I am a huge Cyberpunk Fan. I have read Neuromancer and Snow Crash and many other genre classics, I have played through every Deus Ex game and Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies. The notion that I could walk the streets of Night City and experience something inspired by some of my favorite pieces of fiction was like a dream.

It is unfortunate that while the game is quite good, it is marred by several technical issues and design missteps that keep it from reaching that promise.

From the very beginning there are promises of great things. You go through a detailed character creation system that includes selecting a life path. The problem is these life paths are meaningless and only change the first 15 minutes of the game and a few rare dialog choices. Other games have done similar things before, Mass Effect had nearly an identical problem, you select a history that has little impact on the game, except there it was not touted as a huge game defining choice. It was hyped to such a degree that people were expecting something like the original Dragon Age which included an initial character choice that would define the first several hours of gameplay and hugely impact how the world and characters react to you. It feels like there was a ton of cut content around Life Path choice and the missed first year with Jackie, which is shown as a quick montage of hijinks. The problem is, that is the game I wanted to play. They skipped over the interesting part of the story.

With that said, the first few hours of the game are probably the high point. It is a very guided experience that prevents you from seeing a lot of the technical and system issues. It introduces a lot of interesting characters and sends you on a few awesome adventures before it really lets you have access to the larger world. Then the game opens up and you start to run into a number of the technical issues.

First the AI is nonexistent for pedestrians police and to a large extent the enemies you fight. You can be in the middle of the desert and point a gun at a civilian and the police will teleport behind you. The police have no driving AI. You can get in a car and run over endless civilians and they will never send a car after you. It is very easy to bug out the AI and make them disapear or ignore you.

Speaking of bugs, the game is quite buggy, in the way a Bethesda RPG can sometimes be buggy. I have had vehicles randomly explode or spawn on top of each other. NPC characters T pose or slide around. I have had my motorcycle randomly start flying. I randomly died while walking on geometry in the garbage dumps surrounding the city. I had serious bugs that required me to reload missions and in paticular the final missions I had to reload a previous save five times because it would completely break.

Next is the terrible performance. While the game is certainly beautiful it also runs like I’m playing it on a Nintendo 64. Even with an overclocked RTX 3080 paired with a 10700k at higher resolutions with all the bells and whistles and ray tracing enabled you can expect sub 30 FPS. DLSS is the only thing that makes the game playable with Ray Tracing enabled. I’m not even going to get started on the console release but it is even worse.

The interface is a confusing mess of screens within screens within screens. Some things are only accessible from the top level while others are nested inside of several layers of interface. The quest log is broken up into main missions, side missions and gigs but a lot of side missions seem less important then some of the gigs. There is no way to filter these by area, difficulty or type and you sometimes have so many missions it can be overwhelming. That leads into level scaling. Each area seems to have a set level and if you try to take on an enemy with a red skull you are going to die in a single shot. There is no in game explanation why these enemies are suddenly so tough, and it does not feel quite right. There were times when my mission log only had missions with these very hard enemies, and I thought I had broken the game.

Finally, there is also a lack of player agency and consequence. Rarely do your choices substantially change the outcome of the game beyond the mission you are currently playing. There appears to be no faction or reputation system in the game, and you can literally kill anyone without consequence or impact on the game. This follows all the way to the end of the game where the endings available are only impacted by a few side missions and a few final choices.

In the end, even with the misrepresentation of the game, the bugs, the interface issues, and the game just actively working against you at times, I have still enjoyed my time with the game. I sometimes just drive around or walk around the city and explore the amazing world that they built. From the amazing architecture, to the abundant satirical billboards and posters and even the minor things like watching a random NPC playing guitar on a dirty couch. It is the most complete Cyberpunk world that has ever been created and feels like a seminal moment for the genre that will help propel the genre into the public zeitgeist.

The main story and several of the side missions have moments of extreme emotion, both horror as well as beauty. The game has some of the most interesting characters and performance in recent memory. Johnny Silverhand initially appears like a two-dimensional rock star ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ but eventually I came to enjoy the little moments where he would pop up and comments on my current predicament. The character models and especially the facial animations are simply amazing during most of the major story beats, as long as they don't bug out, and these interactions are some of the most memorable moments from the game.
The gameplay is much deeper than it initially seems with multiple viable paths, between gun play, hacking, melee weapons, stealth and even some missions that allow you to talk your way out of situations. I primarily played an assault and blade weapon wielding assassin but I am eager to play again trying the hacking tree. There are attribute points, perk points, body modifications, clothing, weapons, hacking tools and many other ways to customize your character that I think would encourage multiple playthroughs. An issue though is the number of perks that are esentially useless or worse are actually bugged and do not currently do anything. Also there are bugs with gear where if you use the same item mod mutliple times they stop working making itemization frustrating. The character sheet is also very buggy and sometimes requires reloading the game in order to see your real stats.

I probably sound very down on the game but, even with all these issues, I have enjoyed the game immensily but I find it hard to recommend to everyone. If you fall into these three categories I can reccomend the game, if not you should probably wait for additional patches.

1. If you can put up with the bugs.
2. If you have a very powerful PC or Next Gen Console.
3. If you are a fan of Cyberpunk fiction and have alreayd played Deus Ex.

I am hopeful that the majority of my complaints will be addressed through patches. CDPR has always supported there games well and has released five patches at the time of this review and I have little doubt that many of these complains will be addressed. In spite of the games many shortcomings, I have been unable to stop playing the game for several weeks and would still rate it one of my favorite games of the year.

Video Review below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_iYkOYir2w