Years after its announcement and months since its release I’ve decided to give Cyberpunk 2077 a go. Despite owning the game, I didn’t play it not for the obvious reasons of it being horribly buggy at the moment, but out of my usual principle of not playing story-driven games that have DLCs announced for it until said DLCs are out. I don’t like playing story-driven games until they’re “done” and I was willing to wait a year or more, just like I did with The Witcher 3 and it’s DLCs and expansions or recently with The Outer Worlds. But after almost half a year of CDPR spending all of their efforts on patches instead of additional content, I figured that the wait might be a bit too long for my liking and played the game in its 1.21 patch version. What an experience it has been.
Cyberpunk 2077 is an open world RPG that is both unlike what you can expect from it, and is reminiscent of many things you might’ve played by now. I think the most apt description of what it plays like would be to say – mix Deus Ex, Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines and Grand Theft Auto V into one game and you’ll get something that resembles what you get with this game. It’s a gigantic open world that is extremely easy to get lost in, just like you can in any huge city of modern day. It’s full of quests, from very simple one-off missions that play like a simplified immersive sim and have barebones story to them, to complex multi-stage side story questlines with characters you get to learn more about and whose lives you affect, to hours-long cinematic main quests that mix all of the above and often go in completely unexpected directions.
The most shocking thing about the game is that all of that actually works. If VtM – Bloodlines often felt awkward in how it tried to mix melee and ranged action with stealth, traversal and social elements of gameplay, Cyberpunk 2077 actually does it justice. It’s not faultless, you can’t do everything that makes sense, like what a proper immersive sim would allow you to do. If the game doesn’t want you to climb into a window on the second floor, from the outside even if it makes sense that you should – you won’t. If the mission tells you to fight enemies – you can’t escape or the mission will fail. There are occasional, but often incredible limitations like that that suddenly drop the freedom in favor of shoehorning you into one single “correct” way of playing and they tend to be the low points of the game.
Yet, a lot of the time the game gives you a carte blanche on how you can approach situations. You can be a cool hacker who remotely disables or kills their targets or distracts enemies. You can be a stealthy thief who enters and exits areas unseen or leaving behind bodies hidden in boxes and refrigerators. You can be a machine of death, swinging blades, shooting guns, exploding enemies to bits, using their own cyber-enhanced appendages as weapons of destruction. You can even occasionally talk or pay your way through, with the game often not making dialogues and their choices a separate mode and you being able to “reply” by just walking away or shooting someone in the face mid-sentence. And you can often mix and match, adapting to the quest as it goes along and having fun along the way. In my current playthrough I was a stealthy boi with a street attitude, principles, kind heart and hatred for corpos and vast majority of time, I could play out exactly like a character with these traits would. It didn’t always lead to the “best possible outcome” of a quest, but it still lead to a meaningful outcome that would be acknowledged by the game and might even get a reference or a consequence down the line.
It is important to note, however, that in its current quest flow, which might get tweaked with DLCs in the future, you won’t be getting much variety of quests until pretty deep into the game’s main storyline. Which can discourage people from checking those side activities out. It almost happened with me, actually, as I did a lot of the side “gigs” pretty early on, realized that while fun, those are just simple little sandboxes and nothing more and decided to focus just on the main story. And later only by chance decided to give a few other side quests a go to find out, that they were very story and character driven and completely unlike in terms of the flow to what basically any side content up until then was. So be aware that the actually great involved and emotional side stories don’t really start until about halfway through the main story.
Of course, even the most wonderfully written and told moments can suffer due to bugs or poor voice acting. Keanu Reaves’ performance, overall, does fit the disillusioned drunk aspects of his characters, I suppose, but rarely if ever evokes the “charismatic and vain rock star leader of a revolution” element that so many characters tend to remember him by. There are few other examples of rather subpar vocal performances in the game as well, mostly relegated to other “celebrity” cameos, which do sometimes sour the otherwise fantastic performances from the majority of actors.
And the bugs… Oh boy. I rarely play games in a “not designed” manner, intentionally trying to see the limits of the systems, yet so many things constantly broke for me as well. There were several quests that became soft-locked and I had to reload an earlier save (which you should make often) to make them work again, just because I would touch a character somewhere, or go a few meters in the “wrong” direction. Enemies could occasionally notice me or their knocked out buddies through walls and ceilings. Cars can spawn randomly on the roads right on top of you. Characters can get suddenly shot at without any reaction, and then die, despite being important for quests. In one such case, I then “talked” to a dead body of the character and the quest finished, so at least the developers thought of some fail-safes where they could.
Yet at the same time, not just bugs sour the experience, but also some utterly bizarre decisions. Like – who thought that double-tapping a button is a good “holster” action? A “double tap” is quite the opposite thing. Plus, on a PC it’s non-rebindable and works only one in six times. In fact, a lot of actions on PC cannot be switched so if you, like me, hate having action on “F” instead of an “E” (or anything else, for that matter), prepare to suffer. The menus are a horrible mess too, with some things so hard to find that even after reading the tutorial text twice I could not find the correct sub-menu, because the thing I was looking for exists in two sub-menus and one of those can only be accessed on PC via a menu that is usually skipped with quick-keys. The constant calls and messages from the characters, while often helpful and nice, also eventually get on your nerves, especially when they automatically switch your quest markers without asking.
The game doesn’t run that great either, but at the same time I can at least understand why. It is, when pushed to the max on PC, one of the most astonishing looking games of today. The details, the visual fidelity, the amount of genuinely beautiful stuff on the screen is unlike anything else I’ve seen at all, let alone in an open world game. My usual go to example of a city night rain that feels “just right” has been VtM – Bloodlines for years, but now Cyberpunk takes the crown. Just walking around in the Night City is amazing. Especially since the soundtrack for the game, both licensed and the score, are fantastic.
With all this said and with it being clear that I loved the game, there are two things that must be noted. One – despite me finding the game so great, I have a feeling it will never be as beloved as the already mentioned games like Bloodlines or Deus Ex became. I feel that it’s mostly due to it being so gigantic that the overall “feel”, the overall pace of the game, gets too uneven for the developers to be even theoretically able to make it more tight. This is a good example, actually, of why such high fidelity, such high level story driven open world games (just as Red Dead Redemption 2 was) are simply unsustainable as they require way too much time and effort to make and in the end, they’re still too flawed, too full of systems that are there just to make it all work and decisions that were bad from the start but cannot be safely overruled as the entire game will collapse. And the second – until the game gets even more fixes and more content that was clearly intended to be there (even in-game statistics seem to imply that you can’t do everything, as not everything intended from the start is in the game yet) it’s hard to recommend playing it at all.
Because I want to recommend it very hard. I loved playing it. It’s a deeply flawed game and some of the flaws won’t get fixed by the updates and patches. But a lot of them will be. And until that happens, it’s difficult to recommend the game as there is a high chance that you will be frustrated with it more than it can manage to entertain you. Unless you’re entertained by the game falling apart before your very eyes. Whenever this game gets updated, whenever it gets to its intended “completed” state, I’m sure I will revisit it once again, to play it slightly differently, to see other possibilities and other ways of enjoying it. Until that happens, though, play it only at your own risk, only on PC if yours can handle it, making saves all of the time and in separate slots and prepare to google “is [Quest name] bugged” very often.