Cyberpunk 2077 review
Abrasive rock-n-roller Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves) and Night City itself are the two main stars of Cyberpunk 2077. You may be surprised by which one grows on you more as the narrative unfolds.
2020 has been full of surprises. Some of them were good; but most of them were decidedly not good.
I’m sure I don’t need to get into it.
Actually, Judy Alvarez is the main star of Cyberpunk 2077, and I will fistfight anyone who says otherwise.
Cyberpunk 2077 and the accompanying tempest of $#/+ embroiling it could most certainly be categorized as the latter. In less than a fortnight, developer CD Projekt Red has become a veritable punching bag—the Michael Jordan of Michael Scotts, if you will. Check out this bingo card:
Backtracking on a previous commitment not to subject employees to crunch
Including dangerous flickering light patterns capable of triggering seizures in epileptics
Some truly incredible technical issues
Sony removing the digital version of the game from PSN
People far more qualified than me have taken CDPR to task and, though I am in 100-percent agreement with critics like Carolyn, I want to examine some other shortcomings.
After spending 73 hours in Night City, my main feeling is this: Cyberpunk 2077 is not immersive enough to be an immersive sim, and its world isn’t reactive enough to compare favorably to the standard bearers of open-world design. It’s a bit ironic that a game so concerned with themes of the self has such an identity crisis of its own.
A glitch in the matrix
Even on higher difficulties, hacking can trivialize the game’s challenge in a way that I truly appreciate. Many quickhacks don’t even trigger a state of hostility in your foes, so you can sit back comfortably and Overheat or Short Circuit dudes to (figurative) death.
Cyberpunk 2077 is not Deus Ex.
It’s a close approximation in its best moments, when my netrunner assassin is hacking into security camera feeds and decommissioning any hapless gonks caught unawares. Any camera footage you jack into becomes an extension of your own vision, and the sense of omnipotence that conveys is exhilarating, provided you have the quickhacks (tech magic) to enforce it.
But a handful of glitches and/or weird design decisions dispel the illusion a bit too often.
Exhibit A: I go out of my way to do nonlethal playthroughs (the “assassin” bit before was just for flavor) in any game that allows it. Shooting someone is usually the least-engaging solution, so I often find myself cranking the difficulty up and using as many self-imposed restrictions as possible to make things more fun. Except sometimes, when I would drop an unconscious body, their heads exploded. Which is very lethal.
Exhibit B: You can dodge in Cyberpunk by tapping twice quickly in any direction, which really should be reserved for fighting games and side-scrollers. So often I found myself trying to inch forward carefully, while crouched, only to break stealth and lunge past my intended victim. Speaking of curious mapping decisions, the C key is used to crouch AND advance conversations. Again, weird.
This guy got absolutely SMOKED (nonlethally, of course). Some weapons (blunt weapons like baseball bats or batons) are inherently nonlethal, but there’s also an ocular implant that can turn everything into a nonlethal weapon.
Exhibit C: Sometimes, you can fall at just the right angle, from any height, and you just… die. I never found any consistent rule for these deaths, but knowing that you could fall two feet and die, even 1 percent of the time, certainly discouraged me from using heights to my advantage in stealth.
The world is (not) yours
It sure is pretty, though.
Cyberpunk is not Grand Theft Auto.
Night City is, if you’ll forgive me for a moment, breathtaking. It’s dense, with an imposing sense of verticality, and there is far more geographical diversity than I expected to find. But Cyberpunk 2077 fails to leverage its city, as beautiful as it is, as an incentive for exploration in the way that many other open-world games have.
But it’s not what you do in the world that’s the problem. It’s what the world does to you—or more specifically, what it doesn’t. Hilariously, NPC reactions are extremely binary; it’s either a comical overreaction or no reaction at all. For example, if you accidentally dodge into an NPC, everyone in a mile radius will take off screaming bloody murder. Dodging shouldn’t be treated as a hostile act, especially when it’s so easy to accidentally perform.
Conversely, NPCs often feel like wind-up toys on a predetermined path. Park at a crowded intersection and no one will ever attempt to pass you—traffic will just become backed up for miles. This stoicism is amplified a thousand times when the game breaks in catastrophic ways—cars being flung magically thousands of feet through the air, vehicles randomly spawning inside of one another and exploding, etc.
I eventually got used to keyboard & mouse controls for driving, but I’d still recommend an actual controller.
The wanted system eclipses these other issues. Do a crime? Cops will sometimes teleport behind you, nothing-personnel-kid-style, and mow you down. But occasionally, if you can put any meaningful distance between you, it’s like nothing ever happened. As far as I can tell, there’s no game of cat and mouse. One side job put the brokenness of this system in sharp relief; you’re tasked with blowing up a van full of musical equipment, which inevitably draws the cops. Next, in what the game clearly intends to be a GTA-like car chase sequence, you’re told to flee the scene. But I drove for two seconds and cleared the objective with nary a cop car in sight.
There’s surprisingly little to discover amid the neon-lit alleyways and sand-swept trash heaps of Night City, save for a handful of neat spoils on hard-to-reach rooftops and some cool tarot-themed graffiti. You won’t stumble upon side jobs in the outside world—instead, a bunch of less compelling but lucrative missions called gigs (the third tier of mission behind main jobs and side jobs) await you. I suppose it’s a silver lining that the best content in the game—the numerous side jobs, many of which have no connection to the main plot—is offered up on a silver platter via a random phone call or text from an NPC, and is thereby difficult to miss.
A little somethin’ on the side
Cyberpunk 2077 features a handful of cool cameos, including Grimes as chromed-out popstar Lizzy Wizzy. Her questline… goes places.
Note: Some light spoilers will follow as I describe the premise of a handful of side quests.
One of the core tenets of the wonderful side quests of past CDPR games is that nothing is ever as it seems at first glance. This is the driving principle behind many of Cyberpunk 2077’s side jobs and, frankly, the driving principle behind my enjoyment of Cyberpunk 2077 overall. There aren’t any side jobs that reach the heights of The Witcher 3’s infamous Bloody Baron questline; but then, that questline is better than the entirely of most other games.
Kerry Eurodyne, former bandmate of Johnny Silverhand, is a major quest giver and one of a handful of romance options.
Instead, Cyberpunk 2077 offers up a number of charismatic and/or bizarre Night City residents who have intriguing problems that our hero, V, needs to solve. These problems often outwardly present as one thing while masquerading as something else altogether.
The suspicious break-in of a mayoral candidate’s well-fortified home might just evolve from a typical private investigation into a battle with invisible forces over the meaning of free will.
Would an assassin do THIS?
Another questline, which seemed like a typical hit (I swear my V wasn’t an assassin), was subverted immediately in shocking fashion and led to a touching and surprisingly difficult choice that few video games before it have asked of me.
I also got to talk a suicidal AI-driven taxi cab off a ledge, which felt pretty good. The culmination of this questline is absurd in the best way, and a neat parallel to some elements of the main plot.
These moments are CDPR at its most recognizable. And unfortunately, they will contend pretty fiercely with the litany of technical issues as the things I will recall about my experience with Cyberpunk 2077 a year or two from now.
Closing thoughts
Johnny Silverhand thinks everything sucks, and he is frequently correct.
Rogue, queen fixer of Night City and admirable Keri Russell stand-in, does much of the heavy lifting when it comes to fleshing out Johnny Silverhand’s character.
I decided to spare you three thousand more words by not digging into the narrative, its themes or Keanu Reeves, which I suppose makes this somewhat useless as a review. It’s worth adding that I wasn’t particularly excited about Reeves’s role in Cyberpunk 2077. But at some point, about two hours after his introduction, I realized I’d stopped holding my breath whenever Johnny Silverhand showed up and accepted that he was becoming more of a benefit than a detriment to the experience. I was satisfied with the ending I reached, and I continue to prefer CDPR’s brand of decision-based storytelling that doesn’t explicitly refer to good or bad outcomes. It’s a lot easier to roleplay and lose yourself in a character when the repercussions of your actions aren’t glaringly obvious.
I won’t deign to play armchair developer here, but it’s obvious in so many cases that this game would’ve benefitted immensely from another delay. Though I remain unsure whether my biggest gripes were missteps or deliberate design choices. I’m glad I was able to experience this game in nearly-ideal conditions (an RTX 3070 at 1440p), I can’t say the same for the overwhelming majority of others.
I suspect that much of this will read more harshly than intended. I made a conscious effort to leave my feelings for CDPR’s previous work—notably The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3—at the door before approaching this game, but perhaps a comparison was always inevitable (and not entirely unfair). Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t a bad game; but if we measure disappointment as expectation minus reality, it is absolutely my biggest disappointment of 2020.
I liked my time with Cyberpunk 2077. But I should have loved it.
I still love Judy, though.
