Cyberpunk 2077 is an odyssey instead of just a linear narrative RPG game. Night City seems dense and well-populated, but it isn’t just the people that give this place a personality. The world is filled with many other elements that breathe life into it. There are few instances when you’re in Night City and feel lost as each sector is well defined and detailed according to the people that populate it. And somehow, it feels like a remark on the densely populated and polluted cities right now.
Cyberpunk 2077 often feels like a commentary and prediction of where our lives are going, and this is where the RPG element of the game comes to light. Often as you dive into the game, a feeling of immersion sets in as if you’re talking to the characters yourselves, and the first-person perspective starts to make sense.
Story – Can You Put A Price On Freedom?
While this often gets overlooked, but right off the bat, I always believed that Cyberpunk 2077 was a story about the characters wanting to find their individual freedom. Now, this freedom isn’t just represented by first putting you in shackles and then your character arising to the occasion and breaking free. This freedom is more poetic and personal for everyone.
Characters like Johnny Silverhand, V, Panam, Judy, Rogue, and many more are looking to escape these constant overwhelming events but are tied down and it is in your hands what freedom means to you and who you’d like to be within the end.
The story of Cyberpunk 2077 starts off with three beginnings and depending on how you wish your character to progress you can pick to be a Street Kid, Corpo, or a Nomad. Each life path is bursting with characters that will have you interact with them and form an emotional bond over the course of the game.
The only thing that I felt lacked in the story was a bit of cohesiveness. As I kept progressing, a new phone call every 5 minutes would alert me about a quest. Pretty soon, it became a constant theme and though I was glad to complete all of these quests, it started to get a bit heavy.
Compared this to CD Projekt RED’s Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, each side quest had a meaning and reasoning to it. You felt compelled in that game, while here you may not feel as compelled but they’re still worth the time you invest into them. The story will take you into the personal lives of the characters that you interact with within and out of Night City.
Gameplay – FPS Game Mimicking FPS Shooters?
For the first couple of minutes, you will wish about Cyberpunk 2077 having a third-person perspective mode, this drowns out soon enough as you keep meeting characters. The game isn’t just horizontally vast but vertically as well. The gameplay isn’t as polished as you’d want a AAA title to be, we now know that Cyberpunk 2077 was a bit rushed, and along came some problems, luckily the day 1 patch fixed a lot of that.
But when Cyberpunk 2077 decides to deliver on all cylinders, it literally feels like a completely different game. Suddenly all of the issues become irrelevant as you soon spend hours upon hours investing yourself into the game.
What works for Cyberpunk 2077 the most is that you’re in the driving seat to play the game however you wish to play it. Stealth approach helped me crawl out of dangerous situations a million times but there’s something sweet about going in all guns blazing and I highly recommend that you try it out once when your character can.
Cyberpunk 2077 looks a lot like a next-gen game but the quests and narratives are still held back from progressing much. You will feel the restraint in some of the parts of the game where you’ll wish maybe something different could make this memorable or just interesting enough to keep doing it again and again.
I always believed that Witcher 3 and Persona 5 Royal would be the pinnacle of RPGs as they deliver some of the rawest and truest experiences of narrative divergence and self-driving experience, but Cyberpunk 2077 sometimes takes things beyond those two games and other times delivers just below it.
You’re bombarded with quests and main story jobs as soon as you complete the prologue of the game which can take you anywhere between 3-7 hours depending on how many side missions you’re targeting. And it is in these side missions that you get to enjoy the best parts about Cyberpunk 2077, it becomes irrelevant what Life Path you choose right after the prologue of the game, though you get some lifepath based conversation replies that help you other than that, it does not matter much.
Like every other good RPG in existence, Cyberpunk 2077 delivers the crux of the game in its side quests, this goes out to show that CD Projekt RED heavily emphasized making sure that each quest is wonderful, vibrant, vivid, and memorable.
These quests will also ensure that you meet with a lot of other characters that you might not get to otherwise, the side quests aren’t just the alternate things that you would do when not wanting to complete main quests, but these feel like an extension of those quests.
Graphics – Breathtaking
Now everyone had an idea of what Cyberpunk 2077 would look like even before the game launched, we’d been treated to a lot of gameplay videos and trailers but it’s when you play Cyberpunk 2077 you realize that how fascinating and believable things are.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t bugs or glitches in the game. There are tons of them but when the game decides to run smooth. You’ll keep asking for more. The streets start to look familiar, the buildings from afar will let you know where exactly you are.
Each character, especially Johnny Silverhand has been well crafted and acted to perfection. He carries a certain charm about him that makes you like this tortured character more. Other than that, there’s a nice Cyberpunk vibe that bases itself as a theme for the rest of the game.
Bugs
What stops Cyberpunk 2077 from being enjoyed are the bugs that have been present in the game because it was rushed by the developers. It is quite evident that some aspects of the game outrightly refuse to work with one another.
Few important characters will simply vanish off from a quest that you’re pursuing and you’ll have to load up an earlier save. It often feels like to progress in Cyberpunk 2077, you have to keep going back and do things a bit differently.
The day one patch however smoothed a lot of things over, but the same cannot be said about the last-gen console versions of Cyberpunk 2077.
Music
Often time what drives the tempo of this large and dense world is the music that you get to hear throughout the game. It feels like stepping into a new generation of music just waiting to be discovered but it hits hard during combat.
The combat music has been worked on till perfection and often times will keep you engaged in the fight and make you push yourself even if an army is out to get you. It is the biggest motivating factor. Each character has their own music and you can basically predict players and their narratives by what they bring to the game.
Panam has a grunge type of a vibe to her and so does Rogue, but on the other hand, when you talk to Hanako Arasaka or even Meredith Stout things get more clinical and precise. The music helps to define the personality of the characters and make them believable.
Finally, our rocker boy Johnny Silverhand has the best musical aura that follows him around, being a war veteran, musician, and a terrorist. You will be intimately blasted by the chaos and destruction in the game.
Verdict
Cyberpunk 2077 seems like a half baked game that pushes itself to the max to deliver a great performance on PC. The characters seem believable and you will lose yourself in the world of Cyberpunk 2077 as you set foot in Night City.
The progression seems natural for a game about Cybernetic upgrades, characters have a warmth to them that helps to connect with them and carry out their tasks. Cyberpunk 2077 from a broad perspective feels like being sucked into a black hole and while things seem fast and hurried when you invest yourself, the game unfolds each chapter in a beautiful narrative that going to be remembered for a long time.
When it comes to the question of purchasing Cyberpunk 2077, I recommend that you get the game when things have settled and all the updates have made playing the game a much better experience. Or you could just purchase it now and wait for a couple of months before diving into the world of Night City.
