This review contains spoilers
CYBERPUNK 2077 DOESN'T WANT YOU TO BE A PUNK
Listen up, choom. I played the first release of this game on launch day back in 2020. After playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, this was my most anticipated game for years. So the fact that I refunded the game to get a return on my scratch a mere hour and a half into it due to bugs, performance issues, and just getting a real ick about the writing...well it was not preem.
I can safely say that in the three or so years since the game's launch, Cyberpunk 2077 is now a really solid game. However, it cannot achieve the coveted status of being a "HEBI CERTIFIED 10/5 for reasons I will divulge later.
COMBAT: The combat is extremely satisfying (as long as you're not exclusively using guns) and includes a buffet of ways to flatline your enemies. Starting off the game, my V could most effectively take out people with knife headshots and occasional "malfunctioning" gas tanks that I lured enemies towards via hacked cameras. In the final mission of the game, I ran into a room with my mantis blades, sliced up two guys, then used a super jump to pounce and dismember a sniper on the catwalk above me. From there, I hacked an enemy mech to turn on their own friends, while shooting from a distance with my high powered sniper rifle. Then two guys ambushed my on the catwalk from either side, so I dashed into the air, slowed time, and crit head-shotted them both before touching down on the ground, whipping out my legendary throwing knife and playing the best game of darts of my fucking life with the remaining few soldiers. The gunplay may not be the best, but you can get around that with the myriad ways to approach a given combat encounter.
OPEN WORLD: One of the few modern games that "deserves" to be open world. There are so many intriguing characters to meet, and twisty-turny side quests to undertake. I was pretty much delighted by all of them. I even found the "grindy" quests for fixers and cyberpsychos to be enjoyable not only because they allowed me to play with my new toys, but also because many of them offered a surprising amount of depth in terms of story. Not to mention: HOLY MOLY NIGHT CITY IS GORGEOUS. I love that every neighborhood has its own character and visual identity. Pacifica is completely unique from Japantown which is completely unique from Heywood, etc.
DRIVIN': Cruising around Night City is...not great. Unless you're riding a motorcycle or one of two cars that are actually fun to drive (one being locked behind a very grindy set of not-super-fun car hijacking side quests). Almost all of the cars drive like boats on the open sea. If you want to go any kind of fast, good luck even switching lanes without fishtailing out of control and inadvertently running over a crowd of people, giving you an instant 2 star wanted level. So I cruised around on my Yaiba Kusanagi (the Akira) motorcycle most of the game, which was overall enjoyable. Oh and just as a quick note, the radio stations are super lacking and don't feel like they have much of an "identity" like the ones in GTA. The number of "good" tracks is pretty limited which kind of made my ears beg for mercy after 100+ hours.
NARRATIVE: Alright. Here's where it is. This is the part where I say the thing. The endings suck. And not just because they suck. But because they are the culmination of the rest of the narrative failures of the game compounded into one semi-shitstorm. It is ironic that Cyberpunk 2077 is adapted from a tabletop game, because it sure does not want you to roleplay in a number of key ways. People may counter my coming points by saying they are "realistic", or "fit the genre". But that's honestly bullshit. First thing's first: there are four romance options in the game. Fine. BUT you may choose only one depending on your sexual orientation (I guess 2 if you're bi). Some of them are even VOICE dependent. So if you're playing a masc V with a femme voice, you will actually have only one option.
I understand the desire to have NPCs feel like real people, but at the end of the day, I can't but wonder...what exactly do you lose by making these options so limited? In exchange for "realism", you lose player expression and their own roleplaying experience. I mean Judy being a lesbian doesn't seem to have much of an impact on who she is as a person. Nor does her storyline deal with any issues regarding being a queer person. So like...what is the cost/benefit of making her a female only love interest. The same for Panam. And River. And god help you if you play a gay man because you have goddamn Kerry as your only option. Compare this to Baldur's Gate 3. Astarion is pretty clearly queer coded, but straight women are obsessed with him and are able to romance him. Nothing is lost. None of the impact of his clearly coded plotline is marred. It's fine. You just get to...tell the story yourself with the pieces the writers give you.
How does this tie into the endings? Well, simply put, the endings exhibit the same desire to take control away from the players and into the hands of the writers. It's like a bad GM who wants you to follow their strict plotline that they planned from the beginning rather than adapt to where their players want to go with the story. Everything from V needing to die no matter what (choose one of three flavors!), to the horrible and jarring voice messages you get during the credits, to the fact that ABSOLUTELY none of the logic behind V's need to perish if they decide to go back into their own body makes any lick of sense if you think about it for more than twenty seconds. I remember sitting there on one of the dialogues with "literal AI goddess" Alt Cunningham, just thinking to myself, "Um. Why not just put my engram on the Relic so I can retake my brain. Oh wait, we're already going to literally be doing that because it's the only way back into my brain. Wait what the fuck? Why can't I just take back my brain Johhny style?"
Well, much like Fallout 4 and Mass Effect 3, the game NEEDS there to be a bittersweet ending. Which sure, okay. But it always ends one of 2 ways: either you go back into your body and only have six months to live because your...body is...rejecting your personality (Jesus fucking Christ). Or you let Johnny have your body while you skip off to into AI "heaven" with Alt. And let me tell you something, if you are playing a lady V, the thematic implications of this loss of control of your bodily autonomy to a womanizing POS is kind of sickening (sitll love you Johnny <3).
On the theme of identity and "what is consciousness", Cyberpunk 2077 fails and is pathetic compared to the likes of Prey and Soma.
And it really is just a shame because everything else in the narrative was definitely compelling. I was on the edge of my seat nearly the whole game when it came to the main storyline. So when I got a voicemail during the credits with Judy kind of vociferously saying she was breaking up with me and that "it was a shame things turned out the way they did"... after single-handedly storming Arasaka tower, carving a path of chaos and destruction through their forces, and destroying one of their most ambitious and horrific projects, leaving the most powerful and evil corporations in absolute ruin...well, I was both confused and pretty insulted. Especially after 100+ hours of gameplay.
But hey, it's so cool she was a super realistic character with her own autonomy right? So players get a choice of how they want to do combat, but not how they want to construct and roleplay the story...Why make a roleplaying game? Why is it unrealistic for a character to be player-sexual, but it's totally realistic for the player to slaughter thousands of enemies and mow down crowds of innocent civilians while never addressing it or experiencing mental trauma of being a mass murderer? The game forgot it is a power fantasy.
Most other aspects of the game delivered in a big way. The sum of its parts almost overcome the one major fault I find in it. It's pretty damn fun and engaging and I would recommend people play it still. It's just a shame that Cyberpunk 2077, a story-heavy roleplaying game is ultimately disinterested in you being the one roleplaying.
Listen up, choom. I played the first release of this game on launch day back in 2020. After playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, this was my most anticipated game for years. So the fact that I refunded the game to get a return on my scratch a mere hour and a half into it due to bugs, performance issues, and just getting a real ick about the writing...well it was not preem.
I can safely say that in the three or so years since the game's launch, Cyberpunk 2077 is now a really solid game. However, it cannot achieve the coveted status of being a "HEBI CERTIFIED 10/5 for reasons I will divulge later.
COMBAT: The combat is extremely satisfying (as long as you're not exclusively using guns) and includes a buffet of ways to flatline your enemies. Starting off the game, my V could most effectively take out people with knife headshots and occasional "malfunctioning" gas tanks that I lured enemies towards via hacked cameras. In the final mission of the game, I ran into a room with my mantis blades, sliced up two guys, then used a super jump to pounce and dismember a sniper on the catwalk above me. From there, I hacked an enemy mech to turn on their own friends, while shooting from a distance with my high powered sniper rifle. Then two guys ambushed my on the catwalk from either side, so I dashed into the air, slowed time, and crit head-shotted them both before touching down on the ground, whipping out my legendary throwing knife and playing the best game of darts of my fucking life with the remaining few soldiers. The gunplay may not be the best, but you can get around that with the myriad ways to approach a given combat encounter.
OPEN WORLD: One of the few modern games that "deserves" to be open world. There are so many intriguing characters to meet, and twisty-turny side quests to undertake. I was pretty much delighted by all of them. I even found the "grindy" quests for fixers and cyberpsychos to be enjoyable not only because they allowed me to play with my new toys, but also because many of them offered a surprising amount of depth in terms of story. Not to mention: HOLY MOLY NIGHT CITY IS GORGEOUS. I love that every neighborhood has its own character and visual identity. Pacifica is completely unique from Japantown which is completely unique from Heywood, etc.
DRIVIN': Cruising around Night City is...not great. Unless you're riding a motorcycle or one of two cars that are actually fun to drive (one being locked behind a very grindy set of not-super-fun car hijacking side quests). Almost all of the cars drive like boats on the open sea. If you want to go any kind of fast, good luck even switching lanes without fishtailing out of control and inadvertently running over a crowd of people, giving you an instant 2 star wanted level. So I cruised around on my Yaiba Kusanagi (the Akira) motorcycle most of the game, which was overall enjoyable. Oh and just as a quick note, the radio stations are super lacking and don't feel like they have much of an "identity" like the ones in GTA. The number of "good" tracks is pretty limited which kind of made my ears beg for mercy after 100+ hours.
NARRATIVE: Alright. Here's where it is. This is the part where I say the thing. The endings suck. And not just because they suck. But because they are the culmination of the rest of the narrative failures of the game compounded into one semi-shitstorm. It is ironic that Cyberpunk 2077 is adapted from a tabletop game, because it sure does not want you to roleplay in a number of key ways. People may counter my coming points by saying they are "realistic", or "fit the genre". But that's honestly bullshit. First thing's first: there are four romance options in the game. Fine. BUT you may choose only one depending on your sexual orientation (I guess 2 if you're bi). Some of them are even VOICE dependent. So if you're playing a masc V with a femme voice, you will actually have only one option.
I understand the desire to have NPCs feel like real people, but at the end of the day, I can't but wonder...what exactly do you lose by making these options so limited? In exchange for "realism", you lose player expression and their own roleplaying experience. I mean Judy being a lesbian doesn't seem to have much of an impact on who she is as a person. Nor does her storyline deal with any issues regarding being a queer person. So like...what is the cost/benefit of making her a female only love interest. The same for Panam. And River. And god help you if you play a gay man because you have goddamn Kerry as your only option. Compare this to Baldur's Gate 3. Astarion is pretty clearly queer coded, but straight women are obsessed with him and are able to romance him. Nothing is lost. None of the impact of his clearly coded plotline is marred. It's fine. You just get to...tell the story yourself with the pieces the writers give you.
How does this tie into the endings? Well, simply put, the endings exhibit the same desire to take control away from the players and into the hands of the writers. It's like a bad GM who wants you to follow their strict plotline that they planned from the beginning rather than adapt to where their players want to go with the story. Everything from V needing to die no matter what (choose one of three flavors!), to the horrible and jarring voice messages you get during the credits, to the fact that ABSOLUTELY none of the logic behind V's need to perish if they decide to go back into their own body makes any lick of sense if you think about it for more than twenty seconds. I remember sitting there on one of the dialogues with "literal AI goddess" Alt Cunningham, just thinking to myself, "Um. Why not just put my engram on the Relic so I can retake my brain. Oh wait, we're already going to literally be doing that because it's the only way back into my brain. Wait what the fuck? Why can't I just take back my brain Johhny style?"
Well, much like Fallout 4 and Mass Effect 3, the game NEEDS there to be a bittersweet ending. Which sure, okay. But it always ends one of 2 ways: either you go back into your body and only have six months to live because your...body is...rejecting your personality (Jesus fucking Christ). Or you let Johnny have your body while you skip off to into AI "heaven" with Alt. And let me tell you something, if you are playing a lady V, the thematic implications of this loss of control of your bodily autonomy to a womanizing POS is kind of sickening (sitll love you Johnny <3).
On the theme of identity and "what is consciousness", Cyberpunk 2077 fails and is pathetic compared to the likes of Prey and Soma.
And it really is just a shame because everything else in the narrative was definitely compelling. I was on the edge of my seat nearly the whole game when it came to the main storyline. So when I got a voicemail during the credits with Judy kind of vociferously saying she was breaking up with me and that "it was a shame things turned out the way they did"... after single-handedly storming Arasaka tower, carving a path of chaos and destruction through their forces, and destroying one of their most ambitious and horrific projects, leaving the most powerful and evil corporations in absolute ruin...well, I was both confused and pretty insulted. Especially after 100+ hours of gameplay.
But hey, it's so cool she was a super realistic character with her own autonomy right? So players get a choice of how they want to do combat, but not how they want to construct and roleplay the story...Why make a roleplaying game? Why is it unrealistic for a character to be player-sexual, but it's totally realistic for the player to slaughter thousands of enemies and mow down crowds of innocent civilians while never addressing it or experiencing mental trauma of being a mass murderer? The game forgot it is a power fantasy.
Most other aspects of the game delivered in a big way. The sum of its parts almost overcome the one major fault I find in it. It's pretty damn fun and engaging and I would recommend people play it still. It's just a shame that Cyberpunk 2077, a story-heavy roleplaying game is ultimately disinterested in you being the one roleplaying.
Hebi
1 month ago