Cyberpunk suffers from having ambition that shoots higher than it achieves, but it's still quite impressive in a lot of respects and shows a promising blueprint for what future titles in the franchise could easily capitalize on if they so desire. I achieved 100% (or, rather, as close to 100% as you can get with a singular lifepath, I chose Nomad), and I had fun with almost all of the 140 hours that I played, only having a small dip in enjoyment near the middle of the game that a few months of break did much to alleviate. I got every ending, including a secret ending, and really enjoyed myself.

Fans of modern immersive sim games such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution will find much to enjoy here, and honestly most of the complaint about this game is just a frustration with it not having more, which is a bizarre thing to feel after a single playthrough took me about 130 hours, and then another 10 to grab every ending and do a few other lingering tasks. I'm hoping that they use Night City in the same way that the Yakuza series used Kamurocho, giving us content built on top of this as a base. Everything this game does well, it does so exceptionally well that it's absolutely incredible. This game got well-deserved backlash upon release and probably could have used another year or two in the oven, but similarly to MGSV, once you get over the annoyance with the game not delivering on a specific set of hype-based expectations, what you'll find is a very rewarding open world action game with some light RPG elements, fantastic characterization, and pretty solid writing and world-building that will suck you right in for its entire duration. I can't wait to see what the future of Cyberpunk holds. I just hope that CDPR realizes that what they have here is gold and that it's worth continuing to go. I think Cyberpunk 2078, or whatever it ends up being called, has the potential to be one of the greats.

Reviewed on Nov 08, 2021


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