I was one of the initial people who bought and played Cyberpunk 2077 at release. I didn’t get far. Surprisingly not from the numerous game-breaking bugs people were experiencing, I was somehow lucky in that regard, but from it just not drawing me in enough and having other things I wanted to play more (though I couldn’t tell you what they were now)

I tried returning to it a number of times, particularly when I started hearing people say that CDProject had turned things around. I even went as far to buy the expansion when people were excited for that and the version 2.0 changes. Yet it still didn’t stick.

One might conclude that the game just wasn’t for me, but I couldn’t accept that. I loved the Edgerunners anime, and I always had a fascination with cyberpunk works. By all accounts, the desire was there, but I couldn’t translate it into investment for some reason. I continued to sit on it until this past week or so.

Recently, I had purchased both Metaphor and the Silent Hill 2 remake from the amount of buzz surrounding both. I played through Silent Hill 2 rather quickly, but I decided I would wait on Metaphor until a friend finished it. That made me look for another game I could focus on while I waited, and while I had plenty of options, I remembered Cyberpunk sitting collecting dust. Decided I would force myself through it for better or worse just to get it off the backlog.

A lot of what I have to say after finishing it is going to sound like complaints. So I’d like to preface this by saying that I didn’t dislike the game. I don’t regret playing it, at least for some of the days I did (More on that later) It had some good aspects that I will also try to mention. If you like it, then that’s all that matters.

Also my thoughts will contain some spoilerly things. Nothing direct (ie: Darth Vader is Luke’s father) but things like “The huge tonal shift at the end of Empire Strikes Back caught me offguard” (except expressed way less elegantly)

Okay so let’s get into it.

Let me start off talking about gameplay.

The lack of a third person mode feels like a huge miss. They give you all these systems to customize your look, but you only get to see V in mirrors or on the back of motorcycles. While I could have changed this with a mod, the mod itself didn’t seem seamless enough for my tastes. It really should have been something CDProject designed around.

I did end up using mods for a custom radio station and to be able to romance Panam as a female character. Not to really talk smack about the music on the radio, but I’m the type to stick to one station and none of them had the setlist that I could really stick with (The lack of ability to make your own playlist of songs was also disappointing) The romance being locked to certain sexualities though felt a bit bunk.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I feel like in a game where you customize your character as much as you can in Cyberpunk, that you should be able to romance any of the romantic prospects. I know it’s more realistic and representative to not have it that way, but you’re essentially playing a character that you self insert into. I feel like it’s already meant to be a game that conforms around what you want to a degree.

That’s not to say that it should be like that in all games. I think games with set characters or characters that you have minimal influence over shouldn’t be dictated by the players preference. Leave that for the fan-fiction and shipping shit

Cyberpunk’s battle system/options felt a bit limited. At first I was pretty intimidated by the skill tree, but after I decided to go for a sandevistan katana build, it was actually fairly straightforward on what I should pick. The problem with that is that at a certain point, I had nothing to really spend perks points on anymore.

It might have been different had I picked a harder difficulty or tried something that wasn’t OP like using a sandy. Though nothing really made me want to try other builds. Nothing felt as fun. Which was discouraging about 70% through when nothing was proving a challenge to me anymore.

I think I would have liked to see more perks that weren’t tied specifically to weapons and allowed for a deeper customization experience. Something that might allow for a bit more playing around. Then again, maybe not. I don’t know.

Some other complaints I have can be applied to a lot of the open world games today

First, the city is too big with not enough points of interests to do interesting things at. Being forced to wait a certain amount of time for missions doesn’t add to the immersion but instead just makes it a nuisance. The number of NCPD and side missions are too numerous with little variation or meaning. etc etc

Another huge thing that tends to irritate me is the amount of reading they make you do in these games. I support the idea of lore being stuff you find in the world, but I really hate how everything has to be text. I would love more games to embrace the Bioshock method of audio recordings. Maybe future games could even offer an AI text to speech option for the notes

Lastly in the gameplay department I was disappointed there was no flying cars.

Moving onto story and characters.

For reference, I’ve always started as a corpo. I couldn’t really tell you why specifically. I haven’t ever looked at how the others start. Actually I take that back, I might have played a nomad once, but I don’t remember it very well.

The way Corpo goes is that you’re a fairly high level employee who gets assigned this task of “taking care of” a competing faction within the corporation. You go to your friend Jackie for help, but quickly find out that your company (Arasaka) is onto what you were ordered to do. You’re then fired and a montage of scenes go by showing Jackie help get your life back together.

I would have preferred this be part of the game. Yeah, it’s easy to put together later through conversations you have with NPCs (assuming you pick the right dialogue options) but it’s hard to feel connections to the characters since you’re not an active participant in the relationships your character formed.

It’s why a death later on doesn’t really come off as a shock or very emotional to me. I just thought “Yeah that sucks” and tried to play the role of a sympathetic friend instead of actually being able to be a sympathetic friend.

Really, the game of Cyberpunk has this problem with most of its characters. You’re introduced to a ton, but none of them really shine apart from Johnny (Keanu Reeves) Mostly due to the fact that either V already knows them and they fail to flesh them out (as is the case with most of the people Jackie introduces to you)

Phantom Liberty is somewhat better in the characters department. At least there you’re introduced to people at the same time as V and time is taken to really get to know a lot of them (Primarily because it’s meant to influence decisions later on) I felt a lot more towards those characters than I did toward most of the characters in the base game.

Overall, I think the base game could have used more of the experience Phantom Liberty gives. Characters you grow to know with V and Johnny, less fluff side stuff, and more things that draw you into the world (Many things in the base game are just stuff you could play in any grand theft auto game and don’t really leverage the setting)

This has been my media impressions of Cyberpunk 2077