Teased for years, with selected footage coming out since 2018, and delayed multiple times to ensure a perfect launch — and with a central role played by America's favorite son, Keanu Reeves, "Cyberpunk 2077" could be the most anticipated game release of all time.
This much-hyped game is the official sequel to the 1990s cult hit "Cyberpunk 2020" board game, which was itself inspired by sci-fi works such as "Blade Runner" and "Neuromancer" (whose author, William Gibson, coined the terms "cyberpunk" and "cyberspace"). All the pieces for a smash hit are in place.
Leading the way is Polish studio CD Projekt Red (creator of The Witcher video game series), which was able to lean on richly developed source material and leverage the power of next-gen consoles and high-end computers.
And it has been quite a hit, already the No. 2 best-selling game of 2020.
But much like what is brewing beneath the glitzy surface of Night City, not all is well down in the streets. Almost all of "Cyberpunk 2077" takes place in the city-state of Night City, a beautifully dystopian imagining of a mishmash of cultures, and exploring this world and its interconnected storylines is where the game offers its best experience.
Players can explore an expansive megacity that encompasses residential and industrial areas, lower-class and upper-class neighborhoods, and distinct cultural regions such as Little Italy, Japantown and Little China. An immersive storyline drags players into this richly imagined world, complete with its own cultural markers, as street-slang dominates the various languages characters speak.
You'll visit the ripperdoc if you need a surgeon to implant illegal hardware and cyberware into your body, especially if you want to be a cybered-up netrunner who chops stolen credchips for fixers and sells stolen corpo data to an info bro.
Speaking of Corpo, that's one of the three "lifepaths" backgrounds available to the player character, "V," at the start -- the others being a Street Kid or Nomad. Choosing the Corpo-rat path lets players start the game as an up-and-coming employee of the Arasaka megacorporation that essentially owns Night City.
In a sign that the game is already becoming a cultural touchstone, the term "corpo" is being adopted online to refer to soul-sucking big-tech companies with heavy-handed policies. Unfortunately, the background choice for V doesn't mean too much beyond the opening minutes, mostly being used for character introductions and dialogue choices from time to time.
The start of the "2077" experience, of course, is with character creation, and CD Projekt Red makes this a pretty unique experience. This is the future, after all, when body modifications are all the rage, even going so far as to blur the line between male and female. In addition to choosing the upstairs and downstairs (which don't have to match, and can be toggled off), various tattoos and inorganic additions are possible.
Future upgrades include the ability to have arms installed that can send out a deadly monofilament wire or even blades for close-quarters combat; artificial eyes are available, and, of course, everyone has a network port in their heads so they can plug into cyberspace.
The storyline has V acting as basically a low-level street thug who is moving up in the world, doing heists, rescues and getting sucked deeper into dangerous corporate espionage and the secrets of the city. Where the game shines is as an action-shooter, as combat takes place in real-time, with V able to use an arsenal of guns and melee weapons as well as remotely hacking into enemies and the environment for a tactical advantage.
"Cyberpunk 2077" is also a role-playing game, although it holds up less well in this regard, as the skill selections and stat boosts are pretty blah and don't truly allow for that much difference in how characters operate. One path will allow focusing on blunt weapons and shotguns, and another focuses on rifles and edged weapons, for example, and then it's just a matter of getting better and better weapons of that category as you play. It's nothing groundbreaking in the slightest, unfortunately.
Overall, though, the game is beautiful and fun to play — if you can play it. Unfortunately, anyone with a PS4 or Xbox One is out of luck, for now. CD Projekt Red has promised fixes, but at launch, the game was literally unplayable for last-gen consoles.
And even for those with new consoles and cutting-edge PCs, "2077" is rife with game-breaking and immersion-breaking bugs and wonky physics. Despite its many months of delays, "Cyberpunk 2077" was still released before it was ready, and in a rather corpo moment, CD Projekt Red put its employees through serious crunch to release an unpolished game before Christmas, likely in the hopes of cashing in on holiday sales.
The devs have promised that fixes are on the way, though, and that they're working to regain customer trust. For now, the recommendation is to wait, although one day this game will be a must-have.