TAC Reviews...Cyberpunk 2077

Date Posted: 30/07/2024

This game had something of a troubled launch when it was first released in 2020. It was an ambitious project with features like no two NPCs would look the same, and a massive interwoven futuristic city. The problem was that it basically didn’t work. It was buggy, glitchy, and most found it virtually impossible to actually play it. However, developers CD Projekt Red have been churning out patch after patch, and update after update, to get the game into the state it was supposed to be, so by 2024 it is actually worth playing. 

Cyberpunk is not a genre that I am generally massively interested in, because it always seems to be the same premise. Humans get cyber augmentations, the rich get the best ones, the poor get the knock off ones, and somewhere along the way too many cybernetic components will result in people going insane. As I have said before I am a fan of The Angry Joe Show and after watching his review of the game when it first released and the shit show it was at that point, I ignored it. However, Joe did a roundup of top games in 2023 and Cyberpunk and its DLC Phantom Liberty was on this list so I waited until the game was on sale then got it. I had also watched an anime based on the game called Cyberpunk: Edgerunners which had peaked my curiosity in the game itself.

Before entering the setting of Night City you have to create your custom character V, you can be male or female, can have nudity settings off in which you are always wearing underwear, or nudity on when you can even customise V’s genitals. This is not one of those games in which you have a half dozen faces to choose from, with a handful of hair, and eye colours. No, in this game there must be hundreds of variations of V’s face and body. Now, whenever I have the choice of making a unique custom character I always seem to end up with a right ugly bastard. I guess because I get bored of endlessly going through fifty different shapes of eyebrows, face shapes, chin and nose sizes. I generally just get to a point where I go “fuck it, that’ll do” and just get on with it. You can customise V at any point in the game, and as it is in 1^st person most of the matter I didn’t really care that my V didn’t look like he was old enough to shave. Anyway, I was then given my choice of starting points, I could either be a corpo guy, a nomad, or a street kid. As I looked like a street kid I picked that and finally into the world I went.

The game starts off with you being hired to do a job and the basic gist is you do some preparation missions, unlock weapons and so and so on. Then you get on with the caper itself. Now not surprisingly things quickly go awry with you witnessing the murder of the CEO of a mega corporation Arasaka by his own son and having to flee the building with a high value piece of technology in your possession. During the mission the technology (known as the relic) starts to shut off and V ultimately connects it to himself to keep in functioning. The fallout from the heist results in V getting a bullet in his brain, except he wakes up with the ghost echo of Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves) appearing before him. He learns that Silverhand was a rocker turned terrorist believed to have died in 2023 whilst assaulting the same company you just robbed. The relic contains memory engrams from Johnny, essentially putting his mind and personality onto a data disk.

V learns that the relic is fused to him and will kill him if he tries to remove it, the bullet that ripped through his brain activated the relic’s nanotech resurrection, which is how V survived but it is also bleeding Johnny’s memory engrams into V’s brain. The process will eventually overwrite V’s personality completely allowing Johnny to take over V’s body so with only a few weeks to live V sets about finding a way to remove the relic before the process completes.

His search will lead him from dealings with the City’s low life population to tangling with the new CEO of Arasaka, the man who murdered his own father to take the company for himself. Meanwhile Johnny is not exactly happy about his new location of residence but is determined to see V take down Arasaka, the company that murdered him in 2023…

This was the first RPG I can remember paying in which decisions actually seemed to have consequences, now that might sound strange because most RPGs have that, but in this game you don’t get to just go back a redo a mission if you fail. Play GTA 5 and something goes wrong, no bother the game reloads and you retry the mission again. In Cyberpunk you make an error and you may lose a vitally important part of the game. Make the wrong decision and you might unintentionally screwed yourself over. Dialogue options appear during conversations but you have only a second or two to pick an option before the conversation carries on, the NPCs don’t stand around in silence waiting for you to decide what to say. It creates a rare kind of tension to know whether you should say something or when you should stay quiet. This consequence system is integrated into ever part of the game, early on I entered a shooting competition, the winner scoring themselves a new gun. I did the mission, did not win, and waited for the option to retry but it didn’t come up. The gun shop owner just said “sorry you lost V” and that was it. It seemed so alien to not get the chance to just try again until I eventually brute-forced my way to success. The core of this game was that actions have in-game (real world) consequences. I have seen videos of people who deliberately choose the worst options and lock off basically everything the game has to offer. In reality this mechanic denies the player content but like I said it causes tension because you don’t want to miss anything.

I was amazed at how immersed in this game I became, especially during one of the romance options. The characters that you can romance are limited; you have a nomad named Panam Palmer and a former band member of Johnny’s named Kerry as a man, and Judy or River as a woman. I didn’t really intend or initially even realise that I was romancing Panam, because I was just picking the flirty romance options in dialogue to see what would happen. But the more I interacted with her the more invested in her and V’s relationship I got. Panam is a higher up in her nomad tribe Aldecaldos who clashes with the tribe’s leader Saul about how things should be run. What I liked was that falling for V was clearly not something she anticipated was going to happen and you really feel the struggles she has regarding whether or not to pursue a relationship with V or focus on her tribe. I got so into this romance that whenever she messaged V I actually saved the game before I responded because I was worried about saying the wrong thing. She comes across as very human; she texts you with cute awkward messages in which she kind-of babbles and it feels like you are interacting with a real person with thoughts and feelings rather than just another generic NPC. She sometimes sends you sexy messages, and other times comments on things happening in the world that V may have been involved in then comments accordingly.

As you delve deeper into the game you can upgrade V’s cyberware with more improvements and can really customise how you want to play the game. Personally I went for an Edge/Netrunner build because those allowed you to take control of various technologies in the world and even affect the cyberware of other characters. In my mind in a world where technology rule, whoever controls the technology, rules the world. It did not take long for me to be able to short out enemy’s implants, and by the end I had the option to even fry their synaptic pathways. It was just so cool and more importantly so much fun to square up against some wanna-be badass enemy and turn their own implants against them. The tech is split into Tier levels one to five with five being the best. Upgrades could be crafted but mostly looted from defeated enemies. XP is naturally used to unlock new net-paths that allow you to develop further technologies to suit your play style.

There are also a variety of weapons including guns and melee. You have a stash in each apartment which stores theses weapons. You can dismantle guns for higher tier parts. The game also has Legendary weapons, now I was always paranoid about accidently dismantling them when I was just going through my inventory. One button is all you need to take something apart. The thing is the game won’t give you the option of dismantling a Legendary weapon so you can’t actually do it by mistake.

One thing that you have to understand with this game is that Night City is full to bursting with activities to get on with. Aside from missions that reminded me of the mythical Hydra because every time I finished one, four more seemed to pop up. It can be overwhelming simply because you aren’t necessarily sure which mission to do next, and I learned later that some missions do have timers in which you can fail if you don’t do them fast enough, however, I never had a mission time out on me. The ones that do time out seem to revolve around rescue missions which is fair enough, I mean a hostage can’t sit around for weeks waiting for you to decide to go and rescue them. You have the main missions, then side missions, cyberpsycho hunts, handler challenges, and police radio messages. I initially thought that the police missions were procedurally generated but all of them are fixed points on your map. There is never nothing to do. You have to work through the Handler missions, complete the few on the map, and more higher level ones will be unlocked. There are the usual challenges like races but everything serves a purpose, there are some random collectables like weapons hidden around the city, but there are no glowing orbs that need to be picked up which exist just so the player has something to pick up.

One of the missions that pops up after you have taken a romance to its conclusion, which I am basing on my experience with Panam, was after she and V had sex. By the way, if nudity is on then you see boobs, bums and so on, everything is always 1^st person so you see a woman riding V or whatever but nothing too graphic. Even though you can pick the size of V’s penis or if a female V is shaved, you don’t see any penetrative sex. Anyway, after the romance has been established you can invite your chosen squeeze to your apartment. You can buy several apartments around the city during the game from a one bedroom apartment to a glitzy corporate penthouse. I initially struggled to understand the point of this mission because basically you call your partner, invite them over, they come to your apartment and you get to sit on the sofa together. You can chat. If you jump in the shower they will join you, again naked if nudity is on, but nothing really happens. You don’t have another sex scene with them, you just spend time together, eventually go to bed, and they get in beside you. You go to sleep, wake up next to them, give them a tender kiss then leave and carry on with more missions. Apparently this mission was added in a patch update and was solely because in RPGs when you romance a character you never interact with them outside of missions, so this was put into the game just players could just hang out with their romance option. Again, it was a small detail but made the game feel more alive.

Keanu Reeves playing the badass rocker turned terrorist Johnny Silverhand is in some ways a mixed blessing, initially Johnny is a bit of an arrogant dick who spouts all the usually big business corporate bullshit, about how they are taking people’s freedom, have a monopoly on the world, and so on and so on. He continues this attitude for a lot of the game, however, you start to develop a friendship with him in which he changes, even to the point where he does not want to take over your mind, and wants to help you be free of him even if it means he will die again. This is when Keanu Reeves in this role makes sense, because this is the time when it is so cool to have a Hollywood legend like Keanu Reeves as V’s imaginary friend. There is a scene when V has to pick up an old style payphone, does not know what to do, and Johnny holds his hand up to his head showing V what to do. It is unbelievably adorable. You have numerous dialogue options so once again you get to choose how antagonistic or friendly you want to be with Johnny. But if you decide to be a dick to him then you are missing out on the opportunity to be BFF’s with Keanu Reeves even if it is only a video game.

The dialogue options can happen during conversations, and other times you do get a bit more time to think about what you are saying. Sadly as with most dialogue options there is no way to tell ahead of time what tone your character is going to us. I would occasionally pick an option which I thought would be sarcastic or funny but V would not speak the line in the way I thought he would, so the response from the NPC was not what I had been trying to do.

The majority of the game is done in the 1^st person and my first few attempts to drive a vehicle resulted in what always happens when I try to drive in 1^st person. You can’t judge the width of the vehicle and this was the reason I initially abandoned trying to use vehicles at all. I can’t remember when I noticed that the vehicles have an option to turn the camera to a third person perspective, but as soon as I did it made the vehicles so much easier to drive. I left this option on for the whole game because I seriously doubt I would have been able to complete the racing missions if I had been trapped in the driver’s seat as I was in Far Cry 3. In that game I almost never got into a vehicle because they’d almost immediately end up flipped over within a few seconds of starting the engine.

Once you play through the missions you basically reach the endgame in which you choose how you want to the story to finish. You can attack Arasaka with your friends in the nomads, go in guns blazing with a former flame of Johnny’s named Rogue, you can choose to ally yourself with a higher-up in Arasaka. There is also one other ending in which you and Johnny storm the place but to get that ending there is a very specific conversation that you must have with Johnny, and if you don’t chose the right options then you don’t unlock that ending. The biggest problem I had with the endgame was that once you do the final mission the game resumes, fairly par for the course for open world games, except this is the only time you can repeat a mission. As a result you can go back and replay the end missions choosing different options, which took away from the experience, rather than adding to it. By the third ending I was just going through the motions because there did not seem to be a “true” finish to the story which made the ending less impactful. The endings themselves are all quite…depressing I guess is the right word. There is no “good” ending, you just seem to have less bad endings. I get that in this world you aren’t necessarily going to ride off into the sunset but it does make you wonder why you bothered going through everything you did, when it was generally for naught.

I was also immensely disappointed that there was no Plus game mode. I don’t think it is possible to upgrade and unlock everything in the game, which made me think that you would be able to do that in a second run, but it was not to be.

There are certain things that I don’t think the game explains especially well with the holster option popping up once in the tutorial, but I could not find it in the controller settings. I have recommended this game to a few people I know and told them how to holster their weapons because I was convinced that the game did not tell you how to do it. J sent me a screenshot of a bit in the tutorial in which they do tell you how to put your gun or melee weapon away, however, I missed it and had to look up how to do it online.

Most video game protagonists are kleptomaniacs and pick up everything they can get their hands on. Naturally I collected every pick-up I came across too. I had just done the mission in which the relic had gone into V’s head when I suddenly discovered that I couldn’t run anymore. I couldn’t figure out why I was suddenly moving so slowly and thought that it was the relic itself that was the reason behind it. At this point I had not realised that I could switch to third person in a vehicle so I was tending to run everywhere and was stuck at a walking speed. It was so aggravating and I remember wondering what had happened to the pace of the game that I had been enjoying up until that point. Finally I figured out what the problem was and dismantled some stuff in my inventory and sure enough I was able to run again. I have no idea when or if that game even told me that a full inventory would stop me from running.

In truth there is more to talk about and if I did this article would likely end up being more like an essay than a review. The game is a phenomenal achievement and was great fun to play. I spent hours playing it, and doing every side activity or mission so I could experience everything it had to offer. The endings are a little weak, but all in all the game is fantastic. It was awesome to be V in Night City, I stumbled across random mission in which characters commented on things V had done, and he even stopped a diner robbery by simply being in the room and threatening the would-be robbers. There is enough game that you spend a lot of it being a badass and can tailor the experience to suit how you want to play it.

If you haven’t played an RPG before this is a great way to start and if you are a fan of RPGs then Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best I have ever played. There was so much to do, so much to see, and bear in mind that I started as a Street Kid there are two other starting points to choose from. That being said I don’t know when I will play again because I now know the endings are a bit shit and I would likely play the same way a second time favouring an Edge/Netrunner build once more. This is where a Plus Game mode would have been amazing and I would likely have plunged straight back in to play again to build up all of the other branching paths I didn’t do in my first game without sacrificing all the skills I loved using the first time around.

When all is said and done, this is a game where you basically get to be Keanu Reeves’ BFF and no other games give you that experience. If you have been steering clear after the terrible release then now is the time to pick it up. It was an awesome experience and there is no doubt that I am giving it a very strong Thumbs Up. 

9/10 – A rich cyberpunk world with a cool city to explore as well as characters that you get genuinely care about and are interest in. Plus like I said you get to have Keanu Reeves as your protagonist’s own personal imaginary friend who transforms from arrogant rocker dick to a character that will sacrifice himself so someone he cares about can live.