4.5/5 ★ – willypthree's review of Cyberpunk 2077.

***I’m about to discuss a few spoilers for various side quests. Might have a few main quest spoilers*** This game is pretty awesome. Once they put out Patch 1.5, CDPR was finally able to show off what this game is truly made of. I’m thinking ahead on this at all, so this review may be all over the place. —Side Quests: Generally, you play an RPG with side quests that feel exactly like that. On the side. Don’t really feel necessary or vital in any way. This game is not like that. The side quests in this game are some of the best of any RPG game. They feel like they truly belong in the world and in your story. You are going to meet so many interesting, well-written, and weird characters. Some highlights in this regard are the side quests for Panam Palmer, Judy Alvarez, Joshua Stephenson, Rivers Ward, meeting all of Johnny’s old band mates, and the cyber psycho missions for Regina. You’ll end up doing a lot of bizarre shit, such as helping a newly-religious prisoner on death row be crucified to help spread the gospel, saving a clan of Nomads from destruction at the hands of a corporation, reforming Samurai for one last gig, solving a a child abduction case that the police tried to cover up, and a bunch of other shit. The gigs from various fixers are almost always a fun challenge and feel right at home in the world. The underground boxing side quest is alot of fun. Lots of fun shit to do while waiting for Johnny to take over your head. — Main Quest: Everything about the main quest is right up my alley. Johnny’s character is a fuckin asshole, but his character development is impossible not to love and you come to like having him around. He will randomly toss in funny lines to your side quests and fixer gigs. You learn a lot about Johnny as you progress through the main story, and it’s important to weigh your relationship with him to get the ending you desire. There’s like 4 or 5 different endings. —Gameplay: The gun play is a lot of fun. It could be better, but I’m. It gonna complain much. Sometimes the controls get a bit clunky. For example: If you’re walking through an area doing a mission and you need to crouch, so you hit the crouch button only to accidentally skip dialogue because people were talking at the same time you tried to crouch. Quick-hacking might be my favorite part of the combat. It is so fun hacking and entire squad of enemies to death. Some of the quick-hacks you acquire are powerful as fuck. There are a lot of perks in the game. I went for a straight-forward, offensive, guns-blazing build, so I put a lot of perk points in quick-hacking, assault, blades, and cold blood. A lot of options for you in there though. —Other: Graphically, this game is impressive. I played on PS5 Performance mode. Performance mode runs at a silky smooth 60 frames. There’s Ray-tracing mode as well, which is obviously better looking, but only runs at 30 frames. Trade-off is up to you there. Performance mode still looks incredible, so I went for the high frame rate. I did have an issue with the lighting in the game. No matter how I set the brightness, it is still way too bright outside and way too dark inside some spaces. Don’t know if that’s just me fucking up or if the lighting in game is just simply not balanced well. Game is still a bit glitchy, but I’m not really gonna fault them for that. Every glitch I have found in Patch 1.5 has been purely inconvenient, never game-breaking. It is much cleaner than it has ever been. —Summary: I feel like there’s a lot more I could talk about, but you get a pretty good idea of my opinion here. It’s a great game bogged down by a few flaws. Looking at purely the creative aspects of the game, it’s near perfect. With technical aspects, it’s flawed but well beyond acceptable. TL;DR - This game fucks. Buy it.