“CYBERPUNK 2077 IS AN OPEN WORLD FILLED WITH MISSIONS THAT DEMAND EXPERIMENTATION.”
But before we tackle that job we pull up the map, which is densely packed with question marks, sidequests, and other points of interests from as soon as we step out of our apartment, and get into our car.
We take a couple of detours, cruising through the streets and jaywalking wherever we want, stopping to slice some ne’er-do-wells’ skulls with our katana (though a pacifist run is possible) for bounty rewards, and completing a side-mission to scoop up some new cyberware and daemons – malicious code we can implant into enemies or objects by scanning the environment with o and then hitting u to pull up a quick menu. Whether you fancy using
TVs to distract guards, having someone’s weapon malfunction in a firefight, or exploding someone’s grenade, you can do it (even from the safety of a hacked CCTV camera if you want). Hacking’s slick enough to always be a consideration, a boon to any playstyle even if you don’t specialise fully into it.
SYSTEM REBOOT
When working through a sequence of rooms, if you break stealth the effects rarely seem permanent. We always have the option of regrouping, each new room of foes a new playground. There’s definitely something incredibly gamey in Cyberpunk’s systems, in the way enemy awareness resets, the vision cones, and the way numbers pop out of enemies when you shoot them. But as a first-person RPG it’s incredibly immersive, always playing with perspective to ensure you have a sense of how you fit within a scene. The ability to move your head during dialogue is more than a gimmick, it’s genuinely useful for taking in a moving scene, and sometimes you’ll have different dialogue depending on where you’re looking, allowing you to comment on a suspicious car boot or glance at a burly bodyguard shifting a little too close to you and ask what his problem is.
The choices you have when taking on missions create a sense of immersion, and we can’t help thinking this is the kind of game we dreamed Deus Ex: Human Revolution would be back in the day. Cyberpunk 2077 is an open, dense world filled with missions that demand you explore and experiment.
HACK AND SLASH
In our hands-on we blow off a portion of the quest where we can ask for help from a Megacorp entirely because working with them just doesn’t feel right. Later, as we fight through a meat factory, we come across a usurped gang leader in a holding cell. We could ignore him, but instead we deactivate the explosives keeping him caged, and search through computers for the door activation code (if we wanted, we could hack the keypad). Released, the ex-leader promises us a favour later on. There’s definitely a touch of immersive sim – like Deus Ex, Prey, Dishonored – to Cyberpunk 2077, and it could be a game-changer given such a wonderfully sprawling and densely-packed world.
We play for hours but it feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface of the game’s systems. You’ll want to take your time with this one, especially as the way you play, whether that’s big choices or small acts of roleplay, make your stay in Night City an experience you can only call your own.