V's journey through Night City's criminal underworld and corporate entanglements is engrossing. The story and its attendant characters are the main draw here. Those on more powerful hardware with ray-tracing and 4K resolutions will get the best out of the game, but even those on modest hardware will appreciate the art direction and atmosphere. Whether its watching the sun rise over town-sized solar collectors, the rain falling between city apartment blocks taller than the Sears Tower or homeless folk living on the toxic beaches of Pacifica, the game throws more memorable images at you per hour than most some major franchises have managed in countless iterations. This year's cult hit Cloudpunk got a huge amount of mileage of that on a budget comfortably less than 1% of Cyberpunk 2077, and unsurprisingly this game takes it to a whole new level. If you grew up watching Blade Runner, reading Neuromancer, watching Akira or playing Syndicate, you've probably fantasised about a game that put you right in the middle of a cyberpunk city and let you just walk around sampling the sights. Night City is one of the most gawp-worthy settings for a video game, ever, and your screenshot key (enhanced by a comprehensive photo mode) may burn out from overuse during the course of the game. Cyberpunk 2077 easily has a hundred hours of content in the base game, easily a lot more if you experiment with different builds and different quest choices, and more still if you're happy just travelling around looking at things.Ĭyberpunk 2077 is gorgeous. On top of these, there's also a truly startling number of map icons, depicting crimes in progress (V is a subcontractor for the police, for reasons that are hazily explained), yet more side-missions, shops and sites of interest. These side-jobs can extend into lengthy, multi-hour quest chains of their own, sometimes ending in romances or at least winning the loyalty of the character in question. You also get side-jobs from characters you meet in the main story missions. At any time you'll have a series of main story missions to follow, which push forward the overall narrative, and a number of side-missions, mostly phoned in to you by various "fixers" who work all over the city (who also have side-jobs begging you to buy really rubbish used cars for some reason). You can't choose V's name, but you can choose their gender, sexuality, appearance and background before being set loose in the city. Five seconds later you'll be driving down the street wondering why cars are fading in and out of existence two hundred yards away and why the police only chased you (on foot!) for three yards after you accidentally ran someone over before eerily dematerialising.Ĭyberpunk 2077 casts you as "V", a mercenary working in and around Night City, California. There are moments in this game that are polished beyond brilliance, with storytelling and character beats that, even more than the developers' previous game, The Witcher 3, contemptuously rewrite your expectations of what video games are capable of in terms of storytelling and characterisation. It's also - rather infamously by now - a janky game which, in order to hit its punishingly optimistic release date, has had to not so much cut corners as sear them from existence with industrial-strength flamethrowers. Cyberpunk 2077 is a towering achievement, a story-driven, open-world RPG with a gripping central narrative and a lot of player choice in how you achieve objectives. The number of Things in Cyberpunk 2077 is so overwhelming that it's hard to fully appreciate them all in one go. These Things include: Sentient Waymo a hyperactive anime girl band whose signature song could become the next "Gangnam Style" if it didn't have a swear in the title a soundtrack of near non-stop bangers iguanas cats characters you actually want to hang out with in real life giant holographic fish wonderful dialogue superb stealth Hideo Kojima playing himself a shotgun that sets people on fire decidedly non-cringey romances the red bike from Akira Keanu Actual Reeves GLaDOS from Portal several YouTube streamers hard moral choices really cringey first-person sex scenes a rocket launcher which is also your arm a sentient gun Half-Life gags that dated before the game even came out mysteriously teleporting cops a vending machine who becomes your friend lots and lots of freezers you can hide bodies in inventive hacking city blocks from Judge Dredd cars that drive like bricks and a slew of bugs (mostly minor, very occasionally major). Cyberpunk 2077 has a lot of Things in it.
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