Cyberpunk 2077 Review

For the last week I've been deep in the gritty streets and neon sidewalks of a city. 

It's almost my own city, but not quite. Occasionally I'll recognize a monument or a panorama that is straight out of the view outside my window, right here. For the rest of the time, the glowing streets of Night City are a world only a few brief steps removed from the horrors of the real. 

In Cyberpunk 2077, we step into the shoes of the futuristic everyhero, V. Delving into the machinations of skyline dominating megacorporations and the brutal life of street level crime, all the while listening to the backseat driving of a time displaced rocker-turned-terrorist. It's time to burn Night City to the ground. 

V is what you choose to make of them. The character customization of Cyberpunk 2077 is both impressively trailblazing and strangely crippled at the same time. How we design our version of protagonist V allows an assortment of choices and options that would be fantastic for a standard GTA style game, but beyond allowing some sci-fi options to eyes and metallic teeth, there's little here that actually takes advantage of the Cyberpunk genre. 

Being able to alter V's genitals separate of their body type allows for the illusion of gender subversion, but then having to choose your V's voice to officially designate them as 'male or female' in the eyes of all in-game characters immediately circumvents it and returns it to basically picking your male or female Shepard.

While it absolutely can't be understated that it is insane for an AAA title released in the west to let you create a slender femininely bodied V with a huge cock, it then feels like any further effort was diverted from sticking the landing in character customization, and I can't help but feel this is one of the areas the game may have been handicapped by the famously rushed final days well documented elsewhere.

After an opening introduction unique to your chosen character origin, you're let loose in the dark streets of Night City, and the hand holding is blissfully light. An issue often found in the genre is a habit of slowly introducing game mechanics mission by mission, piling them upon one another until ten missions later nothing has really passed but a series of game mechanics you'll never use again. Cyberpunk throws you into the deep end pretty much from the get go, with access to almost everything you can do in the game from the start. Something wonderful carried over from The Witcher 3 is the fact that almost any character build is effective and a legitimate direction to take your V. 

The guns blazing approach is fast and accurate, with the game definitely being optimized for the first person shooter design. Guns are wildly varied, from the usual pistols, revolvers, shotguns, sniper rifles and all manner of machine guns, but then added to this is the tech side of guns, allowing you to interface with certain weapons to take more effective control, sending bullets automatically seeking for heads in your enemies. 

A bit more unusual in a first person game is the ability to run a robust melee combat build, which is also extremely fun. Far more quick and accurate than trying to use close range weapons in something like The Elder Scolls, using fists here is fast and carries a great sense of impact. The default boxing is fine, but soon you'll be able to augment your arms into Mantis blades to slice up enemies, or Gorilla fists to deliver huge blunt force blows. Your arms can even be altered into the whip-like Monowire, or fitted with a projectile launcher to change standard grenade tossing into direct RPG accuracy with your bare hand. 

Outside of weaponry, you can also take the far more Cyberpunk route of Quickhacking, a system of multiple different tweaks and abilities allowing you to take advantage during combat, quick as you'd use something like spells in a fantasy game, to do things like shutting down your opponents optical sensors or exploding the grenades in their pockets, right up to sending viral system failures into a group of enemies and watching it jump from one to another like a fatal meme. Other uses of the Quickhacking system allows for avoiding large amounts of combat situations entirely if you prefer. Using stealth tricks and turning the environment to your advantage to either circumvent enemies or destroy them without even being seen becomes a devious and playful alternative to using weaponry. While you'll occasionally encounter enemies who will Quickhack you in turn, I only ever encountered them using simple DOTs on me, and it would have been fun and more challenging to encounter enemies who use some more nefarious hacks.

All these character equipment options are supported by a complex advancement system, growing with your level, with a wide variety of buffs and boosts, making certain weapons stronger, allowing you to apply debuffs with fists or adding bleeding effects to blades, and making your Quickhacks faster or adding a multitude of effects to them. Building into these skill trees adds to your chosen abilities drastically, upgrading hacking into real battlefield controlling effects and turning melee combatants into regenerating juggernauts. 

Taking the V you have crafted, genitals and mantis blades and all, into the underbelly of Night City, the game flourishes most in the characters you meet. From your best friend Jackie, a hardened child of the street with a heart of gold, to aging rock musicians turned gangsters and taxi driving sentient AIs, Cyberpunk 2077 has a wealth of fun and unique personalities to indulge in interacting with. Some of the games best moments are hidden deep in a wealth of complex side missions, with one easily missable moment involving a convicted murderer-turned-Night city messiah sticking out to me in particular.

And then of course, we come to Johnny Silverhand. It's impossible to even really talk about Cyberpunk 2077 without talking about Johnny Silverhand.

Johnny Silverhand is a complete piece of shit. He's an egomaniacal, narcissistic rocker well past his day in the limelight who once detonated a nuke in a major metropolis just to prove a point about capitalism. Johnny is forever at your side, judging your shitty choices, talking down your self worth, and forever reminding you that in the grand scope of the Megacorporations who run Night City, you are absolutely nothing. Johnny is both angel and devil on your shoulder at the same time, dropping by to share a story of fucking groupies at some long forgotten show, or to let you know he thinks the guy you're talking to is a wannabe poser or a corporate stooge. Johnny's presence is a unique facet of Cyberpunk 2077, and one of its most enjoyable elements. It was no forced star-power misstep to cast Keanu Reeves as Silverhand, because it's clear he loves the role, and somehow through all the crude, antagonistic snark he throws at you as you journey together through Night City, Silverhand is still lovable as all hell.

Night City itself is a wonderful world to take your journey through. It's energetic and absolutely filled with stuff. The constant barrage of noise and advertisements and buildings and stores is delightfully varied, fun to observe, and interesting to explore. The street art is incredible and unique and feels real. Even late in the game I came across very distinct looking unimportant NPCs who were wearing something I hadn't yet seen in the game before. The incidental characters on the street or filling out one of the cities many nightclubs or bars always wear something wild and they do seem designed, not randomized.

Seeing everyone else wearing such fantastic clothes continually hammers home how little we can customize our own protagonist though. You'll casually run into characters wearing spiked cocktail dresses, huge fur coats, translucent plastic mini skirts and all manner of outrageous sci-fi styles, but we as V don't have access to any such garments. The clothing you can buy in stores is all a little samey, mainly consisting of street wear that wouldn't look particularly out of place in a GTA game, and doesn't jump out as wildly cyberpunk in most cases. Another oversight is the inability to really alter your character. We see people on the street who have chrome flesh from head to toe, cops with glowing cybernetic eye implants, and one of the gangs is based around heavy augmentation and routinely has entire facial organs replaced with all manner of glowing red orbs or mechanical jaws. Why on Earth can't we do this too! The lack of getting to have even something as simple as a robot arm in character creation seems to miss out on half the fun of living in a Cyberpunk world.  

Night City of course isn't complete with out its nightlife. The gangs of Night City, both the style and overall concept of each one, formed a large part of the games design push pre-release and are present in just about every bit of supplemental content about the game. The sexy all-female Moxes, the monstrous heavily augmented Maelstrom, Soviet Scavengers, Japanese Yakuza themed Tyger Claws, the dubiously voodoo themed... Voodoo Boys, all of them have a distinct stylistic flair, an atmosphere that colours the city as we interact with and combat each gang.

The thing is though, we really don't. The gangs are completely secondary to the main story, and really only form a small aspect of the city as a whole, which is a mystifying design choice. 

Even a quick glance at the in game map of Night City sees it separated by area, with the symbol of the gang that primarily operates there, but they never really come up as you navigate the area. Start a fight in any area of the game, it's the same police who come after you, when it would have been much more fun for it to have been that particular areas designated gang instead. Fighting a string of identical police robots is dull compared to, for example, facing a group of Tyger Claws with katanas riding up on motorbikes or the attack of a crew of barely-dressed Moxes wielding baseball bats.

While we have some minor interactions with Maelstrom and the Voodoo Boys in the main story, it's brief. Many of the gangs, especially fringe ones like the Scavengers and 6th Street, are completely ancillary to the game as a whole, and feel like they're barely fleshed out whatsoever. 

The presence of the gangs should be a major way to make coming to each of Night City's seven boroughs feel distinct, and their absence in the story and even just casual play of the game itself is a disappointment considering the atmosphere they could have helped add to the city. 

The only real interaction we have with each different borough is the presence of the 'fixers'. These characters communicate with V through text message and video calls and generally act as your quest givers for each hub, sending you details on things to steal, people to kill or cars to buy. Each is different and has their own personality, some more than others, but generally the fixers aren't as important in the grand scheme of things as it seems they should be. 

We don't really know why V is compelled to interact with most of these fixers at all. A couple are connected to us through the story, but some simply call us up out of the blue and expect us to dutifully run off to complete a side quest for them. 

In one extremely memorable sequence, V meets a local gang leader, and takes a walk with them through the slums of their city. We watch how they interact with locals, how they talk about their corner of Night City, and listen to how they expect V to help them with their own goals. This brilliant moment gave us everything we needed to know not just about this character and the part he plays in everything, but unveiled the uniqueness of that specific part of night city. It would have been great if every fixer got such a neat introduction to the narrative as well. 

The times in the game that we take a step away from Night City and journey into the nearby Badlands are surprisingly poignant. You'll find yourself driving through endless rolling dunes of trash, discarded electronics and kitchen appliances while the city sits, gigantic on the horizon, belching smog and advertisements into the skies. The roads of the old world are there, partially buried under dirt and burned out cars, but what's there looks uncomfortably like it does in reality today. You'll pass motels and bars, old truck stops and bus stops that are relics of times gone past, but something you'd see any time you were to head even a few miles outside of the real Los Angeles. 

You'll spend a fair amount of time speeding around Night City and the surrounding area, and of course you'll do it in one of the games many vehicles. While early on you're supplied with a starter vehicle fitting the starting concept you picked for your V, you'll soon find yourself without one and in need of wheels if you'd prefer to avoid hoofing it around Night City. While the fast travel system is helpful, by the end of the game you can zip immediately pretty much anywhere you need to go, it's a big place in the meantime. 

The variety of cars and bikes you can steal on the street GTA style is what you'd expect from the genre, and the rest you can purchase from your fixers or be rewarded with if you play your cards right in certain side missions or story chapters. Another example of the game choosing quality of life over realism, any vehicle you own disappears into a nebulous off-screen garage to be summoned to your location instantly at any time, and you can leave them wherever you like without worry that they will ever be damaged or lost. However by the time you're earning enough money and respect to purchase one of the many high end futuristic sports cars or anime style superbikes, you may find the convenience of the fast travel has replaced any need to actually use them. 

The more time I spent in Night City, the more I enjoyed myself. Cyberpunk 2077 started off a little quiet for me, and it took a moment for me to get the feel for it, but when the story decides suddenly to take the plunge and grip you, you best believe it fucking does. There's moments of cinematic tension that are immensely entertaining, and some quiet scenes of unexpected tenderness that stuck with me. Johnny Silverhand knows a little about losing yourself, feeling like you don't know who you are at times, feeling lost in the world. The story is, at it's heart, a personal one, and searching for a way just to continue to be yourself is a powerful drive beyond any villainous scheme or a typical saving the world yarn.

The way V's story can end is varied depending on your choices, from quietly satisfying to deeply sad, but all endings are a spectacle to be a part of and worth seeing.  

While it has been covered at great length elsewhere, it's impossible to fully look back at Cyberpunk 2077 as a whole without addressing the issue of bugs. As with bugs and glitches in all games, YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY. I personally was very lucky, and in my 70+ hours exploring every inch of Night City on a PS4 Pro system, I encountered only a handful of minor bugs, all solved by a quick restart to a recent autosave, and a few instances of crashing. The game would sometimes take its time fully loading in a new area, with textures and character details popping in over a few seconds, and occasionally I'd run into strange graphical quirks like an individual clearly smoking their gun instead of a cigarette. Patches in the first week since release seem to have begun to iron out issues, and already the game does seem overall more stable. Nothing still found in game is truly game breaking, and if you don't mind a few odd or sometimes hilarious graphical quirks here and there, you'll likely find nothing that bad among the bugs to still be found in Cyberpunk 2077. 

I enjoyed my time in Night City. The story itself rounds out to a solid 25 hours, and the side missions and world around it flesh out another 30. I'd love to see the world grow and expand, and some of those missing aspects filled out in the future. I've got the feeling I've not quite burned enough of the city to the ground just yet. 

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I played Cyberpunk 2077 on a PS4 Pro.