When Cyberpunk 2077 dropped, my computer was a budget rig already going on ten years old. I assumed the old gal probably wouldn't handle the upcoming release too well, so I let it pass me by. Turns out this was a clever play on my part, for the game sucked ass at launch, and I already had enough on my plate as it was. The world kept turning, Cyberpunk sank into the murkiness of memories past. So it goes.

It's late 2023, people are talking about this game again. I haven't thought about Cyberpunk since the initial slew of giggles caused by cars sinking into the pavement, 3D penises, and the anti-fun teleporting police force. Turns out, CD Projekt Red was beavering away on un-fucking the video game and now people I trust are quickly reporting that they've managed it. Indeed, it's good now. There's a new DLC. There's a tie-in anime animated by Studio Trigger. There's clearly a big push going on, and it sticks in my mind. Before long, it's 2024 and I'm reinstalling Steam on a hot new PC after holding a memorial service for my now-deceased old gaming rig. What can I use to show this fucking thing off?, I wonder to myself. I notice Cyberpunk 2077 is 50% off. Why not.

I didn't know anything in detail about the Cyberpunk setting before booting the game up, but I spent enough of my misguided youth flipping through Shadowrun rulebooks to know the jist of what to expect. Corporations rule America, if not the world, and the increasingly commercialised future sucks. But at least you can install a jackhammer for your dick or relive a violent kidnapping using virtual reality. Strictly speaking, I don't know whether Shadowrun or Cyberpunk came first and don't care to get into the weeds of it, but this felt like a fairly loving depiction of the trash-heap future we've all come to know and love. Equal focus is given to the glitz and glamour of the ultra-rich as well as the dirt-grinding poverty experienced by the rest of the population. Night City looks good, and there were a couple of times when cruising between objectives I would pull over and just admire the scenery.

I'm grateful to the game's commitment in forcing the player to assume a role. Rather than a blank-slate glass of tap water, V is kind of a pisshead who fancies themselves bulletproof. This makes sense for someone who makes a living through violence and extortion in a culture which lionizes it. You can steer how V responds to things, usually whether you dismember someone who crosses you during a mission or whether you live and let live, but there are constants which you won't be changing. I found the consistency in this made it easier to pick options other than the usual doormat Neutral Good choice of letting everyone go and excusing every sleight against you. This world is a violent pit of suckass, so sometimes you have to shrug and ignore the dude tied up in your trunk. V isn't getting paid to ask questions. I also appreciate that some Quest NPCs aren't given any magical protection, so I was able to complete the questline about a middle-manager getting away with a hit-and-run crime by interrupting her with 90 submachinegun bullets to the head and departing through a window.

At its core, the story is a relatively simple one. The main thrust can feel longer than it is because it's so easy to fall down the rabbit hole of doing random sidequests, but the actual time it takes for V to get dicked over and have Keanu Reeves installed in their brain-computer isn't high. If you put your nose down and only hit the critical path, I don't think the game would take much longer than 20-25 hours on a first play. I don't think the main story would feel terrific if you did that, since a lot of the enjoyment for me comes from better understanding the world and the complexity of your struggle against it, which is informed massively by the more involved sidequests with major characters. At the end of the day, V wants to get the Keanu Pentium out of their dome, and has a few different paths to get there. I don't think the story is saying anything earth-shattering, but I also respect that it has a simple and narrow focus: find the cure, or die trying. No matter what ending happens to V, the world's going to keep on turning, and only a scarce handful of people will really know what went down. I like it. It's very ham-fistedly contrasted against Johnny Silverhand's desperate struggle to change the world (and the total failure to do so), but this isn't a harsh criticism. Sometimes the blunt instrument of narrative is fine, too.

Special mention should be made for the Phantom Liberty DLC, which has a much more reactive and crazy finale than the base game. At least, the path I wound up on was dope as hell. Capping the frentic encounter by strolling through a crowd of Tier 1 operators as they pop and fry with red/black lightning and spooky screams cut with low-fi modem noises is chef's-kiss good. This shit sizzles. More of this please.

The game's mechanics are its weakest point, in that knowing not all of them are ones you might want to engage with. At its core, Cyberpunk 2077 is a first-person looter shooter with a GTA framework for driving and police action. I guess a more modern take would be Red Dead Redemption, but fuck you, I didn't play the cowboy game. You can get lost infinitely in identical plot-less sidequests that pop up while you are driving from A to B, which might tire you out before you do something with a bit more bite to it. Similarly, anything related to getting GTA-esque police stars is a waste of time and effort. Just drive past anything cop-related and save yourself the time.

The gun-game portion of this feels less mechanically brittle than something like Borderlands, but still runs into the same shortcomings: hitting someone in the head with an assault rifle bullet for 15% of their health bar never feels fun. This can be circumvented by not using assault rifles. I'm not sure what niche that weapon class was meant to fill, but they're effectively a long-range poking device which tries to be everything at once, specializing in nothing. If you want to explode someone in one hit, use a sniper rifle with explosive bullets or a double-barreled shotgun. If you want to kill someone in a hose of bullets, use a submachinegun. If you want to win the encounter, use a two-handed club or a katana. Just do not use assault rifles. Fucking popguns. Having played on Very Hard, the game was at its most fun when using bullet time implants to go all Metal Gear Rising on people or circlestrafe around them while dumping 1000 rounds/minute into their heads. Trying to play this as a tactical shooter ala Squad will just get you chipped down unless you vastly overmatch the encounter. I think if you are the kind of person who can enjoy a gun game where numbers come out of people's heads, this does the job very well, or at least as well as I have seen that kind of gameplay.

Ultimately I enjoyed my time with Cyberpunk 2077 more than I expected I would, given the apparently dogshit state it released in. I feel bad saying this about something with so much work put into it, but I don't think it's an era-defining masterpeice. It's a very good game that looks and plays well, with a focused story and a fun cast of characters. The tale it told did not make me think very hard, and the gameplay did not demand any tough decision-making on my part. The finest summer blockbuster you can muster, yeah, sure, but wake me when Labyrinth of Touhou 3 comes out.

My friends who’ve heard me talk about this game are going to think this score is nuts. I’ve told everyone how much I love this game. I’ve gushed about this game. I’ve made gifsets and fanart. I’m going to replay it 500 times and make a gazillion player characters. I really, truly love it, and there’s so MUCH to love. The scope, the ambition, the responsiveness of the world and the characters. I love the world and the stories, the way nearly every quest has a million ways you can sneak through or around it. I love the breadth of characters and all of their arcs. I love the recurring theme of how revenge rarely feels as liberatory as you want it to and yet sometimes it still has to be done. I love the themes of autonomy and losing it and taking it back. I love how the characters can grow and change even when you don’t outright convince them. I love how the game looks and the art direction and the lighting. It also drives me fucking nuts. And it’s not even (entirely) the game’s fault.

To be clear, there are, genuinely, things wrong with the game in and of itself. It’s buggy in places — Act 3 especially — and every fix or patch adds three new bugs for every one it removes. Wyll’s arc is short-changed in a way that’s hard not to see as antiblackness. The turn-based combat means that every encounter with more than five or so enemies ends up being slow as sin, and there’s no meaningful attempt by the game to circumvent this issue. Moving through the world out of combat never feels bad, but it never feels awesome, either. Some of the side characters who are from older games are characterized completely differently and often contradictoraly from their old appearances, which is bound to piss off old fans. But, honestly, all of these issues on their own would still have me slapping a 4.5 or even a 5 on this game and moving along, because it really is still GREAT.

No, the real issue is the fandom. They’re insufferable. When they’re not making petitions to add new romances (always with men, incidentally!) or having meltdowns because a writer dared to say that continuing the cycle of abuse was a bad end, they’re trying to dox the devs so they can get new Rolan (another man!) content added. “Rain,” I hear you say, “That’s not fair. You can’t punish the game for the fandom.” That’s true! I’m not out here badly rating Sonic or Dragon Age games just because those fandoms need to be nuked from orbit. The problem here is that Larian fucking worships the fandom. They’re making changes to arcs and endings and characters on patch 900-whatever to appease the fandom! Lae’zel is too mean? Oh, okay, we’ll make her nicer! This ending is too sad? Oh, okay, we’ll soften it! You think Gortash is really sexy? We’ll borrow fan conent to add new stuff for him! (Were those fans PAID? CREDITED?) To be clear, on an objective level I LIKE some of the changes they’ve made. But I don’t WANT to play “Larian’s game but filtered through the lens of what I personally like,” I want to play “Larian’s game and Larian’s story.”

The lack of willingness in the gaming world right now to create games that don’t cater to the player, where the devs and the writers tell the story they aim to tell and build the mechanics they want to use and STICK TO THAT VISION, even if it adds friction or some gamers won’t like it or some fans complain drives me insane. I don’t want something that appeals to everyone, I want something specific and real. The idea that some fucker got mad because Larian dared to make a character that didn’t worship the player immediately and Larian bowed down and caved to the shit makes me want to blow up. STICK TO YOUR VISION AND YOUR STORY, PUSSIES! I’m about to get mad about the ME3 ending shit again good god.

It’s just such a frustrating encapsulation of everything wrong with gaming right now and how fandoms have too much power and too little imagination, and it breaks my heart how much it’s soured my stomach on a game I do genuinely adore. It’s so good where it’s good! It’s goddamn perfect! The love from the team is dripping out of every pore. But it’s impossible to look past the fact that the game that exists now is a different game than the one that was initially released, with different characters, because some people on the team felt that compromising their artistic vision was worth it if it’d make some fandom rando happier.

I still adore this game and, seriously, if you love RPGs or the like this really should be a must-play. It’s a joy. Its scope and ambition are second to none, and I have to cheer that on (particularly given how every other big studio is playing shit so safe right now) even when it doesn’t stick the landing. I love my gang of bisexual war criminals. Despite the tone of this review, I even love Larian; the next Big Game I plan on starting is Divinity: Original Sin 2 entirely because I love this game and Larian’s work on it so much. It’s such a wonderful piece of art. I hope the next one they make will be one with choices they have the guts to stick to.

I finally played Dishonored for the first time in 2023. I went in knowing I don't like Stealth games, but I also like playing morally good when possible, so I wound up with a weird conundrum - play High Chaos for more fun but get a bad ending, or play Low Chaos and have less fun but get the good ending?

I went for Low Chaos. To me, that's how the game is intended to be played, and yeah, I managed. Even at times, I didn't hate it, I actually kinda liked doing stealth. Sometimes. Overall, I had a very neutral experience. I think the game is very anti-climactic with its ending too for Low Chaos unfortunately, making the reward feel like it wasn't worth the effort.

So it's a game where I get why people like it, but it's just not for me and I do think it's a tad overrated. It doesn't do anything interesting outside of its gameplay, and its gameplay is only fine. In my opinion. But, I do respect it for what it is.

Score: 79