Cyberpunk 2077 Review

My first official review for my new website is here and it’s on the controversial Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberpunk 2077 has been one hot topic this year. You have people that accused it of racism and transphobia without any proof and it would seem as if everyone (on the Internet anyway) is hell-bent on piling on this game to make sure it doesn’t succeed. They failed because Cyberpunk has sold over 15 million units already, but the damage has already been done to CD Projekt Red’s image and that might not ever recover. Here’s my honest review of what I thought after playing for almost 90 hours in Cyberpunk 2077.

The Great:

Story:

CD Projekt Red has done it again with their storytelling. Even that shitty 30 hour Gwent game told a good story. This company just knows how to tell good stories in their games and Cyberpunk continued that trend. You play as V, a mercenary whose goal is to become someone important in Night City. Your first real gig to prove yourself goes sideways and that’s all I write about the story because if I say anymore I would spoil it for you and I believe in leaving spoilers out of my reviews.

I really enjoyed the story in Cyberpunk. I usually dick around and do a million things in open-world games before tackling the story and I did that for a little awhile, but once the story got rolling I had to know what happened next and how everything would resolve itself. The characters I met along the way were incredible and the more I played the more I realized how completely fucked up Night City is. There is no happy ending for most people you meet in this city and I loved that. Characters like Panam, Judy, Viktor, and your pal Jackie had some fantastic lines and side quests to complete. Then you’ve got characters that have very little to do with the main story like Claire that slowly reveals herself to you as you get to know her by winning races in Night City. This game is filled with awesome characters with their own backstories, demons, and problems to solve. I really, really enjoyed getting to know them all.

Graphics:

Cyberpunk 2077 has been called a lot of things. I draw the line when someone called it ugly though. Cyberpunk 2077 is a beautiful game and I can’t even run it on max settings. I don’t have an RTX card for the fancy ray tracing and, as of right now, you can’t run this game on ultra with ray tracing with any card. It’s what PC gamers would call a future proof game that’s meant for future hardware. Now, you can easily max this game on a 3080 and 3090 without RTX, but what’s the point? RTX is where it’s at and it’s what I hope I can eventually experience in this game. My old 1080 (not the TI) handled this game surprisingly well in 1080p. I can run the game on all high and very high settings in 1440p if I cap the FPS at 30, but I can’t stomach playing at 30 FPS so I went with 1080p on a mixture of very high, high, and medium settings. Useless settings like Cascade Shadows I had on the lowest settings and it gave me a pretty significant FPS boost.

I average 55-60 FPS on almost every occasion. I do get some pretty big dips when I enter overcrowded areas. Lowering crowd density to medium helped solve that issue. In interiors, I’m always at 60 FPS and in exteriors, I’m anywhere between 55-60 90% of the time. Even when my game does dip to say 45 it never lasts longer than a few seconds. This game ran really well for me and I only experienced 3 crashes in almost 90 hours of gameplay. I’ll get more into that in the negative section of this review.

Sounds:

CD Projekt Red created an original score for this game. How many games can you think of that created an original soundtrack with lyrics? And the songs honestly aren’t that bad at all. I actually really like some of them. Usually, in games like this, I would turn off the radio and drive around in silence. I did it in Watch Dogs Legion because I thought the music in that game was terrible. I haven’t once thought about turning my radio off in this game. I like switching between the different radio stations and listening to the different genres of music that are on each one. Do you want to listen to something relaxing? Then play the Pacific Dreams. Want some heavy rock? Then tune into Ritual FM. There are over 11 different radio stations and every one of them is focused on a different genre of music. It’s really impressive when you think about the effort that had to go into creating these original songs for this game. Some stations are only available in certain parts of the city… just like in real life!

The music isn’t the only thing I really enjoyed in this game. The voice acting is top-notch and so are the facial animations. Especially with Judy. I guess it’s because I spent more time with her (and Panam) than basically anyone else, but their facial capture work is really impressive. They, thankfully, sound as good as they look. Everyone does. The part that impressed me the most was the diverse cast of characters they had voicing these characters. A Japanese man had an actual Japanese voice actor voicing his lines. The Haitians that you meet later on in the game is voiced by Haitian actors, etc. It’s all very impressive and not racist as some “journalist” would have you think. It’s called representation. You know… that thing they were bitching about that this game “lacked”?

Johnny Silverhand:

Keanu Reeves nailed his role as Johnny Silverhand. I was skeptical going in because I wasn’t sure if Keanu Reeves would be a very good voice actor. He proved me very wrong. Johnny Silverhand has quickly become one of my all-time favorite game characters. I loved the banter between him and V and the camaraderie that was built between the two characters as I progressed through the game. They went from being enemies to friends (if you bothered to get to know Johnny) and I genuinely felt for the game as I neared the end of the game. He also plays guitar like a god on steroids and has one of the sexiest pistols in video game history.

The Good:

Replay Value:

I can play this game all day and night if my wife lets me. The replay value isn’t as insanely high as a Bethesda game (yet) or even The Witcher 3 for me, but I can see myself getting a good 200 hours (maybe more) out of this game before I shelve it and I don’t drop that kind of time into games very often. Especially not single-player games. The last one was actually The Witcher 3. I have over 500 hours in that game across multiple playthroughs. I love driving around Night City, listening to music, solving crimes, and buying new cars. The story is good enough for multiple playthroughs too because of all of the different endings and outcomes that could potentially happen.

Gameplay:

The gameplay would’ve been in the great section if not for the driving. Since most of my time is spent on the road in my car the driving should be fantastic. It’s not. I really like the gunplay (even though it’s a little janky) and how satisfying it feels, and looks, when I shoot someone that’s hiding behind a wall with my sniper. I’ve killed two enemies with a single shot from my overpowered revolver, shot a grenade out of midair, hacked into someone’s nervous system, and set them on fire, and you’ve got guns that shoot bullets that automatically track their victims.

How fucking cool is that? There are a lot of different ways to play this game and all of them are enjoyable. Right now, I’m played as a sneaky sniper that likes to hack into people. Cyberpunk has a lot going for it. You can play as a hacker with high intelligence that uses different daemons to wreak havoc on the battlefield. You can blind, confuse, shock, burn, poison, etc. You can hack into cameras to get a better view of the area or you can just deactivate them. You can hack into turrets, computers, doors, overhead structures, and so much more. Or you can completely forget about hacking and stealth and go in guns blazing. Or, like I did in my first playthrough, with a katana and hack everything to pieces.

I was a melee character in my first run because I loved the way the melee combat looked in a trailer I watched. I pumped all of my points into blades and body and went crazy. With my new character, I’m a sneaky shotgunner that loves to hack into everything. It’s an equally fun build as my melee heavy character I went through the game with. I love that this game lets me play my way and I can deal with the subpar driving because everything else works beautifully.

The Bad:

Bugs:

One thing game “journalists” was correct about was the vast amount of bugs in this game. No, Cyberpunk 2077 is not broken. It’s far from it. It’s about on par with Bethesda open-world games. I’ll throw Obsidian in there too because their games are always buggy. This game actually isn’t anywhere near the most buggy games I’ve played this year. That award would probably go to Marvel’s Avengers. I’ve had basic things like loot being stuck in the ground, cars in the ground, people flying, and spontaneous explosions happening around me for no reason. Then I’ve had major things like crashing to desktop (happened 3 times in almost 90 hours of gameplay), getting stuck in the map and being forced to reload, and my character freezing in place for absolutely no reason at all.

Cyberpunk could use some quality of life patches from CD Projekt Red and I have no doubt that they’ll fix the game the way they did with The Witcher 3… which was another super buggy game at launch from them.

Driving:

Driving in this game is bad. I had to download a mod so that my cars wouldn’t slip across the highway like a person running on a wet floor. I’ll chalk this up to inexperience because this is the first time CD Projekt Red has made a game that’s not high fantasy, but even with mods, the driving isn’t something I would call good. It needs some work for sure and I hope that this will eventually get looked at by CD Projekt Red because it’s a known enough issue (on Nexus Mods anyway) that thousands of people have already downloaded multiple driving overhaul mods with the hopes of driving something that actually works as a real car should. My car shouldn’t leave the ground when I speed up and go over a little bump in the road.

When I use the handbrake it shouldn’t do a complete 180. Things like this could definitely be fixed with some patches. Or at the very least some free DLC like the one we got for Witcher 3 that included the alternative move mode. That made Geralt less floaty and more grounded and it really made the game better for me.