My gaming attention has been pretty fragmented lately. I've divided my time between three titles, and here's what I think about them so far.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty--I enjoyed Cyberpunk enough to finally purchase the Phantom Liberty expansion. It starts off pretty hot--you break into Dogtown, an isolated part of Night City controlled by Barghest, a paramilitary group led by Kurt Hansen, after an enigmatic netrunner named Songbird begs you for help and promises a cure to V's fatal Keanu Reeves problem. Soon Airforce One crashes and you have to help the President of the New United States escape. It's all very reminiscent of Escape from New York and the graphical spectacle is impressive. The game cools its heels after rescuing the President, and V is soon embroiled in a spy caper involving Idris Elba and the game switches gears to more of a James Bond style romp. It's all pretty cool, but there are a lot of cutscenes, and despite them being beautifully rendered, you'll find yourself absorbing a lot of story rather than mowing down cyber-psychos. When you do some shooting, it's pretty fun. I used the Sandevistan to slow down time, along with cloaking from the new Relic skilltree to obliterate enemies with my shotgun, or double dashed through the air to finish off Barghest soldiers with my katana that can deflect bullets. You have quite a lot of options if you're willing to spend the points. Be prepared for a pretty long journey. I think I'm only about a third of the way through the story after about ten hours.
When I first played Cyberpunk, I did it on a RX 5700xt Radeon. With my RTX 3080, I can finally use DLSS and ray-tracing. Cyberpunk even has a path-tracing mode (actual realistic ray-tracing with multiple light bounces!) although it's barely playable on anything but a high-end card. I definitely noticed the reflections, while the shadows are a fairly minor upgrade. As for ray-traced lighting, it just looks different, if you even notice it. Path-tracing does look amazing, but I have to bump DLSS down to Balanced, which looks a bit low-res, and then I'm only averaging about 30 to 40 frames per second. Just my two-cents, but ray-tracing is a pretty minor upgrade unless you're going all in with path-tracing.
Some screens:
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun--A boomer shooter with satisfying gunplay, somewhat confusing level design, and a strange difficulty curve that usually finds the game too easy, with some hard spikes every now and then when you run out of health and armor. I'm about a third of the way through this one, and I find it pretty comparable to Prodeus. It's best played in spurts. The pixelated look of the game is pretty cool, but there are shader compilation stutters from time to time, a given since this is an Unreal Engine game. Worth blitzing through if you're on Game Pass. I liked Dark Forces a bit more.
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Helldivers 2--I'm not as apeshit about this game as the rest of the internet. That being said, it is really fun to play with your friends. A Starship Troopers simulator, Helldivers finds you assaulting various alien worlds either full of giant bugs or terminator robots, coordinating with your four man squad to complete various objectives. What Helldivers does really well is simulate the carnage of warfare. You can call in various types of airstrikes, which are required to take out the harder enemies, such as chargers or bile titans, and the various types of unlockables, including defensive deployables like Tesla towers, really give the game a different feel than other co-op titles. I would say it's a tad buggy, however. I haven't had any trouble getting into a game, but the developers had to struggle to add servers, since they underestimated how big a hit the game was going to be. Definitely check out if you have some good gaming buddies.
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