The best immersive sim of the last fifteen years, floating drowned a slurry of misplaced ambition and creative cowardice. Artlessly derivative: it borrows without really understanding its source material, and forms a sort of mismatched accumulation of videogame aesthetics and conventions with no regard for their overall effect. The desperate severity of so many of the main missions is juxtaposed against side content written like something out of a Saints' Row or an adult animated comedy: at its lowest moments the game feels like High on Life. The love interests each get an enormous amount of screen time, most of it devoted to their own characterization, and yet come away feeling as uncomplicated, inoffensive and sexless as Bioware companions. This sort of machine-learning approach to game development is best illustrated by the Fingers sequence, in which a morally unimpeachable lesbian punk straight from the Steven Universe mines is placed in conversation with a comically homophobic representation of a predatory gay man. The fact that the two characters are each representative of irreconcilable worldviews doesn't seem register in the framing of the scene: they are two archetypes blind plucked from popular culture.

The urban space which is the game's great technical achievement is meticulous detailed and aesthetically complex: it's varied, it has history, and it's utterly dead. There's not even the barest pretense of making Night City more than an assembly of discreet levels and visual setpieces, none of the sense of living, relevant space that the progression structure of a Morrowind or a Shenmue was able to achieve. Cyberpunk takes it as a given that a city in a videogame can be no more mechanically nuanced than the Ubisoft-Rockstar open world model allows.

A few of the gigs, the missions least hemmed-in by the game's cinematic conceits, show that the system supports the 0451 approach to level design: an openness in how a level can be physically traversed and a certain allowance for original problem solving. The game's reluctance elsewhere to go more than a few minutes without a cutscene, however, keeps most levels insultingly linear and short. Choice of approach is generally limited to the Bethesda standard of stealth or gunplay, with little in the way of mechanical crunch and almost no sense of danger, even on harder difficulties, after the first few missions.

There's a sense of pacing, tonal focus and of mechanical variety in that opening sequence, the promise of which makes the fluffiness that follows all the more disappointing. There's a distinct lack of content in the game following this: gameplay feels more like an occasional and brief interruption to a script which could be less than half its length without losing anything meaningful. Despite its scale, the game's almost content-free: even the ending sequence was in effect one long cutscene with about a dozen indistinct enemies thrown in.

I liked the game, in spite of all this, because of how well and how lovingly it adapts its source material. Finding that the game had a full, playable adaptation of Never Fade Away as part of the main quest was a completely successful bit of fanservice, and each of the legacy characters gets a level of nuance and an edge which the game denies the rest of the cast. My first impression of Keanu was how noticeably amateur his performance sounded alongside the rest of the cast, but while his range is extremely limited I came away from the game thinking he was its strongest asset. The relationship between V and Johnny is the only aspect of the game which feels complete, original and stylish: where the sheer volume of dialogue is actually matched by variety and substance. In spite of the narrative limits of nonlinear mission structure there's a real sense over the course of the game of this relationship evolving, and of the two characters changing in ways which aren't rigid or obvious. So much of the game is mired in the worst qualities of videogame writing, but this one aspect feels completely free of it. There is something to be said for a successful dramatic approach to a relationship whose closest parallel is probably Dee and Dennis from Always Sunny.