My Third (and Ultimate) Review of Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 is a thing of beauty. A masterpiece even. I hope you can be inspired to play it after reading how much I enjoy it…
As I sit here, thinking about my time with Cyberpunk 2077 after having klepped the last achievement needed for that nova 100% completion both for the base game AND the Phantom Liberty expansion… I’m filled with a lot of emotions. How I feel about the game, and how the game makes me feel, are two distinct thoughts that have made me sit down and solemnly reflect on my life and the messages expressed through the game. It’s made me do a deep search within myself as I’ve tried to understand how the game ticks and why it resonates with me. My fear with writing this review is that I am afraid that I won’t be able to express everything about it that I like and why it makes me FEEL the way that it makes me feel. But I’ll certainly try my best. But before that for those short on time,
Ultimately…
Cyberpunk 2077 is a masterpiece. It’s become the best version that it can be, despite its circumstances, only possible through the countless updates over the past few years. That said, because of its divisive history, I think there will be some who will play it and still find a set of faults that is unique to them, manifested through their expectations, their console/computer, or perhaps their play style. But to that, I say if you’re even remotely interested in the game… if you can hold your expectations and judgments and just play the game, you’ll start to see the masterpiece shine through and have an undeniably fun experience. If you need more convincing, hold on to your shorts, because I’ve broken down every aspect of this game, and given you my opinion on it in the following gargantuan article. Enjoy.
Intro/Overview
Cyberpunk 2077 is an immersive futuristic narratively driven role-playing first-person shooter. It was released on December 10, 2020, and developed and published by CD Projekt RED. This playthrough marks the third time I have played through the game, this time with a large focus on its expansion DLC, “Phantom Liberty”, which I will have a separate review for, published later. These are just my thoughts on the base game.
My Bias (Our Bias?)
I think my bias is incredibly important to understand my perspective on Cyberpunk 2077. I am in love with the Cyberpunk genre itself. Retro / Dystopian / Corpo / Semi-real / Grungey-inspired future scapes. I can’t seem to get enough of them. Right from the outset, Cyberpunk 2077, as a game that takes place in the distant future, forked from a retro-future dystopian history… it’s already off to a great start as being a game that I would like despite what anyone else says about it and despite any of its flaws from a technical standpoint (or otherwise).
There’s something in my brain that loves thinking about these transhumanism concepts and their deep ethical questions… The dangers and advantages of AI. Cyberware and body modification (especially in a retrofuture sense, with hardware that doesn’t make sense in modern terms anymore). Corporations running the world. And yet, despite these concepts, the stories surrounding them and the characters that interact in these worlds are still HUMAN, relatable in their struggles, successes, and goals. I find it all extremely fascinating, just about every time.
I love Deus Ex and its Square Enix cousins. Especially Human Revolution. Bladerunner movies are incredible. Low-fi. Cloudpunk. The Ascent. Ruiner. Citizen Sleeper. This sort of stuff entertains me like nothing else, and as a reviewer, I feel disclosing this bias should help you appropriately make an informed purchase decision, ESPECIALLY if you are someone who enjoys the genre like me.
Without my love for the genre itself, it’s hard for me to think if I would love the game as much as I do, or give it as much a pass over its flaws as I do. So, keep that in mind as you continue.
Gameplay
The best comparison I can make for Cyberpunk 2077 is saying it plays as if Bethesda made a Deus Ex game with the gameplay style of their Fallout series. It’s a light RPG, with a heavy focus on Action. There are a couple of different ways you can approach combat, namely stealth and guns (or swords) blazing. There are a couple of different weapon types, perk-paths, and cyberware implants that support either playstyle. So a stealth-focused player might find themself surrounded by the likes of silenced pistols, stealth takedowns, knives, optical camouflage, and some netrunner hacks. Players who favor the action of shootouts may find themselves rushing into combat wielding shotguns, gorilla arms, light machine guns, katanas, and more. There are a lot of “combat scenarios” in the form of missions, police scanner hustles, gigs, and more for you to test these play styles to help you master your chosen form, or inform you of perhaps an alternate way to play that you might enjoy more.
As you use certain weapons and perform certain actions, you’ll be granted primary and secondary experience points, which can be used to access perk trees, and actual game-changing perks within the trees respectively. The 2.0 update in particular completely reworked the skill trees, and now they synergize in beautiful ways and overall make much more sense for how this game plays.
The perk tree used to be one of the biggest gripes in my other playthroughs, but the team at CD Projekt Red has tweaked it enough to the point where I was satisfied with it through all my 60+ hours this go around.
That aside, this is one of the most compelling and addicting games I have ever played. Combat is snappy, and regardless of how you choose to play, it’s always satisfying to take down a bunch of chromed-up gangers patrolling around a gig, or zeroing waves of enemies storming your position inside of a corpo-controlled super structure… Every weapon type is dialed in to be incredibly fun right when you pick it up, especially if you find an iconic weapon, which usually has an additional effect or two you won’t find anywhere else (akin to Destiny 2’s exotics). I think the best recommendation I can give is this: I’ve played this game for over 200 hours through three playthroughs. While the story is excellent, and I live for those down-to-earth character moments, I wouldn’t dare come back if the combat sucked or the moment-to-moment gameplay didn’t captivate me. It’s addicting and exciting, and it immerses you in the world of Cyberpunk, as an Edgerunning merc in Night City.
So the skill trees are cool, and weapons are excellent, but what you can also do to augment your experience is install Cyberware, which, thanks to the 2.0 update, has been massively overhauled to feel like such a bigger part of the game. Around Night City you can find Ripper Docs that will install body modifications that grant you specific bonuses. One of the earliest pieces of chrome you can chip is a metallic skeleton that increases your base armor by a hefty sum, making you take less damage, but there are many ways you can modify V’s body to enable additional abilities or effects. This can range from things such as a double jump, temporary optical camouflage, upgrades to your Cyberdeck increasing your base RAM and hacking capabilities, enhancing your nervous system with Edgerunner’s famous sandevistan for a sweet time slow down, a rocket launcher in your arm, an auto-revive on death, and all sorts of other cool enhancements. It’s these that have great potential to help you in your journey and are wholly unique to the world of Cyberpunk 2077.
So let’s go through some of my builds:
In my first playthrough, I opted for a stealth build and I molded my character around critical hits with revolvers, which made it so that I could do an insane amount of damage and down just about any enemy with one well-placed shot. I later opted into using tech weapons as my secondary, which allows you to shoot through walls. Combined with a really basic cyber hack to ping enemy networks, I could effectively wall-bang every enemy at a gig, making them scramble to find me like some kind of rat’s nest. Combined with some additional cyberware that let me slow time for a few seconds per interval, I was an absolute demon of the shadows.
In my second playthrough, I had to catch myself from attempting the same style of play and pivoted around level 10 or so into a brawler type. I replaced my cyberdeck with a sandevistan, and I ran around with gorilla fists that did “internal bleeding” damage, which acted like an incurable poison. I also had optical camouflage instead of grenades, and I became even more of a demon of the shadows… I’d walk on-site to a gig, go completely invisible, activate my sandevistan, and completely neutralize an area of enemies within seconds of stepping foot on the job. If I didn’t care to get into conflict, or the job required no killing or alerts, I could waltz to the objective, steal the data, and leave without a trace. It was incredible. For those times I did get caught, my backup plan was to use the target lock-based weapons, which automatically home in on enemies. The shotguns in that category are brutal — imagine a spread of 12 or more pellets all course correcting their trajectory to your enemy’s head. It’s incredible and I love it.
The third time through, I decided that I loved the invisibility and time-slowing combo I opted for that again, but this time, used throwing knives exclusively. Throwing knives rip through enemies like nobody's business. Completely silent, and have the potential to kill in one hit. I became a murderous, undetectable machine. SOOO Fun.
Even still after all this time, I still have at least two more playstyles to experience the combat’s full magnitude — an always loud, shotgun-toting, heavy machine gun holding, finger always on the trig, SOB. And a Nano-wire slicin’, daemon slicing, quick hack dicin’ netrunner. One day I’ll get to playing these, but it’s probably just good to note here that MORE options exist beyond my 200 hours.
There are a couple of enemy types, you have your regular Joe’s, and you’ve got some heavier harder-to-kill fellas, snipers, and robots or mechs of similar variations, but they’re all just different kinds of bullet sponges. What you have to watch out for is the net-runners, they can “hack” your character and inflict burn damage, or make it so you’re locked out of using your abilities, and generally, they’re quite a pain. If you opt to play stealthily, it generally won’t matter what enemies you’re focusing on. While there is a myriad of different damage types, I found that there are only two that matter, with hacks and electric damage being more effective against machines, and bullets or fire damage being more effective against humans. The (maybe unintentional) simplicity means you can generally use your favorite weapons against everything. I think some people will find this too simple (the modding community certainly did), but I didn’t have much of a problem with it.
Outside of combat, you can expect yourself to have a good time listening to the plethora of radio stations while driving the streets of Night City in any number of purchasable vehicles, perhaps using the photo mode to capture some serene vistas or memorable moments, maybe listening to a character express their woes, or perhaps you’re just out shopping and walking around Night City. There isn’t much to do beyond gigs by way of activities… unless you count Roach Race, an infuriating arcade game (that you can also play on your phone). You could read the shards in the game, which is like in-game lore, but after you’ve done that for a while it’s hard to know which shards will be rewarding to read anymore… there’s quite an overabundance of them (and the game doesn’t signify ones you have already read, which gets annoying quickly).
Narrative and Worldbuilding
Cyberpunk 2077’s narrative is excellent. It follows a mercenary for hire, “V”. During a job, something goes wrong and V is put into a situation where they have to put a chip in their head to preserve it. Little did V know, the chip has the consciousness of the rebellious rockerboy Johnny Silverhand, and it turns out, that this chip with Johnny on it is slowly killing V. For the majority of the game, you and Johnny are looking for ways to get the chip out of V’s head so that V can return to living life normally.
While the game does tout itself as being one with a “moldable because of your choices” world, there aren’t many decisions that greatly affect the world at large, like on a Mass Effect scale. There are usually choices that immediately affect gameplay, say, how you’re going to complete a gig, or what you’ll tell another character, but more often than not, the consequences of your actions aren’t seen in the long term. There are side quests that on completion open up an option to end the game differently, but those are the exceptions, and even then, those are still quite linear. You can especially sense this outside of the main quest line. This isn’t as noticeable in the first act, and in some of the early missions, but later on, you can start feeling that your choices don’t have much weight to them outside of the mission or side story they’re restricted to.
But, for those choices that do come up, having Johnny around gives an interesting perspective to your decision-making. He will often appear and tell V to do something his way, trying to persuade you as the player to make his choices. I often found myself thinking about what I might do, only to be interrupted by Johnny and then backtracking in my mind thinking about them again with Johnny’s added two cents. Would things be better if I listened to the voice in my head? What if he’s wrong? What if I’m wrong? While the weight of V’s choices does not sway the world at large as aforementioned above, that dynamic was still enough to make me think about the implications of my actions regardless of how the game decided to carry them out, and I thought it was an excellent use of the main stories “two consciousness in one mind” conundrum, something that can’t necessarily be explored as effectively in other fictions quite like this.
Something I have to applaud CD Projekt Red for is the quality of their side quests. I think in a lot of other RPGs, I’m very used to the idea that side quests are simple, surface-level fetch quests that typically don’t weigh very much on the game world or my character (well, outside of the XP or loot they may offer). In Cyberpunk 2077 however, I found many of the side-quests to be rich with story, some so much so that I think they rival even the main questline’s narrative with how impactful they can be in regards to their emotional payoff and the overall quality of their stories. They continue to build out the world of Cyberpunk and as side quests, they opted to make them completely missable and optional. It’s bonkers for me to think some players will miss out on some of Cyberpunk’s best content, as these captivating stories are some of the best that the game (and games as a whole) have to offer, as they continue to build the world up and make it feel like an actual location in some parallel world.
The questions that arise in your mind as you play many of the side quests (and even some main quest stories) will make you question technology, humanity, fate, and more, all through the lens of the Cyberpunk universe. Some quests will have a comedic tone to them, as you find yourself hunting down rogue taxi AIs, only for the questline to culminate in a head-scratching finale, where your choices in the final decision are nothing but serious, morally grey answers filled with even more questions. In some other quests, the nature of the missions, and the horrific events that transpire are so dark, that even behind the monitor of my computer screen I couldn’t help but feel a foreboding sense of terror, to the point where I was expecting a jumpscare that would never come. Other times I would sit with a character at a point in their quest line and talk with them, while we look on at the city in quiet contemplation, promoting thoughts and feelings of a serene hope for the future, yet still while feeling a twinge of dread knowing that everyone is at the mercy of the city that always wins. CD Projekt RED’s ability to immerse you as V, and take you across a broad emotional spectrum, within the same universe, in the same game, across several different genres of captivating stories, is absolutely a masterclass stroke, and I argue is second to no other game I have played within recent memory. I can’t possibly express that enough.
Supporting all of this is the incredible voice talent they were able to recruit for the game and the excellent writing that’s behind every line of dialogue. Something I discussed in my podcast discussing Cyberpunk is how it’s incredible that they were able to create lingo for Night City that doesn’t make your skin crawl with cringe when you hear it. It feels completely natural in this universe, and it almost feels natural enough for you to use even now. Of course, there are some scenes and quests and voice lines that do make you cringe a bit. But overall, the quality of the voicework and the writing is impressive across the board and all add to the immersion that you feel as V in Night City, during the year 2077.
The last note I want to make about the world-building is while it is incredibly impressive and immersive, almost more than any other game I have played, I do have one critique. You’ll find text message conversations at every police scanner hustle that explain the events leading up to the crime in that particular location. While I think, “Hey that’s pretty cool”, and “Hey, that builds out the world with NPC’s that feel alive”, I also think from a player’s perspective… If I’m going around and knocking 3 to 5 of these out in the space of 5 minutes, the last thing I want to do is read why some dude got flatlined during an illegal exchange of aftermarket cyberware. As a reader of this article, you might think it’s not too bad, but there are at least a hundred of these hustles. This is not to mention that similar non-consequential time-waster text logs are littered throughout gigs and missions and even within the city. I like being able to read lore in the game, and it’s great that it’s written from the perspective of characters who live in this world, but for something like this, I prefer quality over quantity. So, considering myself to have experienced everything the game has to offer, I can confidently say to you, that a lot of these hustle logs are worth skipping after you get the general idea from reading about a dozen of them. The game will notify you if they’re important enough to read for additional side quests, so there is not much point in reading them if you’re not feeling inclined to, but by the same token, I wish what existed to read was more worthy of my time and attention.
Visuals and Performance
For this playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077, I played on my PC, with an RTX 3070 and a Ryzen 7 CPU. Performance out of the box was good, I opted into playing with low Ray-Tracing, which made the game look excellent and overall gave me a smooth experience. I also played for a bit on SteamDeck, though this was only to play Roach Race on the couch (which worked wonderfully, and yes I did get the cowboy outfit from getting the highest score, thank you).
The game is breathtakingly beautiful, even without the ultra-impossibly realistic ray-tracing overdrive. I haven’t taken this many in-game photos before. The design of Night City is crisp and clean, The vehicles and their interiors are sleek not to mention cohesive with their in-game manufacturer. Same with weapons, beautifully crafted, incredibly fun to use of course, and the animations are solid. I have never had an issue with the graphics. It’s overall a really pretty game.
The UI I think at times can leave a bit to be desired. I think a lot of it could be cleaner, and I’m sure some mods do this, but in vanilla, it feels a bit lacking. Better since launch, but there are still some optimizations that could be made there. Serviceable enough for most players though, I imagine.
Audio Design
I have to rave about the soundtrack for a moment. It is GOD-TIER. The emotional weight that the ambient tracks can convey as they’re played in the context of the game — I’m talking The Sacred and the Profane, Been Good to Know Ya, Outsider No More, The Voice in My Head, Rite of Passage, Real Window, the Bells of Laguna Bay… Absolute masterpieces. I cannot properly convey how incredible of a job P.T. Adamczyk & team did. I would pay top dollar to see it live. I don’t even know what I need to say to make people believe this is one of the best game soundtracks of all time. And that’s just me praising the somber ambient stuff, I could go on for days talking about Rebel Path, V, Pat(idiots), Cyberninja, and more. It is DIALED in to perfection.
The radio music is also GOD-TIER quality. The band they created for this game SAMURAI, incredible, inclusions of real-life artists, like, GRIMES. Shivers down the spine. Every track included in the radio and those used even beyond the radio are top-tier, placed with surgeon-level precision in the game’s narrative beats to create one of the truly most GOD-TIER video game soundtracks of all time. There was about a month straight where I would show up to work, shuffle the entire game and radio soundtrack (which is about 8 hours), listen to the entire thing, go home, then wake up, and shuffle it again. For like a month straight. Not to mention, I did this last year and the year before that. My past TWO YEARS of Spotify-wrapped include many songs from Cyberpunk 2077, and with Phantom Liberty’s inclusions, we’re on track for the third year in a row probably. Yes. The soundtrack is THAT GOOD.
As far as in-game sounds go, they’re perfect. Guns are weighty, punchy, and satisfying, the cyberware activations sound futuristic and awesome, swords and knives sound slice-y and dicey… No complaints. Stole the phone noises for my phone IRL lol.
Conclusion
If you’ve read even a small portion of this review, you understand that I think very highly of this game, and it should come as no surprise that I do place it within my best-of-all-time list, perhaps even within my top 10 of all time. It has a flawed history, and may even have parts that are still flawed because of that. But it is a masterpiece nonetheless that has resonated with me in a wholly unique way that no other video game has been able to do. It’s games like this that make me want to keep playing games and experiencing their stories, characters, soundtracks, and messages. It’s games like this that make me want to be creative and write about them, or even write stories of my own.
The gameplay is, as my friend Jorddagreatest puts it, “undeniably fun”, the world-building and narrative are top-notch, and the soundtrack is GOD-TIER both on the ambient side and the artist inclusion side. It is impossible to not see brilliance around every character, building, weapon, and narrative beat. It’s a shame that players will potentially find their own set of faults with the game and for one reason or another won’t play it, or will stop playing it before they can see the brilliance within. But I genuinely hope dear reader, that if you’re even slightly interested in playing Cyberpunk 2077, you’ll push through any hesitancies you may have or will have, to give the masterpiece contained within a chance to shine through and show you what it’s made of.
The part of the game that is undeniably a masterpiece to me is those quiet moments outside of the killing, usually somewhere tucked within the story, where you could sit in quiet contemplation on the outskirts of the city… the music resonating just right… with thoughts and emotions given context through the path you’ve blazed. A thing of beauty, I know. Never fades away.
Originally published 29 Apr 2023 at https://backloggd.com.