There is a lot to say about Cyberpunk 2077. Both a lot I can say, and a lot that I cant. The game is absolutely massive, and I feel like I’ve really only scratched the surface of what the game is, and what it was. I went into this game with completely fresh eyes, while I knew about the fiasco of its original release, I never owned the game, nor did I look in too much detail. I’m going into Cyberpunk after all of the updates to help let the game become what it wanted to be, and that is what shaped my perspective of the game from beginning to end. And from having played through the game, I adored what I experienced.
I think one thing to set straight from the get-go is my lack of experience with this style of game. I’ve played very few open world games; the only two that I’ve played that come to mind are the Switch Zelda games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. While those are open world, they’re still fundamentally different than the likes of Cyberpunk. I bring this up to acknowledge my lack of knowledge, understanding, and familiarity with open world games. I feel like my perspective, while it would be similar, would change if I had more experience with open world games before playing Cyberpunk.
But I just loved exploring Night City. Very few games really get me so immersed to the point where I will just forget about the world around me. I had multiple times throughout the 3 days it took me play the game where after being focused in on the game for a while, I look at my clock and find out that 6 hours have passed. Night City is just such a well-crafted and well-designed location that it felt good just to wander, with no direct goal or location I was heading to. This is tied as well to just how great driving feels. Driving around Night City just feels so nice, either in a car or on a bike, yet again there’s just something so satisfying about it all. This all doesn’t even account for the entire in-game radio station which features so many different songs and there’s so many I didn’t even get a chance to listen to, as I mainly listened to Growl FM. But this all coalesces into like, a dream game for someone like me, who just loves wandering and exploring things.
Combined with that, the game has a really fun skill tree honestly. I put most of my points into reflexes, as my playstyle focused on swords and running around, and that best benefited me. But there’s so many options that really allow for a lot that can be done. You can create a berserker, a sharpshooter, or a crazy netrunner just by building off of this skill tree. By the end of the game, I was only level 35 so I was nowhere near finishing up the skill tree, I don’t even know if you can max out every stat. But it helped craft a character that I absolutely adored playing. I can’t help but recommend putting points into reflexes like I did, it gives some of the most fun movement in the game, allowing you to dash mid-air.
Cyberware also just is fun to play with, and yet again it’s just a way to further build your character to your playstyle. And yet again I upgraded V in a way that would prioritize speed and melee strength. There’s just so much fun Cyberware to play with, especially for the playstyle I went for. There’s cyberware that gives you a double jump, cyberware that gives you a free melee weapon, and how could I forget the Sandevistan, which allows you to slow down time for everything around you. There’s just so much to play with to build a character perfect to your playstyle, and that’s something I always appreciate in games.
The general story of Cyberpunk is so interesting as well, especially in how it shifts and alters depending on how you proceed through each mission. Yet again, your playstyle can drastically change how certain situations can turn out, even if the outcome may remain the same. One situation I encountered was during a situation where I and others had to go into the net, before leaving the net, everyone else around me died because of a virus I had on me that I accepted earlier without my knowledge, because of a choice from a previous mission. Nothing is without consequence in Cyberpunk, and it’s an aspect of the game I just can’t help but admire. Act 1’s story is amazing, and I like how open Act 2 is, allowing you to make a variety of choices that can then impact how Act 3 can play out. I don’t really want to go into too much detail about the story though, as I think it’s worth experiencing for yourself.
There’s also a lot more I can get into, as I said, Cyberpunk has a lot to talk about. There’s a whole prologue that ties into the origin for your character, also granting unique dialogue options. There’s a wide array of really fun sidequests with either unique characters for those sidequests, or further explore characters from the main story. There’s the entirety of the brain dance sequences, which are unique sort of puzzle moments, as you try to find specific information through an event that has already happened. And there’s likely so much more that I haven’t seen. When I finished the game, I had 39 hours total on my Save File, and I could easily see this game going far above 100 hours.
But I don’t think the game is free from flaw, though I will say these are minor issues, and only one impacted me in any degree. The game still has some bugs, and I experienced a good number of them playing through the game. Areas with unloaded textures, animations not playing, or dialogue seemingly being skipped were the most common. Though there were two big situations where the game was imperfect. There’s a cutscene at the end of the prologue that leads into Act 1, but when it played, a lot of it was unloaded at first, and animations didn’t play at all. Some characters moved while T-posed, and during a scene with V looking in a mirror, only there’s head and torso were loaded. The other situation was during the ending of the game, in the specific ending I got, the game crashed, and I had to redo a driving sequence all over again. While I point these out in great detail, they don’t affect my experience of Cyberpunk much at all. I love finding bugs and glitches in videogames, I love when things happen in ways that they realistically, should not. In an odd sort of way, these bugs elevated my experience.
And once last thing before I conclude here; I did not have the luxury of playing through Phantom Liberty. At the time of writing this, I just don’t own it. 30 dollars is a lot for me, and even though I loved Cyberpunk, I don’t have the money to immediately jump and buy the DLC. Don’t get me wrong, I want to get it as soon as possible. But that’ll likely be whenever I have more money to do so, or if it has a decent discount. I’ll also review it separately, as its own product because of that, and why I haven’t mentioned anything of Phantom Liberty here.
But genuinely, I just had so much fun playing Cyberpunk. An engrossing story where every single choice, and even your playstyle, has consequences down the line. A world built so beautifully that I can’t help but be completely immersed into it. And gameplay so customizable, and fine-tuned, I can really just see how much love and care was put into making Cyberpunk as good as it could be. Truly speaking, I think it was a good thing I waited this long to finally play Cyberpunk 2077, while I do wonder what the release version of the game was like, the version I played is genuinely an amazing game.
