Cyberpunk 2077 - Review

Every few years, there is a game that seems to break the stratosphere in terms of expectation and hype, the last big one was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and while Cyberpunk 2077 is a vastly different open world game, it falls into that same category. The question is, could a game that we have been watching for years, live up to the hype and maybe even exceed it, or were the expectations just too high?

The story of Cyberpunk can be a bit complicated; it starts out with you as V, a merc who takes on the largest job of your life, that once completed will set you up for the rest of it, it is that big. With your friend Jackie Wells and some assistance from your Netrunner friend, future code for hacker, you break into a hotel, steal a special piece of hardware and escape, but of course, nothing can go to plan. The escape is kicked into gear when you see the murder of the head of the Arasaka corporation, Jackie is shot and dies and then you are killed and thrown into a trash heap, but rather than die, you are saved by Johnny Silverhand, or at least, something that was once Silverhand. The tech you stole was a chip that featured the engram, an encoding of the ‘soul’ of the former rocker/anarchist and now that it lives in your head, you are not only seeing him, but being corrupted by that very tech. As far as the setup goes, it is a good few hours of story, the problem is, the big event, the death of Jackie Wells and your betrayal, comes so soon after you start the game, that there is never any time to build up any sense of attachment, but this is Night City and things always move to fast for their own good.

Once you have come back to life, you are given the bad news, what is keeping you alive, the engram chip, is also slowly killing you and now there is a race to find a way to remove it, pretty straight forward stuff right. It is really at this point that you can ignore that and start doing gigs on the side, to help bolster your reputation, earn eddies to score the best upgrades for yourself and of course, find a sweet ride to cruise around in. The side missions are actually far more entertaining than that of the main quest line, and while you can push forward on the main quest, I would suggest you stay away from it, until you have had your fill of side quests and gigs, because once you beat the game, for me at least, it just reset me back to the point before it gave me that ‘last chance’ warning. The problem with the story is that the characters you interact with, cycle so quickly that by the time you feel like you might understand them, they are gone and replaced with others. The side quests have characters that are nowhere near as bad, though perhaps some are a little weird, but the more important ones are a treat to interact with. The fact that the side characters are more entertaining that the mainline ones is just crazy and given that your entire purpose to complete the main quest line, you know, to save your life, that is not something I can get behind.

As you explore Night City and the regions surrounding it, you will encounter so many subsystems, it is a wonder the game loads at all, there is weapon management, clothes management, vehicle management, cyberware management, item management and item creation, none of which takes into effect your standard RPG levelling. The game is so filled with things to take care of, I have no issue in stating that I didn’t buy a single car, nor did I craft any items and both for the simple reason that I didn’t have to. I had two vehicles from the outset, one bike and one car and as the side missions and gigs played out, I ended up with two more of each, I honestly had no reason to spend my hard-earned eddies on anything. Weapons also were things I didn’t have to buy, for almost every enemy that I took down in combat, dropped weapons of some kind, guns, melee weapons and even grenades and even if they didn’t, there were always plenty lying around to take. The only time I would visit a gun shop, would be to refill ammo, as that would be hard to come by in the world, occasionally I would buy food, for their buffs, but again that would always be lying around, though the thought of eating a burger from the ground seemed a little odd.

Each of the systems above, all work really well on their own and while you can just use them at a cursory level, there is enough depth to each of them, well the ones I used, to make investing time into them even better. Taking a look at the weapons, you can equip three different weapons and each weapon will have a rarity level, you know white, blue, green and so on and the rarer the weapon, the more bonuses it will have. Each gun could have no bonus or several and when you consider their fire rates, reload speeds and overall damage potential, finding a gun with the right boosts, was something I spent a bit of time investing in. There is even more detail as guns can have mod slots, letting you equip better scopes or muzzles, giving you more ways to make any hardware your own, the only catch with them, you need to carry a few of each type and for a silly reason. Some enemies will be more susceptible to weapons that have a chance to shock them, others fire and if you run into a group of enemies with the wrong weapon, even if it has a high dps, you will quickly find yourself in a real fight.

There are other system at play as well, that is how you want to play the game, you can be a silent player, sneaking in the shadows and avoiding a fight at all costs, or you can bust out the big guns, the ones on your body and go in for a few rounds of fisticuffs. If neither of those strike your fancy, you can hack your way through the world or use your words to try and get people to help you, there is no real wrong way to play through the game, except that the game will stop you a lot. If you focus on the intellectual side of playing, when you come up to a door that requires strength to break open, you will be out of luck, or vice versa if the door requires brains and you are all brawn. The problem is that these restrictions pop up far more than you might consider and if you don’t meet the requirements, you might have to turn tail and get out of there. There was one mission that I could have shortened by about 30 minutes, if I had the right smarts to sneak into the enemy base, and upon discovering that I didn’t left me down hearted. That is not to say you need to focus on one exclusively, I tried to keep my V as balanced as I could, because I felt it would provide more options in the long run and I had fun with that.

If all that wasn’t enough to take into consideration, there are also sub-specialties that you can focus on, giving you even more control over what type of character you want to be. All these systems are fine, but as I said earlier, I really didn’t delve into a few of them, because there wasn’t any need, I would have rather a more streamlined version of some of the systems I did use, to avoid some frustrations. All of the systems that I did make use of worked, but there was a lot of frustration with how they are managed, the game allows for both a Destiny style cursor, or you can click around with the d-pad and while both have their pros, neither worked flawlessly. Speaking of not working flawlessly, the controls as a whole generate some concerns and I say this with the little caveat that they do work, they are just complicated without merit. For example, weapon management, outside of a menu, is done with the Y button on Xbox, press it once and you draw out your weapon, press it again and you cycle to the next one. Pressing and holding would bring up a radial menu, allowing for you to select a specific item, or break out the fists if needed and a double tap would holster your guns, both metal and flesh. The problem is, if you are on weapon one and you want the third one in your list, you have to press the swap button twice, but if you press it slightly to fast, you put your gun away, which in the middle of a firefight is not the best thing to have happen. As I said, the controls do work, but there are plenty of little issues with them, that you have to constantly be aware of and while I doubt there is much they can do about them, allowing for remapping might help greatly.

So far we have talked about the guns, systems and character options, but we have yet to discuss the largest character the game has, Night City itself. The more I drove around Night City, the more I got two distinct vibes, first was Los Angeles, especially in the more affluent locales and those desert locations and given that the game is set in California, that makes sense. The other location that sprung to mind, especially in the more densely populated city centre was Hong Kong, from the neon signs over the streets, to the smaller roads that have shops galore in them, it made me think of all the time I have spent wandering around Hong Kong. The most interesting factor though, is that neither of these two locales should go together all that well, they are vastly different, yet in Cyberpunk, CD Projekt Red have managed to blend them together so well that it feels natural, once you ignore all the cybernetic implants of course.

Getting around is done with vehicles and while I wasn’t able to locate any flying vehicles for myself, I did enjoy the cars and bikes, from a design standpoint. From a driving perspective, they were floaty and annoying, though if you stick to low speeds, then you can drive without issue, however, add some speed and you will leave the asphalt for some ice. There is a side mission where you have to compete in a series of races, which take place across a variety of terrains, which in and of itself isn’t a problem, until you factor in the floaty handling of the cars. The second race has you barrelling across the desert and even in ‘The Beast’, which is just shy of being a tank, I was bouncing around like the ground was one giant inflatable playhouse. It wasn’t just there, when just trying to get from point a to point b, there were times when the car would be to eager to turn and I would spin out. While I did start to understand the cars and bikes I had, it also gave me no reason to want to get new ones, because if I had to learn how each car handled, I was not going to bother with it. Another issue with the vehicles of Night City is that the ones controlled by the AI are rigid to the extreme and that is not a good thing, as when cars change lanes or turn corners, they are so strict, you can almost see the paths they are set on, there is just no natural motion to them.

That is just one aspect of the games presentation that feels wrong, which is a shame, because the concept is incredible, but before we gush, let us complain. First up, the countless visual issues and while I am fairly forgiving in large games, you will always see the occasional object just in a wrong spot, here it was consistent. Cigarettes, whiskey glasses, cars and more, would all hang in space, where they had been used and then the game would move on, leaving them there. Something similar would also happen with cars in scenes, as there were times when I would be driving along, see something happening on the side of the road, and after having a look at it and then recentering the camera, cars would have spawned in front of me, causing a crash. There were also animation cycles that didn’t load right, characters that would speak, but have no movement of their mouths to allow for words to come out, or the best one, characters that would warp around the world like it was Star Trek and walking was beneath them. I also had one instance where after a mission was complete, the on-screen subtitle, either loaded in a different language, or just loaded random letters and it stood out, because it just looked out of place.

For all the issues there were with the games presentation, I honestly still had fun with it, there were some problems that were annoying and require me to restart the game, not being able to change out of first person whilst driving for one, or item collection messages living on the screen, but they were few and far between. Oh and speaking of that first person perspective, whilst engaging, does have issues, especially when you are living as Johnny Silverhand, those times can be very disorientating, given the constant head moves, cuts to black and so forth, so if you suffer from motion sickness, be warned. One issue that I encountered playing on Xbox Series X and Series S, is hopefully just due to the game not being optimised for those consoles and that is element pop in, the developers have created two levels of detail, the first is the far off in a distance layer, where you see lights from cars and more, the close you get to them, the more they vanish, while it helps to make the world feel fuller, seeing them vanish ruins it. The other issue was that lights seemed to fade in as you got near them, as if the game only turned them on as you got close, which if the draw distance was quite large, wouldn’t be a big deal, but it is easily only a 10 meters or so in front, which when you are racing through the streets in your car, will jump out at you a lot.

Looking towards the better side of the presentation there are a lot of things to like, from the overall visual design, to the number of characters that you get to interact with. Starting with the city, I already mentioned how it felt like a blended Los Angeles and Hong Kong and even with those two, there were always little surprises to find. There are times when the crowds would be out in force, sometimes for missions, others because it was just the right place for people to be and when that happened, the world felt alive. People would be going about their lives, doing whatever it was they needed to and it felt organic, even the crimes, some of which were scripted, still felt right, given how complex the city was. Leaving the city alone for a moment, the design of the corporations was incredible, with each having their own look and feel, so when you saw them, you would be able to recognise who you were fighting. The cybernetic enhancements available to you were also fun to see, some folks like the Maelstrom, took things to the extreme, the sometimes-subtle implants looked the best. There were countless times that I would enter a new street or be driving along and it would just hit me how beautiful this game can be, again it is not perfect, but artistically it is up there.

On the sound side of things, the games original score was great, equal parts mechanical and dubstep, evoking a Tron Legacy vibe for me and while neither would be considered my normal music, it fit the tone amazingly well. As for the games soundtrack, I can’t tell you, after a few songs it annoyed me, so each time I entered a vehicle I could control, I turned the radio off and if there were any radios in the world near me, they also got turned off. I did like the fact that when you left Night City, the audio levels not only dropped, but also changed considerably and you didn’t even have to be that far from the limits. Characters were brought to life with some solid voice work, even from characters that only had a few lines in the game, though some felt a little out of place. Keanu Reeves does a solid job as Silverhand, though you can hear slight differences within some conversations, indicating that those lines might not all be from the one session.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a solid game, if rough at times and that is not counting the considerable backlash against the base Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions. The team at CD Projekt Red got all the right ingredients to make an amazing cake but took it from the oven just a little bit to early and as such, the result is that things are just not quite done. Combat is fine, but has issues with weapon management, creating a character that is truly yours is ok, but with so many layers to deal with, can become more of a chore than it needs to be. There is also the floaty car handling, wonky AI, along with the constant visual issues and the fact that you can’t explore Night City once you are done, depending on your ending.

While there is a very good game here, there are just too many issues with it, that could easily deter most gamers from seeking it out, with luck the developers will fix the bulk of them soon and it will allow people to come and experience Night City, but until then, living vicariously through others might be the best option.