'm still sore over Eidos Montreal forcing me into third-person stealth, but that's because those are titles with supremely strong gameplay, whereas CDPR's GTA-inspired formula feels bare-bones as you strip out more of its dramatic flair.
Also agree with you on the level design - at first, I felt it was Fallout 4-level basic, but after playing a bit more I think I can pick up some tentative Deus Ex elements, attempts to carve out alternate, skill-based approaches. It doesn't really work out, though, because of the small scope of most of these individual levels, and it ends up looking like token efforts.
That is my point on why this system is inaccurate. A "7/10" can only convey meaning if the person who reads it can measure it against other "7/10"s he has seen. And from there onwards it all becomes just as subjective as saying "I mostly like this game but it has its weak aspects". When the logic becomes "the reviewer's 7/10 based on his experience with other similar games compared to my understanding of 7/10 based on my experience with other games and reviews of other games, certainly made by different reviewers each with their own variance to the meaning of 7/10..." it's much more practical to express your score in words, as precisely as you can, than to give a marker with no negotiated meaning, supposedly more objective but in fact the being the opposite of objective.
It's just a way of expressing customer satisfaction at a glance, putting a numerical bow on your conclusions paragraph. If you're talking about a single review, it's indeed only useful if you have a good level of familiarity with the author (perhaps like I felt I did with my local gaming magazine fifteen years ago), but once you start piling a whole bunch of these together, the aggregate picture has its uses.
For a publisher or developer, an aggregate score like on Metacritic can have value in future planning, since modern day pre-order/day-1 purchase culture means you're most likely to suffer the consequences of your failed release on your following title, rather than your current one.
As for you as the individual consumer, Metacritic is largely useless but aggregate scores across specialised communities might have have some value, especially as a counterweight to individual prose where everyone waxes poetic about whatever irrelevant detail crawled up their backside. Take Cyberpunk and the Codex for instance - you can get plenty of mileage out of written impressions, but you're also gonna get bogged down into loads of contradictory waffle about it sucking because "it's like GTA" and, simultaneously, because "it's not like GTA." However, you are familiar with the Codex as a collective character, so if you had a poll where Cyberpunk got two out of five stars, you could draw some conclusions from the Codex thinking it's shit, whereas if it got five out of five stars, it's probably
incline also shit but of the turn-based variety.
