While it certainly didn’t set the world on fire as CDProjektRed hoped it sure set someone’s PC on fire.

The best way to describe Cyberpunk 2077 is that it could’ve been a solid mid-next-gen game that got released way too prematurely and suffered because of it. While I can respect the technical ambition with pushing hardware and graphics, even on mid settings it’s still fairly commendable, bugs, flaws, and all, bumping the lamp can get you so far until the real blind-spots of the game start creeping up.

There’s a lot of games to compare to Cyberpunk in whatever it’s trying to achieve as a game. It has the open-world sandbox approach of a Rockstar game, the cinematic non-interactive walk-and-talk sequences reminiscent of a modern Naughty Dog game, the sprawling story-based approach of a BioWare game, the walking simulator shoot-and-loot idiosyncrasies of a Bethesda game, and the unloaded gameplay garbage of any Ubisoft game. Out of all the games I can compare Cyberpunk with the two that stick the most throughout my 30 hour playthrough are the Deus Ex games (obviously) and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Bloodlines especially since both were based directly from tabletop role-playing games. Along with starting out as a player navigating their way through the criminal underbelly of an urban city where factions and notable people are vying for power, the antagonistic force being a high society upstart wrestling control over the city, the MacGuffin basically involving a dead corpse (more or less), and even V’s journey of grappling with their mortality and individuality is strikingly reminiscent of the player’s in Bloodlines. It’s a worthwhile comparison to make because of how these games translate their source material. Bloodlines took it to become a worthwhile if imperfect first-person RPG, while Cyberpunk 2077 only really takes the lore and names of the systems?

I started off trying to play it like an RPG but midway through I stopped because the RPG systems themselves were just useless. The perks you get fall into the mainstream AAA camp of being arbitrary stat bonuses and percentage increases. It became mechanically spread super thin that it hardly became worth investing any points into. I don’t know why the game continued to keep up the pretense that it’s an RPG through the quest structure, dialogue tree, and mechanics if it hardly commits to any real player choice or freedom until the endgame.

On the related subject, what’s the point of having a Commander Shepard/Adam Jensen/Geralt protagonist if they neither feel like their own character or one purely created by the player? V’s clearly supposed to feel like their own character that we define/shape except for when they’re not? We never see them like one because everything’s strictly first-person which implies they’re completely our creation but then why give them a voice and set personality?

Then I started to just play it more like GTA where I drive around Night City and wreak havoc and do what I want. Sadly, this experience barely lasts because of how much of a joke that police AI was, how miserable driving feels, and how static this world felt. I can’t quite put my finger on what specifically tore the illusion of immersion apart, but Night City, for all it’s hardware ambition, feels just so unresponsive and boring to be in. It has good characters with quests (mostly Panam’s) that are worth doing, but it’s all a drop in a bucket full of shovel-ware radiant missions that were a chore to do.

I guess the problem stems from how uninteresting Cyberpunk 2077’s setting is for me to care about. As far as cyberpunk settings have gone in the genre, this feels like a 16 year old’s idea of what cyberpunk is. It’s a game that only pushes neon street grunge visuals and behind that shallow aesthetic completely avoids any attempt at a critique of capitalism other than having Keanu Reeves say corporations are bad in different ways. This is probably why I enjoyed Panam’s quests because pretty much all of it took place outside of the actual cyberpunk setting.

Near the endgame, I just gave up on whatever way I was supposed to play this game as the developers intended and played it like it was Deus Ex because stealth seemed the most engaging gameplay wise. For all the patches and continued promises CDProjektRed made in hopes of doing a No Man’s Sky rebound of delivering the game they promised, I don’t think it’s going to achieve it anytime soon. The newest patches can tweak driving and add stuff like being able to buy apartments which I guess is cool but they feel so minuscule to the real meat that Cyberpunk 2077 severely lacks as a game to become a genuine game changer.