Futuristic shootfest is a little too familiar
It’s only 2020, but we already live in a world like the one imagined in “Cyberpunk 2077.” That is to say, the highly anticipated roleplaying video game, where you control a mercenary in a “Blade Runner” esque futurescape, is not a revolution of ideas and game play.
Instead, it’s an aboveaverage shootfest with science fiction’s legacy of innovation surgically attached. It explores the breaking down of barriers between humans and machines and the increased corporate commodification of our lives, but like the glitches that bog this game down, those ideas are more of an aberration than a central feature.
The game follows V, a playercreated protagonist who joins an underworld of hackers and activists in a neonlit metropolis called Night City. Players can choose from three backstories, and in my case, V was a corporate drone who ran afoul of company politics and ended up kicked to the curb. Now, she and her best friend, Jackie, are hooked up with the newest power broker in town to steal military tech, involve themselves in gang rivalries, run across military veteran turned rock star Johnny Silverhand ( played by Keanu Reeves) and infiltrate V’s old company.
“Cyberpunk” is based on a tabletop game of the same name. The original was a roleplaying pioneer, eschewing the magic of series like “Dungeons & Dragons” and cyberpunk contemporary “Shadowrun.” It favored a straight scifi experience of collaborative storytelling and improvisational theater, with a few battles thrown in. Another distinction was its fastpaced combat system that ( theoretically) would translate well to a modern shooter video game.
This version of “Cyberpunk” is a standard firstperson RPG in the vein of games like “Fallout” or “The Outer Worlds.” Players explore, meet questgivers and other characters, and will mostly sneak or break into places, violenceing their way through action set pieces. There’s little sense that the player is partnered with the game system to weave a story together. “Cyberpunk” does try, especially with those multiple origin stories, but it falls into an onrails rut despite the nonlinear paths available.
It’s almost pedestrian. You learn to shoot things, and things get shot. There are at least 50 hours of the main quest and side missions, plenty of driving around and getting into fights, and lots of clever opportunities to use the environment to your advantage. Players can, for instance, hack a computer terminal to weaponize it. It’s a neat feature, but it’s also weirdly nonfuturistic for a game set half a century from now. It’s not all that different from being able to control your thermostat with your iPhone, and it’s hard to feel like an enhanced superhuman when you’re using the tech available to soccer moms.
On the plus side, driving through Night City feels incredibly immersive. But while the main characters are all wellrealized, the playerdriven conversations are not nearly as polished and lead to some awkward repetition in dialogue chains. Crowds also look sadly sparse in what you’d imagine should be bustling streets.
As an RPG, “Cyberpunk” is one of the best in the genre. Your player stats actually matter, and earning experience points and street cred open new paths and alter the difficulty. Your version of V can evolve very differently than another player’s, and that fluidity is rare in video games. Making character choices impactful is the core of a good RPG.
But there’s an old saying: When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. That rings true the second V has a gun. A mindless gunfight is always lurking around the corner. You either get good at shooting, or you die, which doesn’t feel very deep — or very cyberpunk — at all.
Gunbattles aren’t the only rut. The game is very tropey, often to toxic extremes. The sounds of sexual assault happen around you in the streets, and the first Black male character you meet might as well be Suge Knight. In your first mission, you rescue a nude woman who has suffered extreme physical violence, eventually carrying her seductively placed corpse around.
The game also tries to critique the commodification of gender through environmental assets like advertisements featuring femmepresenting characters with massive erections visible through their clothes, but that ends up doing exactly what it’s supposed to be condemning.
“Cyberpunk” is fun to play, but it falls into too many old paths to be anything special. It’s flashier, bigger and more stylized than a lot of RPGs on the market, but it still relies on violence and “edgy” tropes. The game takes some leaps when trying to incorporate traditional tabletop systems, but it shows how one medium can’t be totally replicated into another. In the end, this distant future is shamefully more of the same.