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Cyberpunk 2077 not-a-review

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This isn’t a review. Obviously. I mean, it’s up in the title and not super ambiguous – this is my “Cyberpunk 2077 not-a-review”. I’ve clocked just over 45 hours of this game, I don’t think I’m even close to finishing it, and my holiday starts tomorrow so NAG’s actual, for reals review is gonna take some extra time. Kind of like the actual, for reals version of the game on last-gen hardware (lololol, I’m sorry).

Okay, let’s not pretend Cyberpunk 2077 has had an amazing launch. Or maybe it has, but for entirely the wrong reasons. It’s hard to choose a favourite glitch, but this one is in my top ten. It’s so, like, metaphorical.

I dunno if I got lucky or what, but besides two geometry glitches that necessitated loading a save to resolve and some very occasional and inconsequential graphics and audio glitches, I’ve had no problems with the game on my Xbox Series X console. Cyberpunk 2077 is absolutely a mess on Xbox One, PS4, and a lot of PC configs, and I don’t want to minimise the frustration that those players must have, but for me? It works like a neon dream. As such, I’m not going to get stuck on the technical issues in this not-a-review, because I don’t have personal experience with them.

I should also tell you that I’m biased as fuck because, as a genre, cyberpunk is totally my jam. I remember watching RoboCop (the 1987 Paul Verhoeven original, not the trashy 2014 remake) when I was a kid, and although I missed most of the cynicism and satire because I was, you know, a kid, I was instantly intrigued by the movie’s prospects of transhumanism. Or, because I was a kid, the prospects of a robotic makeover. And Cyberpunk 2077 is very much RoboCop’s type of cyberpunk, a retro-future dystopia of the hookers-and-coke glam and cheap politics of the 80s, powered by hi-tech innovation and corporate exploitation, cruising the space between existential dread and campy absurdity.

Night City is the vivid realisation of this conceptual gap – a metro of glossy megabuilding facades extending over a sleazy, claustrophobic substructure of urban entropy, of CEOs and gangsters, egos and anguish, with an economy ostensibly supported almost entirely by noodles and dildos. CD Projekt Red promised a game for an adult audience, featuring “difficult subjects” and “different perspectives”, and as its host, Night City delivers. This is the end result of capitalist indifference – a place where the rich get richer, and the hopes of everybody else go to die.

Like me, V, a merc who’s just trying to make some cash but (inevitably, I guess?) gets mixed up in a bad deal. I won’t drop spoilers, but the narrative and character writing in Cyberpunk 2077 is next-level, and I was emotionally invested in the plot and my NPC chooms from the very start. Night City is a violent and chaotic meat grinder, perhaps, but there’s some humanity left behind the vending machines and holographic sex shop ads. I even cried when… you’ll find out. And you’ll cry too, even if it’s on the inside.

This is probably one of the most hyped games of the decade, making its wobbly launch that much more disappointing. I feel like positive impressions of the game are being wiped out by the complaints, and I suppose that’s how it is for now, but it also sucks because Cyberpunk 2077 is an extraordinary experience. It’s complex, it’s provocative, it’s gorgeous, it’s compelling, and it’s fun.

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