The potential Cyberpunk 2077 had was amazing. Between the marketing material, how amazing the world looked and the hype somehow reaching another level, I pre-ordered and even bought the strategy guide. If you've been following the game, you know how things went upon launch. It was a complete horror show between the backlash from the community and all the memes and videos with some truly mind boggling glitches. CD Projekt Red's stock tanked and the game earned some special company with the infamy it created (Cyberpunk 2076 anyone?). Is it still worth picking up despite all the issues? I would say yes but with a few caveats that I will list below.
Are the glitches and performance as bad as you've heard? Yes... Unfortunately they are. I was beyond excited and despite reports of the game being a buggy mess... it only delayed me playing it for a few weeks. I still was tempted enough to fire it up. It crashed on me several times and key components like environments and certain characters took minutes to render instead of being ready instantaneously. I got caught in buildings that were broken enough to let me in but the doors wouldn't open to let me out and I fell out of the map a few times. The phone segments and the driving were the worst. But as much as I could continue to just list flaw after flaw, I did just get used to it and accept it. The game is good enough to overcome and after a trial by fire period, it became an almost non-issue. It was worth it in the end but I can't blame people for being upset or returning the game.
I want to get the negatives out of the way so I'll just touch on how the gameplay was overhyped. 2077 was touted as the revolution in open world RPG gaming, as the true game changer and it didn't have nearly as many features as it was advertised to have. It does have excellent elements in it but between building up your character, the missions or how interactive the world was, I had seen most of it before. With the futuristic environment, it was in some pretty packaging but most parts were familiar instead of awe inducing. It was still entertaining but it wasn't something that re-invented wheel for a sandbox mercenary game.
Getting to what I did enjoy about the game, Cyberpunk does have an involving story to tell. You get to pick V's origin story (another game element that didn't matter much in the end) but his journey through his ups and downs in Night City has a lot of fun, a ton of action and some surprisingly emotional moments. While it does start with the big heist gone bad (a familiar plot beat if you've played one of these types of games before) but between his relationship with Johnny Silverhand (a fun but vocally stunted performance by Keanu Reeves) and joining up with characters like Panam, Judy, Takemura and River, there's lots to explore and enjoy with their missions and their interplay. The game has a colourful cast of characters and while the main campaign is surprisingly short, with the side missions, gigs and cyberpsycho attacks, there's more than enough content to keep you busy in Night City.The characters actually develop and change with the beats of the story, V's love/hate relationship with Johnny and their dynamic might have been the most unique element of the game. How you can affect the game's story also had an impact. It was cool to be able to take different directions, talk my way out of conflict and pick how to deal with potential friends and enemies throughout the game. While some games champion choice as part of their narrative, Cyberpunk does back up that claim. You can fail missions and the story will keep going, save a life here that can benefit you later or sneak in and out of a compound without having to touch a weapon. You can play it your way and while that's not a entirely fresh idea, it is executed well here.
For all the graphical and rendering issues, this world still is beautiful when the game functions properly. Going from district to district, each part of the city is fun to interact with and has fun stylistic shifts. There's a huge disparity in Night City of who lives and works in each area, you can go from the City Center to the Badlands and the environment is completely different. You also have some cool designs from some of the gangs, the maelstrom gang being flunkies who go beyond normal cyber modification to the animals who reject the same modification and become steroid toting hulk knockoffs. There's a lot of variety in the game and you can tell there was a ton of hours put into re-imagining our world in this neon dystopia lens.
Despite all the hate and the problems, Cyberpunk is still a game worth spending your time on. The story, characters and the world are worth the investment even if the game was released too early and needed to be cleaned up. I don't blame fans for being outraged, not everyone can afford a top shelf PC or a next gen console (which at this point in time is not readily available either, so if the game is primarily sold on the older systems, its reasonable for people to expect it to work). While games are rarely glitch free these days, these types of bugs are pretty hard to explain away. Give it a shot with some lowered expectations, maybe wait until they've released some of the patches to improve your experience and hopefully you can get it at a lower price point. Unless you've got some impressive gaming hardware, in that case go nuts.
