“V, Never stop fighting..”
Cyberpunk 2077 is the newest game from CD Projekt Red, the studio behind what is considered one of the best games ever made, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In development for around 7 years, the game has finally released and the reception to it has been incredibly mixed. Developed for PS4, PS4 Pro, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox One X, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Stadia, and a massive arrangement of various PC Builds, it was safe to say that launching on that many platforms at once was not going to turn out for the best. Players have been experiencing numerous glitches, crashes, bugged quests, and in the case of the last-gen consoles, a wide range of blurred textures, low-quality models, and awful performance issues. Now, that said, my experience with Cyberpunk 2077 has been incredibly positive, with little to no issues that prevented me from sinking well over 80 hours into the game, an experience that I always hoped it would be.
This review will detail my experience with the game and not reflect the poor management of CDPR and the fact that the publisher was not anywhere honest about the performance on the last-gen consoles. Since I can only speak towards my time with the game, my score will not reflect those that have not been able to enjoy the game, the glitches that are running rampant on other platforms, and various other problems many are facing. I can only give an opinion on my experience with the game on Series X with it running in backward compatibility mode. For a look at how the game runs on prior gen consoles, Stadia, or on a high-end pc, I would suggest watching footage on Youtube to get a better understanding of what you’re in for on those platforms.
That said, this is going to be a long review, so buckle up….
Cyberpunk 2077 is based on the table-top RPG created by Mike Pondsmith. The game follows your adventures in Night City, a fictional metropolis that is located between Los Angeles, and San Francisco. You play as V, either male or female, and this choice is mostly reflected in the romances you’re able to invest your time into. The character creator is robust enough to get interesting but does lack certain features to really get the most out of it. I was still easily able to craft a V that I was happy with; blacked-out eyes, punk rock blue hair, and a series of tattoos that felt right at home on her body. You can also adjust to various body types, including slight customization on her breasts and genitals, including the option of giving her something a little different between her legs, even if the game doesn’t quite go the distance to being a satisfying experience for many of the trans community.
V, as a character is often as interesting as you want them to be. You’re given a lot of choice over most of your dialogue, even if some of it is still designed to get you to the same place. I’ve gone along with some pretty wild quests, to reloading and changing how they ended, often in ways that felt surprising or heartbreaking, causing me to reload and approach things a bit differently. Though, to be honest, I did keep a few resolutions on how they ended, to accept the consequences for either a botched job or just how I felt the narrative should have ended. There are clear ways for you to act as V, a tough as nails merc trying to make a name for themselves in a city that would just as well chew them up and spit them out. While you can play around with what you want your V to be, they can also be rather sensitive and caring, especially towards the few options you have for romance.
A lot of this choice is based on a variety of different factors. As V, you can choose to start the game as either a corporate grunt, someone living out on the streets of Night City, or a Nomad who has left their collective family for an attempt at making it big in the city. These choices will spawn new dialogue options as well as a few quests that are only accessible due to that starting choice. For my first complete playthrough, I chose Nomad, largely because I wanted to find Alanah Pearce in the game, but also because like them, I am new to Night City myself, and wanted that for my character as well. Some choices will also spawn more quests, or further along others as it is possible to fail certain missions or cause would-be friends to not trust you with what they need done. Hell, some characters ending up blocking V on their phone, cutting them off from continued requests. The game features a quick save function as well as super-fast loading on the Series X, making it easy enough to load the game back up to try to tackle that quest another way in just seconds.
Now, in regards to an issue I had personally with the game, I had a quest bug out where Jackie would not appear at his bike. Now, according to the game, he WAS there. In fact, I could respond to his dialogue, even if I couldn’t see or hear him. Despite being able to select the dialogue I needed to choose, I couldn’t progress the quest, and the only save file that had him present, was one about 7 hours back. This caused me to forgo a lot of side quests that I had completed in order to move the story along. Did it suck having to replay all that over again? A bit, yah, but thankfully, that was the only quest that seemed to bug out for me in this fashion. As I type this, a patch has already hit all platforms and this quest, among many others, is now working as intended. Everything else? Well, I’ll get to that shortly.
My total playtime is just over 80 hours and going as while I have completed every single side quest that the game had for me, I still have the various little crimes around the city to tackle; events that usually just have you clearing out enemies and collecting some sort of powerful weapon. I also have 10 cars left to buy, but currently lack the funds to do so, at least for now. While there is a money glitch regarding a certain painting, I sadly only found out about it after I sold it, so now I can only rely on the grenade dismantle method that earns me around 100K in 30-40 minutes or the various crimes around the city to shut down. That, and selling every goddamn thing my little klepto merc can get her hands on.
Your time in Night City will vary on how you play. You can burn through the story in around 20 hours, bypassing everything else, and getting a rather piss poor ending as a result or invest time into the variety of characters you’ll encounter, with most of them contributing to an alternative ending that while may be happy, sad, or uneventful, can also be rather bittersweet, as was my experience with picking the more nomad focused conclusion. The central story sees you infected with the digital ghost of Johnny Silverhand, a rocker with a penchant for sticking it to the man. Your quest to get Johnny out of your head will put you alongside a very enjoyable set of supporting characters such as braindance hacker Judy Alvarez, NCPD Detective River Ward, fellow nomad Panam Palmer, and significantly more. Some characters will be far more present than others, with a few having entire questlines devoted to them, and honestly, I loved every single character this game threw at me, even if your choices will sometimes push them out of the narrative sooner than you’d want.
What I found the most engaging about these characters is how each of them gets connected to you via the main story, branching their own little narratives that let you get to know them as people, and the drama they all have going on in their lives. From Panam trying to find her place in her clan, to River trying to track down his kidnapped nephew, these quests can lead to romance if you so desire, but these quests are also wonderfully staged and written, giving me legit reasons to care about each and every one of them. The romances are also rather touching, whether it’s having dinner with River and his family or visiting where Judy grew up, you get to the heart of who these people are, and yes, I picked Judy as my romance option because she was easily the most fascinating character the game presented to me, that, and she’s a total knockout. Some characters will still grant you their romance mission even if you are not the gender they are looking for, it just then ends in friendship, which isn’t a bad thing and can give you a fun scene during the game’s outro.
Now, apart from one single moment in the game, at least for the ending that I got, your time as V will be entirely first-person. Given that I am a fan of both first and third-person games, I’m not too offended with CDPR’s choice to eliminate any sort of third-person view of your character, apart from seeing them on the back of a bike, or inside one of the many cars you can drive. Apart from those instances, you can also see your character in mirrors, though you’ll need to activate the mirror to see them, which is a bit of an odd feature. Cutscenes largely play out in first-person, with very limited control of the camera being taken away from you. Most of this comes in the form of V dropping to the ground, their body failing as Johnny Silverhand’s intrusion into their brain causes V to occasionally shut down for a brief spell. While I still wish some moments showed my V in a typical third-person cutscene format, I do find the first-person viewpoint to largely work here, enhancing several aspects of my immersion into the game.
Now, despite playing as V, Johnny Silverhand is easily the focus of this game, as the story is directly centered around him in a lot of ways. He is played by Keanu Reeves and while I’ve never thought Keanu to be a fantastic actor, he shines here, especially as the game goes on. When you first meet Johnny, he is a dick, plain and simple. But, as the story progresses and the situation is given a bit more to chew on, his behavior towards V becomes something that truly changed how I felt about him. There is a very well-written character here in Silverhand that Keanu managed to impress me more so than I was expecting. Some of his lines are not as good as I wanted from him, but he does a tremendous job at making Johnny a fully fleshed-out persona. Some of the final conversations you have with Johnny are dramatically heartfelt, as he is coming to terms with who he was, and how he’d pushed away everyone who even remotely cared for him. It wasn’t something I was expecting out of the character or this game in general, but the narrative is that much better for it.
Night City itself is a treasure trove of secrets and remarkable detail. It’s a claustrophobic metropolis, but incredibly spacious at the same time. Flashy neon lights and oversexualized billboards and posters litter the streets and shine like a beacon in the more open city centers. There are a ton of vendors to shop at, bars and various places to visit, or Ripper Docs that can outfit you with brand new cyberware such as the bladed mantis arms, or the capability to double jump, which I feel is one of the best options to go with. Exploring the city can often come at the expense of certain missions as while you can’t walk into every building you encounter, some missions will open up new locations that you can visit, making the city that much more alive as you explore. Since you have an apartment and other places you’ll visit frequently, you’ll get used to certain pathways, but there are often a variety of ways to get around the city, such as the fast travel locations, vehicles, or just traversing the city on foot, taking in the sights. I found Night City to be incredibly giving to what I wanted from it, always offering me up new locations and ways to get around, discovering a wealth of easter eggs or special quests, taking me deeper into the rabbit hole of what this city can offer.
While I’ve often just walked around the city to take everything in, you can also mount a few motorcycles or get into the seat of dozens of cars as well, several of which can be purchased for quick summoning in case you need to get out of an area in a hurry. The vehicles all vary in speed, control, and durability, so you’ll often want to find out what controls the best for you and usually stick with a favorite. I found a few cars to be a bit unwieldy and spin out fairly easily, but the fact that every car handles completely different from one another is a huge plus. I often stuck with the lightning-fast Caliburn when I needed to be somewhere in a hurry, or the very reliable Type 66 Javelina when I just simply want to drive around. There is also Johnny’s own personal car that can be missed that is pretty damn fun to drive as well. For bikes, I found the Kusanagi CT-3X to be my preferred choice of machine to ride around in, a vehicle that is very similar to a popular anime bike. While you can track down and buy a lot of these vehicles, some are simply hidden around the map, waiting for you to stumble upon them or solve a bit of a scavenger hunt to procure them, such is the case with the Itsumade bike; a quest that was rather interesting to complete. For a developer to never handle vehicles before, I was rather impressed with how the overall driving felt, but do wish they added a road line so I didn’t have to navigate my turns via the mini-map. It’s also worth pointing out that during the races, they include such a line, so the feature is there, it just needs to be shared to the regular driving mode as well.
As you complete missions and travel across the city, you’ll come into contact with various quests, events, and activities that are certainly worth your attention. You may encounter a legendary or iconic weapon, or even just a fat stack of eddies to contribute to that new ride you’ve been saving up for. Whether it’s stealing a guitar from a Johnny Silverhand superfan, helping a neighbor deal with his grief of losing a close friend, or tracking down a few corrupted AI cabs, the variety of side quests are vastly enjoyable, usually with equally enjoyable side characters. Now, during my playthrough, I completed each and every side quest that came my way, at least with what was offered through the nomad path. I can honestly say that not a single quest felt lacking in what you were doing, or the dialogue and conversations that often reflect on what you’re to do, or the events that occurred. As I mentioned before, I would often reload my save and try the quest a different way, or if it ended in a unique and interesting way, then I would often just let the dice roll and accept those consequences. One of the most interesting quests I encountered was that of helping a husband and wife with a possible breach in their security. This quest went to some interesting places, with a few ways that the quest could end. I ended up going the route that was against my negotiated terms, having the wife absolutely detest me as a result, and the husband diving deeper into the conspiracy surrounding him. He even let me know how it was going during the game’s credits, which I found rather amusing.
Now, apart from the more meaty side quests, you’ll have various events and activities to complete as well. These vary from simple kill quests, or tracking down someone or something and then getting the hell out of there, usually to a vehicle or a dropbox to deposit said item. You’ll have a variety of fixers around each of Night City’s districts that will often have a variety of quests to complete, or a few cars that may interest you. You can often have conversations with them as well, apart from the job, that allows you to get to know them, and many of them have fascinating backstories, so make sure to give them a call from time to time or go visit them in person when you have the chance. These little jobs are fun and frequent, often letting you cut loose and go in gun’s blazing, or that of a more silent approach. There were several missions where I would crouch on top of a building across the street and quick hack them all, causing them to overheat, or poison their colleagues with contagion. While the missions may share a lot in the objective, the way you go about doing it is up to you, flexing a great deal of freedom should you want it. There are also blue missions on the map that are usually just killing enemies or taking down bounties that the NCPD have had troubles with that are usually bite size events that can offer up some quick eddies or a new flashy gun or two.
Now, I’ve mentioned a few bits of terminology and some aspects of combat and hacking, so let’s get into everything you’re able to do. As you level up, you’ll earn two forms of experience; that which contributes to your overall level, and that of street cred. Each varies in its purpose of what you’re able to do with it. Street cred is your popularity around Night City, opening up new missions, as well as granting you new items to buy from various vendors. As you level up or perform other tasks, you’ll earn attribute and perk points that go into V through various upgrades. Attribute points reflect your core abilities; Body, Reflexes, Technical Abilities, Intelligence, and your Cool Factor. These need to be leveled up to certain milestones in order to force most doors open with Body, or certain hacking dialogue choices with your Intelligence. For my playthrough, I focused more on Body and Technical Ability, while also dipping into Intelligence to a certain point. Now, each of those core abilities has a skill tree all their own, several in fact. Body, for example, has Athletics, Annihilation, and Street Brawler. Athletics is based around core Body stats such as increasing your health, your carrying capacity or preventing enemies from knocking you down. Annihilation is largely based on your skills with a shotgun or light machine gun, as well as your mobility during combat. Street Brawler is based around your combat skills with your fists or blunt weapons, should you opt for a more in your face combat style.
Perk points will largely dictate how your V operates and the effectiveness of your weapons and hacking skills. Intelligence is where you’ll want to dive into further should you want to be the best Netrunner the city has ever known. Quickhacking can usually destroy most enemy encampments without raising much of an alarm, so putting enough points into Quickhacking or Breach Protocol will favor that playstyle. I put just enough points into these to make me fairly capable of downing enemies with a few quick hacks. While I’ll get into cyberware shortly, one such item you can equip is your cyberdeck, a chipset you’ll equip as your main Operating System. When I am not rocking my more melee-focused build, I have a cyberdeck that grants me 10 ram slots, allowing me more uses of my quick hacks. With a few strategically spent perk points, I reduced the amount of ram needed for each quick hack, meaning I can pull off more of them as I wait for my ram to recover. Quick hacks vary by type as you can cause enemies to forget they saw you, burn up into flames, or reset their optics, allowing you to almost become invisible. They range in rarity and effectiveness, so you’ll always want to keep an eye out for better versions of them.
Your cyberware is where you can make V more machine than human in most cases. You can equip new tech into various parts of your body, such as equipping powerhouse punching arms, mantis blades, to granting the capability of using smart targetting. You can upgrade everything from your eyes, hands, shoulder, legs, and more, granting you various perks, bonuses, and new abilities to make stealthing, combat, or hacking, that much easier. Your cyberware cannot be swapped out on the fly, requiring you to seek out Ripper Docs to swap out parts or buy entirely new ones. While much of the gear you can equip is vastly expensive, based on what rarity tier it belongs to, you can often find them out in the wild, as you explore the deepest reaches of Night City.
One of the core abilities you’ll want to invest at least a few perk points into is crafting as while it’s not a very robust system, you can make a lot of money by dismantling items and crafting others that then can be dismantled into components that sell for more. You can also use crafting to make new items and improve others, but since there are so many guns and clothing items to track down, I never really found myself relying on this system too often. I would improve my current guns and armor, but as for creating items from this system; it was something I did maybe a handful of times before I just kept finding better guns and clothes not even an hour after I made something that was impressive for the time. Nearly everything you find can be broken down into different rarities of components, and you’ll need certain perks spent in Technical Ability in order to craft better and more effective items. There is a perk called Scrapper that auto dismantles everything for you, but for the love of Johnny, do not ever buy this as some items that will be auto dismantled can sell for a ton of eddies.
Apart from quick hacking, basic weapon combat is insanely fun and you’ll have a decent range of weapons to tinker with as, much like you can with clothing, you can outfit guns with various mods and attachments. These include new scopes or mods that grant additional critical damage or the ability to make the gun non-lethal, even if it still looks like your really messing someone up with it. You’ll have various pistols, assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, each that vary as a more traditional weapon, but some that have smart features to have bullets track your target or tech weapons that can be charged up. Each weapon type has a variety of iconic versions as well that have additional stats like my favorite gun the Prototype: Shingen Mark V that fires self-guided micro-projectiles that also burn their victims alive as well as grant insane critical damage buffs, and comes with four open mods slots.
The gunplay is very good considering that CDPR has spent the last decade and some in the land of swords and sorcery, and feels more akin to what shooting felt like in the more recent Fallout games. Each gun feels different, and with the wide range of scopes and mods, you can usually find a nice balance of what you want from it, should you have the mods to do so. I ended up using smart weapons far more than the others given their ability to track their enemies, making killing a much faster and engaging affair. Though, to be honest, I also found sniping to be very satisfying as a few of the legendary or iconic rifles I found could one-shot them with a well aimed shot to the dome. There is also a wide range of katana’s and various other melee weapons, but once I found my mantis blades, and equipped a fire mod to them, I ended up not using a weapon slot for any sort of melee weapon again.
Clothing and fashion are everywhere in Night City, from the plastic tops to glowing hats and jackets, you’ll find a large assortment of clothes to help you fit into the fashion scene that is Night City. Clothes will come with various stats, even if +48 armor on a bra top doesn’t make sense. Several of the higher tier outfits can also grant you mod slots, allowing you to add in mods that boost your critical damage or simply add more armor. You can also buy perks that aid in boosting those mods, which helped me add in almost 500 armor to my favorite top. The only issue I have with clothing is that hats will bypass your hairstyle, which is a problem that occurs in nearly every game, but sadly, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t appear to have a hide hat feature, so I often neglected to equip anything to V’s head, preserving her chosen hairstyle. At launch, having anything equipped to V’s head, made them bald whenever you would look into a mirror. This has thankfully been patched to work, even if having to activate a mirror is a weird design choice.
My biggest issue with clothing and your weapons comes in the form of the UI. While the aesthetic is very pleasing with a wealth of information at your disposal, the tabs just cover too much of the screen and other weapons, and you can’t scroll down your items without a big ass window covering everything. Also, when you sell items, it flickers the screen and readjusts everything and it can cause selling or dismantling items to sometimes become a nuisance. It’s a shame you can’t mark items as junk and then just mass sell them along with your other junk. You also cannot favorite items yet, something that could go a long way to prevent you from accidentally selling something you want to keep. Again, the menu system is well thought out and functional but needs a few tweaks and features to really have it stand out and be everything I’d want from it.
Another few issues that I have with some parts of the game’s design is the side quests to buy the car I wish had a different icon than what is already used for actual side quests. It’s too easy to look at the map and be like “hey, I have more side que… oh wait.. those are just cars to buy..” The phone system allows you to pick a person and press X to open messages, but doesn’t open THAT person’s messages and instead just defaults to the entire message list, forcing you to track them down individually. It’s another thing I deem a small annoyance, but also something I would love to see a quality of life improvement for. I’m also not a fan of having to craft a single item at a time, yet the game allows you to dismantle groups of items at once. Another few issues revolve around pedestrian AI being largely dumb as rocks, cops stop following you once you break line of sight, not being able to double jump during a phone call, and the B button is used for skip dialogue as well as crouch, causing me to miss a few lines of conversation as I attempt to hide from enemies or not be crouched during an important conversation.
Now, performance issues and bugs; the real meat of why so many people have either sought out refunds or are waiting until more patches come out to fix the game. Again, I can only speak to what I’ve experienced and how it has affected my game. Apart from one bugged quest, which I talked about earlier, I’ve had very few problems with my time around Night City. That said, I’ve had several minor glitches affect me pretty reliably. I’ve had characters walk through walls, get into my vehicle without opening the door, to items being stuck in the ground, or enemies behind walls shooting me. The glitch that I’ve had the most is not being able to run after getting out of a vehicle, which can be fixed by simply pulling out my gun. I’ve also had the bug where I cannot access my inventory or swap weapons, something that is fixed by simply saving and reloading. In my 80+ hours, I’ve had 3 crashes and only 2 instances where enemies are T-posing. I haven’t had any body glitches or stuff you’d find hilarious, apart from one single car dropping from the sky. I had one instance of a character having a gun in their head, and less than a dozen instances of enemies getting stuck in the ground; though, the best one was one of the boxing fights as I could simply just stand there and keep punching them with no retaliation; so I gladly welcome that particular bug.
Most of the bugs I’ve had are easy to bypass and are likely to be addressed in future patches. I haven’t found them to ruin my experience or make me think less of the game. Should they have been addressed before the game came out? Of course, but as many of them can be fixed by reloading my game, I simply was able to move past them and just keep playing. While I know that some users are seeing crashes every 30 minutes, that isn’t my experience and for the most part, my time with the game has been very positive and glitch-free.
Now, as for performance, the game offers two modes on Series X that both have very solid benefits. First, you have a quality mode that grants you a locked 30 fps but runs the game at a much higher resolution. This mode is perfect for those that want higher resolution textures such as posters and items in the foreground to be at a much greater detail. You also have a performance mode that runs at a lower resolution, but offers up dynamic 4k at 60fps, but at the cost of some detail. I ended up preferring the 30 fps mode as the game just often looked better and still ran very slick. I often swapped between the two to find what worked best for me. As for what has been reported on last-gen consoles, they largely run at a much lower low resolution and fail to even remain at 30 fps almost anywhere you go. As for PC, well, it will vary on your build and what overall graphics card you are running. The game offers raytracing in all its glory on PC, but I’ve seen people with very high-end rigs notice frame dips with it activated, especially during streaming on Twitch or Youtube. The game is set to see a next-gen patch for the Series X and PS5 that is supposed to add in such raytracing at some point next year, but no date has yet been given.
Now, technical numbers aside, how does Cyberpunk 2077 actually look on Series X. Well, in a word well associated with the game; Breathtaking. Yes, I fully understand that high-end PC’s are trouncing what the Series X is capable of at the moment, but keep in mind that this version on the console is the Xbox One version running in backwards compatibility mode, so of course a high-end up-to-date PC is going to look better until that patch comes out, and then you’ll notice less of a graphical gap between platforms. That said, I can’t get enough of how good this game looks, the sheer detail in the city, and the neon-infused lights and reflections that are simply everywhere. Driving or walking around Night City during the day and during the night can offer up a very different feel from one another as because of this, I would often explore the city on foot rather than in a car, just to take it all in. Sure, there are some blurry textures or some areas that need work, but as this is running a game meant for a lower-end platform, it’s about the best we can currently get at this time. Still, this game is absolutely gorgeous, and after seeing it run with raytracing, I cannot wait for that next-gen patch to make this already great-looking game look even better.
While I talked about Keanu Reeves earlier, the rest of the cast is rather enjoyable in their performances. Female V is solid enough without being any sort of a standout, offering a good counter to many of the other voices present. I really enjoyed Carla Tassara as Judy Alvarez as well as Emily Woo Zeller as Panam, even if she does sound a bit too similar to Ashly Burch most of the time. The rest of the cast from River, to Takemura, to Jason Hightower’s superb performance as Jackie Welles, all contribute some fantastic voice work here, bringing these characters to life. The music choices will obviously vary on your tastes, but honestly, I can’t get “Pain” by Le Destroy out of my head and I always smile when I end up decimating a base while it’s playing on one of the boomboxes littered about.
It’s no secret that Cyberpunk 2077 needs work, and given the patches we’ve seen in the last week, CDPR is up to the task to get this game functional for all to play in the near future. Now, as I mentioned at the start of this review, I can only gauge the quality of the game based on my own experience, and frankly, I had a damn enjoyable time with very little to truly even come close to ruining my play. There are a few systems and mechanics that I would love to see quality of life improvements towards, such as the UI and the skip dialogue button and crouching being something different, but in regards to the core gaming experience, I consider Cyberpunk 2077 to be one of the best games I’ve ever played; a true cinematic masterpiece. I thoroughly enjoyed the story, the characters, the moment-to-moment combat, and the fact that characters will go out of their way to phone you, especially after solidifying a romance. Night City itself if a wonderfully designed character of its own, its towering buildings around you, to the deserts that can seem to go on forever, I was consistently impressed no matter which direction I headed out in. Cyberpunk 2077, at least on console, and especially Series X, is only going to get better, and it will be an experience I’ll easily push through again and again.
Developer - CD Projekt Red Publisher - CD Projekt Released - December 10th, 2020 Available On - PS4, PS4 Pro, PS5, Xbox One/X, Xbox Series X/S, Stadia, and PC. Rated - (M) Blood, Intense Violence, Nudity, Strong Language/Sexual Content, Drugs /Alcohol. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X Review Access - Cyberpunk 2077 was purchased by the reviewer.