Nowadays, we’re constantly looking for new ways to improve our lives. Technology plays a huge role in this, the better the technology, the better our lives; or that’s what you would hope. In the world of Cyberpunk 2077, this isn’t the case. Technology doesn’t mean a better way of living. It means giving more power to the corporations all while stripping away everything from the lower classes. It’s a world filled with violence, drugs, sex, and the constant struggle to survive. If you’re not in the major league, you’re worth nothing. Welcome to Night City.
Create your story
Before we jump into the impressive city, the CD Projekt Red team demonstrated the character creation, which is an important element of your experience. The first thing you have to decide is your gender. Will you go for a male or female V? Depending on what your choice might be, the world will interact differently with your character. Although we didn’t see any gameplay of it in action, I imagine a female V might draw a lot more attention than a male V. For this demo, we went for the male version. After the gender selection, it’s time to give some background to your character. What is his key moment in life, what does he like to wear, how does his hair look like? Everything is important, from the hair to the jacket. If you look cool and slick, the inhabitants will interact differently too. CD Projekt wants everybody to have his or her own experience and story in the game. If we can believe the team, not a single V will live the same life in the dark city.
Immerse yourself in the chaos
Unlike The Witcher franchise, Cyberpunk 2077 plays as a first-person shooter to maximize your immersion in the dystopian world. Our first minutes in the city were extremely impressive. Keep in mind that this was a hands-off demo but a staff member was controlling the character to demonstrate that everything we saw is the real deal. Describing how vibrant, colorful, chaotic, and beautiful the city truly is, is nearly impossible on paper. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen before and it even looked like a next-gen version of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. All the inhabitants are different from each other and have their own paths and goals. There’s no set quest path to follow, the world is open to explore and if you bump into the right people, you’ll activate your quest.
We enter the city after we wake up in our small apartment with a male escort by our side. The atmosphere in Cyberpunk 2077 is dark and gritty. It’s set in a world where technology is at an absolute peek while the standards of living are at an absolute low. The team really managed to recreate the cyberpunk atmosphere perfectly. There are neon signs everywhere, drugs addicts in your complex, prostitutes on street corners, and shady salesmen selling body augmentations in basements. If you’re a fan of the cyberpunk style (think Blade Runner), you’ll have a blast discovering everything the city has to offer. CD Projekt ensured that every piece of technology is rooted deep in the lore of this world and even the smallest piece of tech makes perfect sense.
Time to steal a spider
After we got over the fact of how good everything looked, it was time to start our first main quest. It starts off rather slow with you looking for a missing female. Your best friends hands you over a drive which you can scan with your mind and after that, you’ll have every intel you need to complete the mission. This quest marked the start for a way bigger picture. You meet up with Dex, one of the important criminals in the city and he sets you on a quest to retrieve a certain spider robot, a powerful weapon in the world of Cyberpunk 2077. What’s interesting here, is that you’re never forced to follow a set path. During this quest alone, we’ve met with other people who all had different intentions on how the events would eventually come to a conclusion. Without going into full details here, we ended up in the hideout of highly modified human beings and we had to defeat them, although that’s because we might have made some weird decisions earlier on. Defeating them was good for the sake of the demo, since it offered the perfect playground for the epic arsenal of weapons.
Let those bullets bounce
If you thought the city and overall atmosphere were awesome, just wait until you get your hands on some of these futuristic weapons. For the sake of the demo, the developers bought some of the coolest weapons using a lot of Eddies (Euro Dollars, the in-game currency). From bouncing and homing bullets to futuristic katanas that stop bullets using a magnetic field, combat looked extremely satisfying and fun. It’s very high-paced since you’ll go from one enemy to the other, all while sliding, jumping, and even wall climbing using your Mantis gear (you might remember those from the initial reveal). At some points, it reminded me of an improved and better-looking version of Vanquish but to be honest, there’s no game actually getting anywhere close to this epic action.
Clearing the hideout resulted in some adrenaline-filled minutes where we got to see a lot of impressive guns and some of the battle drugs in action. V could inject himself with a certain serum to slow down time, creating his own epic version of bullet-time. The possibilities of combat truly are endless since you can constantly tune your own weapons and skills without ever being locked to just one class. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t work with set classes, instead, the players can decide exactly what they want to improve and tune. Those are some important decisions since the boss battle at the end already showed us that this isn’t going to be an easy ride.
A masterpiece in the making
While exiting the press room, my mind was still struggling to process everything I just saw. Cyberpunk 2077 feels like a game of a next-generation since I’ve never seen such a vibrant city and such a truly open world before. It’s hard to believe that a game like that can exist in times like these. Even after seeing it in action, it’s hard to believe that this is the real deal, it even got me doubting if this quality can be maintained in the final product. CD Projekt Red, on the other hand, are masters in creating worlds filled with deep lore and interesting quests, I’m pretty sure they’ll pull off the impossible.
