Cyberpunk 2077

I'd put the Witcher 3 up there with my top ten games of all times, a serious contender for the best written RPG I've ever played, competing against Planescape: Torment and Knights of the Old Republic 2.

After the triumph of Wild Hunt, the hype for this new release of CD Projekt RED was insane, which is leading to strongly mixed reactions. Eight MILLION preorders is an incredible result; however, a certain part of the fandom seems to be receiving this as well as the last season of Game of Thrones, churning out scornful memes at impressive speed.

I've read console versions have important issues in terms of visuals and stability. On my PC no complaints on the matter, the game looks neat and I've encountered no major bugs.

More than a cyberpunk Witcher 3, however, this feels like Deus Ex: Night City.

Writing is typically fine, both in the main and secondary quests, with memorable characters and solid dialogues anchored by strong voice acting. CD Projekt RED has a knack for creating NPCs far more interesting than the usual quest-delivering puppets.

What doesn't work? Well, the open world sandbox element of the game lacks immersion and feels rushed compared to, say, Red Dead Redemption 2, which came out two years ago. Night City is vast and looks impressive (I particularly like its verticality) but kinda feels empty, because NPC (and vehicle) AI is lacking and, well, there's not a lot to do other than quests. Some features reek of cutting corners, like the awful police AI: when a crime is committed a bunch of angry cops will spawn behind you like law-enforcing, trigger-happy ghosts and start shooting. It's so rough compared to the sophisticated reactions of lawmen in RDR2.

My advice: if you liked, say, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and want to play this on PC for the story and characters, Cyberpunk is strongly recommended. If you crave an immersive sandbox cyberpunk experience ("GTA 2077: Blade Runner"), wait for new patches and see.

TLDR: 83/100 (probably going up after patches similarly to The Witcher 3)

Preface:

Cyberpunk 2077 was among the most highly anticipated games in history. Its brought to us by the same developers of the Witcher games which, in addition to the casting of Keanu "Breathtaking" Reeves, is probably what made this game as hyped as it was. With all this hype this game was destined to be a failure for some, for me however it was probably the best gaming experience I have had all year. Despite the amazing writing it is just average in some of its "RPG" parts, this did not hinder my enjoyment much, but it might lower yours significantly.

Story and Characters:

Main Story:

Cyberpunk's Main story (around 25 hours) is relatively short, especially when looking at the Witcher 3 with its around 50 hours. The biggest weak point of the story is the first act. It mostly just serves as setup for the main story and introduction to the world, this is also where your chosen live path only ever plays a major role, which is somewhat disappointing. After this pretty generic 3-4 hour long introduction the story jumps to its high point and stays there for its entire run, it's an incredible story where you as V get to decide how it plays out. Once starting the second act you will stay at the edge of your seat throughout the entire journey. The ending is an emotional banger, and it does not really matter what ending you get, V's fate is always a punch in the gut, always fitting with the classic themes of the Cyberpunk Genre and the World of Night City. Another detail i find fascinating is that the name of every quest is the name of a song and said song matches the tone of the quest pretty well. Chopin for the final was such a fitting choice.

Side Stories:

The side quests are where Cyberpunk truly manages to outdo most games I have played prior. If you read this right now and have yet to play/finish this game, go play through the side missions even if they seem meaningless at first most develop into mind-boggling stories that show what kind of bleak future for the human race is prophesied here. The side quests always end with though moral choices, they also further the understanding of Night City and how AI "lives" in it (Delemain quest line or "Coin Operated Boy") to a disturbing look at Night City's politics in "Dream on". Not to even mention the more personal quest that are equally as amazing, especially the four main ones with one romance option in each (depending on the gender of your charatcer).

Those often surprising developments lead me to always do every side quest. You never know if the basic "kill x" side quest you just started develops into the best quest of the game. There is also some foreshadowing in some side quests, adding greatly to the replayability of the game.

The Side quests also majorly influence the endings you can achieve, doing some side quests will open up 5 more possible endings. You are free to rush, only playing the main story, but also can experience the game in its entirety and get something totally different as a ending.

Characters:

The Characters are the heart of the game. The story is great and raises interesting points regarding AI, our possible future and body modification, but the characters in this grim world are what makes the ending so emotional especially with what happens while the credits roll.

However, V, is the in my opinion worst written one. The 3 live paths did introduce you to him but never really gave huge insights to any bits of his past. Every other character is believable, and you get to know them greatly, from goals, past to personal struggles you get to know everything about the people living in and around Night City.

The Characters of Cyberpunk 2077 are more than you might expect at first glance, the most prominent example here is clearly the man, the myth, the legend Johnny Silverhand. He is also the character most prominent throughout the story and the one that undergoes the most surprising but amazing development. The others are not much different though, they all are so well fleshed out and developed that once that ending hits, it really it's hard.

Gameplay and Sound

Combat with balancing issues Its all up to you how to approach a mission, you can just run and gun, hack the enemy into killing himself or bring out your blades from inside your arms. Across the board everything here is pretty average and not groundbreaking in any way, the game is clearly not about the combat and more about the story, the amount of variety however does make up for it. A huge problem for the combat is that the different aspects are not that well-balanced in my opinion. Melee and Hacking/Stealth feels way too strong. Another problem is that missions turn from hard to very easy in no time at all and even turning the difficulty to the highest level does not make them more challenging.

Leveling up:

They handled the role-playing features very well in my opinion. There are attributes and perks. Attributes are here more major while perks are more specific. The Attribute points are sparse, and you can't get all maxed out. That further increases the replay value since you can't get your Attribute points back. Always trying different builds will be one of the main reasons to replay this game.

Sound:

The pretty average gunplay gets compensated here. The Gun sounds are what makes the combat fun pair that with the banger that is this games soundtrack, and you will have fun just shooting up some cyberpsychos. The Voice acting is also top-notch.

The AI Its just bad. Nothing more to say, it surely is a downgrade from games that came out a couple of years ago.

The World: Night City

Open World: Atmospheric but not the next GTA CDPR's worlds were always about stories and not about you interacting a lot with it. What you experience in this game you experience in the quests, not in any side activities. There is not much interaction with the world. Its mostly a stage for the characters to play on. You have an apartment, but it does not feel like "home" because you just can't do anything with it. Just don't go in it expecting it to be a Rockstar game, because it is not. However, the atmosphere in Night City is amazing, driving through the rain as never been better in any game i have ever played. Its also very detailed, you know by looking around in which district you are, what people live here and how they live.

Visuals Its stunningly beautiful. My old GPU really surprised me with how good games can still look with it. The Photo mode also is a great addition to really capture the beauty of Night City. Its not well optimized though, it does run relatively smooth but dips below 40 fps at times. Even on moderate settings.

Technical Problems

It seems the ones i had were relatively mild but still decreasing the enjoyment to some little extend.Especially when i had to reload just because i got stuck with a quest which happened at least 3-4 times. Technically speaking its clearly a mess but the same was Witcher 3 and look how that turned out!

Wrapping it up Despite all the flaws that this game indeed has. The miserable AI, the lack of interaction with the world (even The Witcher 3 had Gwent) and the balancing issues, just to name the biggest ones. It has Groundbreaking characters, themes and stories to carry the game. Pair that with the beautiful world that is Night City you get a Breathtaking game that is worth every penny i paid for it.

The games foundation is superb, it just needs some more work and neat extra features and its a contender for my personal top games of all time.

For me, this game has completely redeemed itself.

From playing it at launch I was thoroughly disappointed. With all the glitches and bugs I just kept forcing myself to enjoy it, but I've given it another go on Xbox Series S and it is like a brand new game. I feel like this is what the game was supposed to be like when it first got released. The graphics are smooth, no bugs/glitches; you get the odd visual glitch where something won't render in but for me that is very rare. I'm loving this game at the moment and I'm starting a brand new save for the third time now. Give this game the hype it deserves.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that was obviously conjured up to be a huge platinum, AAA hit and that, for not totally clear reasons, it fell very short of achieving that.

The best way I could describe it would be this: imagine that the game was very well thought-out, a lot of resources and creativity put into it to make sure good ideas were concepted and developed, a very solid base laid out in terms of the overarching structure and design of the whole product but that, at some point, the budget was pulled from the game and developers ordered to wrap it up for deployment in the cheapest, quickest way possible with whatever resources they had at the time.

The whole game and most individual aspects of it feel wide but not deep. Everything about Cyberpunk 2077 feels fine but very few things feel fully realized.

Let's take Night City, the actual place the story takes place in, as an example. When you are in the outskirts of town and you look at the city from afar, it looks majestic. When you get close to that cityscape and look the faces of those very same buildings from a close distance, things start to feel off. When you are down on street level and look up towards the tall skyscrapers all the way from below, it looks amazing but when you actually want to climb or interact with those skyscrapers, you're denied of that. At first glance, everything is nicely-modeled, detailed, realistic, intriguing and inviting but on closer inspection, disappointment takes the wheel. Even the initial quests and introductory areas really conjure up the notion that you're in a vast, unexplored world that's alive and that has a ton of things to see and experiences to enjoy. A few minutes later, however, when you actually walk down the streets of the town and are left to free roam, everything feels incredibly generic and empty. In the first firefight, the level layout is engaging, there are many tactics to approach it and there's a sense of imminent danger. When bullets start flying, you can shoot pieces of plaster and concrete off the walls really allowing you to appreciate a sophisticated and promising physics systems that would make any battle much more interesting and satisfying. Yet all of these promises get diluted very quickly and the rest of the game has nothing to do with the initial impressions.

It's hard to put a finger on what exactly creates this disappointing vibe. Whatever the cause, I take a look at the game world and it's very clear that this was set up to be a huge game with a lot of content and high quality subsystems but for some reason this vision was left unrealized. All pedestrians do one thing: walk in a straight line, 90% of the buildings you can't go into, as if they were made of cardboard, highways and avenues are, at times, populated with only one or two cars and so on and so forth.

This phenomenon also trickles down to the actual missions and gameplay content. Most side-missions are just 'steal that', 'hack this computer', 'kill this NPC' and they become stale, repetitive, very easily. Also, they have pretty much no impact on anything tangible other than the self-contained experience of completing that mission. Dialogues? More of the same: most conversation choices are absolutely irrelevant and seemingly penned in as an after-thought to create some illusion of player interaction and choice. Even on missions where you are required to do things stealthily, if you don't, the only consequence is the quest-giver saying "hey, you're a disappointment" but rewarding you (albeit with a bit less money) for finishing the mission and calling it complete regardless.

Character development? Same deal-o. Yes, there was clearly some thought put into romance routes with different characters but all those scenarios feel like sketches of what they were meant to be. You can romance a character, have sex with them and all but confess your love for them and a couple hours later they are with you on the phone speaking distantly as if you had just met. Skill trees and character customization? Yup! There's like 10, 12 different skill trees and, save a few notable exceptions, they sure as hell don't feel like they mold or specialize your character into anything separate from any other character.

Let me beat the proverbial dead horse for the last time: there's this quest, right? One of those staple secondary questlines in modern RPGs you are introduced to very early on in the game, a pursue-at-your-own-leisure type of deal. We all know the kind. In this particular one, you have to fight a bunch of different opponents in street fights and, eventually, reach a big bad boss. When you finally beat him, nothing really happens. Yes, you are given some money. Yes, one NPC says "hey, good job!", but that's it. Even the NPC that hands you the quest and keeps tabs on progress through it all says absolutely nothing at the culmination of it. It's so abrupt and anticlimactic that a lot of people took to Google in search for answers having the same thoughts: "the quest must have bugged out" or "there must be a glitch where the dialogue for the finishing of the quest didn't trigger". But no: it's just the way it is haphazardly implemented.

There's definitely a pattern: the foundations for most aspects of the game are great and solid but something happened along the way and Cyberpunk 2077 became a rushed, unfinished, empty product instead of an honest labor of love. By the way, this company clearly knows how to make a hugely successful, beautiful game: they've done it with the The Witcher series. It's clearly not a matter of expertise or know-how. What's also clear is that the game was going to be bigger and better than what we actually got.

Having said all this, I still believe you should play this game through, at least once, if nothing else, for the main story.

From a technical standpoint, we all know the release for this game was awful and unplayable for some people, but as of today, in patch version 1.3 the game is playable. It still is glitchy and frustrating at times, but it's stable: just had literally two crashes in more than 60 or 70 hours of playtime and I could finish all content in the game without having to do crazy workarounds to finish missions (okay, maybe once).

Incomplete as it might feel, what's present in Cyberpunk 2077 can be fun. Depending on the playstyle, the basic gameplay loop can be pretty rewarding for quite a few hours, particularly if you can jive with the main narrative from a storytelling point of view.

Speaking of the story, I would venture to say that the main selling point of the whole shebang is the plot. It's interesting, it's more or less well narrated and structured and the interactions between the main cast and the world around them are, for the most part, compelling enough to leave you hungry for more. Hell, I'll say this: Keanu even had me in (very manly) tears a couple of times.

Now for some hyper-specific personal recommendations that most people will hate, but hey, who's writing this review?

1) Play the game in Japanese with English subs.

Don't ask me why, but it works. I never do this in any game, but there's something about the general aesthetic of Cyberpunk 2077 that lends itself to this. Feels much closer to the anime Akira and Ghost in the Shell than Bladerunner and Total Recall. It just makes the whole experience feel much more natural, engaging and immersive than hearing the English voiceovers.

2) If on PC, get the mod "Muted Markers".

Default loot visibility is weird and annoying, since you have to constantly be spamming your scanner for item markers to pop up and, even so, it glitches out and you might miss important loot. This mod fixes this and is the #1 quality of life improvement I can think of.

2b) If on PC, also get the mod "Annoy Me No More".

Removes fall damage (come on, people have cyberlegs and can telepathically hack into stuff but they die if they drop from a 20-feet-high ledge?). Other very good quality-of-life fixes that you'll probably want to install are bundled in this very same mod as well.

2c) If on PC, also get the mod "Holster by Tap". Whoever designed the holster/weapon cycling for the PC version was a sadist.

3) Play a Netrunner.

The whole playstyle revolves around hacking people and devices while remaining more or less away from the action. It starts out a little slow and it's a bit gear-dependant, but, after a while, the way you can control and dominate multiple enemies instantly and safely with quickhacks becomes pretty fun and unique to this game so it's probably something you want to experience to some extent in your playthrough.

4) Play a time-stopping Samurai.

Grab a katana, the Qiant Sandevistan Mk. 4 "Warp Dancer" cyberware (don't punch Fingers!) and 3 Sandevistan heatsinks. This is one of (if not *the* most) fun builds in the game. If on PC, there's an essential mod that really fixes the mechanics in this build to what it should've been by default: it's called "Better Melee". It contains not only fundamental fixes, but it there's also a module that gives Mantis Blade functionality (basically a leap-to-enemy attack) to any melee weapon, which makes katana builds super fun. Very highly recommended.

4b) If on PC, get a trainer that has a 'no cooldown on skills' option.

Being able to use your Sandevistan to time-stop constantly, combined with the "Better Melee" addon turns you into an anime Samurai. Freezing time, rushing a room slashing through and leaping to every enemy and thawing time to watch them all get dismembered simultaneously is oh-so-satisfying.

6) Play a knife-throwing ninja.

By default, the knife-throwing system is ridiculous and unusable, but if you're on PC you can get a mod called 'Enhanced Throwing Knives' that makes knife-throwing absolutely viable as a build and while the stealth shenanigans are not great in the game because of AI and the skill tree, it's still fun and a decent option if you prefer a less direct approach.

Cyberpunk had one of the worst releases of all time. It had so much bugs and glitches that it was barely playable. But after a while majority of it was all fixed and that was when I got it. And after playing thought the game it's not that bad it's has a compelling story with some Beautiful graphics the open world feels alive and the combat is not that bad you basically become an unstoppable killing machine by the end of the game. Keanu Reeves was one of the best parts of the game he is with you all though out the story. The game also has it's own choice wheel where you pick what your character says and the choices you pick will affect the story as a hole. The game has about 6 different endings so there is always a reason to replay the game. There is tons of additional content to do after the game with tons of side quests and collectables to find. The game also lets you select your origin story and that will make different characters react to you differently and you can only meet certain characters depending on your origin story. Overall the game is not bad it just had a bad release I would recommend to play it now as the game is not that bad anymore.