Finally finished Cyberpunk 2077 after about 84 hours on hard mode.
It was my most anticipated game of this year, as I imagine it was for a lot of people. I've had high, though I think mostly realistic, expectations. And for what It's worth, it fulfilled most of them, even if it rarely ever surpassed them. Cyberpunk 2077 is a good game, a very good one, even. But having to live up to high expecations I feel obliged to offer not only praise but criticism. That being said, let's start with the praise:
As I've already mentioned in my first impressions, Night City is still the most visually impressive and most immersive urban environment ever depicted in a game. It's a dense and lively futuristic metropolis where every single district looks, sounds and feel different. Its locations tell countless little stories through environmental design alone. One look at one of its crowded streets and you can determine their cultural influences, economic situation and demographics. The game in general is a triumph of visual design and visual worldbuilding. Cyberpunk's alternate 2077 depicts a small slice of a dystopian future that, while not exactly believable, feels detailled and lived in. It's a violent and sleazy world, but in a way than can be quite beautiful. It's those moments, where I ride a Japanese motorbike through the neonlit streets of Night City's Japantown, past sex shops, night clubs and pachinko parlours, a katana on my back, a revolver from the Soviel Union in my holster, where Cyberpunk 2077, as an immersive experience, really clicks. In those moments the games, often frankly rather juvenile, obsession with the aesthetics of the genre really pays off.
And to its credited, it does back up that obsession with aesthetics with fairly consistently strong writing. Though I think there are a few things worth talking about here. I believe one on the lead writers stated that the main quest of Cyberpunk 2077 was slightly shorter than that of Witcher 3. This is a bold faced lie. It is, in fact, much shorter than that of Witcher 3, not even quite half as long, I'd estimate. Now, as I've already mentioned, it still took me 84 hours to finish so there's not exactly a lack of content there. The truth is, next to the main quest there are a number of very elaborate questlines that are technical optional, yet feel like a very integral part of the games story and are presented with the same amount of production values as the main campaign. It's pretty easy to tell them apart from the one off "Gigs" that make up most of the games other side quests, as they usually tend to spin off from the mainquests and center around characters you meet in them. And by all means, they're all very good and memorable characters. The first act of the game, which should take about 5 hours, includes a number of characters that don't appear in the later parts of the game and yet despite their limited screentime they didn't fail to leave an impression. The characterizations stay consistently strong throughout the game. There are actually a number of love interests in the game, four overall. Straight male, homosexual male, Straight female, homosexual female. Straight female V gets an honest ex cop from a poor suburb, straight male V a tomboyish nomad girl, lesbian V an artistically inclined punk girl and gay V is settled with a washed up Rockstar. They all are characters that are easy to fall in love with and as far as romances in games go, I'd call them well realized.
The writing is at its strongest, though, when it comes to its two central characters. Cyberpunk 2077 has the character dynamic of a buddy movie. V's buddy being Johnny Silverhand, portrayed by action movie star Keanu Reeves. Silverhands mind, you see, was copied onto an experimental chip that, after a heist gone wrong, ended up in V's head. Getting it out of there before Johnny's personality overwrites that of V is the main goal of the main quest. The relationship between these two characters is the emotional core of the game. They are very different people and neither is happy with the situation. Johnny is a a larger than life figure, an underground rockstar and terrorist responsible for one of the greatest attacks on the worlds most powerful corporation. A kind of cross between Mick Jagger and Che Guevara. He's sometimes called an Anarchist, sometimes called a Marxist but he's mainly one thing, and that's angry. He wants to overthrow the plutocracy and what's gonna happen afterwards is for someone else to figure out. Fifty years later, he still has got a score to settle. V, meanwhile, mostly gets to play straight man to this flamboyant character. Something that may rub some people the wrong way is that V is not quite a completely malleable character. Of course they don't have the decades of characterization in other media that Geralt from the Witcher games had but neither are they just an Avatar for the player. While you decide how they dress, whether they warm up to Johnny or not, whether they pursue a romantic relationship and even some small details like whether they drink alcohol or not, there are still the fundamentals of a predefined personality there. V will always be a hotheaded but empathethic young mercenary with much less of a "big picture" view of the world than Johnny has. And, for the record, you can pick one out of three backstories for them (Former Nomad, Street Kid, Corporate Executive) but frankly, it rarely makes a major difference.
Witcher 3 was based on, at least back then fairly obscure, Polish fantasy novels. Cyberpunk 2077 is based on a tabletop RPG. But make no mistake, its presentation is pure Hollywood, though very often Hollywood at its most lecherous and its most decadent. As a matter of fact it often reminded me of Troika's cult classic RPG Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines in that regard. Much like that game it goes to great lenghts to fit the aesthetic sensibilities of film and television into an RPG, kicking and screaming. Dialogue comes not only with extremely high quality voice acting but also with very elaborate choreography on the characters side. While they talk to you, other characters will not only emote, they may smoke cigarettes (People in this game smoke a lot.), eat lunch, pace around the room, sit down and do other things people do when they have a conversation. And god knows despite being almost entirely in first person, the game really knows how to go for those dramatic camera angles during big story moments. God knows CD Projekt wants you to see how high their production values are. Mostly it pays off. Again, mainly in the absolutely stellar voice acting. Ironically enough it was Reeves, the most high profile actor in the game, that took me the longest to warm up to but by the end even his performance really sold me on the character. In other aspects, the games obsession with spectacle can become a bit overbearing. There are moments when Cyberpunk 2077 goes all in on the big cinematic setpiece moments and doesn't know when to stop. I'll get back to that later because by now I've spent multiple paragraphs criticizing a game without even once talking about the gameplay.
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