New Review: Glaring technical issues and bad shooting mechanics aside, Cyberpunk 2077 proves to be an unintentionally nostalgic throwback that I enjoyed in spite of itself

 

What a strange, strange game.

It’s hard to review something like the incredibly highly-anticipated and now quite controversial Cyberpunk 2077, especially knowing that much of what I say will ultimately come across as a backhanded compliment.

As a game that was supposed to end this current console generation on a high note while ushering in the next generation of open world RPGs, Cyberpunk 2077 fails to do what it set out to do in such an incredible, brazen fashion that it could serve as a showpiece for a studio not being on the same page with itself.

I say this as someone who ultimately enjoyed my time spent in Night City; Cyberpunk 2077’s intriguing and sometimes dazzling cityscape. The story told and characters featured rarely dip below surface level, floating in a sea of ultimately unrealized potential while still squeaking by with just enough charm that they manage to entertain. The world of Night City is one that’s both compelling and expansive enough for me to wish more was done with it, where I could have really gotten to know “which district boasts the best burrito in town,” or “how many stations are in the endcart system,” both things mentioned in a stylish trailer for the game prior to its release, but things which sadly don’t translate to the final product. You drive around Night City, with atmospheric tunes on your car or motorcycle’s radio, in the same way you would in Grand Theft Auto, with certain neighborhoods standing out from the pack as you go, but ultimately serving as for the most part a platform through which to travel atmospherically from one mission or sidequest to the other. Even setting aside the game’s dramatically underperforming technical aspects on the base PS4, which I’ll get to in a bit, Cyberpunk 2077 feels less like a fully-realized RPG or the future of open world gameplay as it does a throwback to GTA-style open world games released during the Xbox 360 era. It’s something that I wound up liking about it, as it’s an era I still have fond memories of, and Cyberpunk 2077 ultimately feeling like a throwback to those times made playing it a very enjoyable experience for me, even if I’m fairly sure it wasn’t the game that developer CD Projekt Red intended on making.

Trying to figure out what they planned on making proves to be incredibly difficult, as 2077 has the very distinctive feeling that other massively-budgeted AAA games that disappointed upon release have had, which is the feeling that the setting, the technology, and the various concepts had been in conceptual development for many years, with the creation of the main game itself being a rushed afterthought forced in during the final years of the project’s development. Major concepts introduced into the scenario, such as the “brain dance” sequences where you form conclusions after reviewing memories from different speeds and angles, at first feel like they’ll play a major role in the storyline, but instead show up once or twice before being forgotten entirely. The idea of main character V being implanted with the digital spirit of Johnny Silverhand, (voiced by and looking, I have to say, incredibly distractingly like Keanu Reeves) feels like it was meant to go into far deeper territory than it ultimately does, as does V’s relationship with numerous other characters he comes across during Cyberpunk 2077’s relatively brief (by genre standards) main story. Some of these characters are given more depth through completing certain sidequests, (something highly recommended if you want to get your money’s worth, as well as to level up your character) but for the most part their existence fits into the theme of a game where the roadmap was seemingly set for something vast and expansive, but where the developers just didn’t appear to have the time to get to.

Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in the 1^st person perspective, something that I’ll never understand the appeal of for games like this one. It isn’t that FPS games are impossible for me to enjoy, but for developers who are attempting to tell a story and connect us to the main character, I’ll never understand why the decision would be made to force the character off the screen. V’s thankfully not a silent protagonist, and he’s given plenty of dialogue and plays a central role in Cyberpunk 2077’s scenario. It’s all the more reason I found it to be a bummer that the only times you really get to see him or her are when looking in a mirror, (assuming his or her reflection properly loads) which for me greatly disconnects me from the character. Though the myriad of technical issues are what will likely stand out for most as the defining flaw with the game, my biggest issues with it are instead all related to the FPS viewpoint and the shooting-focused gameplay that serves as the backbone of many of the main story missions. The shooting segments, which rely on a mixture of hacking security cameras, stealth, and gunning down enemies, do their best to drag the game down. Guns run out of ammo seemingly incredibly quickly, and though there are plenty of firearms to collect from fallen enemies, the amount you can carry at one time is incredibly restricted, leading to much time spent throwing away or disassembling guns to make way for new ones, something which takes a lot of the fun away from loot hunting and the shooting segments. It eventually got to the point where I gave up on guns almost entirely, choosing to focus instead on using my melee weapon; which, to Cyberpunk 2077’s credit, its gameplay system gives you the freedom to do, but unfortunately the limitation handicaps the main focus of the combat sections, making many of them a drag. Stealth gameplay when sneaking past the enemies sometimes works and often it doesn’t, as I found it almost impossible to tell, when sneaking around an enemy, whether they’d be able to see my character or not. The fact that many of the main story missions are designed with the expectation that you’ll use stealth at least through parts of them just adds a level of frustration to the proceedings that can rear its ugly head. The checkpoint system doesn’t work nearly as well as it should, and I found myself manually saving during action sequences whenever the game allowed it because the auto-save doesn’t happen frequently enough to be relied upon. Why do so many Western RPGs fall into the trap of thinking that they have to be shooters? They have so much more to offer in other areas, and the shooting, which these developers aren’t good at, just brings it all down.

Despite these negatives, however, and they’re big ones, exploring Cyberpunk 2077’s world is an incredible amount of fun. Night City’s broken up into various districts, with a navigation map that’s nearly perfect and makes breezing through the city at ridiculously high speeds not only easy, but a blast. It helps too that driving gives you the option to switch to the 3^rd person view (assuming the feature doesn’t glitch out) so it’s during this time where for me Cyberpunk 2077 feels most alive; journeying through Night City, receiving a nearly constant stream of calls and text messages on your phone begging you to participate in side missions. The game helpfully indicates the difficulty of each mission in the menu, giving you a good idea beforehand what you’ll be getting into. Unlike many of the missions of the main story, the sidequests are almost universally fun to play, and some make use of the game’s features better than the main story itself, including a mission where you have to make dialogue choices that can, or can’t, save someone’s life. The tone of Night City, and the game as a whole, is much darker than I’d expected from the trailers and commercials, which depict a bright, sunny city complete with palm trees and Rockstar Games-style humor. Though it does somewhat feel aesthetically like a super futuristic vision of sunny LA, the world of Cyberpunk 2077 is dark, foreboding, unpleasant, very harshly-scored, and intensely shot. It isn’t a game that attempts to give you a warm, fuzzy feeling, and admittedly it took me a few hours to adjust to the tense atmosphere. That said, it’s a compelling world; V’s apartment building feels like a city within itself, packed with NPCs and featuring floors of open-air retail, apartments, and a ton of atmosphere. It made me wish so much that the missions in Cyberpunk 2077’s main story focused more on Night City and its people and neighborhoods, instead of forcing you into frustrating stealth and shooting sequences. With its grimy apartments, lively bars and clubs, very sketchy characters and illegal ripperdocs, Night City’s truly the star of the show here and I loved exploring it. It reminds me a lot of Omikron: The Nomad Soul; a PC/Dreamcast game from Quantic Dream with a similarly dark and heavily atmospheric futuristic city, but presented in a way that Omikron’s developers could only have dreamed of.

I’m sticking this last section at the end because it’s something that will likely change over time and I don’t want to make it the defining aspect of the review; but at launch, Cyberpunk 2077 was indeed a mess, and as I write this now nearly 2 months later, instances of the game crashing, horribly fuzzy graphics, features not working the way they’re supposed to, and an at times very poor framerate have been…I hesitate to say fixed, because they certainly haven’t been fixed, but they’ve been greatly improved through the various patches, (some of them, anyway) with another major patch supposedly on the way.  The graphics on the PS4 still look nothing at all like how they were marketed, but the unacceptably fuzzy visual output that was there at launch has since been fixed, resulting in a major improvement. The couple times Cyberpunk 2077 crashed me were all in my first couple weeks with the game, so that might have been fixed as well. The less fuzzy graphics allow the great art direction to shine on the base PS4 much more that it did on Day 1, and various glitches that occurred for me stopped happening as I progressed through. Many glitches certainly still remain however; your viewpoint when switching from 1^st to 3^rd person when driving sometimes won’t change, forcing you to restart the game if you want to switch perspectives. The final boss somewhat anticlimactically glitched in midair as I fought it, trapping it there and allowing me to pummel it mercilessly until the fight ended. Certain side missions, which required me to wait a day before being contacted by someone or for something to happen, still remained completely dormant in my Journal until much later, when the game suddenly seemed to remember to progress them for me. Answering calls, texts, etc is far from seamless, with often multiple seconds in between the time you answer a phone call until the point where you hear the caller’s voice. Icons and notifications that pop up on your screen sometimes remain frozen there, not disappearing until many minutes later. Cars you see in the distance will vanish before ever approaching you. What’s gotten the most attention but what bothered me the least is the framerate; a sluggish framerate for me isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker if the game’s otherwise enjoyable, and for the most part Cyberpunk 2077 on my base PS4 runs in a way that I was okay with; there are pauses here and there as you drive or walk around Night City, which are certainly noticeable but not for me a big issue. The framerate during the shooting segments however is abysmal and though they were my least favorite aspect of 2077 anyway, the slideshow-like framerate during them (still, after numerous patches) doesn’t help. I’ll say that the game doesn’t perform as horribly as I think some believe it does; it’s by no means unplayable, and frankly there have been other games (such as Remedy’s Control last year) that I thought ran far worse that didn’t seem to attract even a fraction of Cyberpunk 2077’s negative attention. Still, it’s a release that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen the way it did, and publishers I think would be smart to focus on how deceptive marketing and releasing an unfinished product can irreparably damage a game’s reputation, with this game likely being a sad but very clear example.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that I wish was more developed; that more time and effort could have been devoted to allowing us to truly sink our teeth into every corner of this world the way many of us expected to, rather than what ultimately feels like a more commercial but uninspired decision to focus on shooting and explosions. But what’s here, at least in terms of Night City and the more RPG-like aspects, is great. Though much of the shallow-but-entertaining main story has already faded from my memory, the world that it inhabits is something that will likely remain in my mind for quite some time. V’s journey through the compelling Night City may feature an under-developed plot and many bland, frustrating shooting sequences, but the world’s such a blast to explore, the sidequests so frequent and many of them incredibly fun, and when it’s firing on all cylinders, Cyberpunk 2077 brings back the feelings of the golden years of Xbox 360/PS3 gaming, and it’s a bit of nostalgia that I definitely wasn’t expecting. There isn’t a doubt in mind that this wasn’t CD Projekt Red’s intention, and definitely isn’t how the game was marketed. I’d love to one day see some sort of documentary exploring how an attempt to release what was supposed to be a genre-defining jump into next gen open world RPGs turned out to be this. But ultimately, in spite of itself…and there’s a lot of caveats there…I enjoyed the game. I think there are other people who will also enjoy it, though likely not the majority of those who purchase it. There are huge issues here, even aside from the presentational disaster that in many ways it still is, but it’s undeniable that I had fun with Cyberpunk 2077, and it’s a world that, all said and done, I wish I’d gotten to know better. Beating a game and wanting more is better than having wanted less, and it’s a game that I have to say I recommend, albeit after doing due diligence on whichever version you would plan on buying.

3.5/5

Note; This review is based off the PS4 version, played on the base PS4 console.