Door 19 has no handle, you have to live this chromium life and get in to unlock it with preem quickhacks and look I’m running out of jargon just open it, you know what it is.
That’s right, it’s Cyberpunk 2077!
Graham: Cyberpunk 2077 is a buggy mess and a garbage RPG, but that doesn’t reflect the thrilling experience I had while playing it. It is a game that does very well quietly and loudly.
The night city is great: a big, reckless, cacophonous metropolis, this is one of the best open worlds I have ever explored. That he is also one of the most fragile – the more you try to interact with him, the more he falls apart – ultimately does not matter to me. As a place to explore and watch, it’s glorious, especially if you’ve ever looked at Mega City One’s drawings as a teenager and wanted to see more.
The silence is even better: Cyberpunk 2077 has some of the best conversations in any game. Late at night, around a campfire, or gathered in a cabin in a fiery nightclub or on a long, rainy journey through the city, the dialogue is allowed to stretch, relaxed and personal. I finished the game with a dozen characters that I liked and with whom I wanted to spend more time. In an environment where NPCs are often little more than exposure deliverers or simply miserable, the inhabitants of the Night City are unusually human.
Alice0: Bug fixes can’t make Cyberpunk 2077 a great game. Too much is essentially a little crap. Stealth feels functional, with no interesting consequences and escalation for mucking up. Skillful trees are inflated with uninteresting growths of 2%. Going through a flood of random weapons for those that fit my style is boring. The manufacture of specific weapons is a huge chore and an unreasonable investment. Buying anything in a store is 1) outrageously expensive 2) almost useless, because soon you will find something better. The consequence of breaking the law is either losing a minute of my time in a boring way, or reloading my last rescue. The game has so much great fashion, but it’s wasted because the clothes are related to statistics, so V gets dressed like a drunk baby and finding a good-looking dress is just disappointing. Ah, I have so many issues to address, but they come down to: it’s at the intersection of The Elder Scrolls, Grand Theft Auto and Deus Ex in a configuration that doesn’t fit well. I’m still very happy.
Night City picks up a weird but interesting 7/10 in a game I’ve already played more this year than anything other than Destiny 2. God, I love Night Night. I grew up with Judge Dredd, dystopian B movies, the ’90s game basket, and industrial music muttering about sticking to The Man, so I had to have a soft spot for it all. Achieving Cyberpunk 2077 of these aesthetics and ideas is more than we hoped. It is, as Alice Bee has already said, a proper look. It’s so big! It’s so cruel! Everyone is so weird and colorful! It’s so messy! It’s so much! As long as I don’t move slowly enough to see the stupid NPCs’ behavior and technical limitations, I’m thrilled to drown out the noise as I break through the alleys and under the concrete canopies.
What is especially enjoyable is that we are free to explore so much. You can climb much higher than you might think, especially once you get your legs double-jumped. I rarely drive or use fast trips, because running through Night City is a delight in itself.
I can’t tell you how Cyberpunk 2077 will end up. I imagine the bugs will eventually be shattered. Beyond that, I half expect that CD Projekt Red will finally be able to relaunch it with a lot of revised and expanded features in a huge “Improved Edition” update, as in the case of their first two Witcher games. Even if I don’t, I would be happy with this as an expensive walking simulator. Oh, but yeah, I really like the story of cyberpunk detectives going through it so far and the cyber-friends I meet. I wouldn’t really know – my attention is obvious elsewhere.
Ollie: As I watched the end credits run after my first play of Cyberpunk 2077, I felt a little empty, a little depressed. At first I thought it was because I rushed to the game and didn’t get to experience it properly. I also thought I was disappointed that the game was not better in every way. Both things were true, but as I pondered my thoughts, I realized that the real reason for my discouragement was that I was missing the characters. In a very small way, I was sorry that there were no more experiences with them.
Yes, I’m talking about Judy and Panama. Both are treasures and I will not hear a bad word against them. Their stories were amazingly powerful, and the searches that involved them were absolutely the most important moments of the whole game. They felt like people who had suffered pain, loss and hardship, and yet they managed to keep their heads up and help those in need. Above all, they wanted to support and feel supported. Any moment with Judy or Panam was guaranteed to be a climax in terms of the player’s writing, vocal performance and immersion. It was not from Pyre that I felt such pain at the prospect of no longer having interactions left to explore with the characters in a game. For all its flaws, Cyberpunk 2077 deserves a place in the Advent calendar for this in my book.
Alice Bee: Your apartment has a whole separate room where you keep your weapons, but a burrito vending machine instead of a kitchen. I approve of this type of design thinking ahead. Imagine that V brings a meeting there. “We have burritos for dinner. Again. LOL. Don’t go in there, that’s where my weapons sleep. “
I have a lot of problems with Cyberpunk. I see a lot of people saying it’s “good” on the computer, but … it’s not. He seems to spend most of his time trying to annoy me while I play him, like a really cute puppy peeing on your carpet – but I knowingly brought the puppy into my house. Last night I called my car and it appeared with a truck about halfway behind it. I approached with extreme caution. Then, just as I was about to enter the car, the truck it exploded from the back and a half of my car doors fell. Even though Cyberpunk didn’t have bugs, a lot of basic systems are very good, as others have said. And unlike the others, I found that the story is poorly paced and superficial so far.
I really like.
This seems to be the usual experience from the people I spoke to. As if, we complain about all the Cyberpunk 2077 loads between them and then we say, “Still okay, useless?” (I understand it’s the same relationship that The Walking Dead fans have with The Walking Dead). I think if you understand that before you play it, you’ll be fine.