Cyberpunk 2077 Review

The year is 2077, the world has changed, most people flock to cities to find protection and to start a new life. These cities, one of them being Night City, are controlled by Corporations. Sure, there are “elected” officials, but they are mostly figureheads. The real power is in the Corporations. In CyberPunk 2077, you will be playing the character, V, a person looking to make a name for themselves in Night City, you will be taking on different jobs through middlemen called fixers. If you complete their jobs you get credits, if you fail the jobs you might never get to work with them again. 

The character, V, can have a couple of backstories. These stories help build complexity of your character and your group of friends, and give you special dialog options during specific parts of the game. Now of course before you jump into the world you’re going to be given the chance to create your character. There are definitely a good chunk of options to play around with to customize your character, and that includes genitalia and nipples. I will warn you that if you select a male character and go for the genitalia option, you may find your “flag” blowing in the wind during certain scripted events (completely out of your control, but something tells me you probably would prefer to have all your clothes (armor) on). 

I put in over 100 hours into this game and I will flat out admit there were problems. There were problems in a ton of the basic mechanics of the game, but I waited so long for this game, and I wanted to know what all the twists and turns were in the game that I stuck with. I know that I am definitely not alone in experiencing issues with the game, but hopefully there are a couple of people out there willing to see the game all the way through.

So let's get into some of the biggest issues that, after so many delays, should not have been a problem. The first has to do with the graphics of the game. There’s nothing quite like having random graphical buffering issues spontaneously occurring in the game. For example you could be walking down the street and everyone magically becomes super blurry losing basically all the fine details, and then slowly they will start coming back. Speaking of people in the game, there will be times when you have a close up conversation with individuals where they will randomly become ventriloquists (their lips stop moving) and then randomly the lips will start up again. There’s also the issue of the disappearing objects in the distance. For the most part it has to do with road traffic, but there might also be moments where people are there and then they are not. 

I really wish that that was one of the only problems, but there are a couple other doozies that will stop most gamers playing through the entire game, or perhaps smash a couple of controllers. The next issue has to be the MOST frustrating for me and that is the INSTA-DEATH random places. This can happen to you ANYWHERE in the game. You will either be taking a small jump or a small fall and then magically, what a hail of bullets couldn’t accomplish, you will “flat-line” and watch all your HP drain away. There’s nothing quite like trying to, from the ground, jump at the railing of a fire escape and then upon touching it dying. Speaking of collision issues let’s not forget that while being stealthy there will be times where an enemy will fall against the wall, either you will place them there or they will have perished there, and then magically every enemy knows that you are there because a small piece of that enemy somehow magicked through the wall (could be a tip of a shoe).

Oh, there’s also the fun issue of at random times during combat you will no longer be able to fire your weapon while using the scope. You can still fire it from the hip, but sighting down the scope, any scope, will cause your gun to no longer fire. The fix for this, just in case you’re wondering, is to save your game (when you can) and then immediately load that saved file. Seriously, that’s the fix, you would think that that would be something that could easily be caught and fixed in testing, but apparently not.

I wish that I could say that that was it for issues, but I would be lying through my teeth. There’s also menu windows that will not appear immediately and you will have to either change tabs or retry pulling up that sub-menu so that you can figure out what you’re doing. This definitely happens a lot when it comes to leveling up your character and trying to get info on how each attribute affects. It also happens when you try to hack/breach an object/enemy.

After outlining all of those issues, let's get into my personal gripes (I know you’re probably thinking, “holy crap there’s more?”). It is beyond frustrating to have the skip dialog button and the crouch button be the same thing. There’s nothing quite like having one of the strong pieces of the game (the story) skipped because you wanted to uncrouch. Continuing with the story aspect, as seems to be the case with many of the games nowadays, there is a love story. I completed the entire love story portion of the game within the first 20% of my entire playthrough. One of the big reasons that this TRULY sucks is that it can potentially factor into the end of the game.

Underneath all of these blemishes exists a complex and amazing game. When everything works the way it should, you can get lost in the sheer amount of content, be it the quests, the crafting of weapons, the characters, Keanu Reeves (he’s not just a passing cameo), the hacking, the combat, and of course the overarching story. As I previously stated, I played over 100 hours outside of the issues that popped up all over the place, from time to time, I GREATLY enjoyed the game.

Here’s the deal this game could, potentially, be a hell of a game, but at this current moment in time there’s too many issues to warrant a $60 price tag. It is frustrating to see this game delayed over and over again, and then to finally get the game on launch day and find so many issues still present. That reminds me of one more issue I personally had. I bought the game through STEAM and for some reason I kept getting a read disk error and so I was unable to play the game. It turns out that there was a bonus polish version of a pdf that was trying to install into a read only folder, and that stopped me from playing the game through STEAM, until I fixed that issue. This game really can be amazing, it could, but there is so much to fix that I don’t know if an audience is going to be willing to stick around long enough to see a MUCH (hopefully) MORE POLISHED edition of the game.