I actually played Cyberpunk 2077 at release on the PS4. It was hastily removed from the PlayStation Store after it became apparent just how broken the game was. The game would crash, people would fall through the floor, assets wouldn’t load, cars would randomly veer off the road, along with countless other problems. It didn’t bother me, in fact I found the whole thing hilarious. I guess it helped that I didn’t actually buy the game, I got my copy via a rental service, Boomerang Rentals. I didn’t complete it in this state, I didn’t even complete the prologue. I liked the atmosphere, and the art, but it didn’t seem like the game was for me, even if it was fixed.
I bought a copy of the game, with its DLC, Phantom Liberty, when it was on sale. I’d heard that along with fixing most of the bugs the developers had refined the game massively. I never played enough back at the original release to really tell exactly what’s changed here, and I still found lots of it very confusing this time. In particular the menus and inventory system are fiddly, and I never found it clear what choices I was making in them. Weapons I found hard to compare, the system of cyberware, having cybernetic implants to enhance your abilities, throws lots of jargon at you that I didn’t understand. In some of the first firefights in the game I was being hacked from every angle, and didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing. It made the game feel like it was just a bad shooter. I figured that the game wasn’t for me. I liked the idea and the setting, I am a fan of Neuromancer, but I didn’t enjoy playing the game. I stopped playing again for another couple of years.
I kept hearing people saying that this game was actually great, I thought I’d give it another go. I started again from the beginning. This time, I thought I’d just rush through the fighting, and then slow down and spend my time exploring the world. I’d do all of the side content, get my character levelled up, and find the best equipment I could. I thought this would at least make the combat easier, and mean that I didn’t need to worry about the hundreds of guns with tiny stat differences to rifle through. As I did this, I found it all started to click. I genuinely started enjoying myself, the world, the main plot, the characters, and the side stories all tied together into something unique. However, I never really got the hang of the inventory. By the end of the game I wasn’t even using weapons, I was using something called quickhacks. Holding L1 slows down time, and allows you to use some of the enhancements that you have installed to perform all kinds of tricks. You can take over cameras, make various equipment explode, cause enemies to fight each other, or just plain attack them by causing their own implants to overload. I was starting to become some kind of god, I could stand outside a building, jumping from camera to camera causing everyone inside to drop dead. I’d then wander in picking up the spoils.
As much as I enjoyed the world, I did find some of it just didn’t seem to quite fit. There is a character called Panam who has a quest line involving a gang of nomads who act like a family. She is always squabbling with the leader and you’re getting her out of trouble. By the end she’s leading the group, and the family are on a more stable footing. The whole thing takes place outside of the city in desert areas, it’s a bit Mad Max. It was fine, but it’s just not what I think of when I think cyberpunk. In my head it’s all claustrophobic cityscapes of skyscrapers where you can barely even see the sky when you look up. The game does have its fair share of that, and something of this size would feel monotonous if that’s all it had, but I think I’d just prefer a smaller game in that case.
There are several other long quest lines for side characters as well, I particularly liked the one with Judy. She’s a techie working in an underground bar. You’re introduced to her in the main quest by a sex worker named Evelyn. When Evelyn dies you help Judy get revenge, and eventually help her take over running the club that she worked in. There was a lot of pathos, the voice actors did a great job, and the story really showed how the world of the game is stamping on the lives of the people at the bottom. Judy is a potential romance for the main character of the game, V, but I felt it all clashed with the amount of trauma that they were both going through. There were several characters that V could romance in the game, and each time it felt pretty weird to me.
There’s a common problem in a lot of cyberpunk media, in that the message of society getting destroyed by unfettered capitalism and humanity literally losing itself in technology is a bit undermined by how cool it all seems. It really is very cool as well, Keanu Reeves in particular. He plays a character named Johnny Silverhand who is a dead rock star terrorist that is taking over your psyche via a chip. He gives a fantastic performance of someone filled with rage at the world, who doesn’t know how to direct it productively.
There is one particular feature in the game, autodrive, which I found hilarious. When you get in a car, or on a motorbike, you can click in the left stick to have the vehicle take you to your destination. 70% of the time it works fine, the rest of the time it’ll run over pedestrians, drive straight into police cars, or go completely the wrong way. Multiple times I ended up in a police chase because the self-driving car had gone haywire. I figure that it’s just a bug in the game, the whole thing was barely holding itself together at points even with all the patches. I did notice though, later on, that when you are in a mission with another character driving, this kind of thing doesn’t seem to happen. I can’t help but think about Tesla’s claimed self-driving cars turning straight into barriers.
At the end of the game you can make several choices which affect the ending you will see. I chose to help the daughter of the Arasaka family, who run the company which made the chip in your head. She wanted to avenge the murder of her father by her brother. She promised to remove the chip, and it seemed like she might fix some of the problems with the company. Johnny was begging you not to, he wanted to storm the building again like he did when he died originally. This was absolutely the wrong decision. She had a copy of her father’s psyche implanted into her brother, bringing them right back to where they were. She also got the chip removed from your head, but you became a shadow of who you were before the operation, and still only had six months to live.
I reloaded my save, and chose to go in guns blazing with Johnny. It’s still a bittersweet ending, an important character dies, and you still don’t get a full life back. I made Johnny choose to relinquish V’s body though, and it felt like meaningful character arcs for everyone involved.
I’ll probably never come back to this game, it’s so long and huge. I’m very glad I finally finished it though, after all this time I can honestly say that I think it is a great game.
