GET PUNK’D!

wandering into the wrong part of town – trouble only comes if you go looking for it. And once you find it, it’s an absolute blood-soaked gore fest – from straight-up gunfights, to close combat knife and sword battle. V’s story is surprisingly compelling, the slow burning plot giving you time to develop your own relationship with the character as you both explore the world around you. You’re aided on your journey by Johnny Silverhand, Night City’s most notorious rock star – brilliantly brought to life by Keanu Reeves. V and Silverhand are intrinsically linked, and the dialogue between the two is genius in places. Just like the world it inhabits, Cyberpunk is itself a game of conflict – moments of pure brilliance contrasted with buggy slips that should never have been allowed through. The most talked about bug is, typically, the most NSFW one – involving the game’s genital options. If you’ve chosen to make V a man, then for some reason he struggles to keep his bits in his pants, and that’s not something you need bobbing around as you prowl the mean streets. Likewise the ladies need better bras, as ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ really ruin the game’s gritty tone.

Less puerile problems see characters randomly standing in an arms outstretched ‘T’ pose, vehicles that disappear from under passengers in the blink of an eye, objects that float on their own – and the less said about the driving mechanics the better.

For a game that’s been this long in the making, you’d expect it to be near perfect.

The other shock is, depending on how you choose to play – the main mission and nothing else – you can ‘beat’ the game in just 20 hours, making it way shorter than CD Projekt Red’s other masterpiece, The Witcher 3. But why you would choose to throw away a much deeper experience with this game is beyond me.

Yes it’s flawed, and yes that lack of polish pulls you out of the game much more than it should, but this is still an astonishing achievement. The sheer breadth of choice and flexibility within Cyberpunk is unmatched in terms of RPGs, and the heart and surprising depth of the storyline elevates this above anything else I’ve played this year.