It's a shame that people spent so much time and energy talking about the buggy and unfinished state Cyberpunk released in, because it really overshadows how poor the core game is.
The Good:
Somewhat allows for a variety of builds and approaches - Occasionally interesting characters and sidequests - Generally competent writing
The Bad:
The map is deceptively dense with icons to hide a shallow, uninteractive world with little to do - Largely uninteresting, unrelatable cast - Both V and Silverhand are eye-roll-worthy edgelords who won't shut up - Boring MMO style combat with bullet sponge enemies - Managing junk loot takes up far too much of your time - Unbalanced skills and weapons make the gameplay trivial - Unfulfilling main plot lacks motivation and ends quickly and with a dud - Completely sidesteps most of what makes dystopian futures interesting fiction
The Ugly:
Absolutely ridden with bugs and glitches of all kinds - Constant crashes - You will live in constant fear of a game breaking bug - Plenty of choices and none of them ultimately matter
---
The most anticipated game of the past decade, especially post-2015 after the runaway success of CDProjekt Red's previous smash hit, The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 has finally emerged from an 8-year development hell cycle during which the hype surrounding it has been propped up by a suffocating ad campaign and constant puff pieces in the gaming press; did it live up to the expectations? Absolutely not.
What was promised as a veritable revolution for the RPG genre, the next evolutionary step in the Deus Ex formula, with impactful moral choices steering a deep, involving plot into drastically different directions, all set on the stage of a bustling, organic, fully explorable city with advanced AI routines and endless opportunities, actually turned out to be a simple façade with an open world with nothing to do and choices that don't matter in the grand scheme of things, with the icing on the cake being the gameplay loop of a Borderlands-style lootershooter where you spend just as much time sorting out the trash in your inventory as you do playing the game, and the cherry on top of that icing being the fact the game is so broken (at the time of writing this - four months after release) to be borderline unplayable for some and a frustrating mess for others.
The premise is that you are an individual known only as "V", just another bland jaded nihilistic nobody living in Night City, a metropolis populated with bland jaded nihilistic nobodies, and you get roped by a local imbecile (read: disposable tutorial character) into an impossible heist to steal "the Relic", a valuable piece of technology owned and secured by a powerful Japanese corporation. Typical quest hook for "things go tits up" and so they do: V finds himself with a chip in his head containing the digitized consciousness of early 21st century post-marxist terrorist and rockerboy douchebag extraordinaire Johnny Silverhand, esquire, who frequently pops up as a digital hallucination to spout off some cartoonishly jaded cynical remark. V now has to embark on an epic quest to find someone who can remove the chip from his head before Silverhand takes over his body in his quest for booze, drugs, poontang and smashing capitalism, in that exact order, overwriting V's consciousness in the process, effectively killing him. Silverhand is played by Keanu Reeves who has to be praised for managing to record so many voice lines in between his morning shower and coffee, or at least that's how he comes off, since he sounds positively asleep for the entirety of his screen presence. His performance took me back to the good old days when Hollywood stars would show up for videogame voice over duty in their pajamas and yawn their way through the recording sessions. It is nostalgic if nothing else. He even gets his own "one last gig" side story, which culminates in one of the most low energy and cringe-inducing concerts I have seen. I suggest you look it up to see for yourself.
It is small wonder then that V is so desperate to get rid of the Keanu Reeves in his head, and this is where the supporting cast comes into play as V bounces from contact to contact trying to get help with his problem. These character, as mentioned before and not unlike V himself, constitute a majority of money-obsessed nihilistic assholes, flat, materialistic, backstabbing schemers who might be right at home in a dystopian setting, but who start making you weary as you meet nothing but. The few and far between exceptions are the slightly more interesting characters driven by duty or loyalty to family: these are the best moments in the story, and they are almost all missable side content. It is safe to say that by sticking strictly to the relatively short main plot as many players are likely to do, you will miss the best the game has to offer, which is already not much, including all of the inevitable romance subplots we have come to expect in an RPG made in a post-Mass Effect world.
Describing the romance aspect in particular is a good way to introduce the next area in which the game disappoints and misdelivers: choice and consequence or the lack thereof. The four "significant" romance options in the game, only two of which available for each gender, present no real progression towards the intimacy status but rather drop it on you out of the blue regardless of which dialogue choices you have made during your interactions with the character: try as you might to drive these people away, the game will always present you with the romance option when the time is ripe, which makes the situations all the more awkward when they occur. Suddenly a character will be giving you the look and you'll be offered the "Kiss" option despite no chemistry existing between them and V at any point before then. None of your decision regarding your attitude amount to anything, as it all funnels down towards the same outcome. Compare and contrast with Bioware relationships which, while far from perfect, can be screwed up to the point the other character refuses you or even leaves the game entirely, and you might see the step backwards that happened with Cyberpunk.
But what if you do decide to choose this unearned romance option, are you then expected to be faithful to this partner? Are there consequences for not doing so? Can you anger them so they will leave you? Simpler still: can you interact with them romantically outside of the scripted romance moments? The answer to all of that is, of course, no. These relationships are introduced as something serious but then everyone goes their own way and you can't even go see them to have a chat, as they won't give you the time of day. At the end of the game a character will even berate you for never going to see them anymore, but if for some reason you were to wiki where they are and go see them, they still would have nothing to tell you. It has to be said the the writing per se isn't bad by any stretch, it's just that the writers have to work with that plot and those characters, so they get little chance to shine.
The lack of impact of your decisions also applies to the much boasted-about tactical and moral decision which were a large part of the marketing material and were promised to significantly influence both single missions and the story at large. Here too we can only call those promises half-truths if we feel generous and and outright lies if we do not: while, yes, you can approach a small number of missions in a variety of ways (bribery, stealth, hacking, charisma or violence) and these will indeed result in different outcomes for that mission (though never outright failure, only different flavours of success) these outcomes exist in a vacuum: never will these decisions influence anything outside of the mission that contains them, with the exception of very rare, very minor callbacks in later missions, which are ultimately entirely inconsequential.
Practical example is the E3 demo mission that everyone has likely seen: in it you are tasked with acquiring a drone from some punks belonging to a gang called Maelstrom. You options are to outright pay for the drone with your own money, go in shooting and steal the drone or again pay for the drone but with a chip infected with a virus that kills the punks, allowing you to make off with the booty. One would expect your actions to cause a rift between you and this Maelstrom faction, and the promotional material unambiguously promised so, however this is not the case, since that faction doesn't exist... because no factions exist as a game mechanic: you have no reputation that can be compromised with anyone the way it can in, say, a Fallout game where a faction might cast you out if you work for their enemies. Cyberpunk has none of that to offer because it was all entirely cut: the promised gang drive-bys against you? Gone, even the cops don't chase you for more than one block if you cause a fuss in the streets. The game just isn't built for that. Cause too much of a ruckus and cops will simply start endlessly spawning behind you when on foot and kill you and that'll be that. Or just drive away for thirty seconds are see everything return to copacetic.
The permanent bounties on your head seen in the likes of Red Dead Redemption? None of that here. As for your decisions in the mission above, all that changes is whether the maelstrom will offer you to parley or attack you the one time you will meet them again in an optional side story of little consequence as you will never interact with them outside of that. Oh you will meet Maelstrom members here and there in the game, but they will be nothing more than cosmetic skins for generic thug enemies you can kill for XP and loot without repercussions.
Is the main storyline at least influenced by your decisions throughout the game? Of course it isn't: like in 95% of AAA games out there, you get three or so choices at the very end on which ending you want to see, with the availability of one option contingent on whether or not you have completed an optional questline. All this does is unlock a slighly more varied version of the final mission, where everything plays out more or less the same up to the lackluster ending. Can you at least live with the consequences of the ending you chose? No: finishing the game boots you back to the main menu and lets you load from before the final mission or start a New Game+ from the beginning. All you get are a few phone calls during the credit sequence where NPCs either yell at you or congratulate you and that is your lot. Or it might be your lot, since the game crashed on me during the credits, denying me even that bit of closure.
What about the side activities around the city outside of the major main and optional quests? Simply put, there is nothing to do aside from shopping for augmentations, guns and pants, then missions and encounters that all boil down to killing everything you see for XP and loot and/or retrieve something/someone for a cash reward. There are bars you can sit at and drink for no reason or consequence, there are hookers you can pay to watch a blurry, shaky 30 second sex cutscene with all the sexy bits censored Austin Powers style, you can buy cars you will never use, and that is it for the side content. It feels like the developers filled the map with icons to give the illusion of quantity, but it's very soon apparent how those icons correspond to nothing worth doing and there is little behind all that icon spam that just gets on the way of finding what you do need. The game tries its best to force you to do side activities by immediately saddling you with massive debt: you start with a staggering 25.000 credits debt with your cyber surgeon and your car gets smashed and you need to spend a premium on a new one. Too bad you can just ignore your debt forever and just steal cars the entire game with no repercussion. The surgeon never calls you to remind you the money you owe him, not even in the aforementioned end credits, in which he appears.
So the story and content are a big dud, but how is the gameplay? You can forgive a lot to a game if at least one between story and gameplay is done well. Unfortunately this is not the case with Cyberpunk. For some baffling reason, CD Project Red decided to go down the lootershooter route for their sprawling RPG: as such you will quickly find yourself with an inventory full to the brim with trash loot you must either scrap for crafting materials or sell for pennies on the dollar (a gun sold in a shop for 50.000 credits will net you a few hundred at most) at one of the sell-a-loot machines scattered around the city or any of the stores. Yes, the local sushi joint will be happy to buy the 26 blood covered revolvers you have looted off the corpses of the latest gangsters you have killed. This means you will spend so much time faffing around with the inventory, slowly selling and scrapping each piece of armament and clothing (clothing is armor by the way: a pair of rare tier assless chaps will offer more protection than an uncommon tier bulletproof vest). It's a chore.
In the game's favor, the combat is studied in such a way that you can pretty much approach it in any way you want: fancy going in guns blazing? Not recommended since the gunplay is spongy and unsatisfying, but you can. Want to jump in with a katana or blade arms and start hacking away, or remotely hack people's implants with your own? Quite possible. Want to sneak in with suppressed weapons? Look up the very specific build that allows your to do that and you can. Want to snipe from a distance? Buy the right sniper rifle and you can. So the game does provide a variety of combat options but still manages to trip and fall on its face because of how broken and unbalanced some of these options are.
The sniping in particular is broken to the point of pure comedy: since this is a modern game you can tag enemies to see them through walls, in fact the game autotags every enemy who has detected you. Also you can easily acquire a class of sniper rifles that fire through walls. Not only through walls in fact, but through absolutely anything, whole buildings, even mountains, meaning the enemies don't have a chance in hell to see you, let alone fight back. And if you're thinking this must be a bug, the game has unlockable skill that give you huge damage bonuses when you fight that way. This translates in practice to you reaching a mission area, tagging every enemy in the building with a net ping, then sniping them all through a dozen walls while they wonder what's going on and barely react, then you stroll in and complete whichever objective you came for, completely unopposed. Similarly overpowered are the melee builds you can make, which render most of the combat absolutely trivial.
This doesn't simply break the gameplay, it also reveals yet another problem with the narrative structure of the game: it really feels like Cyberpunk went for a complete power fantasy, wanting to make the player feel like an unstoppable cyber commando rather than exploring any of the ethical and social downsides of a world that has fully embraced transhumanism, which is what Deus Ex has done for the past twenty years and speculative science fiction at large for the past seventy or so. Cyberpunk 2077 isn't interested in any of that: all it wants to do is present cybernetic augmentations as aspirational superpowers and nothing else. The developers could have given the player the opportunity of siding with a Luddite faction opposed to cyber augmentations (faction already present in the source material) but they have none of that: the player has no say in V's attitude towards cyber enhancements, and frankly neither does anyone else in this world.
Another aspect that makes Night City completely lacking in believability is the overarching narrative of Johnny Silverhand's revolutionary rebellion against corporate control. Johnny speaks as if revolution is happening at any moment, as if the powder keg is waiting for the spark to ignite it, he's trying to be some kind of Alan Moore-esque anarchoid figure, a feeling further compounded by the fact his host character is named "V"... However, nothing in Night City even so much as hints to his views being the case: people seem absolutely content with their existence, they are fat and wealthy, showing no real sign of discontent towards their corporate overlords. As such, Johnny's "down with capitalism" shtick comes off as more of a tantrum than a relatable, cogent struggle the player can get behind (not that the choice is offered in any tangible way).
It could be argued that this is intentional: that Johnny is indeed "a Relic" of the past, uselessly struggling against an oligarchy that has been fully accepted by society and which is ruling it as a stable system. It can be argued, but then I must ask... what is the point? It is as if the game developers deliberately sidestepped any aspect that could make their carefully crafted power fantasy look like a serious dystopian future, hilariously this is a future set a few short decades after a nuclear apocalypse, yet that has no bearing on the story or world at all: there are even buses traveling between states on the highway like nothing is wrong. This really feels more like a modern day Los Angeles with some extra neon signs and aggressive body piercing more than any future dystopia.
If you take out of cyberpunk as a genre its cautionary tale element about overreliance on technology and the alienation that derives from it, then what's left is just another flavor of Marvel-style aspirational popcorn superhero schlock... and then what is the point of even writing cyberpunk-themed fiction?
I don't even feel like spending too many words on the bugs and glitches under whose weight this game agonizes: it is all too easy to find petabytes of information about those, and I'm confident they will be fixed in future updates. It's a shame that people spent so much time and energy talking about how buggy and unfinished Cyberpunk is, because it really overshadows how poor the core game is. Suffice it to say that playing the game in its current state will drive you up the wall at the 20th crash.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a mess on every aspect: narratively by being such a low stakes and shallow affair, gameplay-wise with the constant self-sabotage of its mechanics and as a piece of software for its absolutely dreadful stability. Technical issues can be fixed, but the core gameplay design and narrative choices cannot. As such it is only recommended for people looking to feel like an overpowered, uncomplicated cybernetic John Wick, which is precisely why Keanu Reeves was chosen as a testimonial. Everyone else who might be looking for the next Deus Ex need not apply.
The Good:
Somewhat allows for a variety of builds and approaches - Occasionally interesting characters and sidequests - Generally competent writing
The Bad:
The map is deceptively dense with icons to hide a shallow, uninteractive world with little to do - Largely uninteresting, unrelatable cast - Both V and Silverhand are eye-roll-worthy edgelords who won't shut up - Boring MMO style combat with bullet sponge enemies - Managing junk loot takes up far too much of your time - Unbalanced skills and weapons make the gameplay trivial - Unfulfilling main plot lacks motivation and ends quickly and with a dud - Completely sidesteps most of what makes dystopian futures interesting fiction
The Ugly:
Absolutely ridden with bugs and glitches of all kinds - Constant crashes - You will live in constant fear of a game breaking bug - Plenty of choices and none of them ultimately matter
---
The most anticipated game of the past decade, especially post-2015 after the runaway success of CDProjekt Red's previous smash hit, The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 has finally emerged from an 8-year development hell cycle during which the hype surrounding it has been propped up by a suffocating ad campaign and constant puff pieces in the gaming press; did it live up to the expectations? Absolutely not.
What was promised as a veritable revolution for the RPG genre, the next evolutionary step in the Deus Ex formula, with impactful moral choices steering a deep, involving plot into drastically different directions, all set on the stage of a bustling, organic, fully explorable city with advanced AI routines and endless opportunities, actually turned out to be a simple façade with an open world with nothing to do and choices that don't matter in the grand scheme of things, with the icing on the cake being the gameplay loop of a Borderlands-style lootershooter where you spend just as much time sorting out the trash in your inventory as you do playing the game, and the cherry on top of that icing being the fact the game is so broken (at the time of writing this - four months after release) to be borderline unplayable for some and a frustrating mess for others.
The premise is that you are an individual known only as "V", just another bland jaded nihilistic nobody living in Night City, a metropolis populated with bland jaded nihilistic nobodies, and you get roped by a local imbecile (read: disposable tutorial character) into an impossible heist to steal "the Relic", a valuable piece of technology owned and secured by a powerful Japanese corporation. Typical quest hook for "things go tits up" and so they do: V finds himself with a chip in his head containing the digitized consciousness of early 21st century post-marxist terrorist and rockerboy douchebag extraordinaire Johnny Silverhand, esquire, who frequently pops up as a digital hallucination to spout off some cartoonishly jaded cynical remark. V now has to embark on an epic quest to find someone who can remove the chip from his head before Silverhand takes over his body in his quest for booze, drugs, poontang and smashing capitalism, in that exact order, overwriting V's consciousness in the process, effectively killing him. Silverhand is played by Keanu Reeves who has to be praised for managing to record so many voice lines in between his morning shower and coffee, or at least that's how he comes off, since he sounds positively asleep for the entirety of his screen presence. His performance took me back to the good old days when Hollywood stars would show up for videogame voice over duty in their pajamas and yawn their way through the recording sessions. It is nostalgic if nothing else. He even gets his own "one last gig" side story, which culminates in one of the most low energy and cringe-inducing concerts I have seen. I suggest you look it up to see for yourself.
It is small wonder then that V is so desperate to get rid of the Keanu Reeves in his head, and this is where the supporting cast comes into play as V bounces from contact to contact trying to get help with his problem. These character, as mentioned before and not unlike V himself, constitute a majority of money-obsessed nihilistic assholes, flat, materialistic, backstabbing schemers who might be right at home in a dystopian setting, but who start making you weary as you meet nothing but. The few and far between exceptions are the slightly more interesting characters driven by duty or loyalty to family: these are the best moments in the story, and they are almost all missable side content. It is safe to say that by sticking strictly to the relatively short main plot as many players are likely to do, you will miss the best the game has to offer, which is already not much, including all of the inevitable romance subplots we have come to expect in an RPG made in a post-Mass Effect world.
Describing the romance aspect in particular is a good way to introduce the next area in which the game disappoints and misdelivers: choice and consequence or the lack thereof. The four "significant" romance options in the game, only two of which available for each gender, present no real progression towards the intimacy status but rather drop it on you out of the blue regardless of which dialogue choices you have made during your interactions with the character: try as you might to drive these people away, the game will always present you with the romance option when the time is ripe, which makes the situations all the more awkward when they occur. Suddenly a character will be giving you the look and you'll be offered the "Kiss" option despite no chemistry existing between them and V at any point before then. None of your decision regarding your attitude amount to anything, as it all funnels down towards the same outcome. Compare and contrast with Bioware relationships which, while far from perfect, can be screwed up to the point the other character refuses you or even leaves the game entirely, and you might see the step backwards that happened with Cyberpunk.
But what if you do decide to choose this unearned romance option, are you then expected to be faithful to this partner? Are there consequences for not doing so? Can you anger them so they will leave you? Simpler still: can you interact with them romantically outside of the scripted romance moments? The answer to all of that is, of course, no. These relationships are introduced as something serious but then everyone goes their own way and you can't even go see them to have a chat, as they won't give you the time of day. At the end of the game a character will even berate you for never going to see them anymore, but if for some reason you were to wiki where they are and go see them, they still would have nothing to tell you. It has to be said the the writing per se isn't bad by any stretch, it's just that the writers have to work with that plot and those characters, so they get little chance to shine.
The lack of impact of your decisions also applies to the much boasted-about tactical and moral decision which were a large part of the marketing material and were promised to significantly influence both single missions and the story at large. Here too we can only call those promises half-truths if we feel generous and and outright lies if we do not: while, yes, you can approach a small number of missions in a variety of ways (bribery, stealth, hacking, charisma or violence) and these will indeed result in different outcomes for that mission (though never outright failure, only different flavours of success) these outcomes exist in a vacuum: never will these decisions influence anything outside of the mission that contains them, with the exception of very rare, very minor callbacks in later missions, which are ultimately entirely inconsequential.
Practical example is the E3 demo mission that everyone has likely seen: in it you are tasked with acquiring a drone from some punks belonging to a gang called Maelstrom. You options are to outright pay for the drone with your own money, go in shooting and steal the drone or again pay for the drone but with a chip infected with a virus that kills the punks, allowing you to make off with the booty. One would expect your actions to cause a rift between you and this Maelstrom faction, and the promotional material unambiguously promised so, however this is not the case, since that faction doesn't exist... because no factions exist as a game mechanic: you have no reputation that can be compromised with anyone the way it can in, say, a Fallout game where a faction might cast you out if you work for their enemies. Cyberpunk has none of that to offer because it was all entirely cut: the promised gang drive-bys against you? Gone, even the cops don't chase you for more than one block if you cause a fuss in the streets. The game just isn't built for that. Cause too much of a ruckus and cops will simply start endlessly spawning behind you when on foot and kill you and that'll be that. Or just drive away for thirty seconds are see everything return to copacetic.
The permanent bounties on your head seen in the likes of Red Dead Redemption? None of that here. As for your decisions in the mission above, all that changes is whether the maelstrom will offer you to parley or attack you the one time you will meet them again in an optional side story of little consequence as you will never interact with them outside of that. Oh you will meet Maelstrom members here and there in the game, but they will be nothing more than cosmetic skins for generic thug enemies you can kill for XP and loot without repercussions.
Is the main storyline at least influenced by your decisions throughout the game? Of course it isn't: like in 95% of AAA games out there, you get three or so choices at the very end on which ending you want to see, with the availability of one option contingent on whether or not you have completed an optional questline. All this does is unlock a slighly more varied version of the final mission, where everything plays out more or less the same up to the lackluster ending. Can you at least live with the consequences of the ending you chose? No: finishing the game boots you back to the main menu and lets you load from before the final mission or start a New Game+ from the beginning. All you get are a few phone calls during the credit sequence where NPCs either yell at you or congratulate you and that is your lot. Or it might be your lot, since the game crashed on me during the credits, denying me even that bit of closure.
What about the side activities around the city outside of the major main and optional quests? Simply put, there is nothing to do aside from shopping for augmentations, guns and pants, then missions and encounters that all boil down to killing everything you see for XP and loot and/or retrieve something/someone for a cash reward. There are bars you can sit at and drink for no reason or consequence, there are hookers you can pay to watch a blurry, shaky 30 second sex cutscene with all the sexy bits censored Austin Powers style, you can buy cars you will never use, and that is it for the side content. It feels like the developers filled the map with icons to give the illusion of quantity, but it's very soon apparent how those icons correspond to nothing worth doing and there is little behind all that icon spam that just gets on the way of finding what you do need. The game tries its best to force you to do side activities by immediately saddling you with massive debt: you start with a staggering 25.000 credits debt with your cyber surgeon and your car gets smashed and you need to spend a premium on a new one. Too bad you can just ignore your debt forever and just steal cars the entire game with no repercussion. The surgeon never calls you to remind you the money you owe him, not even in the aforementioned end credits, in which he appears.
So the story and content are a big dud, but how is the gameplay? You can forgive a lot to a game if at least one between story and gameplay is done well. Unfortunately this is not the case with Cyberpunk. For some baffling reason, CD Project Red decided to go down the lootershooter route for their sprawling RPG: as such you will quickly find yourself with an inventory full to the brim with trash loot you must either scrap for crafting materials or sell for pennies on the dollar (a gun sold in a shop for 50.000 credits will net you a few hundred at most) at one of the sell-a-loot machines scattered around the city or any of the stores. Yes, the local sushi joint will be happy to buy the 26 blood covered revolvers you have looted off the corpses of the latest gangsters you have killed. This means you will spend so much time faffing around with the inventory, slowly selling and scrapping each piece of armament and clothing (clothing is armor by the way: a pair of rare tier assless chaps will offer more protection than an uncommon tier bulletproof vest). It's a chore.
In the game's favor, the combat is studied in such a way that you can pretty much approach it in any way you want: fancy going in guns blazing? Not recommended since the gunplay is spongy and unsatisfying, but you can. Want to jump in with a katana or blade arms and start hacking away, or remotely hack people's implants with your own? Quite possible. Want to sneak in with suppressed weapons? Look up the very specific build that allows your to do that and you can. Want to snipe from a distance? Buy the right sniper rifle and you can. So the game does provide a variety of combat options but still manages to trip and fall on its face because of how broken and unbalanced some of these options are.
The sniping in particular is broken to the point of pure comedy: since this is a modern game you can tag enemies to see them through walls, in fact the game autotags every enemy who has detected you. Also you can easily acquire a class of sniper rifles that fire through walls. Not only through walls in fact, but through absolutely anything, whole buildings, even mountains, meaning the enemies don't have a chance in hell to see you, let alone fight back. And if you're thinking this must be a bug, the game has unlockable skill that give you huge damage bonuses when you fight that way. This translates in practice to you reaching a mission area, tagging every enemy in the building with a net ping, then sniping them all through a dozen walls while they wonder what's going on and barely react, then you stroll in and complete whichever objective you came for, completely unopposed. Similarly overpowered are the melee builds you can make, which render most of the combat absolutely trivial.
This doesn't simply break the gameplay, it also reveals yet another problem with the narrative structure of the game: it really feels like Cyberpunk went for a complete power fantasy, wanting to make the player feel like an unstoppable cyber commando rather than exploring any of the ethical and social downsides of a world that has fully embraced transhumanism, which is what Deus Ex has done for the past twenty years and speculative science fiction at large for the past seventy or so. Cyberpunk 2077 isn't interested in any of that: all it wants to do is present cybernetic augmentations as aspirational superpowers and nothing else. The developers could have given the player the opportunity of siding with a Luddite faction opposed to cyber augmentations (faction already present in the source material) but they have none of that: the player has no say in V's attitude towards cyber enhancements, and frankly neither does anyone else in this world.
Another aspect that makes Night City completely lacking in believability is the overarching narrative of Johnny Silverhand's revolutionary rebellion against corporate control. Johnny speaks as if revolution is happening at any moment, as if the powder keg is waiting for the spark to ignite it, he's trying to be some kind of Alan Moore-esque anarchoid figure, a feeling further compounded by the fact his host character is named "V"... However, nothing in Night City even so much as hints to his views being the case: people seem absolutely content with their existence, they are fat and wealthy, showing no real sign of discontent towards their corporate overlords. As such, Johnny's "down with capitalism" shtick comes off as more of a tantrum than a relatable, cogent struggle the player can get behind (not that the choice is offered in any tangible way).
It could be argued that this is intentional: that Johnny is indeed "a Relic" of the past, uselessly struggling against an oligarchy that has been fully accepted by society and which is ruling it as a stable system. It can be argued, but then I must ask... what is the point? It is as if the game developers deliberately sidestepped any aspect that could make their carefully crafted power fantasy look like a serious dystopian future, hilariously this is a future set a few short decades after a nuclear apocalypse, yet that has no bearing on the story or world at all: there are even buses traveling between states on the highway like nothing is wrong. This really feels more like a modern day Los Angeles with some extra neon signs and aggressive body piercing more than any future dystopia.
If you take out of cyberpunk as a genre its cautionary tale element about overreliance on technology and the alienation that derives from it, then what's left is just another flavor of Marvel-style aspirational popcorn superhero schlock... and then what is the point of even writing cyberpunk-themed fiction?
I don't even feel like spending too many words on the bugs and glitches under whose weight this game agonizes: it is all too easy to find petabytes of information about those, and I'm confident they will be fixed in future updates. It's a shame that people spent so much time and energy talking about how buggy and unfinished Cyberpunk is, because it really overshadows how poor the core game is. Suffice it to say that playing the game in its current state will drive you up the wall at the 20th crash.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a mess on every aspect: narratively by being such a low stakes and shallow affair, gameplay-wise with the constant self-sabotage of its mechanics and as a piece of software for its absolutely dreadful stability. Technical issues can be fixed, but the core gameplay design and narrative choices cannot. As such it is only recommended for people looking to feel like an overpowered, uncomplicated cybernetic John Wick, which is precisely why Keanu Reeves was chosen as a testimonial. Everyone else who might be looking for the next Deus Ex need not apply.