Searching for a Reason to Survive in 'Cyberpunk 2077'

The original release of a Cyberpunk 2077 will be immortal, even as that trainwreck now no longer truly exists. That stinking trash fire of the game will live on forever in glitch compilation videos and tweets. History will probably not much remember this final version, which is a bit unfair. We should judge games based on their best selves, not their worst. Maybe in a year or two, some critic will dare to write a "Cyberpunk 2077 was good actually" take. But when a game launches this poorly, nothing will erase that initial reputation for total hysterical calamity. 

I did not play Cyberpunk 2077 at launch in late 2020, because I wanted the "real" Cyberpunk 2077, the Platonic Ideal Cyberpunk 2077, or at least the piece of code that could most approximate CD Projekt Red's dream vision for this title. The "next-gen version" of Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed so long you could probably call it the "current-gen version" at this point. It launched suspiciously quietly last month, just days before Horizon: Forbidden West and Elden Ring, two of the biggest games of the year. Most critical attention is still focused on the usual Twitter arguments that accompany any FromSoft title. So, I figured, I should follow my own path. I won't add much to the Elden Ring discourse, but I could try my hand on this old boy. Can a new coat of paint in the new Version 1.5 save this game? Or was it fundamentally broken even under the busted physics and incomplete ideas?

The good news is that this version feels like a completed work. All of the various systems are fully operational. A year of polish and some PS5 horsepower has made a functional product. It is still janky in many ways, but this is no longer a forty-car pileup we can rubberneck in abject horror as we drive by. The jank now is less an unplayable mess and more a lovable scamp of a game trying its best. It's adorably inconsistent. I ran into glitches of all kinds, luckily all of which were solved by simply restarting the game. There still some knee slappers of glitches, such as the time my DualSense controller would not stop snoring loudly. I also had to watch the ending cutscenes with a tutorial message stuck on the screen, a final victory of jank over the forces of polish and stability.

Forget the build-quality, the real question is this: Is Cyberpunk 2077 the game you wanted? Well, not really. Does it lives up to the near-decade of hype? No. Is this the SciFi answer to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, still arguably the gold standard for open world Western RPGs? No. Is it a solid combination of the lawless freedom of Grand Theft Auto and the mechanical freedom of immersive sims? No. If you come at this object demanding that this be The Witcher, or Deus Ex, or GTA, or any translation of the original tabletop RPG, you will be unhappy. Instead, Cyberpunk 2077 is a roughly thirty hour game, depending on your thirst for sidequests, full of pieces that are decent at best, barely acceptable at worst.

It is any fun to play? Well... not terribly so. The driving is awful. Every car feels roughly the same, the braking is always stiff, the acceleration is meaningless, and the music on the radio is universally terrible aside from the one song I really love and have been jamming to for days. The combat segments are full of stiff shooting galleries against uninteresting bullet sponges. I specc'd early on for stealth and hacking to sneak by. This was not out of an honest desire for pacifism or a more creative combat option (that does not exist). I just didn't want to do the FPS stuff, because it sucked. Your role-playing options are frustrating and made meaningless by the story decisions. The sidequests are rarely satisfying, they lack much player agency or moral statement. The greater story sucks too, actually. It is a bad mixture of various 90s SciFi films, and the better Cyberpunk 2077 would be not playing this game, but instead watching those films. (Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days is brilliant and underrated, please track that down.) Your character, always named "V" is probably the biggest issue in the game, and I'll get to why in a moment.

Ultimately, this is all building up to a fantasy that does little to appeal to me. So why even talk about Cyberpunk 2077 at all? I could end it here and say "it works, but it still kinda sucks". However, there is something interesting about this game. It achieves a unique culture, a kind of aggressive ambivalence to your existence, which could have been the jumping off point to a bigger statement. Sadly, it never takes that leap to an actual conclusion. Cyberpunk 2077, however, ends up offering a very different kind of fantasy by the end, one that strangely seems to be in direct opposition to the very fetishes at play in the cyberpunk genre.