Welcome to our review of cyberpunk 2077, quite possibly the Most anticipated game of the year and it kind of disappointed.
Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world, action-adventure story set in Night City, a megalopolis obsessed with power, glamour and body modification. You play as V, a mercenary outlaw going after a one-of-a-kind implant that is the key to immortality. You can customise your character’s cyberware, skillset and playstyle, and explore a vast city where the choices you make shape the story and the world around you.
When survival of the fittest is the name of the game, you’d better make sure you know who the top players are. From the more-machine-than-man members of Maelstrom, to the absolutely ruthless Tyger Claws, to Wraiths sowing chaos throughout the Badlands, here are some of the most notorious groups operating within and beyond Night City’s walls.
From the same studio that brought us the Witcher games, Cyberpunk 2077 is their latest attempt at glory. I will explain my sarcasm later on but indulge me for now. Set in the year 2077, this game aims to be the Witcher in the future basically, at least it did to me. Having faced several delays, obligatory crunch, … The game has had its hurdles to finally make it to market and its release has been driven by negative comments so far.
I agree with all of the negative comments to be clear. I too have had bug after bug after bug and I am playing it on an Xbox series X. Just to name a few, my cars keep driving straight when I try to steer, it refused the skip function multiple times, people have walked through my character and the game has at least crashed a handful of times on me.
During certain sections of the game, called braindance, there are very bright flashes and I can clearly see how some gamers have complained about epileptic seizures, personally, I looked away as to be 100% sure I would avoid them. Not that I suffered from them, I just prefer to be safe rather than sorry. It really has that feeling. In all fairness, this is going to be patched out, but it still sucks that this was left in from the start.
Another bug that I suffered from was the inability to switch weapons during some combat. Often leading me to go for a suicide driven attack and hoping I would survive the barrage of bullets. I also had some delays in crouching and many more just small things that went wrong. Like the game was just not ready yet but got pushed out anyway.
Now enough ranting about the bugs and whatnot, let’s move on to the story. While it is not my habit to really talk spoilers, I do feel this game deserves a bit more background to counter all the negativity in the first part of my review. I went for a female antagonist called V, Short for Valerie. There are three options for the storyline and I picked the Streetkid one. The others being Nomad and Corpo.
I teamed up with Jackie and it was our goal to become the best at what we do. Take on missions, rescue people, everything that brings in the eddies, the in-game currency. Taking on missions here and there, we suddenly get contacted by Dex, a big shot who can get us into the big time. After a few here and there’s, we embark upon a mission to steal an implant that is one of a kind and it supposedly brings immortality.
During that mission, you nearly get caught while stealing the implant and you get to witness the murders of kin as the son killed his father. The son being the quote-unquote bad guy in the story. Jackie ends up inserting the implants into his implant slot as you try to get out alive, Jackie gets shot and the unmanned taxi comes to your aid. This will make sense when you play it… You barely make it out alive but your partner is not as lucky. Jackie transfers the implant to you in the meantime.
As you meet up with Dex, he betrays you and ditches you in a dump. After you miraculously wake up, You try to crawl out of the dump and get intercepted by Dex and Takemura, the former bodyguards of the aforementioned father. Dex gets killed by Takemura and he ends up saving you. Taking you to Vik, a friendly Ripperdoc who tries to fix you up. But he has bad news for you…
The implant in your head is slowly killing you as it is trying to rewrite itself into your brain. This is where Johnny Silverhand first appears, the chatacter played by Keanu Reeves and this is also where the game actually begins. Sure you’ve had a few hours of getting to learn how to play the game, but this is the real start of the game as you and Johnny need to work together to survive.
This is where you finally finish the prologue and it is also where my description of the game will finish, do not want to spoil too much as I feel I already overstepped my usual boundaries.
So what did I think of the game? It is a bit hard to rate a game that was so overhyped yet so buggy, bugs that will for sure be smoothed out in the future. Even after hearing the older consoles have even more issues, it makes it hard to be neutral and not just figuratively rage quit and rate it negatively.
Being a game journalist or even critic as you may, overhyped games are quite possibly the worst specimens to review. Some people have already made up their minds that this game is game of the year and others will think the opposite due to its massive hype. I will be honest, I was one of those that did not care very much about the game, thinking I would make up my mind as I played.
Sadly that gameplay started with bug after bug so you can see me coming a mile away, I hate the first part of my gameplay. So I decided to do things a bit more differently and just rate the game on storyline alone, seeing as these bugs will be removed eventually anyway.
I was left with a game that was more than OK but not great or amazing or the best I’ve played this year. That honor belongs to Watch Dogs Legion with Yakuza Like a Dragon as runner-up. Cyberpunk 2077 might honestly not even be a top 10 game for me personally this year. Having played many great games in this Corona year… sure, I had fun and was amused by the game but it was not very GOTY-like if I may call it so.
In conclusion, Cyberpunk 2077 did not live up to the hype for me personally and despite having fun at times, there are awkward parts in the game that I did not enjoy very much. the more than necessary explicit red light district for example made it far from perfect in my humble opinion.
