Saturday Morning Gaming: Cyberpunk 2077 Reviewed

This will contain spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077 insofar as it discusses a handful of side quests from the later game in broad detail.

I am playing this game on a pretty good gaming PC. It’s got an SSD, a double buttload of memory, and one of those newfangled graphics cards that everybody is talking about. As such, I will be reviewing the game as “something that works” rather than as “something that is so very broken that even Sony and Microsoft has announced that they’ll be giving refunds for digital sales“.

I mean, if the game is unplayable out of the box, then we’re not in “complaining about the game” territory, are we? And there are a *LOT* of reports of the game being unplayable out of the box. If you’re idly wondering “will my system be able to do it?”, the answer is “probably not”. So the first part of this official review is “you shouldn’t get this game unless you’re sure you can run it on your warhorse PC”.

There’s probably an interesting article to be written about investors demanding that a game be released, even in an unplayable state, because they want their money and they don’t care about anything else.

Anyway.

If you’re still reading, I’ll say that the majority of the complaints about the game (and they are legion) fall into one of two categories:

1. This isn’t the game I had spent the last 7 years daydreaming about.
2. This isn’t the game I was promised.

One of the rumors I had heard about years ago involved language translation chips. You start the game without a language chip at all. Then you get a language chip that translates poorly. Like “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” poorly. Then you get a real translation chip that just works.

Holy cow! I thought. That’s cyberpunk as heck!

As it is, there is a language translation chip in your head. It subtitles foreign languages. So when you hear someone speaking Japanese, it has subtitles floating underneath their faces that translate their Japanese language into English text. You don’t get to upgrade it. You don’t need to.

Yeah. That’s Cyberpunk. I guess.

The Cyberpunk twitters, back before the game was released, quite regularly tweeted about the cars and motorcycles in the game. I always was confused about that. Why aren’t they tweeting about the cyberdecks you’re going to be using???

Well, that’s because you’re going to spend more time driving than cyberdecking.

So I’ll say that this game is not Cyberpunk 2077: Netrunner. It is Cyberpunk 2077: Solo. You’re playing the game as a Solo. You care about cars and you care about guns and you care about body modifications that give you armor or make it easier for you to shoot people. You do engage in hacking, but it’s either the hacking that you do as you run around doing Solo stuff (you can force a reboot of optical implants, for example) or breaking into stuff on the network and stealing creds. If you’re perking up at the “breaking into stuff on the network and stealing creds” and remembering playing Shadowrun on the Sega, don’t. You’re given a small hacking minigame that will test your ability to read a grid and plan out moves on the grid. Hacking takes about 20 seconds. It’s just barely more interesting than the hacking mechanic in the SNES Shadowrun.

Now, I find both of the above to be disappointing. Whose problem is that? Is that the problem of the game? Is that a problem with my own expectations? I mean, I wanted a game that had hacking the way that Sega Shadowrun did hacking. I did not get that. Whose problem is that?

You’re also playing a pre-established character. Like in the Witcher, you’re playing Geralt. Like in Red Dead Redemption 2, you’re playing Arthur. Like in Grand Theft Auto 4, you’re playing Nico. There are theoretical avenues that just aren’t available to you because you have a particular personality already. You don’t get to pick a third way a lot of the time. You just get to pick what mood your character is in as you agree to do what the game asks you to do.

I wanted to play with *MY* character. I wanted options to be presented to me and then for me to say “nope, I want to do it a different way” and then get a third way presented to me. I didn’t get that. Instead, I got Grand Theft Auto 2077. Whose problem is that?

Now, the game itself, even on a system that runs it well, is buggier than a lollipop in an ant farm. You’re going to see T Poses in a lot of places. Like, you go into a bar and you’re walking past some hot people who are all talking and one of them is in a T Pose. Another time, I was walking past a busker who was playing air guitar. They were playing air guitar masterfully. Like, the fingerwork appeared to be accurate to my untrained eye (that is, the hand moved and fingers shifted when chords changed). But there was no guitar. Maybe they were playing a cyber guitar.

When it comes to stuff like character customization, the customization is vaguely disappointing as well. I go to a great deal of trouble to outfit my dude. I make sure that he looks fresh, as we used to say. But I only see him in the character screen and, occasionally, behind the wheel of a car. So this makes getting new clothing pretty much unrewarding. Do you want pants that look dumb that give you 45.3 armor or pants that make you look *AWESOME* that give you 42.8 armor? If you never see yourself, why not just go for the 45.3 armor? It’s not like you’re not going to swap it out when you find something that gives you 45.4 armor.

So what about combat? Well, they do a good job of having different ways to do stuff. It’s possible to hack people and set them on fire or melt their brains. It’s possible to get Mantis arm implants (like those seen in the teaser oh-so-many years ago) and do some serious melee damage. There are smart guns that make gun combat easier for people who aren’t into the whole FPS thing. I, myself, use a combination of a sniper rifle and an ocular implant that gives me bonus damage for headshots. Since my first sniper rifle, I have upgraded sniper rifles exactly twice. I have a sweet one with a sweet scope and it’s only against people undergoing cyberpsychosis that I might ever need to take a second shot.

In the same way that the game goes out of its way to give you different ways to fight, it has a lot of quests that give you different ways to do them. You’ll recognize all of the classic side quest forms:

1. Fetch Quest (and its twin sibling Delivery Quest)
2. Sneak Quest where you have to go in and touch an item and then sneak out (and its twin sibling Assassination Quest where you have to go in and kill somebody and then sneak out)
3. Conversation Quest where you have to talk to somebody (in person… you can’t, like, just call them)
4. Combat Quest where you go in and kill everybody

And there are the quests that mix any or all of these together.

Now, there are quite a few side quests that are just “meh”. You’ve played all of these quests a thousand times in dozens and dozens of games. BUT! There are a handful of quests that add a pretty cool Cyberpunk flair to them. Like, there’s a side quest where you help your AI buddy wrangle the taxi cabs that have lost contact with home base. Some of the cabs want to kill you. Some of the cabs only need to be talked to. Some of the cabs are trying to run away from you and it’s your job to stay within a certain distance of them for a certain period of time. All the while, they’re giving you monologues.

This is pretty cool. Now, I’ve noticed that there are a number of quests that are just “meh” but, if you engage with the flavor text, the quests become somewhat more cool. For example, there’s a quest where you have to get a gambler’s eye back. (He bet it and lost.) Now, if you just look at the quest, it’s sneak in, touch jar, sneak out, delivery quest to drop-off point. But if you engage with the flavor text, you’re stealing back an eye that was lost in a card game from a street gang that you’ve got beef with. Now your Fixer’s buddy has his eye back. You can feel good about that.

An ideal quest, of course, is one that is fun without having to do the reading. But if you do the reading, you’ll see that there are a lot of really cool quests out there that, on the surface, are just one of the four forms. (I just finished one of the “assist the cops” side quests that involved killing 4 gangsters who were standing over a couple of dead bodies. After the quest, I read the transcript of what happened and why the police wanted to outsource this one. The transcript described an interaction between the gangsters and the now-dead people they were standing over that set up what had happened 5 minutes before I encountered them. But if I didn’t read the transcript, I’d just be shooting 4 gangsters in the head.)

They do a good job of having multiple ways to do a lot of quests. A fetch quest might send you into a building. If you have good enough tech skills, you can hack your way through one of the side doors. If you have good enough body, you can force the back door open. If you are, instead, a sneaker, look around and see if you can get on the roof. I betcha there’s a hatch you can shimmy through and get in that way.

But, for the most part, the quests are only good if you do the required reading. (As someone who *LOVES* reading flavor text, I dig it. I can see how someone else might not, though.)

But what about the main quests in the game? HOLY CRAP THESE ARE AWESOME. I’m having a blast going through the main storyline. The dialog is good, the characterization is very strong, the voice acting is off-the-charts, and I can’t wait to see what happens next. Well, maybe after some more side quests. But after the side quests, I can’t wait. The main story is so good that I don’t *MIND* that it’s not Cyberpunk 2077: Neuromancer. But, ironically, that also makes this one of the games that can give you the lion’s share of the joy of playing the game by just watching youtubes of the cutscenes. All of the joys of the story, none of the frustrations of playing the game.

As one of those Gen Xers who played Cyberpunk 2020 and loved it, who loved reading the sourcebooks, who loved playing Shadowrun on the SNES and the Sega and complained that all of the good hacking went into the latter while the amazing story went into the former, I’ll say this: This game is a lot like playing Shadowrun on the SNES. The story is SO GOOD. Heck, they did a good job (on the surface anyway) of creating the world. You walk through ultra-ritzy corporate areas that just oooze money. I feel envy just walking on the sidewalk. Then you turn down an alley and find a homeless encampment next to a crime scene. You go out to the sticks and see miles and miles of trash as far as the eye can see. Then you get back on the road and drive to a ripperdoc and get sub-dermal armor. The spices are just right for the world. This *IS* the world from Cyberpunk 2020. The beauty is only skin-deep, though. So much of the game is shallow… the side stuff that is bland and meh and has you remembering other games that you were hoping that this game would be more like and remembering the game that you were hoping for and this is not that game.

And, worse than that, it’s unplayable for a majority of the people out there who would want to play it in the first place. And, heck, might even be the cause of a recession in Europe.

I think it’s fair to say that the game is a disaster.

But it happens to be a disaster that was calibrated in a lab to appeal to a handful of people… and I am among that handful. I hope that the modders can turn this thing around and make it playable for more people than just those with warhorse PC setups and, more than that, make it enjoyable for more people than just children of the 70’s and 80’s who will love revisiting one of the retrofutures from their childhood.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is a trashheap. Screenshot from the game taken by the author.)