Cyberpunk 2077

In Cyberpunk 2077, there's a roller coaster you can ride. A literal one. Disused, but with a bit of tinkering, you get to ride it with your cyber-buddy Keanu Reeves. You get a dialogue prompt to hold your arms up in the air as you go down the big slopes.
Once it's done you don't get any achievement, any gun, any number-pumping perk. Just a pleasant moment, away from any quest markers, that's yours and yours alone (and cyber-buddy Keanu Reeve's too, depending on your inclination towards the man.)

Cyberpunk 2077, like the rest of CDPR's catalogue, is at its best when it's quiet. It might seem counterintuitive to their guns-a-blazing marketing and stoic, bad-ass white dudes on their covers, but these are really games about Hanging Out with believable, loveable characters. It's what carries The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [Wiedźmin III: Dziki Gon] through middling gameplay systems, many extraneous that dangle off it like lichen on solid oak.

Cyberpunk is no different in this regard, but it does not coalesce. Why? The gameplay is arguably an improvement, each mission a self-contained Deus Ex level accommodating for all manner of playstyles, and the characters are almost all delightful.

As I see it, there are four main problems with Cyberpunk. One is easily remedied, the three others are not.

1. The Glitches
To get the first and obvious one out of the way, the glitches are a problem. Visual bugs occur on such a frequent basis that one learns to unconsciously look away from them, as if to protect the game's modesty. Just by walking around you can feel that the game is held together by twine, spit and a wish. This unreliable narrator erodes trust quickly, and you learn to not prod at the world too hard if you have any hope of maintaining even a few minutes of immersion.

By the time you might be reading this, this might be a past issue. However, the following might not be.

2. Pacing
A classic RPG problem: The universe is about to explode, but I want to go fishing. Somehow, game developers are grappling with this conundrum to this day. Cyberpunk 2077 is more guilty of this than most just by the sheer imbalance of Main/Side content ratio, and the nature of its plot. There's a ticking time-bomb in your head which you need to deal with right now or you're gonna drop dead. Despite this, you're still eating dirt jobs for a living in order to nebulously "make it" in Night City. After thirty hours of spin-off episode shenanigans, it's easy to forget the sickly, desperate urgency the main story wishes to convey.

The fix for this would involve major rewrites to the plot, though feasible. I wish there was an actual in-game timer. How do you spend your remaining time? Choose wisely, you only get so many days to spend in NC. Do you focus on building your legacy, or caring for the ones you love most? The content is there, but it's just not contextualised as it should be. The game wants its cyber-cake and to cyber-eat it too.

3. Diegetic exploration
I don't remember where I heard this argument, but it resonated with me a lot. The open world design here is as antiquated as Samurai's dad-rock rebellion. There is no reason to explore the city when it tells you straight-up where all the meaningful content is, letting you hoover up Ubisoft markers like smarties. The genre has mostly moved past this. Assassin's Creed Odyssey implemented a hint-based navigation system which works wonderfully. Bethesda figured it out already in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with its radial compass, enticing the player to look to the horizon, to discover that undiscovered location.
This is perhaps a result of the game's rushed development, but it is much too eager to point you towards "the good bits," and treat everything in between as fodder. I think this is a reason why many people find the gameworld somewhat sterile.

4. The Bethesda Problem
This is a big one, and one I was nervous about even before the launch of the game.
CDPR's writing has, in the past, relied heavily on the fact that you as a player are not you. You are Geralt. Geralt has history, personality and friends that are all established well before you step into his grimy shoes. This helps not only ease the player into the world through the eyes of someone already familiar to it, but deepens interactions with other characters as Geralt has clear motivations and goals.

With Cyberpunk, CDPR had the ambition of translating the Pen and Paper experience to the AAA-Shmooter-Shlooter. That ambition fell woefully short -- as essentially the only role you can play in the game is that of a Solo, a mercenary for hire -- but its tendrils remain. The protagonist, V, falls somewhere between player cypher and a defined character, with much of their background left vague and up to interpretation, but not vague enough for a player to write their own background.
The game manages to make you care about the protagonist by the sheer strength of its character writing, but not having a defined identity is a massive problem in a game chiefly concerned with themes of identity and death.

And boy is it obsessed with death! Not since Persona 3 have I seen a game so obsessed with it. Night City reeks like a corpse that's gotten a shotgun blast from the makeup gun. The other main themes of Legacy and Identity stem from its ruminations on death and nearly every side quest harkens back to one of these three topics. It's to the game's credit, but again, due to the character's lack of historicity, it doesn't hit quite as hard I'd wish.

The roller coaster mentioned at the start is the exception in this game, not the rule. It's where all my criticisms are met and rebutted. You're a dying person riding a dying roller coaster with your dead friend because you found it yourself, and wanted to do something nice for yourself before the final reckoning. It also doesn't bug out in some hideous way. I wish the game was a little more like that.

Was never as bad upon release as the reddit hivemind tried to convince everyone it was but is also not nearly as good as that same hivemind tries to claim now.

• Unbearably corny, inappropriately kitschy and just always "off": this bizarre cultural disconnect makes sense considering the almost complete lack of Americans or at least native English speakers on the writing team

• Not a single Johnny Silverhand moment lands in any way other than flat on its face thanks to awful writing and truly TRAGIC voice acting

• Constant at-the-top-of-your-lungs moralizing and impotent, artificial drama the writers constantly try to squeeze from severely undercooked characters with barely any screen time to properly set them up first

• Style over substance in just about everything from the character writing to the weak world building: CDPR's idea of cyberpunk era hyper-sexualization is just a million sex shops, le dildos everywhere and penises featured in ads

• Not a SINGLE interesting side-quest SWEET LORD: it's abundantly clear CDPR is unable to create interesting stories and characters from scratch when there isn't a pile of books to get their inspiration from

• Txt files sharted out into every damn corner of the game are NOT a proper narrative device and are NOT good content

• Total lack of a sense of place: the gangs are all region-based reskins with nothing to deepen or set them apart, vendors peddle the exact same things regardless of whether they're placed somewhere downtown NC or in the middle of a desert, the lack of new or region-based challenges, the general lack of LIFE, interactivity and meaningful detail

• Witcher 3's setting and story successfully hid away the lifelessness and the non-interactivity of its open world; Cyberpunk with its bustling metropolis and a lack of a deep main character from a book does neither.

• Constant Half-Life 2-esque cutscene-gameplay blend sections that, just like 20 years ago, fail to capitalize on the good sides of its two parts while also inheriting the bad sides of both: most scenes like that are neither particularly well-directed nor offer much (or sometimes ANY) interactivity

Cyberpunk itself was great, but the Phantom Liberty DLC left much to be desired.

Oh Cyberpunk, where the hell do we even start. I don't need to remind you about the game's launch and all the controversies surrounding it, but it's hard to talk about Cyberpunk without acknowledging them. Cyberpunk for years was a game that would send people in a fervor anytime you mentioned it, and for some people it still does. It was partially justified -- the base PS4 and XBOne ports remain messy to this day (although much improved), and what CDPR brass did to try and hide the game's console performance was rightfully lampooned. It had a completely broken cop system, a broken perk system, buggy enemy AI, floaty car controls, and RPG systems that were so subtle, many thought they weren't even there.

So why despite all of its issues, did I fall further and further in love with Cyberpunk 2077, even before the bug fixes and improvements complete CDPR's "redemption arc"? In a few words, Cyberpunk is special because of the subtle details only games as a medium can express.

Worldbuilding is a difficult craft to master, and largely something that goes underappreciated until it goes wrong.

I played this game on 1.5 patch for the first time. Everyone was saying "it's fixed now" however it really wasn't. It was still a buggy mess, with bad pacing in main story and with RPG systems that are not fun to engage. I thought it was a huge missed potential.

I think they've fixed most of my problems with 2.0 and the expansion. The combat is way more fun and the new perk system is way better. I played a netrunner on my second run and the game sold me on a netrunner power fantasy.

The DLC is excellent. Not only it offers a excellent story with great new characters, but the quests don't suffer from a identity crisis anymore. IMO the base game's quests were stuck in a limbo where they couldn't decide whether this game was more action focused or RPG focused. I think new missions play out more like an action game. I still have preferred if they've focused on the RPG side, but at least the game knows what it wants to be now.

Still got some issues tho. The base storyline still has a horrible pacing with an Act 3 almost doesn't exist. Also (spoilers for the DLC) I think The Tower ending (the ending we can get with the new DLC) is a let down. I really liked the bold move with the story where we couldn't get any ending where V didn't die eventually. It was thematically accurate for the game. Some would argue the new ending isn't a good one too, and still a bad ending. But you know what, I liked the aspect that for the whole game, we aimed to not die and the game doesn't give you that.

I love the writers at CDPR. They write really good stories and characters, especially if you compare it to any other triple A video game. I could talk about many aspects of the story all day but I want to keep this review relatively shorter. I can confidently recommend this game right now.