Cyberpunk 2077
PC, PS4, Stadia, Xbox One
Keanu Reeves is inside your head and going full John Wick on your psyche. To quote the man himself: bogus. You are V and he is Johnny Silverhand, a long-deceased rocker taking a joyride in your skull and finishing the work that dropped the curtain on him all those years ago. A devil on your shoulder, then, but also a convenient tour guide for Night City, albeit one who spouts as many c-bombs as restaurant recommendations. Think Ocarina Of Time’s Navi from the wrong side of the tracks. As a character, he’s the embodiment of Cyberpunk 2077’s most abrasive impulses; as a device, an ingenious method of tying even the most plodding map filler back to that central dilemma: this head ain’t big enough for the both of us, and it ain’t me who’s gonna leave.
Aside from V’s body the home you share is remarkable, if overly familiar in its satirical targets. Night City presents materialism and capitalism gone haywire and supercharged by sinister tech, but says little more than RoboCop did in 1988, and says it in similar ways to Grand Theft Auto’s modern hellholes: obnoxious DJs, spoof TV shows and adverts that vomit into the sky and drown pavements with smut. But it’s more overwhelming than any GTA. A firstperson camera puts you in your place: a tiny gnat of a mercenary, forced to crane their neck to see the spires of success they aspire to, or that Silverhand would see you topple. That height has powerful allure, with some great missions punching through the smog as you rob gleaming penthouses or brave cruel corporate boardrooms. The way tasks pull you into interiors of all kinds gives a convincing illusion of a city rendered inside and out.
After years of shouty marketing, the pleasant surprise is how much of The Witcher’s earthier charm survives. For all the sound and the fury of the world and your digital passenger, there’s poignancy to be found in shady corners: an awkward fumble in a storm-buffeted shack, or a rare pocket of calm in the arms of a cyber escort. The firstperson view shines in such scenes, as exemplary voice work and motion capture combine into intimate moments of virtual theatre. If anything, it’s slightly at odds with a main mission line that’ll whip you to its conclusion in 20 hours if you let it. Hit the brakes and the supporting tales come to life, and you’re reminded of the best of The Witcher 3. Not just the bleak drama of its Bloody Baron quest, but the joyful silliness of Hearts of Stone’s Dead Man’s Party, especially in a storyline where you atone for Silverhand’s past sins with a cast of now-aging rockers.
With an urban home and busy social life, Cyberpunk’s flow has more in common with GTA than rambling through a fantasy landscape. You navigate more by minimap breadcrumb trail than deciphering tangled slip roads, and chunks of the tale are spent driving from point A to point B, enjoying passenger chat. Roadsides are dotted with more busywork than GTA has – there are many repetitive gang fights unconvincingly dressed up as narrative events with data pads explaining who you just murdered. But, like a Rockstar game, Cyberpunk also knows to use its mammoth setting as a backdrop, taking you inside the hillside homes of the rich to momentarily enjoy Night City’s priciest panoramas or a freeing yarn in the deserts where a distant skyline serves as a tombstone for a life the locals have rejected.
The barren Badlands are also one of the few locations you can let rip with raytracing graphic options without tanking the framerate on all but the most beastly of rigs. The bustling, neon-filled city centre is not so gentle. It should be noted that Night City is plagued with bugs beyond its big specification ask; nothing progress-breaking in our 60 hours, but beset with frozen HUD elements, missing dialogue lines and T-poses galore. That after several delays, and reports of extended crunch, the game releases in this state, one wonders if this is the right studio to be shaking its head at the grim business practices of the future.
And as expertly as it captures a place and its drama,
Cyberpunk 2077 is less confident in the nitty-gritty of mercenary life. There’s a distinct divide between the highly cinematic main missions and the gigs offered by the city’s fixers in which you’re given more freedom to express yourself through a playstyle. As engaging as its assignments are, you don’t dig into your mechanical skillset too often in the main story. You make impactful decisions in dialogue, but standout sandboxes are few and far between. Infiltrating a shopping mall is a notable stealth beat, and there’s atmospheric skulking to be done in a warehouse housing eerie parade floats, but the action is unusually linear given your range of toys. There are even on-rails shootouts and a tank section; more
Call Of Duty than what you’d expect from a RPG. It’s almost as if there is V, the emotional being who shapes the yarn, and V, the tool you build in the inventory and skill trees to clear other icons off the map.
Action, for the most part, is noisy, glossy fun. In
Cyberpunk’s homing bullets and wall-puncturing energy beams there are hints of Borderlands – there’s even a droll, chatty pistol for diligent explorers. Like Gearbox’s games, gunfeel varies between brands and it takes the right loot drop for the action to sit right in the hand. Thankfully, when it does, you can hold onto that feeling by upgrading favoured weapons. A few early perks also counter the bullet-sponginess of enemies and that disconnect of perfect headshots merely stumbling goons. Given the variety of what you throw at attackers it’s a shame how little is returned; enemy types and behaviour are uninventive and don’t ask more of you than dodging grenades and sensible use of plentiful cover. Cyberpsycho boss fights across the city require
There’s a distinct divide between the highly cinematic main missions and the gigs offered by the city’s fixers
more prep, but it’s some way from the craft of conquering
The Witcher 3’s exotic bestiary.
When a rival Netrunner zaps viruses into your head
Cyberpunk finally finds a threat worthy of it. The upload bar triggers an invasive panic as you hunt an invisible aggressor or, better still, pre-empt them with a silent takedown. Playing a tech trickster yourself can’t help but echo Deus Ex. Looking at hacking perks or the spread of purchasable quickhacks (actions you load into a suitably powerful cyberdeck, preventing you from spamming deadly moves from the off) there’s a tingle of excitement that Cyberpunk 2077 might be an immersive sim on a city scale. This doesn’t manifest. Interplay between hacks is limited and many boil down to distractions by different names. There’s even one to whistle guards to your location, a 21st century skin on a trick that felt hackneyed in Assassin’s Creed’s 49BC.
Cyberpunk 2077’s stealth is easily manipulated. An endless loop of tempting guards with malfunctioning vending machines, cracking their necks and heaving bodies into freezers. More substantial hacks require a breach: an inert sequencing minigame that pauses the action until you make the first move. Install a pair of double-jumping legs and the challenge softens further as you bound over tricky level design. Maybe this is the point: it’s a power fantasy, after all. But the thrill of similar superpowers in Dishonored or Deus Ex is having a foe worthy of them, or rewards for pushing beyond common use in a ghost or pacifist run. A few fixers pay cash for a silent infiltration, but given the ease of it, their post-mission praise rings hollow.
Despite the simplicity of Cyberpunk’s individual disciplines, there are novel ideas on the fringes or in their interplay. Hacking in open combat, for example, lets you hammer squads with viruses or jam guns with quickhacks, while melee combat is pleasingly workable thanks to adrenaline-pumping perks that push through the pain barrier of bullets and bring katanas within fatal range. Given how viable it can be (and how slick the swords look) it’s a shame the swordplay is as basic as Skyrim’s, but there’s no denying CD Projekt Red delivers very playable versions of major sci-fi assassin tropes.
Perhaps it’s asking too much for punishing stealth and experimental problem solving in what aims to be huge, mainstream entertainment. And the accessible mechanical spread is fundamentally what empowers designers to serve up diverse action set-pieces most RPGs would relegate to cutscenes. As you frantically escape a botched heist or assassinate targets around an aerial parade, the last thing on your mind are all the moving parts not in play. But once your pulse regulates and you’re left to your own devices, it’s impossible not to look at pockets loaded with untouched consumables and mods and wonder if the balance of the world and its systems isn’t off. Hard difficulty comes recommended as standard, but even here the granular nerdiness and blockbuster thrills never quite gel.
V isn’t the only one with two souls wrestling for one body. Cyberpunk 2077 ends up being a sometimesunnecessary exercise in building a better merc, and a propulsive open-world tale about building a better life. If you can ignore the inconsistencies of the former and enjoy the latter, there’s a lot to love in Night City. But if Johnny Silverhand teaches us anything, it’s that two heads aren’t always better than one.