Door 19 has no handle, you have to live by that chrome life and jack in to unlock it with you preem quickhacks and see, the jargon is running out, just open it up, you know what it is.
That’s right, it’s Cyberpunk 2077!
Graham: Cyberpunk 2077 is a buggy mess and trash RPG, but that doesn’t reflect the thrilling experience I had playing it. It is a game that does very well in quiet and loud.
Night City is noisy: a big, brash, cacophonic metropolis that’s one of the best open worlds I’ve ever explored. That it’s also one of the most vulnerable – the more you try to communicate with it, the more it falls apart – I don’t care in the end. As a place to explore and look at, it’s delightful, especially if you’ve ever looked at drawings of Mega City One as a teenager and longed to see more.
The silence is even better: Cyberpunk 2077 has some of the best conversations in any game. Late at night around a campfire, or in a booth in a blaring nightclub, or on a long, rainy drive around town, the dialogue is allowed to be stretched, relaxed and personal. I ended the game with a dozen characters that I liked and wanted to spend more time with. In a medium where NPCs are often little more than exhibit vendors, or just horrible bastards, the residents of Night City are unusually human.
Alice0: Bug fixes can’t make Cyberpunk 2077 a great game. Too much is actually a bit of nonsense. Stealth feels superficial with no interesting consequences and escalation for disposal. Skill Trees are blown up with uninteresting 2% boosts. It’s boring looking through a deluge of random weapons for weapons that fit my style. Creating specific weapons is a daunting task and an unreasonable investment in stat points. Buying something from a store is 1) outrageously expensive 2) almost pointless as you will soon find something better. The consequence of breaking the law is boringly losing a minute of my time or reloading my last save. The game has so much great fashion, but it’s wasted because clothing is tied to stats, so V ends up dressed like a drunk toddler, and finding a good-looking item of clothing is only disappointing. Ah, I have so many more aspects to complain about, but the bottom line: It’s at the intersection of The Elder Scrolls, Grand Theft Auto and Deus Ex in a configuration that doesn’t fit properly. I’m still having a great time.
Night City elevates a janky-but-interesting 7/10 to a game I’ve played more this year than anything other than Destiny 2. God, I love Night City. I grew up with Judge Dredd, trash dystopian B movies, the ’90s game Quarantine, and industrial music growling about The Man pasting, so I definitely had a soft spot for everything. Cyberpunk 2077’s realization of these aesthetics and ideas is more than I hoped. It is, as Alice Bee said, a good viewer. It’s so big! It’s so flashy! Everyone is so weird and colorful! It’s so messy! It’s all so much! As long as I don’t move slowly enough to see the stupid NPC behavior and technical limitations, I’m delighted to be drowning in the noise as I walk through alleys and under concrete canopies.
What is especially nice is that we have so much freedom to discover. You can climb a lot more than you might think, especially if you have the double jump legs. I rarely drive or use fast travel as running through Night City is a treat in itself.
I can’t tell you how Cyberpunk 2077 will end. I imagine bugs will eventually be squashed. That aside, I half expect CD Projekt Red to eventually relaunch it with a ton of features revised and expanded in a massive ‘Enhanced Edition’ update, like with their first two Witcher games. Even if they don’t, I’d be happy with this as an expensive walking simulator. Oh, but yeah, I quite like the cyberpunk detective story that runs through it so far and the cyber friends I meet. I don’t really know – clearly my attention is elsewhere.
Ollie: When I watched the credits roll after my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077, I felt a little empty, a little depressed. At first I thought it was because I had rushed through the game and not experienced it properly. I also thought I was disappointed that the game was no better in almost every way. Both things were true, but as I sat in my mind, I realized the real reason for my despondency was that I really missed the characters. In a very small way I mourned the fact that there were no more experiences to be had with them.
Yes, I am talking about Judy and Panam. Both are treasures, and I won’t hear a bad word against them. Their stories were surprisingly harsh, and the quests they were involved in were definitely the highlights of the entire game. They felt like people who had experienced pain, loss, and hardship yet could hold their heads high and help those in need. Above all, they wanted to support and feel supported. Every moment with Judy of Panam was guaranteed to be a highlight in terms of writing, voice acting, and player immersion. Since Pyre, I haven’t felt so much pain at the prospect of there being no more interactions to discover with characters in a game. Despite all its flaws, Cyberpunk 2077 deserves a place on the advent calendar in my book for this.
Alice Bee: Your flat has a very separate room where you keep your weapons, but it has a burrito machine instead of a kitchen. I approve these kinds of progressive designs. Imagine V taking a date there. ‘We have a burrito for dinner. Again. LOL. Don’t go in there, that’s where my weapons sleep. “
I have a lot of problems with Cyberpunk. I see a lot of people saying it is “fine” on PC, but it is not. It seems to spend most of its time trying to annoy me while I play it, like a very cute puppy who keeps peeing on your carpet – but I deliberately brought the puppy home to me. Last night I called my car to me and it came out with a truck sitting about half way in the back. I approached with extreme caution. Then, just as I was about to get into the car, the truck exploded from the back and half of the doors of my car fell off. Even if Cyberpunk had no bugs, a lot of the core systems are well liked, as the others have said. And unlike the others, I’ve found the story to be poorly paced and superficial so far.
I really enjoy it.
This seems to be the general experience of people I have spoken to. For example, we complain about all the Cyberpunk 2077 payloads to each other and then go, “It’s okay, right?” (I understand this is the same as the relationship The Walking Dead fans have with The Walking Dead). I think if you understand that before playing it, you will be fine.