4/5 ★ – JacobPollnow's review of Cyberpunk 2077.

Very light spoilers, mainly about themes rather than exact plot points. Cyberpunk is fun. I played over 60 hours of it before reaching the conclusion, and I would recommend it. The story is engaging. The moment to moment gameplay, while rough at first, becomes quite fun once you specialize into the build you want, and it’s that building your character that makes you feel incredibly badass. Like coming up on a group of three enemies, hacking a nearby device to distract one, hacking another's bionic eye and then shooting the third in the head with my silenced revolver that I specifically built my character around by stacking every headshot, pistol, and stealth damage buff to ensure that it kills the enemy in one hit before moving on to the second and then hiding the bodies before the third comes back and finds them. Moments like these make it worth fighting through the baffling issues the game has. Like dodge being bound to double tapping the movement keys, causing me to randomly jump out of cover unintentionally when I was trying to be stealthy. Or crouch being bound to the same button as skip dialogue. Issues like these make the experience frustrating at times, but ultimately it's still very worth it. When you first start Cyberpunk you’ll likely be overwhelmed by the scale of it. Night City is massive and looks real, the advertisements, the buildings, the height of the city, the number of levels there are in any given location, the traffic and number of people on the streets - it feels incredibly large. But when you look a little deeper, the cracks start to show, there’s not much of a reason to actually explore, the cars have incredibly simplistic AI to the point where they won’t even drive around you if you’re blocking their path, same with the civilians, they’ll do little more than cower if you point a gun at them. After your first few hours in Night City it will start to feel empty, and I think this is where a lot of people stop, this is where a lot of the criticism comes from, and I can certainly see their point. But I think they miss something important. This isn’t GTA, Cyberpunk 2077 makes it’s open world feel alive in a different way. Driving through the streets on your own the city can feel dead, but when you’re exploring it with one of the game’s fantastic characters through a quest it doesn’t feel dead at all, driving to Judy’s apartment to help her with her latest plan, rushing out to the Badlands with Panam, sitting in Rivers car hearing about his latest case, walking by a piece of history and hearing Johnny talk about how the city used to be different and how it used to be the same. In these moments the city doesn’t feel empty, it feels very much alive: it feels like these characters have actually grown up here instead of simply springing into existence to satisfy a plot point. The characters in Cyberpunk are where the game really shines, and it makes it a joy to play through. This ties in very closely to the other standout aspect of Cyberpunk: the world building. The different gangs, the corporations, the technology, it all feels fleshed out, spectacular, and very possible. This combined with the incredible characters make Night City what it is, each character gives a unique perspective and adds to the character of the city itself. As I played I found myself wanting to complete every side quest I came across not for the sake of being a completionist (I gave up on that years ago) but because I wanted to experience more of the world, to see it from every perspective that I could. It's these things that drove me to spend more time in this game than I've put into any single player AAA game in years. In my mind the game's biggest flaw is that thematically it's very muddled. The game seems to be going for two main themes: the first is about legacy, would you rather live a quiet life and die peacefully, or go out in a blaze of glory. The second is the concept of slowly losing who you are until you're unrecognizable. On their own these aren't bad, they're interesting concepts and could make for a very compelling story. The problem is with the execution. The theme of legacy is prominently featured early on, frequently talked about in the first few hours of the game. But once you get out of the first act it's seemingly forgotten and isn't returned to until the very end where the game suddenly remembers it and acts as though it has been the point all along, to varying degrees based on which ending you get. The second concept of losing who you are has the opposite problem, it's referenced and explored throughout the story, both in the main quest line and many of the side quests, but then it's unceremoniously dropped shortly before the ending and never really mentioned again. The other issue with the ending lies in the choices. The game gives you the choice of a few different endings, but none of them really seem to have a purpose. They're linked to a choice you have to make shortly before the finale, but that choice is not at all relevant to the important parts of the ending, mainly the thematic conclusion, and the consequences for V's character. It doesn't feel like your actions led you to the ending you got, it feels like you made an unrelated decision and the game arbitrarily decided your fate. There is no moral choice, there is no reason to choose an ending other than the exact one you want, other than not having any indication as to which one that is. A multiple choice ending should have a purpose: the point should not be the existence of multiple endings, the point should be the choice itself. Which option you choose should say something about the themes of the game and about V as a character. Instead different variations of V's character are linked to certain endings, and since the endings are chosen based on meaningless choice rather than a moral decision, it can go wildly against the character you've played throughout the game. The quiet life or a blaze of glory? What does it matter? You don't get to choose, the game chooses for you, based on unrelated criteria.