A number of years ago, Saints Row 2 came out and I put a ton of time into it. It had a perfect mix of driving, mayhem, humor, shooting, exploring, and the usual upgrading and purchasing thing. It fell in love with the characters and the city. There were story beats that wrecked me.

Cyberpunk 2077 is almost as good as Saints Row 2.

To be sure, there's over a decade of time between the two, and Cyberpunk greatly benefits from it. The city is every bit as diverse and alive as SR2's, but even MORE. There's more grime. There's more greebles on the buildings and cars. There's more details in general. The characters are every bit as fleshed out as SR2's, but now they're so far past the uncanny valley that it's just ... uncanny. Eyes, lips, expressions. They're completely convincing. The music is great, though it isn't quite as much of a driving force in Cyberpunk, which is probably good, since it means I didn't get as tired of it.

The cars are diverse and interesting. The weapon systems are acceptably complicated, as is the economic system in general. The leveling might be a little complicated, coming directly from a sourcebook-and-charactersheet role-playing game. You cannot actually max out the game. Once you hit your level cap, you stop progressing and, unlike so many other games, it is not possible to reach full-on god-level. I still can't craft god-tier items for lack of levels in Crafting, for example, but there are no levels left.

That said, the scaling is a little weird. I started out relatively weak, but found myself pretty massively overpowered by the end. I had a gun that would set people on fire, rapidly taking care of enemies after just a few hits. I had a contagion hack that would wipe out a half dozen people from hundreds of meters away and they'd never know I was there. It started taking some of the fun out of the game. This was especially true at the very end when I was just cleaning up completionist tasks and they had become rote tasks instead of fun little mini-adventures.

About now, I should probably acknowledge C77's teething problems. I got to miss most of them, only purchasing after the v1.52 release that cleaned up a huge list of problems. I only saw a small number of t-poses. I only had a few bodies go walking around after they were dead. I never crashed into invisible cars. I only fell through the geometry a couple of times. The biggest bugs that still troubled me were unreachable items (especially drones), and statuses that would get stuck. Like, I'd be stuck unable to run. Or the sound engine was continuing to play the spooky sounds despite that whole spooky mission being over.

The good thing is that, their save-data seems to be rock-solid. Any time I got stuck somewhere, I'd be able to quick-save, then quick-reload the same save game, and all the issues would be fixed! I never did crash to desktop.

My biggest complaint aside from that has to be driving. Every car is squirrely when playing with a keyboard. The AI cars are pretty stupid. But I think the biggest problem was how crashes destroyed my suspension of disbelief. You could hit a concrete wall at 220km/h and you'd just stop. No damage, no death, no consequences. You could blow through a full-sized cactus as if it wasn't there, but you'd better not clip a guard rail, or you're going flying. If you flip a car, you just have to finesse the steering wheel and you'll magically flip back over.

SR2 was often compared unfavorably to Grand Theft Auto. C77 is also not GTA. Driving is mostly just a way to move across the map. There's a surprisingly tiny number of sequences that require driving. There's only, like, four races? Unheard of!

Anyway, lastly, the story... CDPR wants to be making movies. They are the masters of the tableau. The game is a movie. It's beaultiful -- I think I took more than a 100 screenshots, and by no means all of them were of Panam's butt. For such a crapsack world, it's beautiful. There are expansive vistas and dimly-lit alleys. There's the big flying billboards and every bit of exposed electronic gear spits out sparks. There are times when the game doesn't trust you to be a cinematographer and takes away the reins for a bit. These are almost always used well, though the skip-dialog button got a pretty good workout from me when things started dragging. It was murder when they took away the skip-dialog button.

The absolute worst is the end of the game. There are about four main endings, and you really need to see all of them. But during the end game, your ability to save is taken away. So you have to go through a good 20 minutes of exposition FOUR TIMES IN A ROW to get to all the endings, and this is one of those where the skip-dialog button is largely unavailable. YES, VIK, I KNOW. Can we skip ahead a bit? No?

Anyway, there's 130 hours of game in here in one playthrough and a handful of end-replays. I think I'll probably try again with another character, just to see if I can change anything, and to get another chance to wander Night City now that I know what the hell I'm doing. But I honestly don't think this is going to be as sticky of a game as SR2 was. It's a great game, and a great experience, and I want SO MUCH MORE from its world. I just don't think the game has it in it to deliver what I want.

It's kind of a hellish position to put CDPR in, I suppose: Your game was great and I loved it, but I hate it for not being enough.

Witcher 3 came out with an acclaimed set of DLCs. I'm excited to hope that C77 might follow that pattern, and my wallet will be ready when they arrive.