For some context, I played this game for about 30 hours on the Xbox One X and 60 hours on the Xbox Series X.
I was lured into playing Cyberpunk by my love of near-future and post-apocalyptic science fiction. I'm a huge fan of the Deus Ex series, having played each iteration and loving every second of playing within that franchise. Knowing nothing about the game prior to buying it on launch day, I didn't go into it with many of the pre-conceived notions that many people who had followed the development of this game over the last seven years.
I'll start with gameplay before I get into the bugs and other technical issues. Ostensibly, this game is a pseudo-open-world shooter with stealth, RPG, and driving game mechanics. Think futuristic GTA, but with more emphasis on stealth / hacking options for combat. The gunplay is satisfying enough, if unpolished. I found the ADS mechanics jerky and sticky, not as fluid as playing something like an FPS. This isn't a huge gripe, but it was noticeable.
The quickhacking / breach protocol system is varied and impactful, especially later in the game, where certain quickhacks can make short work of what would otherwise be difficult enemies or groups of enemies. But something about the system just didn't feel...urgent? When you go to quickhack an enemy, time slows down, and that made it feel like there was less at stake when in the middle of a firefight. Obviously this leads to a less stressful experience overall but I would've liked to see the time-slowing mechanic ditched when you're in combat.
The driving in this game is a mess. The cars all handle pretty much the same, with the steering of each car being very jerky and hard to pull off without crashing into things. Cars are also very floaty, seemingly barely attached to the ground, and will go flying with the least provocation. Braking on cars is also frustrating, taking a much longer time to come to a complete stop than makes sense, even when not traveling at top speed. The traffic AI is also poor, as drivers on the road will literally sit behind your car and never move or attempt to drive around you. The roads also seem pretty sparsely populated with cars, especially in what you would expect would be congested city areas, but I actually appreciated this more as it made it easier to move around and not rely on the quick travel system.
The main story is generally engaging, though fairly linear with minimal branching opportunities (mostly towards the end) and with a few side missions with "main" side characters that can affect the rest of the game. Otherwise the missions you do for the various factions in the game (the Tyger Claws, Aldecaldos, etc) generally don't impact the world much, and certainly don't contribute to any kind of faction standing system or faction area control system, which I would have liked to see.
The voice acting is generally good, with Johnny Silverhand (voiced by Keanu Reeves) and the side characters being the highlight. But the background AI characters and some of the side characters are voiced poorly enough to be a distraction, which is disappointing. The character dialog is also generally mediocre to poor, with some laughably bad lines being delivered over the course of the games 60-80 hour main story / side mission running time. But there are only a handful of spots where this it's particularly bad.
If you commit crimes in Night City, which generally including assaulting or killing innocents (or getting close to a cop), the Cop AI will trigger and they'll start trying to take you down. This AI for cops in this game is LAUGHABLY bad as cops will regularly lose you if you run 50m down a sidewalk and make a turn into an alley. There's also a shockingly short amount of time between when your crime is reported and when cops forget your crime entirely. There also seems to be little change between the 1-star crime report and top-tier 4-star crime report. Sure, more cops will spawn, but you don't generally have to face more difficult cops (other than the occasional netrunner cop) and they'll forget your transgressions just as easily. Disappointingly enough, cops don't drop any loot when killed, so there's no benefit to killing dozens of cops for sweet, sweet loot.
Which brings us to the crafting system. The thought behind the crafting system in Cyberpunk is technically sound: you collect items (junk, guns, food, etc.) which you can break down into raw materials to craft items whose blueprints you find or purchase in the world. But the implementation of this system is poorly thought out and poorly implemented. There is a setting where you can automatically break down any junk items you find into constituent parts, which is a great time-and-space saving measure. But there's no similar system to mass-craft items like healing items, grenades, etc. and certainly no way to mass-craft weapons for selling. Which you'll need to do because Cyberpunk is pretty tight-fisted with handing out cash, which you'll need for purchasing vehicles, weapons, clothing, mods, and cyberware.
Currently the most efficient post-completing-missions non-exploitive way to make money in the game involves buying out soda cans from all the vending machines you come across, breaking them down, and crafting them into basic weapons you can sell at a profit. This is a horrendously tedious process, but will functionally be the only method available to you after you've completed all the game's side missions and NCPD dispatches. This is a major problem CDPR will have to address in the immediate future if they want people to continue playing past the time it takes to finish the main story.
Cyberware is generally implemented well in this game, with various systems you can modify (hands, legs, circulatory system, etc.) with different kinds and qualities of upgrades throughout the game. One of the leg upgrades gives you a double jump ability, which is a huge game changer. One of the mods to another system is the "Second Heart" mod which allows you to basically respawn after dying without having to reload a save (with a cooldown of course). These modifiers are huge, and affect gameplay significantly. But most of the Cyberware mods available don't approach this level of meaningful gameplay change, and that's disappointing. CDPR will surely be able to add other mods in the future, but for me at least, it didn't feel like my choices of mods largely changed much.
Which brings me to attributes and perks. Attributes are the overall governing stats (there are five of them) that will determine how you play the game: things like Body affect your HP and carrying capacity, Reflexes affect your evasion and gunplay abilities, Cool affects your Stealth, etc. Each time you level up (to a current max of Level 50), you'll receive 1 Attribute Point and 1 Perk Point. You can also earn additional perk points through various methods. Within each of these attributes is a subset of Abilities which level up with use (like Blades, Assault, Quickhacking, etc.). But these abilities can only level up to the level of your Attribute governing that ability. So if you want to max out your Blades skill, you better dump attribute points into Reflexes. There’s no way to increase Attributes other than assigning attribute points to your character at each level you gain. But each of the Skills you level up also contribute XP to your character, so you shouldn’t have a hard time leveling up rather quickly.
Once you level up a Skill to a certain level, you’ll be able to choose a number of perks related to that skill using your Perk Points. Some of these Perks are governed by your Attribute Level (so you can’t allocate points to a certain perk if your overall level is too low), and some are governed by your Skill level. You also receive additional perk points for leveling up a skill, so there’s incentive to generate XP for that skill if there are some perks you really want.
With five Attributes that can each reach Level 20 (that’s 100 Attribute points for those keeping track), you won’t be able to max out all your stats with the current level cap. But you are given some options for AP allocation at the beginning of the game during character creation that can defray some of these problems. Overall the Attribute / Skill / Perk system works well, though with any game of this kind, it always feels like I’m making tough choices towards the end of the game with the last few Attribute / Perk points I have left. I’d recommend finding a guide online about what the various perks / skills do, and plan out your character from there, or you’ll be faced with the prospect of missing out on some perks you wanted to have because you spent too many perk points in something else. ALSO, keep in mind that a couple of the achievements for the game require investment into certain attributes / skills, so make sure you know what those are or you could potentially miss out on a couple of the achievements.
Now, on to the bugs/glitches: I was immediately struck by how messy the game seemed within the first 10 hours of play. I experienced numerous texture pop-in issues, clipping, and character models failing to completely resolve, or appearing in places they shouldn't. I experienced 10 full game crashes in the first 23 hours of gameplay on the Xbox One X and dozens more game freezes which resolved themselves within a few seconds. These freezes and crashes mostly occurred when driving through the city, when the game loading the buildings and AI cars and people couldn't keep up.
I also had NUMEROUS quest-breaking or game-breaking bugs, including characters not able to be interacted with, necessary dialog not occurring, characters not maneuvering to a necessary spot to trigger an interaction, characters just not being around at all, locational requirements not triggering, targets not registering as having been killed, targets being unkillable, and all manner of things of this sort. I had to save and reload the game dozens of times to progress in various missions, and in some cases even had to resort to earlier saves to fix a bug.
Overall, if the game had only minor bug/glitch issues, my score for the game would be a solid 4/5. Cyberpunk would be a good – but not great – game which is not groundbreaking in any single way but cobbles enough gameplay elements together for a fun experience which should be easy for CDPR to smooth over the next few months. Most of the core gameplay elements that Cyberpunk implements have been done before, and done better by other games, but the setting, characters, and story are all pretty engaging. The City does feel somewhat hollow, but I could’ve easily seen CDPR adding more NPCs / side missions over the next few months to a year, really filling out the space for a compelling world and game experience.
But with the state that Cyberpunk was shipped in – wholly unplayable on launch model Xbox One and PS4 consoles, borderline unplayable on the upgraded Xbox One X and PS4 Pro models, and still a glitchy mess on the PS5 and Xbox Series X – I have to knock a full point off my score. After playing the game for 5-10 hours, I was excited at the prospect of what was to come. But that hope ultimately never came to fruition, and I’m left with a largely hollow game experience I don’t see myself returning to now that I’ve 100%ed the game. This may change if CDPR is able to right the ship and fix the litany of gamebreaking bugs, glitches, and technical issues and introduce meaningful, engaging DLC. But as it is, the core experience did not feel worth it.
Cyberpunk 2077: 3/5.
3.0