“Cyberpunk 2077” is a 2020 action, open world, role-playing video game developed and published by CD Project Red. The story takes place in “Night City” in an open world set in a futuristic California. Players assume the first-person perspective of a customizable mercenary known as V. “Night city” is known for having a sky-high rate of violence, obsessed with power, and body modification. As you play as V, your goal is to hunt after a one-of-a-kind implant that is the key to immortality. 

     According to the article titled “Cyberpunk 2077 PC review” posted on the IGN website, “After several years of heavy anticipation, CD Project released Cyberpunk 2077 for the PlayStation, Stadia, Windows, and Xbox One on 10 December 2020. It received praise for its narrative, setting, and graphics, although some of its gameplay elements received mixed responses.” 

 The Best the Game Has to Offer 

        The story is the strongest element in the game, but it’s also the part of the game that can’t be patched or fixed. The story itself is very plot driven. A lot of the dialogue is based on how things in the game work, like how fictional technology works. However, I believe that this shouldn’t be the focal point of dialogue in a game. The story can also feel disjointed sometimes.  

    For instance, for my first play through, I chose the corporal path where you are a career worker that gets wrapped up in some disturbing corporate espionage. In this path, another character snatches your microchip, so you have to quit your job immediately, despite being so involved in this insidious plot. This results in the character becoming a low-level thug, and one of your first missions as a low-level thug is to steal a super-secret microchip from the most powerful man in the world.  

    On top of that are a bunch of characters calling you and giving you new side missions that you have to complete for them, while at the same time you are currently pursuing a side mission from 10 phone calls ago. This causes the player to forget what the entire premise of older calls or side missions of why you need to do them or why they are important to the story. 

    One time I mixed a side mission with the actual plot, and I spent over four hours doing side quests. I didn’t even notice because of how well-written they were; they did not feel like random side quests, but like unique stories that did in fact have an impact on the game overall. Unfortunately, not all side quests are this level of narrative. Most of the side quests are copy and paste filler. 

   Junior Orlando Gomez said, “8 years…for THIS!?? Playing on PC with an i9-9980XE, 128GB Corsair RGB Vengeance, and MSI RTX 2080Ti Gaming Trio X (high tech pc parts) with everything (like crowd density, maximum FPS, and graphics to name a few) off and on low. It’s all buggy, buggy, buggy. It’s just a buggy mess.” 

What’s Wrong with the Game 

   When Cyberpunk is at its best, it can look very impressive. Unfortunately, Cyberpunk is rarely at its best. The graphics are mediocre at best especially when doing cut scenes where guns are floating just out of reach of the Non-Playable Character’s hands. The game is so far from completion that Sony is issuing refunds for the game and have removed it from the PlayStation store. 

   Not everyone is disappointed with the game.    Junior Esteban Rodriguez said, “While I admit the game does have issues and needs to be fixed, as someone who has played 25 hours of this game on the PS4, I absolutely love it. Yeah, there are issues, but those aside I love the story, the characters, I love night city, and just how gorgeous it looks especially at night.” 

    Junior Ricardo Del Rio says, “Firstly I would like to say that I’ve been hyped about this game since the first trailer; it looked interesting and something new. Now that the game came out, personally I think it was 100% worth the wait. I’m just sad to see that it has a ton of bad reviews because of poor performance. People have every right to be angry about that, but I think that just because of that many people won’t even give it a chance and try out the amazing story it has to offer.” 

     This game has potential. Don’t get me wrong, the launch was not great and considering how long it was in development for, all the delays and excuses, this game was not ready for release. CD Project Red has, and hopefully at the end of this, will still have a brilliant reputation; however, I think games are being pushed too far in regard to over-hyping, advertising unrealistic gameplay/teasers, and just generally releasing the games so broken.  

Final thoughts 

     As I write this review, I realized that this is a very negative and critical review, but I actually did enjoy this game. Cyberpunk 2077 is carried by actors and animators, and it’s refreshing to take in those details in first person. That’s why I say this is one of the better open world games I ever played, so I give it a 3/5, and I would totally recommend it to anyone that’s interested in story rather than gameplay. 

Interesting facts about CyberPunk 77  

• Was first announced in 2012 and released in December of 2020. 
• Based on a 1998 table top game also called Cyberpunk which is based on 80’s futuristic science fiction 
• The 4th game in the Cyberpunk series 
• Elon musk’s “cyber truck” makes an appearance in the game. 

• Dark Horse comics has started to release new Cyberpunk comic books 

Source: https://youtu.be/nNf0yIqNPfM