2.5/5 ★ – ClintDriftwood's review of Cyberpunk 2077.

Man, this is one I deliberated over for a long, long time. It has moved both within and off my GOTY list entirely more than any other. I didn't want to include it because CDPR's business practices have been rough for about a year now - from crunch to the lack of true detail regarding last-gen versions, not revealing that new-gen wouldn't be released yet until days before the game and such. It's only got worse for those in charge since, facing backlash from all angles. They totally deserve it. However, I cannot deny that I really enjoyed my time in the game. I immersed myself in it and put about 70 hours into it from 10-14 days after launch. I played the digital PS4 version on my PS5 and luckily experienced very few bugs. Regular crashes were my only issue, and boy were they regular. I've since looked back at my crash reports and it happened 32 times, sometimes 3/4 times a session. It ain't good enough. It should have been delayed further. The irony of Johnny SIlverhand ranting about Corpo greed and the pitfalls of capitalism would ordinarily be music to my ears, but here it all just felt sickeningly ironic. CDPR do realise this, surely? They cannot have a total lack of self-awareness to see that they are Arasaka here? Anyway, I went down the hacker/stealth route and highly recommend that. I really felt like I was a netrunner and lived out my childhood dreams of becoming Deckard from Blade Runner. The world is dense with detail and I loved the aesthetic. The density of the world is impressive, and their world-building is stellar. I enjoyed the story. It is a little boiler-plate at times, but aided my excellent voice work from the majority of the cast - Judy, Panam, Kerry, River, and all the rest of the side characters are the high-point of the game and the "big" side story strings are the closest to the Red Baron Questline CDPR get here. One in particular about a young man struggling with his sexual identity and being preyed upon is surprisingly delicately done, considering everything around the game. But it is fucking problematic too man. Their treatment of trans people was just rank and still sours. Their compromise has just muddied the waters even further, and is clear merely lip service. Everything is just all a bit uncomfortable. The game should not require a certain playstyle to be enjoyable. There were far too many broken promises, and it is a massive shame for such a talented and hard-working dev team. I got lucky, basically. And I want to include this because you just have to talk about this game - it is the nadir and culmination of a cacophony of issues that have plagued the industry for far too long. It needs to be fixed and fully realised in-game, and the story itself become a warning shot that malpractice, and other issues such as over-hype, lack of focus from the top-down, crunch, stereotyping, and over-promising need to be pushed back. Yet they still sold over 13 million copies including refunds. "Are we the baddies?"