This article originally ran under a different banner/website in January of 2021 and is now being here re-uploaded for purposes of convenience and consolidation. Please enjoy.
Hype is poison. As I, the Video Game Doomsayer, stand before you, my loyal followers, the number of games that overpromise and under-deliver seems infinite, while the number of games to survive seems far and few. Watch Dogs. Aliens: Colonial Marines. No Man’s Sky. Time after time, games promise the sun, the moon, and the sky, only for us to be left with those promises shattered like glass. I would ask when will we learn, but when I heard the thunderous applause at a trailer showcasing Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand, I knew the answer was not today. I won’t say I anticipated the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077. I was skeptical, as always, of the marketing proclaiming this would be the next innovation in the open-world genre. Even the reputation of the developers, CD Projekt Red, wasn’t enough to get me to buy into the hype. I even joked saying Cyberpunk 2077 was going to be the last twist of the knife from 2020, but I certainly underestimated everything. MY LOYAL FOLLOWERS!!! I PRESENT MY REVIEW OF CYBERPUNK 2077!!! THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND CERTAINLY THE UGLY.
We begin building our playable character named V. You can customize their look and pick one of three backgrounds. I am sure many of you would assume that the three backgrounds would lead to three various stories making either play through unique; well, I am unfortunately here to tell you that’s not the case. All three paths eventually lead to running into Jackie Wells and becoming a mercenary in Night City. Now part of me doesn’t mind that approach because developers are allowed to tell the specific story. I am all for branching stories converging onto one point; it just doesn’t feel like the next innovation in the open-world games when the stories converge so quickly.
The focal point revolves around V and Jackie getting involved in a heist to steal a secret chip from one of the most powerful corporations in all of Night City: Arasaka. Unfortunately, the plan falls apart resulting in V being the only one surviving, having to implant the chip in his brain, and seeing the ghost of Johnny Silverhand. All moments that I felt should have had more emotional impact but were lacking since CD Projekt Red showed off these scenes at E3. Spoiling the death of one of your best character’s just baffles me and honestly removes any emotion the game could have evoked with his death. On the other hand, I could only imagine how shocked and surprised everyone would be to discover Keanu Reeves was playing Johnny Silverhand in the game. I could imagine the million YouTube reaction videos to seeing Johnny Silverhand for the first time. Unfortunately, CD Projekt Red wasted the moment for marketing hype.
After a quick trip to a trusted doctor, we learn that the chip we stole is slowly overriding our brain; like a virus, it will eat away at V’s brain and override it with Johnny’s consciousness in six days. For some reason, I just thought this plot point was frankly ridiculous. I couldn’t quite grasp the use of this technology. Sure this would allow the truly rich to body hop from old bodies to new bodies, but surely cloning themselves would be easier. Also, why would they put a known terrorist in this chip? Why would Johnny Silverhand need to be brought back? I know the game answers these questions along the way, but frankly, at the moment, the reasons for justifying having Johnny Silverhand be your own personal Jiminy Cricket didn’t feel earned.
Let’s discuss Johnny Silverhand while we are here. Johnny, a famous rockstar turned terrorist. He was so infamous that the Afterlife bar named a drink after him; the Afterlife is known for naming drinks after famous Night City citizens that die in a blaze of glory. Of course, we all know Johnny as his actor, Keanu Reeves since the two have an almost uncanny resemblance. Personally, I don’t think Keanu should have gotten the role of Johnny Silverhand. A shocking statement to say the least, but my reasoning is simple: Keanu Reeves is not an asshole. Keanu has been famously described as one of the nicest guys in Hollywood. Even when he plays John Wick, he never comes off as an asshole. Wick is just a character who was a nice guy who was just pushed too far.
Johnny Silverhand is a complete prick. He initially wanted to kill V and override his body as soon as possible. You learn through flashbacks that Johnny was your typical ego-tripping rockstar who treated bandmates and fans like trash. He even shot a fan on stage. His rampage versus Arasaka seems to be nothing but a narcissist ego trip and even when Cyberpunk 2077 explains why Johnny hates Arasaka it still seems petty. My point is I wouldn’t cast Keanu as an asshole character like Johnny; he doesn’t fit the role. Maybe this is due to my binge-watching of The Boys, but I would have rather seen Karl Urban in this role.
The other character I have complaints about is V. My gripes don’t extend to how the character is acted. V has a gruff city-slick voice that I would imagine someone hardened by life on the streets to have. My issue stems from how V is written. Numerous times I would select a dialogue option for V to say something totally different. So many times I wanted to tell characters not right now, only for V to completely tell them to fuck off. It’s the Fallout 4 problem all over again. A major issue considering we are supposed to be inhabiting V. The second it feels like we aren’t V, the illusion breaks. Now, I haven’t gotten around to the Mass Effect trilogy, but I have never heard any issue with people feeling like they didn’t feel like they were embodying Commander Shepherd. It almost feels like if you are going to be creating any RPG character like V or Shepherd, you might want to be taking notes from Bioware’s playbook.
Despite V and Johnny not being fully fleshed out, I believe the rest of the Cyberpunk 2077 cast to be the highlight of the game. Conversing with these colorful citizens that inhabit Night City was some of my favorite moments within Cyberpunk 2077. Any time I got an unexpected phone call from Judy, Evelyn, Panam, Misty, or Jackie, I would drop what I was doing and enjoy the quieter moments with these characters. Moments where the writing shines through. I am still disappointed they chose to kill off Jackie so soon in the story. Jackie Wells breathed a lot of life into Cyberpunk 2077. Always carrying himself with a positive hopeful attitude; like he knew his hard work and dedication would pay off. All a breath of fresh air in a frankly miserable city. Without wishing to spoil anything, another character passed away during my playthrough and I spent a good half hour just driving around mourning their death.
How’s the driving in Cyberpunk 2077? Personally, I can only really stand driving on motorbikes. The cars feel like you’re slipping and sliding on a bar of soap. The traffic moves so slow that you can easily get stuck in traffic in some of the wider cars. The mini-map also feels like it’s pulled too far inward, resulting in limited time to react to sudden turns. It reminds me of those “turn right now” commercials.
However, when you can find a bike that allows you to weave in and out of traffic, you might find yourself getting lost in the driving. Zoning out as you listen to the various radio stations in Night City. As a fan of multiple music genres, I easily lost myself trying out different radio stations as I zipped along the long highways of Night City. As someone who has roamed the streets of Boston, Philadelphia, and Jacksonville proclaiming the end of video games, Night City certainly resembled those cities with its twisting streets and towering skyscrapers. Many have said Night City makes a lot of use of the upper ward space with its towering skyscapes of Night City and I am not sure I agree with the thought. Yes, the buildings are tall, but I never felt that was incorporated into gameplay. I know mainly that we are supposed to feel like tiny ants scuttling around on the ground, while the ruling class hides in their towers. A true sentiment that would counter that doesn’t mean you can say Cyberpunk 2077 makes full use of these towers.
When you’re not driving around, head bobbing to the music, you will be taking part in missions to find a way to get the chip out of your head before Johnny consumes you. Most of these missions revolve around going to various places and shooting up anyone who stands in your way. The main missions, honestly, are absolutely boring. So boring I felt compelled to hunt for more interesting content in the side missions. This is a trend that I am starting to loath in video games. I always recall the writing tip: if it is not the most memorable part of your character’s life, why are you telling it? Similarly, I must ask developers, if your most interesting stuff is the side content, why not put that stuff in the main quest line? To pad out the run time, by forcing us to engage with the side content? If you don’t have the content to justify an open-world game, maybe you shouldn’t make one.
Many of you might be wondering now if Cyberpunk 2077 has enough side content to justify being an open world. My answer to this question is sort of. There are plenty of interesting side quests that I thoroughly enjoyed. From watching YouTuber Jesse Cox have his crotch light on fire to trying to talk a car out of committing suicide, there are tons of unique storylines to give Night City more life. However, there are a ton of copy-pasted side activities that appear to rip straight out of a Ubisoft game. Hunting for tarot art, bounty missions, car missions, and cyberpyscho’s missions feel so bland and lifeless that I can’t help but wonder why they are here. Frankly, I would have been happier with all these missions ripped out and replaced with a handful of unique and interesting quests like the ones mentioned above.
What also can be removed from the game is the obnoxious cell phone. You will be cruising along Night City when all of sudden you will get a call on your cell phone. With no option to ignore the call, you will get a fixer, a glorified quest giver, yapping in your ear about how great they are and how you should totally work for them. Every time I got a call from these people I just wanted to scream. Imagine if quest givers in World of Warcraft ran up to you and shoved quests in your face and you have an idea why I wanted to throw the cellphone out the window. What’s worse is these fixers usually give you dull quests like the cyberpsycho missions. Again the best missions are ones you stumble upon and CD Projekt Red was better off ditching the cell phone entirely.
When you decide to give in to the will of these fixer’s demands and do jobs for them, you will have to engage with the game’s combat. The combat doesn’t feel like one promised in a game aiming to innovate the open-world genre. Sure you have the same array of pistols, assault rifles, and shotguns that you get in every other open-world game. Yes, some of these guns will have the ability to ricochet bullets, shoot around corners, or shoot through enemies, but it doesn’t change up the combat loop. Yes, you can hack enemies, but that feels just as limited. Honestly, this combat system feels like a step back when you look at a game like Bioshock, where you can mix different plasmids and weapons to create some creative kills. Even the old Bioshock 1,2 punch of shock plasmid with a quick wrench to enemies head feels more creative than this. Maybe there are better weapons and hacks later in the game, but frankly, I won’t slog through hours and hours of bland pistols and shotguns to get to the creative stuff.
You also engage with the stealth system, but quite honestly, the stealth is the same as every other stealth system in every other video game. Crouch down, watch the icon saying if an enemy sees you, perform stealth takedowns that usually have an animation glitch, repeat. Even in the open-world games I enjoy, I am starting to become sick of this trend. Surely, there has to be another way to do stealth gameplay and I wish more developers would put in the effort than copying the same old tried stealth gameplay.
I also find the RPG systems rather boring. I will admit, I enjoy having a separate dialogue option if I have enough points in a certain attribute, but honestly, this system has been done better before. I recall my limited time with The Outer Worlds that had loads of dialogue options depending on where you put your points. I was able to intimidate a guard into letting me into a high-security area in The Outer Worlds. The attribute points never allowed me to do something similar in Cyberpunk 2077; instead, I could break open doors or ask dull tech questions. Hooray for me. The small skill trees within each attribute didn’t give me much to be excited about either. I am so tired of skill trees that can only passively offer me extra assault gun damage. If you are not going to provide an interesting skill tree, then remove the whole thing altogether; make me excited to level up. Don’t make me feel like I am just spending these points so you can stop nagging me I have them.
Now I can see all of you patiently waiting. I am no stranger to the fact the outrage is an internet currency and I have plenty of rage to spare. Many of you are waiting in anticipation to see what bugs I encountered while playing Cyberpunk 2077. I didn’t encounter any game-breaking bugs as I tried my best to keep my save file under eight megabytes to avoid it becoming corrupted. However, I ran into plenty of graphical glitches. Many textures took a few minutes to load in while some never loaded at all. Character models stuck inside other models. Characters dying in weird poses. Cars flipping around as if they were driving on ice. My bike spawned under a car. I got locked inside of a building I was completing a quest in and when I reloaded an old save, I was falling through the map. I don’t claim to have a high-end PC, but my PC has been able to run titles like Star Wars: Squadrons and Doom Eternal. Cyberpunk 2077 is simply a mess and no amount of graphical horsepower will fix that.
Cyberpunk 2077’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: immersion. One minute you will be hypnotized by the neon streets of Night City. The next you will see an old man jamming on the street with nothing but his guitar and his amp. Sit back on a dust worn-out couch he continues to shred his guitar as if nobody is around him. He’s lost in his own world of music. I want nothing more than to talk to him about his favorite bands, his influences, if he was part of a band at one point or what he thought of the music today. I got to talk to him and all he can say is two lines repeated over and over: ‘What do I do’ and ‘What do you want’. The illusion shatters before my eyes. I am not in some futurist city; I am just some guy sitting in front of the screen. Playing the same old video games. Nothing more.
Frankly, it might seem like I hate Cyberpunk 2077, and honestly, I don’t. I hate all the hype surrounding this title. How CD Projekt Red promised the world while only able to give a world that feels similar to all other open-world games. How developers were worked to the bone over this false idol. How two-faced CD Projekt Red has been the whole time. They will mock Rockstar and EA for their egregious microtransactions but plan to implement them into the online component of the game. How they implement NDA’s forcing reviewers to only show footage they provided to hide the ugly mess. How to force reviewers to stay silent on the state of the console ports. How they rallied fans into a frothing frenzy over any review that didn’t gleam Cyberpunk 2077 in praise. All this rage and destruction for a decent Grand Theft Auto clone. This game needed to be delayed not only so the fans could get the game they wanted, but so developers did not break themselves against the stones of this false idol. An idol to broken promises and false marketing.
As I prepare this speech for all of you, I can’t help but remember that famous Dark Knight quote. Yes, the quote has been overused so many times, but what better way to describe CD Projekt Red’s fall from grace. They have lived long enough to become the villain. Now in league with the likes of Blizzard, Bioware, and many other AAA studios. To what end, will we allow incompetent management and egregious marketing to run rampant across our favorite hobbies. How many Anthem, Fallout 76, Marvel’s Avenger, and Cyberpunk 2077 must we endure before we see that the industry is broken. The industry needs to take a long introspective look and sort through the corruption. We must demand change. Not just from CD Projekt Red, but the whole industry. Or else the end will truly come.
