January 2nd, 2020
If you’ve read or seen anything about Cyberpunk 2077 in the last two weeks then you already know the game is a bit of a mess on the technical level. Socially it hasn’t been doing great either with corrupted saves, seizure-inducing story beats, and rumors of class action lawsuits, but very little of the press that’s flooding the airwaves is bothering to address the main question: how is the actual game? And for the record this question really only applies to the versions of 2077 that are not on the Playstation 4 or Xbox One, since those ports are messes beyond repair (at time of writing).
The short answer is that Cyberpunk 2077 is fine, which in itself is probably a disappointment considering how long it’s been in development. Strip away all the technical issues, bad press, and overblown hype and it’s just a passable game that I probably won’t even think about again until they finish releasing all the DLC. It sort of plays like a mashup of Fallout 4 and Grand Theft Auto, but almost everything feels off center just enough that I find it hard to be engaged and I’m pretty sure the root of this problem can be traced by to our poster boy: Johnny Silverhand.
As a bit of background on the plot, Johnny Silverhand fulfills a role similar to Joker in Batman Arkham Knight: a voice in your head that runs commentary on your actions throughout the game. But since this is the cyberpunk genre Silverhand isn’t brought on by any sort of psychosis or drugs but is instead from a computer chip in your brain that’s slowly killing you. This is how you’re introduced to Silverhand for the first time, with a confrontation in your bedroom where he tries to psychologically beat you to death…but then in the very next scene he suddenly changes his tune and wants to work with you and save your life. This radical tone shift is not only jarring but unfortunately sets the stage for a long series of confusing interactions throughout the game as Cyberpunk 2077 desperately tries to convince you that Johnny Silverhand is a cool guy you should be friends with.
Maybe this is why they had Keanu Reeves play Johnny Silverhand, because deep down I think we all want to be friends with Mr. Reeves. Unfortunately 2077 falls into the same trap as Persona 5 Royal where it builds an entire story around trying to convince us that we like one jackass that’s central to the whole plot, and if we don’t like that one jackass then much of the narrative falls to pieces. Now, this isn’t to say that 2077 grabs you around the throat and forces you to be Silverhand’s friend (this is an RPG after all) but the story keeps trying to seize the wheel and turn you back towards Silverhand’s friend list, whether or not you want to put up with the voice in your head that’s trying to kill you. Hell, toward the end of the game it actually started suggesting that I was okay with Silverhand killing me with dialogue choices that weren’t my own, referencing conversations we never had.
This disconnect from what feels like your own understanding of the world of 2077 permeates every beat of the game as you play it, be it when you’re taking side quests or even trying to believe you live in the world it’s presenting to you. After the game’s introduction you’re supposed to have a price on your head and one of the biggest corporations in the world (perhaps even the government of a country) wants you dead, but outside of story missions it never feels like it, if then. This is another thing 2077 has in common with Arkham Knight, where you might have the world ending and so strung up on hallucinogenics that you can’t even stand but there’s still enough time to do six hours of racing challenges with no problems or interference from the outside world. There is almost never any feeling of urgency when you do anything, and even when there are people threatening you for the price on your head or trying to tell you that you only have days left to live the open world aspect of the game undermines it all in the very next breath.
And it is a shame, because the best part about 2077 is the world they’ve created. The game’s visuals for all their missteps with textures and character animations just click as you breeze down the street in your vehicle of choice, bombarded by ads soaked in implicit and explicit sex, skyscrapers towering above you as the radio blabs about absolutely terrible sounding things that are just the norm in this world where you’re either rich with a knife in your back or so poor that you spend your last ten bucks on a recorded memory from someone else just to escape. It’s incredible to absorb this version of reality, and I’m sure for some players just doing that will be enough. I’d wager that there are people right now “playing” Cyberpunk by just walking the city streets, passing the food stall vendors, stopping on the corner when the crosswalk holograms tell them to stop, and avoiding the dangerous parts of town where police get in (scripted) shootouts with gangs. Those people are going to love just being IN this world, but for the rest of us who have to actually play the game it’s not so simple.
I may make several comparisons to the last two Deus Ex games in these next few segments where we’ll talk about the gameplay and other genre tropes that you would find in cyberpunk games. 2077 has a similar sort of flavor to Deus Ex where it sells itself as a “play your way” sort of RPG that you can complete the game with a focus on combat, stealth, hacking, or even social skills, though the social stuff is a little less relevant in 2077. However, while Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided have incredibly beautifully designed levels that truly do let you get through most every situation with whatever skills you’ve invested in or playstyle you prefer if you look hard enough, 2077 does not have such artisan levels. Sure, there’s the odd area where you can sneak through rafters, hack open a side door, or vault over a fence, but these are rare and strangely almost exclusively happen during side missions. I had been trying to manage with a stealth/hacking playstyle for reasons that we’ll get into later, but I quickly discovered that wouldn’t fly when I started hitting missions full of rooms with enemies all looking directly at each other, and electric doors that couldn’t be hacked. Hell, it feels like some side missions just straight up can’t be beaten without enough points in hacking or physical prowess, which gets very frustrating.
The frustration continues when you level up and see your options for advancing your character. 2077 has five stats that dictate your ability to do things, similar to the stats you’d find in a tabletop RPG: Body, Reflexes, Tech, Cool, and Intelligence, and each of those have their own skills that you can invest points in to “enhance” your in-game prowess. I put “enhance” like that because unlike Witcher 3 or other, better RPGs your skill increases don’t really do much to change your moment to moment gameplay experience. Three percent damage for pistols? Sixty second regeneration on a fraction of your hacking resource? Ten percent faster ADS with rifles? Slow down there, buster, I don’t know how much more exciting percentile growth I can take.
I’m lying to you, a little bit. As you invest more and more points into any given stat you’ll gain access to more skills that are interesting and relevant, but it’s not any fun to get there when all the baseline skills that are offered are pathetic and don’t feel good to unlock. In fact I’m struggling to think about what use most of the stealth skills or tech skills have at all, but I still invested points into tech like a dummy because I wanted to be able to hack open doors which is apparently a different skill than hacking computers. A better avenue may have been to have less upgrades but make them feel more impactful, however without reading the Cyberpunk pen and paper RPG book I’m not sure how much of this is because they’re trying to follow in the path of the game that came before.
Your cyberware is equally disappointing for the most part, especially compared to Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Maybe this is a problem with 2077 where every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the street is augmented to some degree, but this game just makes your cyborg parts feel more like every day improvements to a Honda Civic while Adam Jensen’s upgrades in his Deus Ex games made you feel like a sports car. 2077 has some equivalents to Deus Ex with arm upgrades like sword arms or built in rocket launchers (but you can only have one arm upgrade compared to Deus Ex’s Swiss Army knives), and leg upgrades that let you jump super high, but anything that Deus Ex had that made you feel like an actual superhuman (being able to fall from any height, stealth camouflage, punching through walls, dashing through the air, etc) is off the table and thus makes the whole thing feel rather bland. Again I wonder if this is the fault of the tabletop RPG the game is based on or some other limitation that the developers implemented, but I have to imagine that there are more creative ideas for brain implants than “more RAM.”
Speaking of RAM, my favorite part about Cyberpunk 2077 is the combat, specifically the in-combat hacking that they call “quick hacks.” You get a taste of it in the game’s tutorial, where you’re shown that you can slow down time to a crawl to target enemies and do everything from disabling their weapons to overriding their internal processors and forcing them to kill themselves. Obviously most of that is taken away from you until later in the game since those are high tier abilities, but even early on you’re able to do things like see enemies through walls or turn off their eyes for a few seconds, which is great for stealthing around or blinding enemy snipers. In fact these abilities were so good that I was almost convinced that high tier enemies like bosses might just be regular humans with no augments so that you couldn’t turn them off…but no, some enemies are just immune to being overloaded or deactivated with no explanation other than “action blocked.”
The rest of the combat is very standard with the usual sniper rifle, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, etc. If you’ve played any FPS with average mechanics you’ll know what to expect, albeit with the added bonus of sometimes the weapons not working properly due to 2077‘s many technical issues. Frankly the biggest issue I had with 2077‘s combat and overall gameplay is something that can’t be ignored regardless of your playstyle: its dodge mechanic. It sounds like a good idea on paper, where double tapping in any direction will give you a quick dodge in that direction to help with melee combat or other damage avoidance. The problem comes when you start to notice all the times you might double tap any particular direction, be it adjusting your speed as you keep up with a character you’re supposed to follow or carefully trying to peak around a corner during a stealth section. The former is just awkward from a cinematic point of view, but the later will easily get you spotted at an unfortunate moment unless you’re quick enough on the blinding quick hack. I’m sure your mileage will vary over how much this feature bothers you, but I guarantee you that it’ll be an inconvenience for you at least once unless you’re playing a straight up “draw sword and rush people” build, in which case dodging is probably your best friend.
Conflicting player experiences leads us to the most obvious and most widely known part of the review: the technical issues. I have a long list of all the glitches that I experienced, from clothing disappearing to aggressive pop-in to not being able to continue certain quests without reloading a save, but the technical issues that bother me the most are the ones that point to a more pervasive lack of oversight in game design. One example I’ve told anyone that would listen is a quest based on your car being destroyed in an accident, only for the same car to come right back to your side if you press the “call car” button. How this got past testing I’ll never know, but it’s far from the only instance of something obvious that should have gotten caught by even the most basic of quality assurance. Similar problems include said car sometimes driving through a dozen barriers to try to get to you (all but destroying itself in the process), cyberware like the Gorilla Arms not doing what it says or straight up not working, UI disappearing, and cyberware that you uninstalled still stuck on your body, but frankly the issues are so numerous I could write a whole review just about each and every one and it all just starts blending together. Hell, I completely forgot that at least ten percent of the time a character’s mouth won’t start moving until they’re halfway through saying their lines before I checked my notes.
In my opinion the worst part about 2077 isn’t the disconnected story or the unexciting RPG elements or the mediocre combat or even the technical issues, instead it’s the overall feeling that CDPR is capable of so much more. They clearly built a world that can carry the weight of an open world cyberpunk RPG but weren’t able to fit one in there, and even after everything is fully patched and whatever DLC they have in mind is finally released, I really can’t see this game being anything more than a passing memory. Be it a disappointing memory or one that you enjoyed but aren’t in any hurry to revisit, this isn’t the next great RPG for your game library, regardless of whether or not it’s glitching so hard that it makes Bethesda blush. All I can hope for is that this enthusiasm for the cyberpunk genre will shake Square Enix awake and give us a new Deus Ex game within the next decade.
