Cyberpunk 2077

Review game Cyberpunk 2077, A stunning skyline with an incredible array of options (and a few too many bugs).

V, a Night City mercenary, ends up with the long-dead rock star and anti-corporate terrorist Johnny Silverhand’s mind imprisoned in their head. Even though, to be honest, Keanu Reeves’ stiff performance is by far the weakest of an otherwise incredibly impressive cast, Reeves’ Johnny is a wonderfully likeable jackass. Nevertheless, the central theme of this story is the confrontational relationship between Johnny and V and their eventual growth as they struggle to find a way out of the shared mess they find themselves in.

After six hours of gameplay, I finally reached the point where the logo appears on screen for the first time, and I was immediately engrossed in Cyberpunk 2077’s narrative. Although the first part is a little constrained in comparison to what follows, it does a fantastic job of drawing the player into V’s struggle and maintaining that feeling as the main quests gradually intensify. After the intro, you can explore Night City’s vast map at your leisure. Unless you go looking for trouble, you can usually expect to be shot on sight in some neighborhoods that have more formidable foes than others. Additionally, you’ll have plenty of side missions to occupy your time, starting in the early hours of the game.

This game’s structure feels very different from many other RPGs I’ve played, like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt by CD Projekt Red. Cyberpunk 2077, unlike most game structures resembling a tall redwood tree with branching paths as you progress, is more akin to a large bush. By the time you reach the midpoint of the game’s main quest, you’ll be surrounded by numerous tangled branches, all competing for your attention. The majority are also just a phone call away. Since this is the future, job offers frequently come your way without you even having to look for them. The options available to you increase quickly and then plateau for the majority of your playtime, which somewhat robs Cyberpunk 2077 of its familiar feeling of scaling growth. However, the abundance of things to see and do, along with hidden content that requires active exploration, made me willingly trade the familiar style of discovery for a wealth of choices.

Right from the beginning, V and Johnny’s struggle engrossed me.

Night City is so dense, diverse, and consistently beautiful that there are opportunities to stumble upon unexpected sights all the time within it. For instance, it took me almost 40 hours of gameplay to uncover the existence of a sprawling forest concealed beneath one of the busiest interchanges in Night City. Though the single, unrestricted urban map means you won’t get that “wow” feeling of traveling to an exciting new open-world location at any point, As you explore, you will traverse impoverished neighborhoods, opulent office buildings, arid wasteland, verdant forests, and even a few strange locations that are best explored on your own. Night City’s scale and scope are truly breathtaking, and exploring the city by car and taking in everything it has to offer—from the enormous skyscrapers to the meticulously detailed in-world advertisements that adorn them—can often be a fulfilling experience in and of itself.

Different Courses

Night City is the kind of place where you’ll miss half of its attractions if you go through it too quickly. Cyberpunk 2077 feels like an RPG from start to finish, despite the first-person viewpoint and brutal futuristic combat. A lot of the time, the game moves slowly, with rich, exquisitely presented dialogue and an almost overwhelming number of options to choose from when it comes to dialogue, character development, mission approaches, and other aspects. I would regularly load saves to see how particular scenarios might have turned out if I had taken a different action, and nearly always, what I discovered astounded me. Cyberpunk 2077 allows you to make decisions that profoundly affect the stories of the characters around you as well as V’s own.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a Rorschach test, not a Rubix cube to be solved perfectly.

This is the main aspect of Cyberpunk 2077 that makes it so amazing. It’s a Rorschach test, not a Rubix cube that must be solved optimally, but with several paths to reach the solution. It’s not as long as the epic quest you might have anticipated, but there’s so much variation that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of it. As a result, you can expect exactly what you see in that inkblot. Nothing in this game forces you to play more or less than you choose, and there are no wrong answers. It gives you amazing control over the game as a player.

Having said that, there are a few minor errors in the arrangement and presentation of this structure. The mission log itself is a long, disorganized list that doesn’t make it obvious what rewards you can expect from each task or which optional jobs are more relevant to V and Johnny’s story than others. It’s mainly divided into three categories: “main jobs,” which are necessary to advance; “gigs,” which provide entertaining but fleeting bursts of action and narrative; and “side jobs,” which are essentially home to everything else, including crucial but optional plot points, dates with side characters, and simple sparring matches. The annoying thing about this is that, because they’re all optional and grouped together, there came a point when I ran out of ideas for additional ways to influence the greater narrative and produce more endings.

Gunner Blade

Cyberpunk 2077 offers you control in a very interesting way through its mission structure, but there are also some classic role-playing game choices regarding how to dispatch (or at least subdue) those who stand in your way. Instead of using a traditional class system, you allocate points to each of the five main attributes and then to perks within each of those attributes for more focused enhancements. For instance, the Stealth perk page within the Cool attribute contains a plethora of additional benefits to unlock, such as increasing your movement speed while crouching or unlocking an aerial takedown if you plan to sneak through hazardous situations. I’m not sure why, but let’s roll with it.

The best thing about this system is that these features and benefits usually gave me the impression that they were complementing the playstyle I chose to adopt rather than penalizing me for choosing not to pursue other interests. Although not having enough body points may make it more difficult to use some heavy weapons or prevent you from being able to force open some doors, shotguns can still be used effectively even if you choose not to use the assault perks to make them more powerful. Actually, each perk can level up naturally through use. For example, if you invest all of your points in intelligence to become an expert hacker, but after ten hours discover that you actually enjoy stealth, your stealth perk will gain some level of improvement, whether or not you have invested in it. Like most things in Cyberpunk 2077, this system is incredibly customizable and always rewarding, though the sheer number of options available can be a little overwhelming.

Combat isn’t the world’s most complicated dance, but I was totally in charge of the choreography.

Another area where you’ll essentially benefit more from more effort is combat itself. As I previously mentioned, this is an RPG, not a first-person shooter, despite how it appears in action. Because of the unexpectedly bullet-spongy enemies and surprisingly fast damage drop-off at distance, I wasn’t initially enamored with the gunplay, but the more I played, the better it got. Benefits allow you to statistically improve those issues, but it was the discovery of increasingly inventive weapons and astute cybernetic enhancements that took combat beyond point-and-shoot gameplay. I purchased perks that increased the guns’ capacity to fire through walls and charge more quickly. Alternatively, a different player might focus on using smart weapons, which direct bullets at target enemies. Things really start to get interesting when you add equippable cyberware like the mantis blades, a double jump, and the ability to slow time when you dodge while aiming.

Conclusion

With few limitations, Cyberpunk 2077 immerses you in its stunning and dazzlingly dense cityscape. You can choose how to develop your character, go about quests, and deal with enemies in an astounding number of ways, and the decisions you make can actually affect the world and the stories of the people who live in it. These tales have the capacity to be dark, funny, dramatic, emotional, and occasionally all of those things at once. The abundance of side quests that are accessible practically from the beginning can have a surprisingly powerful effect on the options you have when you get there. On its own, the main quest might be shorter than anticipated, and it’s not always obvious what you need to do to make meaningful changes to its finale. Although annoyingly frequent bugs can occasionally ruin an otherwise well-established mood, Cyberpunk 2077 is a truly remarkable role-playing game thanks to its remarkably flexible design.