To say that Cyberpunk 2077 was released in 2020 seems farcical, considering the nightmarish launch that it hard, but that’s the release date on Steam so I’m going to go with it. The biggest game of the year, the biggest failed launch of the decade and then maybe the biggest comeback too? Let’s have a look.
Before I begin, it’s worth noting that I purchased Cyberpunk 2077 at the same time as I purchased Stray, so I very definitely avoided the nightmarish start that people who purchased the game at launch would have experienced. I understand that, for some people, such a launch is automatically reason to avoid a game going forwards – I’ve had trouble with some games and then never come back to them again because I just can’t bring myself to do it, so I can relate. I will say now that I only ever encountered very minor glitches in the game that required me to reboot and I never noticed any lost progress as a result. It is, to all intents and purposes, a game that runs smoothly enough that you wouldn’t question the points where it doesn’t. It runs better than most Bethesda games. Maybe not when it launched, but now at least.
For those that don’t know, Cyberpunk 2077 follows your player-character ‘V’ as they (you determine appearance, sex, gender, genital shape, titty size, the works) attempt to become a big-time player in the criminal underworld of Night City, a futuristic cyberpunk settlement loosely based on San Francisco. Shit goes south during the big ticket job that’ll earn you a spot in the big leagues, and the rest of the game is basically trying to survive the fallout from that – no easy feat considering the fallout includes a bioship inside your head possessing the “soul” of Johnny Silverhands, a terrorist rock star that ‘died’ in 2023, which is trying to take over your body after initially saving you from a fatal gunshot wound.
It’s a crazy ass plot, but you what? Something about it just works. You have a variety of main quest tasks to do, from infiltrating areas to acquire information, to going in guns blazing to places and taking down anyone foolish enough to get in the way, and that’s without taking into account the vast array of side-quests – from becoming the number one boxer in the city to tracking down a kidnapper’s hideaway; from helping desert dwelling nomads to steal tech from a military corporation, to taking part in races so that the woman behind the bar at a club you go to sometimes can get revenge for her lover’s death in a previous race. The world feels lived in, quest-wise, with all manner of ways you can tackle the task at hand.
My own, personal, method for taking down most enemies was to find one that looked particularly strong and trigger a psychotic break so that they would go ahead and help whittle down the enemy numbers for me. Stay in the shadows, clean up the mess when it’s over, either using my ridiculously overpowered shotgun or my ridiculously overpowered blade-arms, leaping from enemy to enemy until they’re all dead, emitting a wide-spread electrical shock to any enemies near enough when I dropped below a certain amount of health, which recharges so quickly that between that and the literal second life I get every couple minutes, killing me is a genuine achievement.
Whilst I praise the number of quests, they do after a while get a bit samey – go here, kill people / retrieve item, try not to be spotted, kill everyone when you are invariably spotted. Maybe it’s my own fault for blasting through a few at a time instead of pacing myself, but I’m one of those that wants to achieve full completion, but doesn’t have the drive to actually do it. I assume I would need to buy all the cars from the game to manage that, too, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.
The levelling up system could do with some trimming down, in my opinion, and the crafting/upgrading section could just be cut completely for all I care. You collect enough loot that you don’t need to be able to make your own, often sub-par, equipment. I lucked out with a shotgun that turned out to be better than everything else anyone else has dropped for a good four hours of gameplay, and that’s taking into account the fact that there were better weapons coming along pretty much every time I killed more than a handful of enemies. I actually found optimising my gear to be a frustrating experience, just because I would go through the effort of sorting it, do another mission and then have to spend another 10 minutes sorting it.
As for the levelling, there’s just too much to pay attention to be able to do it justice, and not enough opportunities to level things throughout the main game to make it so that you don’t have to at least think about what you’re doing with it. There’s this whole “cool” stat that I basically ignored, just because the boosts didn’t seem worth it and when you’re a big-titted redhead with a variety of guns and blades in your arms, capable of murdering anyone who gets in your way, who won’t think you’re cool? Especially when you take up smoking cos the terrorist living in your head wants a smoke.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with having upgrades that one can use to make themselves stronger – the body-mod options were pivotal to both plot, my own build and the cyberpunk genre as a whole, so I can’t critique that. In fact, I rather enjoyed just looking at things through the eye upgrade that allows you to zoom in and scan people, to mark targets. It was handy, and in many ways it was just interesting too.
The use of Johnny Silverhands – famously played by Keanu Reeves – as a foil to V is clever, whilst also allowing for the possibility that we, the player, are actually Silverhands himself. Johnny is quite clearly an asshole, to everyone around him, but we end up becoming more and more like him as we attempt to survive his unintentional attempt to take over our body. Likewise, he becomes more and more sympathetic a character. I cannot get over how close a likeness he is to Reeves, it’s uncanny, it’s remarkable, it’s something that I wish more games did. Not necessarily with him, of course, but with actors in general. If there was ever a time that it felt like games were being properly accepted by the mainstream as the immersive story-telling devices that they can be, the whole use of an actual, widely respected, actor as a main character is that time. It’s a pity the game was foiled by a rushed release window, but it did at least finally achieve what it was meant to be after all the patching and reworking they did.
They’ve also included romance options and, genuinely by accident, I ended up falling into the lesbian relationship which resulted in a singular sex scene, some flirty chatter, a text chat with her mother and a specific cutscene at the end of the game… as well as the odd romantic text chat from the partner themselves, who if I recall seems to call us their pumpkin, but in Spanish. It’s a nice touch, I think, to have them be this more present character than they would be in, say, Skyrim, where unless they’re following you around they’re just at home doing whatever while you go off on an adventure. While you can’t have them tag along with you, it’s clear that this is because they are people with their own lives.
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Speaking of their own people with their own lives, everyone you encounter in Night City seems to have their own schedule to follow, but there doesn’t seem to be all that many people to encounter. The streets are eerily quiet a lot of the time, with most roads not even half-filled with cars in even the busiest areas of the city. There are no massive crowds of people, even in the sections where you visit markets, unless it’s for a specific quest related reason. It’s this massive map, but it just feels so darn quiet.
Is it the perfect game? No, absolutely not – some of the controls are clunky, particularly while driving, as well as the levelling system and the completely pointless crafting section – but it’s a great step in the right direction that I think most open-world fans would do well to check out properly when they have a chance. I regret nothing.
8/10
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