Cyberpunk 2077 is an undeniably ambitious game. What you might not expect from it is a feeling of nostalgia. Spending my Christmas playing Cyberpunk 2077 took me back to playing Deus Ex invisible War as a kid on Christmas day back in 2003. I fell in love with a genre that was new to me, the FPS RPG. A genre that allowed deep layers of role-playing and level customization and narrative choices, all while keeping the fast-paced action of a first-person shooter. It was then I developed a soft spot for the janky RPG shooter. Deus Ex felt small and somewhat linear at the time. You would just jump from environment to environment. It didn’t feel like a connected world, so it's cool to play something like Cyberpunk that feels like everything I enjoyed about those games blown out into a massive ambitious open-world.
Cyberpunk 2077 (PC, PS4 [reviewed], PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series X)
Developer: CD Projekt Red
Publisher: CD Projekt Red
Released: December 10, 2020
MSRP: $59.99
Cyberpunk 2077 is also a unique case study that will challenge just how many small technical issues you are willing to put up with to enjoy a messy, but essential open-world gaming experience. I use the word essential because Night City itself feels like a groundbreaking artistic achievement.
Speaking of nostalgia, the amount of Grand Theft Auto influence in Cyberpunk is staggering. From the world’s feel to the eclectic radio stations, this game feels almost like the futuristic GTA game I always dreamed of. Cyberpunk 2077 impressed me more artistically than the last two GTA games. It’s breathtaking! Sure, technically, it's only about ⅓ the size of something like Red Dead Redemption 2, but the city is dense and packed with so much detail. The art direction might be my favorite of the year. Nothing looks quite like Cyberpunk 2077. I would stop and stare at every single object in the world. From the bright neon signs to the futuristic furniture to the smallest little cyber themed personal effect somebody might have on their desk. Extravagant futuristic highways wrap around massive gorgeous skyscrapers. Citizens of Night City wear clothing with glowing emblems and foreign design patterns. Almost every single bit of this world feels lovingly crafted with the Cyberpunk aesthetic in mind.
It's not perfect though, some NPC models have wonky-looking faces, and there are probably a few too many repeating billboards and advertisements, although several of them had me smiling the first time I saw them. The game takes place on a day/night cycle you can speed up and adjust at your leisure, much like the Witcher 3, and when the sun goes down Nighty City is a sight to behold, but during early morning and dusk, textures can appear a bit bland. I noticed so many gorgeous little details on my PS4 version, including smudges on windows and even subtle furniture design textures. The ugly stuff is just a bit more glaring because so much of the game does look great.
The combat harkens back to something more akin to Deus Ex as mentioned before, but with more emphasis on loot, which I love. When you approach a combat scenario you have your usual FPS options in place. Do you want to stealth through and encounter by sneaking up on enemies and hacking cameras and computers? Do you want to run in with your giant blade arms and hack away in a chaotic mess of blood and murder? There is a respectable amount of options here to satisfy whatever your play style is. As much as I enjoy the looting and shooting aspect of the game, it can be overwhelming at times picking through every corpse after a firefight. Cyberpunk 2077 takes place from a first-person perspective so much like the Elder Scrolls games, melee combat here feels sloppy, but it gets the job done. Hand to hand combat feels particularly awkward. Much to my surprise, the shooting felt quite good, and I enjoyed the simple loop of looting new strange cyber weapons and upgrading my abilities. The enemy AI isn't particularly impressive, and the battles can sometimes feel chaotic and messy. For the most part, this works with the general outlandish tone and feel of the game, but it's still worth noting. It's a janky love child of Deus-ex/Bethesda style combat and I had a ton of simple fun with it! It's janky as hell but fun and diverse enough to hold my interest for fifty-plus hours.
If you have played an open-world RPG in the past decade, then you will feel right at home here with the usual upgrading and equipment systems. You have a character screen that allows you to view your character model and equipment, including cyberware, and a standard upgrade screen where you put level up points into abilities like stealth, combat, and there is even crafting. The only criticism I have is that it’s all a bit overwhelming at first and a bit overwrought. For example, as mentioned previously, the game has crafting, but I never felt inclined to use it. Crafting also seemed superfluous as I was generally able to loot everything and move through the game just fine on the normal difficulty. Cyberware feels a bit overly complex as you can visit surgeons called Ripper Docs to install various upgrades. Do you want blade arms? Well, you would need to visit a Ripper Doc and sift through some fairly dense menus. You get the hang of it all over time but it's a lot to take in at first and a bit overwhelming, especially when you can quickly run through the game just blasting everything to bits, but where is the fun in that? Also, for anyone familiar with open-world RPGs, you will loot a lot of Junk. You can sell it all for scraps with a simple button click. It helps with the world-building to see all these different objects that you can pick up and examine/sell, but it's also a chore that yields little for your effort.
One of the more unique aspects of the gameplay is Brain Dance editing. A Brain Dance in the world of Cyberpunk is a recording of an event played back via a cybernetic implant allowing you to see past events of a crime or any scenario that’s been recorded first hand. It's basically a complex new detective mode to enable the player to investigate crimes or dig deep into someone's memories, exploring for clues to help further the narrative in some situations. Much like many aspects of the game, these seem overly complicated at first, but after a few, they become much easier to navigate. They allow for some exciting ways to investigate some of the darker moments of the game. There is something creepy about rolling back through somebody's fuzzy memories like your rewinding a VHS tape, pausing and fast-forwarding in search of lurid clues. As cool as these sections were, they could also be frustrating as I often felt stumped looking for clues, especially during some of the more complex side missions. In general, I think BD editing is unique and important to the narrative, but it comes at the cost of some hair-pulling moments where I felt lost.
As far as your character is concerned Cyberpunk 2077 allows you to create your own character from a good variety of options...even selecting a penis or vagina. I had high hopes for the genital customization. Yes, you read that right. When CDPR announced this would be one of the first games in history to allow genitalia customization I was intrigued. It was not just because of the hilarious videos and screenshots that would swarm social media, but narrative implications. Would my badass merc let down a date by dropping trow to reveal a minuscule member? Could I have an elephant trunk sized penis dragging across the streets of night city? Sadly the implementation here is basically superficial and fairly limited at that. You get a few basic penis and vagina sizes and nothing seems to affect the relationship/dating aspects of the game. Bummer.
The relationship/sim aspects of the game were something I was also really looking forward to, and they were a bit disappointing as well. I was hoping for more depth and options when it came to building a relationship and whom to build that relationship with. You can only romance four primary characters in the game, but you can hook up with a handful of characters. There are a few joy toys or sex bots scattered throughout night city you can pay for a one night stand, and there are a few side characters you can also woo into a short sexual fling. Because I chose the CORPO life path, Meredith Stout was a character I was interested in dating early on. You meet Stout early on during a major mission in the game, and through some conversational options, I chose to work with her. After the mission was done, she sent me a text; the game has a simple but nifty cellphone system where you can call and text almost every character in the game; after a quick response, she wanted to meet me in a dirty hotel. We banged it out, and that was that. It wasn't really the relationship build-up I was hoping for. I guess in some ways; it works for her character. A corporate agent for Militech focused on business. She fucked me and left me feeling empty so I guess there's some narrative value in that comedy. She did leave some legendary loot on the bed afterward. A rare Dildo that functions as a melee weapon. I proceeded to mushroom stamp enemies for the next seven hours with pure joy.
The four primary characters in the game you can romance have more of a buildup up as you will do a series of missions before hooking up. After my empty fling with Stout, I turned my attention toward the gorgeous punk hacker, Judy. Judy was a primary character that was romanceable, and it was interesting getting to know her through a series of missions and eventually forging that romantic bond. Judy’s narrative arc ended beautifully with a heartfelt and sensual trip through her past before she gave me the keys to her apartment, solidifying we had become an item. I felt satisfied with how everything with Judy played out. I guess I was just expecting more options and more variety to the romance options in the game. For a game this ambitious having only 4 primary romantic options seems slim, but they are handled very well.
When you begin the game, you can choose from three life paths that function as basic backgrounds and starting paths for your character. As mentioned before I was a Corpo character and this game me several options when speaking to characters involved with corporations in the game. You can also choose from Street Kid or Nomad lifepaths, and I look forward to trying those out on future playthroughs. After you select your life path, you get about an hour of gameplay setup specific to your class before the game’s storyline emerges, and the main storyline truly begins.
The narrative, while a bit uneven, is stronger than I expected. Early trailers left me with the impression that the game’s ridiculously loud nature would rub me the wrong way when it came to emotional investment or finding the characters interesting. Would the vibe of the storytelling be too obnoxious and abrasive for me to enjoy? This does happen on occasion, but generally speaking, the narrative arc is well done. The first act is pretty damn engrossing, and a bit more emotional and poignant than I expected. Cyberpunk 2077 has a title card that drops several hours into the game and it's bloody brilliant. The second act felt much more uneven and dragged for me in a few places. However, when the main storyline felt a bit flat I would just tackle a side quest that sounded interesting to break things up.
Compared to The Witcher 3, CD Project Red's RPG Opus, this game’s side content falls a bit short. It's important to remember that The Witcher 3 has some of the most memorable side quests in all of video gaming, so failing to reach that bar while disappointing, isn't the end of the world. Still, some of these side missions need to be seen to be believed. One involves a talking gun named skippy. Another involves an escaped convict that wants help with a public crucifixion. The yellow question marks on the map were like a random grab bag of entertainment. Random crimes are marked on the map with blue icons and are mostly used as a quick means to level up and earn cash with little narrative value. The game also separates the larger side missions and gigs into the menu screen so you can easily browse for a new fun activity to do. In general, the menus are pretty overwhelming at first because there is just so much content, but once you get the hang of where everything is located, it becomes second nature.
The main narrative, however, feels a bit stronger to me than The Witcher 3's. It might be because I just really found the narrative hook of the game involving Johnny Silverhand performed by Keanu Reeves to be a clever and memorable way to approach the subject matter and aesthetic of the world. Also, my female V was pretty endearing as a player character and voice acted very well by Cherami Leigh. There were several characters in the game that I was genuinely emotionally invested in, including myself. Unfortunately, I feel like having character customization, as mentioned before, does little to enhance the experience of the game because it all takes place in first-person. The game has some clever moments in the first act to remind me what I looked like, but overall it just doesn't add much to the game. When you talk to a character you stay in first-person view so it's much different than something like mass effect that allows you to constantly see your character. It's not implemented poorly, but it didn't add much value to my experience. There is probably a way to have a single-player first-person narrative with a customizable character, but the genre just hasn't figured it out just yet. Cyberpunk 2077 features several endings, and it's fun to dissect and analyze those with your friends. There is absolutely nothing groundbreaking here, but it's all fairly well-executed across the board.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a game I enjoyed so much that I continued to play despite it crashing on me more than a few times during my thirty-plus hour playthrough on my PS5. In all my years playing games, I've never experienced a AAA game that has crashed as often as this game did, but again for what it's worth, I would immediately jump back into the game because I was having a great time.
I experienced a plethora of small comical bugs that didn't affect gameplay in a meaningful way, but I did experience a rare bug that caused the title screen never to show up. Yeah, I never got the title screen on PS4. It just cut to two characters awkwardly staring at me for ten seconds. It wasn't until the additional PC playthrough that I could experience the brilliance of that moment, but by then, it was a bit marred. Speaking of which, I put over 20 hours into the PC version of the game and experienced almost no issues, but I wanted to focus this review on the console version of the game. The game’s PC version is a slam dunk and one of the best games of the year, especially running on ultra settings, but this review is based on my experience with the game’s PS4 version.
Verdict: A review for Cyberpunk 2077 is currently a fascinating thing. On the one hand, if you are dying to play it, you have probably already purchased it. On the other hand, if you were patient enough to wait initially, the controversy surrounding the game has perhaps solidified your decision to wait. You cannot currently even purchase the game digitally on PS4. One of the issues around the game’s technical issues hit peak damage control a few weeks ago. Sony removed the game from their digital store. Cyberpunk is messy as hell. In many ways, it is disappointing when considering the pedigree of the Cd Projekt Red. Still, it’s also addictive and engrossing with one of the most incredible cities ever created in a videogame. I've been playing the game nonstop since release, and I have no problem saying if you can find it, buy it.
Buy it
Author: Morgan Barnes
[This review is based on a retail build of the game purchased by the reviewer]