3.5/5 ★ – hcolesmith's review of Cyberpunk 2077.

We all remember that reveal trailer of Cyberpunk. It was a big reveal: super sleek, incredibly cool, and arrived at a completely different time eight years ago. I’m not going to tell you how Cyberpunk 2077 was in development for eight years and what we got was a disappointing game, because that wouldn’t be accurate. We got a game in development for about four years and some change from an AA developer that pulled off a miracle with Witcher 3 and was trying to do something even more ambitious without the resources afforded to AAA studios. So, is Cyberpunk 2077 a disappointment? Yeah, but not exactly like you’d expect, and certainly not in a way that anyone is really talking about. The technical shortcomings of the game are well documented. I’m fortunate to have played on a high-end PC so I didn’t have any sort of crash problems, but the bugs are so prevalent that it becomes hard to tell what is intended experience and what is just a mistake waiting to be fixed. My playtime didn’t have nearly as many bugs as something like Skyrim or New Vegas, but the bugs in those games were pretty readily apparent, easy to work around, and didn’t really impact my playthroughs very strongly. Cyberpunk is a different story because of the way the narrative is presented. Some glitches are clearly the result of Johnny Silverhand taking over your body, but some of them are also just the result of shoddy coding. When the line becomes blurred, I become confused. So yeah that’s disappointing, but the real faults of Cyberpunk are much deeper than that. I’ve never played a game that felt more like a proof of concept than Cyberpunk 2077. I’ve played a lot of games that felt like tech demos, and most games that are the first in their inevitable franchise often show the cracks of needed improvement, but Cyberpunk is different. It almost feels like the things they promised us in the years since it was announced were actually in development for the eventual sequel, the Cyberpunk 2078, if you will. As if they weren’t ever really feasible for 2077, but if you wait until 2078 then we’ll see that mind-melting game changer. But even then, I’m not sure that’ll actually fix anything. A couple days back, I went to watch the 2018 gameplay trailer again. And unlike many people online, I didn’t really walk away with a sense of disappointment because of the cut features, I walked away with a sense of disappointment because I don’t think I really ever was going to vibe that hard with this game. The promise of a living, breathing virtual world with infinite complexity and deep and immersive things to do only excites me so much. And the actual gameplay segments we saw show a bunch of shooting, some stealth mechanics, and an open world to muck around in and…how many games have we seen with that exact set of criteria? I mean, throw in hacking and we’ve still got three Watch Dogs games, add in cyberpunk augmentations and you’re still barely outside the realm of Deus Ex and that game is twenty years old. So…what were we all that hyped about? Often I feel like we get hyped because we have to get hyped about something. But the game itself is fine. It’s decent. If you get past the bugs and the sense of sadness for the cut features (which, tbh I only really care about the enemy AI) you’re left with an extremely okay experience. It rarely ever pushes the envelope and it rarely ever seems to try. It really just felt like a first person Watch Dogs to me, or more accurately Grand Theft Auto: Deus Ex. But all those labels do a disservice because it doesn’t really leave a lot of room for innovation or improvement. Deus Ex is tremendous for its stealth mechanics, GTA is just top tier sandbox and driving, and Watch Dogs…well I haven’t really played much beyond a few hours of the first game, but I’m sure it does something well. The moments where Cyberpunk actually begins to shine are few and far between, but it’s often in its side missions, when it doesn’t have to give a flying fudge about its edge-lord main plot. I much preferred taking down the oppressive managers of a brothel; helping a nomadic gangster rise through the ranks of the Aldecaldos; or (perhaps my favorite) helping a dead-beat, altruistic detective find a sense of success amidst the absolute mire of corruption in the city (yeah, I like Blade Runner ok). The characters we spent time with doing the things that matter to them show that CD Projekt Red still knows how to write characters and still knows how to create an interesting questline. It’s just a bit of a shame that they forgot what people love about Witcher 3. And I feel that people forget that Witcher 3 isn’t really that groundbreaking of a game, gameplay-wise anyways. The gameplay is fine. The questing is what makes it great. So it’s a shame that CDPR sidelined the good questing and instead tried their hand at upping the gameplay. Stealthing is too easy for a veteran immersive sim player (and I played on hard). Gunplay is extremely bullet-spongy unless you’ve maxed out your damage perks. And melee is just absurdly, hilariously broken. The driving feels like you’re on a slip and slide. And the AI makes all of it downright mind-numbing. It’s hard to have fun with any of the hardcore gameplay segments of Cyberpunk because it all feels kind of goofy. When we can get back into the bits that allow us to feel more like we exist in Night City we start getting somewhere, but then we see that the world itself is less interesting and interactive than games that came out twelve years prior. I stumbled across an article talking about how there is a possibility that once Cyberpunk has been patched and “fixed” in a few months, what we’ll be left with is the actual intended experience of the developers. And at that point, we might be scared to learn it’s not the bugs and crashes that kept the game from reaching greater heights, it’s the game itself. The design decisions might just actually be lackluster; the systems in the game might just be uninteresting and boring. I thought about that article a lot as I finished the game…and I’m afraid that it might be right. Because for as ambitious as Cyberpunk marketed itself to be, I almost wonder if that were something of a calculated PR move so that when the buggy mess actually dropped, we could blame it on a studio that shot for the stars and landed in the pit of Tartaros. That’s not what we said, but perhaps that was the intention. This game was announced at a time when cyberpunk fiction was sort of at a critical low. But since then, we’ve not only seen an influx of games (likely because of Cyberpunk, I’ll grant you), but because of TV and movies (we got a Blade Runner sequel, dammit) too. The bar is high. Just in the months before the release of CDPR’s monolithic hype glutton, we got Cloudpunk and Ghostrunner. Geez even the Final Fantasy VII Remake is a cyberpunk game. The market for the game sort of up and disappeared between the announcement and release. Higher budget studios were able to make slam dunks and indie studios made something more focused. And the daddy of all cyberpunk visual media released another goddamn masterpiece (I love you, Blade Runner 2049). Just like all of you, I’m disappointed by Cyberpunk 2077. But I can’t say I’m surprised. I do look forward to revisiting this in about a year after the game has been patched to perfection and some DLC has been added, but as it stands now we look upon a game that broke us because we dared to get excited about it despite knowing we were pulling at a thread that was too good to be true. A day after I finished Cyberpunk, I didn't really know what to take away from it. I knew I had finished it, but I also knew that for the back half of the game I basically pushed myself through it. There's a clear moment in the narrative when I thought to myself, "is this really what all the fuss was about?" The good and the bad. Eight years of hype, an outcry of anger over the state of the game's technical shortcomings, and people telling us to push through it because there was something good in there. The trend of game development in recent years is to make things more immersive, more complex, deeper. It's as if we are looking to have one single video game that does everything so we'll never have to buy another game ever again. I understand the allure. It's great to think that there is something out there like that, a game to make all other games obsolete. But is that really what we want? Whenever we dip our toes into these types of catch-all games, we, more often than not, walk away with criticisms. And sure, we can point fingers at the developers. We can continue to give them the same complaints I already have: the gunplay is weird! The driving is slippery! But is the fault not also on the consumer? We have pushed developers to make these experiences where we can theoretically do whatever we want in a next-level open world sandbox. But it's not feasible. So as I thought back to Cyberpunk, I had some immense disappointments. And as I thought back on it more, I realized the thing I was most disappointed about was that I ever thought I would be presented with such an immersive escape. I mean, hell, Cyberpunk isn't even that long--not for an RPG, at least. I spent about fifty-five hours in my playthrough, doing a mix of main and side gigs. And the times I found myself enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 the most was when I felt like the game was at its smallest, exploring the characters and their lives. It was clear to me that CDPR has a pretty accomplished writing staff, but they were shoved under the rug in favor of a bombastic mega-narrative that didn't feel earned. And then, it was over. The hype, the years of waiting. All boiling down to a game that is so firmly rooted in the past you wondered if the design decisions were all made when the game was announced and then never thought about ever again.