And, just to continue the trend: ME3 felt great, but difficulty-wise it was a complete joke. I played on Insanity for my very first playthrough, and I blasted through the game with my Vanguard. With other classes, I wouldn’t have even had the very few unpleasant surprises with instagib-bullshit enemies. For the…

As greedy as it is to say, I think CP77 felt like it was missing quite a few more systems that would’ve made it at least a properly ambitious game of its type for 2020; but then we’re back to your criticism, which is also totally valid. More systems might’ve made the critique even more trenchant (though, I dunno, a…

How can they possibly get around the total clash between online play and V.A.T.S., though?

Compared to netrunning/hacking, a Mantis Blade build is a giant noob trap that doesn’t hold together well at all. I was super pissed at how dumb it was. So, I have to disagree with an extent to the claim that every build becomes stupidly OP.

If there was any Big Mystery uniting this show, it was “with all the fuckery we’re throwing around, what ultimately happens to Sabrina Spellman’s soul... and why?”

Oh yeah, that’s some crazy shit, for sure. But that agent was looking ahead to when the blackmail was all used up, and managed to get Worthington locked in to a movie series whose second entry wasn’t going to be released for like 10 fucking years!

>in that it lends itself to easy cultural satire instead of grappling with much more interesting historical moments that they could have used instead.

>But he also notes all that diversity exists only at the surface level, while the fact that cops are often the most powerful teammates you can recruit undermines the game’s message of revolution.

The moment is coming around again! Avatar 2, baby; its subtitle is “holy shit Sam Worthington’s agent turned out to be the smartest motherfucker on the planet.”

They’ve already been straining British patience to the limit by occasionally conceding that America exists and is kind of important sometimes. An American actor would be the last straw.

I don’t know nearly enough about British-Indian cinema and television to make any legitimate suggestions, so here’s some joke suggestions:

It’s almost like that Marx guy was onto something.

If you don’t gameify that concept, the rest of the house of cards can’t stand up. To the best of my recollection, CP77 never even pays empty lip service to your aesthetic choices.

It does it a little bit. With a suite of mods, you can get much closer to the platonic ideal of such a system.

Yeah, for a property where obsession with appearance is a core concept, they really biffed on the armor/clothing system. Even granting that they didn’t have the time/budget to add (or keep) some kind of gameified aesthetic system, it’s still amazing just how simple it would’ve been to improve what they had.

So, a few things:

These blurbs could use an editor. It doesn’t have to be an Editor of the Year or anything, but, seriously: make the tenses agree. Add some commas.

Mass Effect 2's an easy game to love in isolation, but tough to love when taken in context. Mass Effect 3's gameplay is flat-out superior, as is its approach to the Paragon/Renegade gameplay effects. Quite a few scenes in ME2 sucked if you didn’t powergame to max out one or the other.

It baffles me that somebody can call this game “regressive” when it’s portraying a capitalist dystopia with a shiny neoliberal facade. Honestly, I feel like there’s an entire generation of games reviewers that have come up just flat-out not grasping the concept of dystopian fiction... or actively rejecting it,…

You’re not entirely wrong, but I still think you’re downplaying just how incomplete and/or buggy and/or poorly-conceived several of CP77's systems are. If you take one system in isolation and compare it to one of the worst offenders elsewhere, and then repeat, then sure, you can build your argument. But notice how…