Cyberpunk 2077 joins Immortals: Fenyx Rising on the list of “Open-World RPGs I played in the last [2] year[s] that in theory I should have hated and yet somehow enjoyed more than Horizon Forbidden West.” While I don’t have as much of a history with CD Projekt RED as I do with Ubisoft, I am one of apparently 5 people who did not like The Witcher 3, so between that, the fact that this game was famously barely functional when it came out, and my increasing antipathy towards giant AAA open-world RPGs in general, I assumed I was going to hate it.
But when you find a PS4 copy of a 2-month old AAA game on sale for $10 and it comes with a free upgrade to the PS5 version, how do you say no to that?
Let’s start with the obvious: Cyberpunk 2077 is a janky game. There’s really no denying that—glitches are so commonplace that they’re practically part of the world of the game. And you know what? I don’t really care. Sure, there were a solid handful of game-breaking glitches, but as I’ve said before, with generous autosaves and fast reload times those barely make a dent. And the ones that didn’t break the game were honestly pretty fun. One time I tried to call my car and I didn’t see it anywhere, but I heard a noise, and when I turned I discovered it had spawned inside the building behind me. It just kind of floated there until I got close and the collision detection kicked in, at which point it and the room it was in mutually destroyed each other.
It is also very true that the dialogue is clunky and the performances of that dialogue are even clunkier. Neither Keanu nor Cherami Leigh have a ton of range, and, you know, Keanu is Keanu, but Leigh’s impression of an unceasingly world-weary hard-boiled noir protagonist got really grating really fast (and is especially annoying given that right at the end she suddenly busts out a fully-dimensionalized performance that actually conveyed more than two emotions, and it’s like, where was this the last 80 hours?). And neither can convincingly say choomba without it sounding like someone’s dad trying to show interest in their new Pokémon game. (Side note: after watching Civvie 11’s recent video on the old Blade Runner game, I wish they’d gotten Lisa Edelstein for V. The way she just breezes through all that jargon like she’s been using those words since she was 5 is gobsmacking.)
Add to that a fairly boilerplate cyberpunk dystopia that has very little to say beyond “hey, isn’t this cool and/or bad?” and stories that are mostly interested in making references to other, better stories, and you’d think I would be absolutely shitting on this game’s writing. Which, I guess I am a little. But, here’s the thing: Cyberpunk 2077 knows it’s stupid. It knows Keanu is a ham, or would be if he had more personality. It knows V suffers from a repetitive stress injury in her detached irony muscle (can’t comment on Gavin Drea’s performance). It knows exactly what it’s doing when an AI taxi service splits into different personalities and one of those personalities wants to run you through a bunch of tests that are secretly designed to kill you, and I know it does because they got Ellen goddamn McLain to do the voice.
Cyberpunk 2077 knows exactly what it is: pulp, pure and simple, and it absolutely revels in it. The world is dripping with over-the-top, on-the-nose, in-your-face personality and it’s just fucking fun. You box a guy who’s one consciousness split across two bodies and really hates it when you refer to them as two different people, and another guy with a grenade for a nose whose name is Ozob Bozo because why the hell not. There’s a gang who ritually replace their eyes with these giant red robot eyes that look vaguely insectoid and also make hardcore noise music. There’s a “sniper rifle” that just fires a giant explosive that does like 2000 damage.
As with the best pulp, there’s real emotion too, melodramatic as it may be. Stories of people trying to work out their relationships, find their place in their community, protect their loved ones, and just generally try to find joy and meaning in an inherently corrupt and antagonist world. And while the best of these are in the side missions, I was surprised at how invested I got in V and Johnny’s stories by the end.
Also, I mentioned in my Horizon Forbidden West review that I wanted more stories where the hero doesn’t end up standing on a pile of their loved ones’ bodies, and maybe even dies at the end, and Cyberpunk 2077 lets you choose one or both of those, so that’s a pretty big win in my book.
Night City is possibly the best video game city I’ve ever seen, certainly in the top 5. Other games might have seemingly more impressive sprawling metropolises, but in those the grandeur of the city is always a facade, a painted backdrop to the few areas the player is actually allowed in. Night City is not only huge in theory, it’s huge in practice, with mazes of alleyways and sidestreets, bustling marketplaces, broad avenues, and intertwining freeways winding their way between towering megabuildings, multilevel city blocks, and the mansions, wharfs, oil fields, suburbs, and wastelands that exist at the edges the city—all of it navigable (to admittedly varying degrees) by the player, be it on foot, in a cool-ass car, or on a difficult-to-control but surprisingly-fun-to-drive motorcycle. Though other games have tried to make a city into a world, I don’t think any have succeeded to this degree, certainly not on this scale, and I think once people get over the glitches, Night City is going to be this game’s true legacy. (Really makes me want a full-on FF VII Remake-style remake of Dragon Age II—imagine how amazing Kirkwall would be at this scale and without the same 3 dungeons repeated over and over again.) (Also we should have more open-world games at the city scale rather than the country scale.)
Right, I should probably say something about the gameplay. The hacking: very fun (not the Breach Protocol minigame part, the actual uploading hacks in real-time combat part). Kind of overpowered when fully upgraded and combined with certain Ninja skills, at which point you can basically one-shot every single enemy, and in quick succession too. But you don’t have to, and can use it judiciously to just make the shoot-em-up combat a little more fun. Also it’s not at all overpowered in situations where you can’t sneak up on an enemy or breach them, which is why I had to turn the difficulty back down to Normal for the end of the game (almost put it down to Easy but thank god I made it to the checkpoint on attempt #3 and wasn’t facing having to go through all that dialogue a fourth time).
The gunplay: also very fun, obviously not as well-crafted as a true FPS, but with a surprisingly nuanced level of variation that goes beyond just the stats, and a generally satisfying feel to it (as opposed to, say, Fallout). I don’t know if this has been a thing in other games and I just missed it, but the idea of having reloading take a variable amount of time depending on how many rounds are left in the clip, and the fact that it’s done physically and looks different for each weapon, is really cool. My main annoyance was at how few sniper rifles actually had a sniper scope attachment. Also didn’t get into tech weapons or doing anything fancy with the power ricochet, it seemed kind of tedious.
Melee…is kind of meh. First person melee always feels really hard to follow due to the field of view, and swinging a bat or a crowbar doesn’t feel all that different from swinging a katana or knife. It’s also largely impractical in a game where most of the enemies have guns. But I’m sure someone out there has done a cool melee build, and it was handy early on when it was my only way of taking down cyberpsychos nonlethally.
Other than that there’s a bunch of crafting and equipment stuff that you’ll either like or not (the equipment mods are all fairly mundane, unfortunately), the consumables seem like they’d be unmanageable if you tried to do more than heal but the game makes that easy, at least. I didn’t find most of the cyber implants as game changing as I would’ve liked, mostly quality-of-life stuff like not constantly getting set on fire or having to switch my non-lethal mod every time I got a new weapon, but there’s a double jump, which was unexpected and fun to play with (can you cheese your way up walls? Yes, yes you can.)
Aaaaaaand I think that about covers it. Cyberpunk 2077 is a cheesy pulpy mess set in an incredibly well-realized cyberpunk metropolis, and fun as hell to play, from start to (almost) finish.
p.s. Aside from the glitches the other clearly rushed part of the game is all of the food, which looks like it’s from The Sims. It’s really weird looking around at the vibrant, hi-def world, and the person next to you with the detailed face, and then down at your bowl of unidentifiable blurry polygons.
p.p.s. The sex is gratuitous and awkward.
p.p.p.s. The radio has some great tunes, particularly the jazz and synthwave stations.
p.p.p.p.s. An unknown number of things I said here are no longer true, but more on that in my Year in Review 2023 post.
Certain of Eventual Failure 