JH

Talk about late to the party! While writing a review of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2024 feels a bit strange, in many ways this is the best time to play the game. CD Project Red have put an enormous amount of work in since its disastrous launch three and a half years ago and have turned their own narrative into a redemption arc on the scale of No Man’s Sky. Since I didn’t play the game previously and have no reference point this review is not going to contain much in the way of comparison (that can be easily found elsewhere), but suffice it to say that as well as bug fixes, some core features have been overhauled, added or changed completely to transform Cyberpunk 2077 into a different beast (cyborg?) than on release day.

I’d like to start by describing what the game is, because despite its extensive coverage I wasn’t sure until I played it. Wikipedia states “Cyberpunk 2077 is an action role-playing game played from a first-person perspective”, which is probably a good starting point. The game follows in the vein of games like Deus Ex and draws irresistible comparisons to Bethesda’s first-person open world games. As a player you will find yourself shooting, hacking and slicing your way through a variety of mission scenarios, interspersed by story and flavour dialog spread across the richly decorated world of Night City. You’ll get experience points, level up and purchase perks.

In a sense, the above characterisation is a disappointment. The initial trailer and subsequent marketing materials promised something new, fresh and truly next-gen. What we in fact got was a very old formula, albeit executed with love, care and to a high standard.

The first thing that struck me as a new player was the the world, its style and its detail. Night City is deep, layered and lovingly rendered. Though cliché, I wouldn’t hesitate to call it “alive”. Cars drive through the city intelligently, people fill the streets with purpose and meaningful conversations hum in the background. The city embodies the narrative themes by giving the impression it doesn’t give a shit about you and it exists in your absence. The first impression also states Cyberpunk‘s overall intentions: you are blasted with explicit adverts for performance enhancing drugs, cyborg implants and sex shows. This is the garish world you’re contending with.

The first act of the game features the heist-gone-wrong trope, a catalyst that drags you from seedy underbelly to sparkling heights of Night City. The story is large in scale, in terms of length, scope and themes. Continuing CD Project Red’s trend of making a blockbuster game out of esoteric media, Cyberpunk is based on a tabletop game released in 1988. This in itself inherits much from the book Neuromancer, and in many ways this feels like Neuromancer: The Videogame. It explores a world of corporate control, body modification, the nature of identity and an awful lot more besides. Cyberpunk probably bites off more than it can chew in this regard, but approaches its sprawling ideas with thoughtfulness and a sense of humour at all times. Much of the content is optional, seen through side quests, leaving the player to decide how much they want or need.

As noted, Cyberpunk works well as a cohesive whole. All of the above is reinforced and integrated with a consistent visual style. We can find the typical “neon-noir” of the cyberpunk genre in night-time city districts lit by glaring ads and store fronts. There is effective distinction between regions of the city, each with their own style and visual language: down-market sprawling residential semi-slums, upmarket LA-style mansions and sweeping industrial complexes. The map also features more rural areas surrounding Night City which provide a topographical pallet cleanser. Certainly, Night City is a pleasure to walk, fight and drive through and serves as a fantastic substrate to the game that lies on top of it. It feels like a real, working city and reminded me of large cities that I had visited myself – in much the same way The Witcher 3 felt familiar to my experiences on windswept moors and mountains. Furthermore, Night City feels like a character all on its own.

So you’re a tiny cog in a a gritty, in-your-face, degenerate near-future. What do you do? Cyberpunk places you in the role of a mercenary, providing a tried-and-tested conceit for the range of tasks you will be set: killing a target, kidnapping, rescuing, stealing. Here again, Cyberpunk is effective but not groundbreaking. You can shoot your way through, and the gunplay on offer here is excellent (far surpassing peers like Fallout), with a variety of weapons to choose from. Melee is also a valid option.

I’ve heard it said that Cyberpunk is an action game dressed in action-RPG clothing, and that is underlined by the lack of development of alternative approaches; principally stealth. This is my preferred play-style and my build reflected that. However, aside from the odd one-off quest objective or throwaway dialogue line, there is little motivation to go unseen. Likewise to complete the mission without killing anyone.

The game features a fairly robust “quickhack” system, which functions like magic would in other similar games. I also spec’d in this direction and found the system to offer satisfying synergies between the variety of quickhacks (blind an enemy, bait an enemy, misfire weapon etc), and also the more traditional shooting and slashing. Despite dedicated “covert” quickhacks, all of this felt like more of an accessory to the combat than to the stealth.

Having said that, I did have a ton of fun when I reached the top tier of quickhacks and unlocked “System Collapse”, which allows you to silently knock out (when appropriately upgraded) groups of enemies. I felt like a true netrunner bringing down a group of goons silently and unnoticed before creeping closer to my target over their spasming bodies.

A notable failure, even after upgrades and overhauls, is the inventory and crafting system. I played on PS5 but I don’t think it would have been any less painful on PC. Cyberpunk features a loot system which is again standard to peers in the genre, with players pulling “tiered” weapons off bodies and from shops which gradually get better and require swapping equipment out for new and superior options. The menu is a migraine-inducing nightmare, with weak comparison options often leaving me confused and not sure if I actually scrapped the assault rifle I should have held on to? The crafting system, which I only ever used to build “upgrade parts” to improve “iconic” weapons has a UI that seems intentionally opaque. I’m getting a headache just writing about it and I’m sincerely not convinced my loadout ended up much better than if I had just equipped every new weapon that had the green “better” arrow on it.

Conversely, praise is owed to the soundtrack: finely tuned to match the themes and style of the piece. Grimes is used both for soundtrack and as a voice actor for a pop-star character. The end credits theme to the DLC is a standout here, offering Radiohead meets Bond Theme against a futuristic twist on a Bond movie opening montage.

The soundtrack meshes nicely with my other target for compliment: the driving. Taking in Night City by car is a fantastic experience, with the radio blaring low-fi electro and the atmosphere of the neon streets oozing. Car combat was significantly improved at launch of the DLC, which was fun and thrilling but not quite a showstopper. The game features a significant set of activities centred around driving which perhaps indicates that CDPR overestimated its value. My build also provided a “blow up car” quickhack/spell which meant that I could explode all my competition in the first quarter of any race and then chill for the rest. To be fair that was pretty fun, but not exactly edge-of-seat stuff.

A final, minor mar on my enjoyment, which I face with many games, is pacing toward the end. I played this game for 90 hours, and at some point after 30, 40, 50 hours, I understood the world, the vibe and I’d seen the major areas. I was finding there was a little too much downtime between missions, even if I was targeting optional one-offs. CDPR, you’ve made a good game – now get me hacking, sneaking and shooting! Cyberpunk has a fast travel system, but only from and to specific, fixed fast travel points à la Witcher 3. A quick Google shows a PC mod exists for fast-travel from and to anywhere, and I used similar on my last playthrough of The Witcher 3 to enormously boost my enjoyment. I understand that the developers have put a lot effort into making this world – and I enjoy and respect it immensely – but please trust me to know for myself when I’m ready to speed things up.

They also execute a cheeky bait-and-switch with the frequent presence of flying cars in the story and background which are never usable by the player. A sure addition to Cyberpunk 2!

I’ve gone on long enough, but want to add a small note specifically regarding the DLC, Phantom Liberty, which I gladly purchased to lengthen my time in Night City. It adds a new region, new mission types and a new storyline to itself (and Idris Elba!). The narrative borrows from the Bourne and James Bond series, and indeed V themselves becomes a government agent not knowing who to trust. It is naturally more compact than the main narrative but I felt that this perhaps enhanced it, leaving me clearer on character motivations and the impact of my choices. Overall a fantastic addition.

To conclude, I had a blast with my 90-ish hours with Cyberpunk and its DLC. While perhaps overpromising on its initial premise, the result is a first-person action-RPG that can proudly stand shoulder-to-shoulder with it’s third-person brothers from The Witcher series. In fact, the same strengths and weaknesses are mirrored across the whole CD Project Red family. Their mechanics are respectable if not standout and their crowning glory is a world that pulses with life, feeling and grit.

Spider-Man 2 offers an open-world action adventure game that is as close to perfect as anyone could ask for. While not without its flaws, the depth, polish and outright fun on offer here are a true testament to Insomniac’s skill (if not their vision).

Spider-Man 2 is the sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man. In many places it builds upon, and in other places remixes, many of the aspects that make the original game great. You’ll find web-swinging around a lovingly realised New York city. You’ll find Arkham-style combat. You’ll find hanging from a thread stealthily webbing up grunts.

To begin with one of the game’s most striking features: it is beautiful. The textures are highly detailed and shine in close up shots. The city looks fantastic from a distance and crawling on its surface. Notably coming off Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the facial animations are realistic and effective. The game performs admirably on all of its three graphics settings. The cut-scene lighting and cinematography are truly best-in-class, and even non-scripted moments of swinging through the evening city are themselves cinematic.

The combat develops further on that of the previous game, this time featuring gadgets, rechargeable skills and what is essentially a super meter. The wide variety of enemies encourage various strategies, keeping the combat fresh, along with extra XP available for completing specific objectives (“Perform 3 Web Yanks”) in some combat encounters. The options available, along with combos, are almost too many to remember and, while I did find myself revolving toward a few old reliables, stayed interesting for the duration.

Sections of the game feature essentially back-to-back boss battles, which are fun and challenging but I found a bit exhausting (admittedly on the hardest difficulty). I would say gameplay suffers from a common affliction: the skills and abilities necessary for the majority of the combat (crowd-control, buying time, isolation of enemies) don’t apply to the boss battles. This results in a sense not that the boss battle is testing your skills to the highest level, but requiring you to develop a whole new set of tactics, strategies and reflexes. Perhaps a matter of preference, and indeed the boss battles feel unique, but I would have preferred the former.

The game’s weakest aspect – one that reduces SM2 to the rank of almost perfect – is its story. While it is well-acted, well-executed and punctuated with some absolutely thrilling cut-scenes, it is undermined by its near total predictability. It nicely portrays the conflicting demands of being a Spider-Man, but one can see events coming several acts ahead. At first this provides a nice sense of impending doom but sadly evolves into a plodding inevitability. This is of course a problem that is faily unique to Spider-Man, whose story has been told and re-told for decades and where creativity is likely to be limited by some licensing agreements. Nevertheless the game has to be assessed on its own strengths and weaknesses, and this is one of them.

Furthermore, the story feels bloated – partially due to the easily predicted story beats described above. Kraven and his Hunters, featured heavily in the game’s marketing, appear extensively and often but see little development or depth. Despite being a major chunk of the story, they could easily be replaced with any other source of jeopardy that would result in imperilled New Yorkers and some fun set-pieces. Frustratingly, he actually does very little hunting himself, preferring to send his thousands of grunts out to do it for him. Indeed, I wasn’t clear at all on Kraven’s motivation until a line was dropped in passing very near the end of his story arc, which brings me to another minor narrative criticism.

Substantial chunks of dialogue are delivered during combat, especially boss battles. Even on the lower difficulties SM2 is not easy, so it is to be expected that exposition delivered during combat might be missed. Some of this miss-able material is actually really important to the story, and I repeatedly found myself thinking “wait – what just happened?” while trying not to be pounded into the Brooklyn sidewalk.

In some ways SM2 can be at odds with itself. The breath-taking realism is in contrast to the more comic-book aspects of the story and gameplay. I couldn’t help thinking that a more stylised, Spider-verse visual style might have leant itself better. Perhaps that is a nit-pick, but some suspension of disbelief is required here and hyper-realistic graphics don’t help that.

I also found the character of Peter a little contradictory. [MINOR SPOILERS] There is some intentional, shall we say, internal conflict in Peter’s arc, but I found myself irked by the portrayal of his “Nerdiness”. In the world of Spider-Man, science and technology are basically presented as magic, that can do almost anything with a few narratively convenient limitations, and the scientists are the wizards. Peter is Head Wizard, who can contribute meaningfully to any field of science he is presented with. This is literally highlighted in a sequence where he meets a parade of specialists and their research, and he casually tells them one-by-one how they can improve on their life’s work. All of this in itself is not a big deal and just requires a bit of suspension of disbelief (see above).

However, I cannot forgive the contrivances of a story if they are not self-consistent. Having made the observations from the last paragraph, I was then irritated when a whole act of the story is dedicated to finding a missing scientist, because a particular science problem cannot be resolved without him! Instead of just using his Big Brain(TM) to solve the problem himself as Peter, he instead becomes Spider-Man to find the scientist. This can probably all be excused in service of some exciting gameplay, but it stood out to me as a bit of thoughtless writing.

For SM2018, some criticism was levelled at the stealth parts involving other playable characters like MJ. Insomniac have made significant improvements here, adding more mechanics than just creeping around and thereby providing more player agency. They are also used to deliver exposition and character development and at their best felt like scenes from The Last of Us. These parts certainly provide a change of momentum, but in a game so action-packed that is not always a bad thing. I never found myself sighing and rolling my eyes when these sequences began.

An interesting and unexpected failure of SM2 on release was the significant presence of bugs and glitches. Reportedly, these were absent from review copies but introduced in the Day One Patch. I personally experienced no less than:

• Numerous random crashes to dashboard
• Broken and missing parts of UI
• Inability to punch
• A timed challenge where the last enemy didn’t spawn so I couldn’t complete (perhaps the most frustrating)
• Missions would disappear when I reached the starting point
• An on-screen button prompt that didn’t respond to pressing the required buttons, leaving time frozen

None of these were gamebreaking and could usually be rectified by restarting at last checkpoint, or at worst a quick Google for a workaround, but it did take a layer of veneer away from a flagship title.

With all that said, I’m conscious of focussing too much on the negatives of what is really overall a remarkable game. And look at it this way: if the comments I’ve made above are the worst things a reviewer can say, that’s still pretty good.

Additional positives were the nice variety of side-activities. A particular favourite were New York photo opportunities, designed to communicate the spirit of New York independent of its spidery protector. These are accompanied by a little dialogue discussing the nature of the city and its inhabitants and add some nice (if a little rose-tinted) flavour.

I would like to conclude with what may be for me the highlight of SM2, and the substrate on which all other qualities are fixed: the swinging. This is the part of the first game which I thought about the most since its release and here in the sequel it is refined to perfection. Utilising the power of the PS5 we see the speed and elegance of Spidey’s web-swinging in its full glory. The game has a fast travel mechanic which I almost never used since getting around was such a pleasure. The traversal is fairly forgiving (and has some assistance which can be switched off in settings) but requires just enough thought to be continually satisfying when you get it right (and amusing when you splat into the side of sky-scraper). The swinging – along with the rest of the game – uses the skill-set of the PS5 DualSense controller to its maximum to add to the immersion of the experience.

When all is said and done, Spider-Man 2 is a blast from start to finish. It is the first game that I have platinumed on PS5, and that is saying a lot. While not a complete work of art, it does everything a game like this should in the best way possible.

When playing open-world games, especially ones with fun mechanics and enjoyable moment-to-moment gameplay, I find myself actively avoiding the main storyline, which will bog me down in dialogue and cut-scenes. Instead, I revolve toward the in-world activities and side-quests, which give me more of the mechanics and less of the fluff around it. In this sense Assassin’s Creed Mirage is the perfect game for me, because it has great gameplay and a completely forgettable story.

ACM is an open-world stealth action game that lets loose the player in 9th Century Baghdad during the reign of the Abbasid Empire. Broadly, the player is tasked with a series of tasks such as stealing items, gathering information and – naturally – assassinations strung together by a story of mysterious hidden forces.

Starting with the positives, the gameplay in ACM is really top notch. The protagonist, Basim, moves fluidly through the world in some of the best parkour the series has seen. Assassinations are weighty and satisfying and the player is offered a range of fun tools to help bamboozle guards and reach their targets.

ACM has shed the enormous skill tree of Valhalla for a stripped down but far superior alternative. It has fewer choices, but each has a meaningful impact on the strength and abilities of Basim. Options range from improving Basim’s situational awareness to additional combat manoeuvres, but the game really hits its stride when you unlock the variety of tools at your disposal.

Basim can use a blow dart that puts guards to sleep, traps to knock them out and fireworks to distract them. Once they are all unlocked Basim feels like he has a powerful arsenal at his disposal, making it fun, exciting and achievable to complete his goals entirely undetected.

I personally enjoyed that most activities contributed to overall progress. Completing side-quests (“contracts”) yields experience points. Looting rewards Basim with resources that can be used to improve his gear. This pairs well with the tight mechanics, as it makes pretty much any engagement with the game’s world meaningful.

The gear system is dramatically pared back too, for the better. The player can collect a variety of armour, swords and daggers, but each can only be upgraded three times (to add perks and improve stats). This further contributes to a more streamlined, focussed experience – as opposed to the RPG loot chaos of Valhalla and Odyssey.

Mirage also looks fantastic, from the outfits to the architecture. Baghdad is lovingly recreated in a way that makes me really feel like I know the city. Sadly the same cannot be said for the facial animation, which suffers from the same static dullness of previous titles in the series.

While all of the above makes ACM a pleasure to play, the same cannot be said for the story. At best, it can be completely ignored and at worst it is boring nonsense. The story beats come quick and shallow, with characters introduced and killed off before any substance can be developed. There are very few characters who are present through the whole narrative, and of those most are uninteresting. There is no greater indication that a narrative has misfired than [MINOR SPOILERS] a character betrayal supported by dramatic music and cinematography that leaves the viewer thinking “Am I supposed to be feeling something here?” Moments like that are in abundance.

Perhaps the most irksome aspect of the story is that its entire payoff is actually just an explanation of questions raised in Valhalla (which I did play but have mainly forgotten). It makes no effort to give the necessary context for its grand finale, and kind of left me with a feeling as if it’s just been revealed that Vader is Luke’s father – if Darth Vader had not been mentioned before.

I’ve looked into the wider story of Assassin’s Creed as a result of playing Mirage and I actually kind of like it. It definitely strays very frequently into batshit sci-fi insanity, but it’s fun in a way that complements the efforts at historical accuracy of the main parts of the games – if deployed correctly. I would have had no objection to ACM being tied into the wider narrative, had it been done in a more inclusive and interesting way.

In a sense though I actually liked the lightweight story, as I could blast through the cut scenes (which have skippable lines of dialogue) and just get back to the killing. I appreciated the purity. It gives the player the tools and a fun world to use them in, and then leaves them largely to their own devices. However, there is definitely something to be said for slowly building up a despicable villain over time and then having the opportunity to put an end to their evil by your own hand – a device used in the series’ earliest games but only weakly attempted here.

Overall Mirage is a great package for a certain type of player (like me). Despite it’s lacklustre narrative, it works best when it gets out of it’s own way, gives an objective and the tools to tackle it and allows the player to just play.

Or, An Idiot’s Guide to Local Gamestreaming

Having recently built a new PC, I was frustrated with the lack of an easy way to play games from that machine (in my office) on my living room TV. I tried using SteamLink on the TV itself, which was a working solution but found the performance to be pretty poor; poor enough to stop me from using it altogether.

As a result, I tentatively splashed out on an Nvidia Shield TV Pro. It’s a box that can play all your streaming favourites (Netflix, iPlayer et al) and also stream games from a PC on the local internet using Nvidia’s proprietary Gamestream software. The USP of the shield is Nvidia’s homemade AI Upscaling technology which will take a lower resolution image and increase it to 4K using magic AI algorithms (or something). I bought the box from Amazon on the condition I could return it if things didn’t work out. Long story short, I did keep the Shield but using it has been such an experience I felt the need to write about it. There’s a lot of articles out there espousing the Shield as a top-of-the-range steaming box, but surprisingly little on the range of issues that accompany it.

Fair warning, this is an article aimed at people seriously considering getting a Shield, people currently wrestling with one, or nerds. It’s going to get technical so abandon faith all ye who enter here.

My first impressions of the box were very positive. The UI was snappy, a delight in comparison to my TV’s built in software. The remote control was ergonomic and the whole thing had a quality feel. So far so good.

I immediately ran into problems when I started to use Gamestream. I tried to play Immortals Fenyx Rising from my PC on the TV and the game could not be detected. Thus began my first foray into the sprawling and esoteric online Nvidia community. After a little research, it turns out you can add games manually to the Geforce Experience windows app which will then become available to play on the Shield. Once I had done this, it worked pretty well.

However, it raised the question: why wasn’t the game automatically detected (unlike some others that were)? There were vague allusions on forums to some games being “Gamestream Optimised” but I couldn’t find any official word on that. Did these secret “optimised” games run better on Gamestream?

At this point it seems a good time to mention that there is pretty much no online documentation for the Shield – AT ALL. There is a “user guide” on the Nvidia website which amounts to “plug it in and hope for the best”. The GFE Windows app helpfully links you to a now defunct page: originally supposed to be a list of Gamestream optimised games, it now shows games available on Geforce Now (related conspiracy theory detailed below). The scant information that is available is spread in an internet breadcrumb trail between Nvidia’s clunky forums and reddit.

Further problems arose when I tried to improve my Gamestreaming experience using the settings in the app. There isn’t much to play with, essentially just resolution and max bitrate. Once again, I was left puzzling over what “resolution” actually meant to the app, for it didn’t always output the requested resolution. Sometimes it explicitly told me my requested resolution wasn’t available. I could even change the resolution of the settings directly in the game I was playing – what effect did that have?

(If anyone is stumbling upon this article trying to solve that particular riddle: it turns out that Gamestream has the ability to change both the resolution of the monitor being streamed, and the in-game settings (as long as the game is on the sacred, secret “officially optimised” list). So the Gamestream will do its best to output the resolution you have asked for. This is actually quite a cool feature, if only it had any signposting)

Speaking of monitors, one of the most bizarre quirks I have run into is the inability of the Shield to intelligently stream the screen that the game is playing on. In fact, for my unmodified (very standard) dual-screen setup, Gamestream exclusively streamed the wrong screen. I have delved deep into this one too and can provide the peculiar explanation here, which is one of the most mind-blowing pieces of programming oversight I’ve ever witnessed (and I used to be a very bad software developer myself).

Here goes: A GPU has a specific order it checks for connected screens in order to display the startup info for a PC, and the BIOS menu if you activate it. For Nvidia cards this is VGA > DVI-A > DVI-D > HDMI > DisplayPort. As far as I can tell, this is hardcoded and not customisable. Now, Gamestream will ONLY stream the first one of these that your PC has connected. This also cannot be changed.

In my case, my main screen (used for games) is connected by DisplayPort and a secondary screen connected by DVI. The GPU hits the DVI screen first and therefore, when it is connected, that is the ONLY screen that Gamestream will show. This can be solved by unplugging the second screen and restarting the PC, but I don’t want to do that every time I want to Gamestream!

A further arcane mystery of the Shield ( I’m getting to the end now, I promise) is how AI upscaling works. I’ll skip to the explanation on this one, but needless to say the UI itself doesn’t signpost this at all and I only found THE TRUTH after more forum crawling. Essentially, when AI upscaling is active any input below 4K will be scaled up to 4K using Nvidia’s algorithms. This means that you can improve your streaming by asking for a lower resolution and letting the box upscale it. This applies to all possible inputs (Youtube, Netflix) but the results I’ve seen have been mixed. There are a variety of unexplained settings to accompany this that I have yet to master.

In a strange twist, from forum posts I discovered a separate, third-party app called Moonlight which seems to be objectively better than the native Gamestream app in every way. I was surprised other apps were even allowed to connect to a PC with Gamestream enabled but here we are. The Moonlight app has more settings to customise, and they are more clearly explained. I have solved many of my problems by using the Moonlight app and I’d encourage anyone experimenting with Gamestream to try it out.

To sum up, using Gamestream on the Nvidia shield is not a plug-and-play experience. It’s more of a plug-and-spend-two-weeks-poring-over-three-year-old-reddit-posts experience. And sitting here as I am, at what I hope is the end of my saga, I am left wondering why is Gamestream – one of the flagship features of the device, heralded prominently on its Amazon page – so shit? 

Don’t worry, internet wisdom has got the answer. Basically, Nvidia has ended up competing with itself with its Gamestream (local game streaming) and Geforce Now (internet game streaming) services. And you have to pay for Geforce Now. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the former list of Gamestream games has been replaced with a Geforce Now page. Perhaps the apparent neglect of Gamestream is an intentional ruse to drive gamers toward the paid Geforce Now service. Of course, this is all conjecture and there has been no official abandonment of Gamestream support, but in light of the removal of the official list of Gamestream games Nvidia’s silence is conspicuous. If this tinfoil hat theory is true, it’s a very shady move from Nvidia; they use Gamestream as a selling point for the Shield. Indeed, that’s specifically why I bought it and inadvertently wandered into the mess described above.

And yet, despite all of this, I would actually recommend the Nvidia Shield to users looking for a premium experience. Content streaming platforms like Prime Video are well optimised and can be upscaled if you like and, when it’s working, the game streaming capabilities are exactly what I’ve been looking for.