Cyberpunk 2077 Review Roundup: The Good, the Bad, and the Buggy

Night City is nearly unparalleled at middle to long distances, joining the best of PC gaming’s open worlds, which include Red Dead Redemption 2’s American west and Grand Theft Auto 5’s Los Santos. Rockstar’s been matched. I’d pay full price just to walk around and take photos forever, my senses perpetually drunk.

Night City is beautiful and ugly in all the ways a megacity should be. Every time you turn a corner, the game reveals another startling angle of the urban landscape. And it makes Night City feel menacing and inescapable. The visual fidelity and art both contribute to this sensation. The streets are packed with people and vehicles. Giant colorful holographic advertisements shoot into the sky. Neon lighting alerts you to restaurants and sex shops.

Here, sneaking your way through gang-infested warehouses or corporate lobbies, you can hack objects to distract enemies or short-circuit their optics to blind them temporarily, but these abilities feel pretty tame compared to the opportunities for zany, emergent hacking mayhem offered in games like Watch Dogs: Legion.

In fact, stealth is the weakest part of Cyberpunk’s action, and doesn’t feel that viable until you purchase a couple of specific and entirely optional upgrades which allow you to throw knives and slow down time when you’re about to be spotted.

Cyberpunk’s most objectively great quality is that it contains hours and hours of an extremely committed and multifaceted performance from Keanu Reeves. His starpower and presence is not wasted here.

For the most part, Johnny is a well-written character in that I was always curious to hear what he had to say and how he interpreted the situations we were in—I was never quite sure if his advice was any good or if his opinions had any merit, but I wanted to hear him out every time. It’s Reeves’ delivery of these lines, which often involve Johnny chastising you for something or other, that really sells the “lovable jerk” vibe that I would normally find overplayed.

I’ve had important or emotional conversations undermined by the characters I was talking to glitching between incorrect poses, or the objects they were holding and referencing not load in at all. I’d frequently get phone calls in the middle of other conversations, causing two simultaneous discussions to overlap. I’ve had to sit through drives with my camera distractingly bobbing like I was in a run animation, and seen enemies (or even my own shadow on a wall) stuck in T-poses.

A conversation between two riders on a freeway was interrupted when one of them started spazzing out and rotating in circles at a high-speed rate. A key character would continue to spout their “idle” game chatter during tense life-or-death negotiations. “Pick it up OK?” she’d casually say, as an urgent scene unfolded in front of my eyes. Despite the delays, it’s clear the game needed more time in the oven.

If you return to the location of a minor quest, V might note what has changed, and an NPC might explain what happened. These minor, self-contained nuggets of storytelling are everywhere.

It’s easy to see CDPR took the adoration of The Witcher 3’s side quests seriously, and there’s loads of easter eggs to hunt down across the gleaming high-rises and dark alleys of Night City.

[The infamous Chromanticore ad] is everywhere. And while the “purpose” of it may be to show what a sex-obsessed, superficial, exploitative place Night City is, there’s nothing in the main story or any of the side quests I did that gives it even that much context—I found just one message on one of the many computers I logged into that commented on how low-brow Night City culture is. The result is that there’s a fetishization of trans people at every turn, in a game with only one very minor trans character (that I found, at least) and no way to play as an authentically trans character yourself.

In my 40-plus hours in Night City, I never met a single character of any significance whom the game made clear was trans, and one of the only queer-coded characters I encountered was an extremely unsavory cybernetic surgeon who does extremely unsavory things.